While many green environmentalists rightly condemn corn-based ethanol and other destructive biofuels, they often have good things to say about cellulosic ethanol. Today’s New York Times offers a salutary reminder of how the technology remains elusive:

Government officials gave optimistic speeches. In the background, workers prepared a new network of pipes, tanks and conveyor belts. That was in October 1998, when ethanol from crop wastes seemed to be just around the corner. It still is. Last February, company officials gathered here once again, to break ground on a plant designed to make ethanol by yet another method. At the time of the first ceremony, the Energy Department was predicting that ethanol produced from cellulosic waste would be in the market by about 2009 in the same volume as ethanol from the conventional source, corn. But no company has yet been able to produce ethanol from cellulose in mass quantities that are priced competitively with corn-based ethanol. And without the cellulosic ethanol, the national goal for ethanol production will be impossible to reach. “Producing cellulosic ethanol is clearly more difficult than we thought in the 1990s,” said Dan W. Reicher, who was assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the time of the first ceremony and who spoke here then.

This is the case with so many technologies that people are claiming will provide the breakthrough with just a tad more government investment. Caveat emptor.