By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Two representatives from Michigan attended last month’s inaugural Growth Energy Executive Leadership Conference, a conference designed to help move legislation and policy favorable to ethanol.

The conference was March 15-16 in Phoenix. Jeff Sandborn, a corn and soybean grower from Portland, Mich., attended the meeting along with Tom Durand of Croswell, Mich. Sandborn is vice president of the Michigan Corn Growers Assoc. (MCGA) and serves on the ethanol committee of the National Corn Growers Assoc. (NCGA). Croswell is a chair of the MCGA Board.

Tom Buis, the CEO of Growth Energy, sent out a letter in January inviting people to attend.

“As you know, Growth Energy has been extraordinarily busy since our launch 14 months ago,” Buis wrote. “Our top accomplishment in 2009 was to put an end to the misinformation and falsehoods surrounding ethanol production, from the fiction of ‘food verus fuel’ to the bizarrely-conceived theory of ‘international indirect land use change.’ We filed the Green Jobs Waiver to increase the allowable percentage of ethanol blended with gasoline and all signs indicate a positive decision will be made on E15 by midyear.”

Growth Energy is an association made up of 55 ethanol plants located in 10 states and 34 affiliated companies, including POET, ICM, Western Plains Energy, Hawkeye Renewables, Green Plains Renewable Energy and others. It has offices in Washington, D.C., Jefferson, Mo. and Omaha, Neb.

The meeting was made up of two days of lectures and roundtables, with speakers such as Wesley Clark, the former U.S. Army general and now co-chair of Growth Energy, Bud McFarlane, the former National Security Advisor, and Gal Luft, author of Turning Oil Into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice. He co-authored it with Anne Korin.

“They did quite a job keeping us busy,” Sandborn said. They had quite a few speakers. There was a lot of networking; you got to talk to people and pick their brains.”

He said it was all about work, and although he turned down a game of golf the first day, it was still nice to look outside since the weather was so nice. He said the talk by author Luft was pretty interesting.

Luft and Korin’s theory is that “salt was the oil of its day,” Sandborn said. Countries that had a lot of salt were strategically important in the same way oil rich countries are today, before there was modern refrigeration. The idea of the book is that it’s important to steer America away from its dependence on foreign oil by converting over to electricity, which is powered primarily by sources other than oil.
“By doing that you take away some of the strategic role of oil,” Sandborn said.

There was also a presentation by the Ricardo Co., an automotive engineering firm that designs engines with what Sandborn called verified ethanol boosters. There was also a discussion of the blender’s credit, which Sandborn said is due to expire at the end of the year. According to the American Coalition for Ethanol, the credit amounts to a 5.1 cent credit on a gallon of E10.

“The petroleum industry doesn’t really take the full value of that tax credit and pass it on to the people,” Sandborn said. “That’s really a sore spot.”

Other guests at the conference included former President George W. Bush’s top aide Karen Hughes, who discussed how things work in Washington, D.C., at the policy level; and Bob Casper, president of POET Ethanol Products. He, along with Hawkeye Gold Vice President Randy Ives, talked about the 2010 market outlook for grain, ethanol and distillers.