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E85 Inc. is a name that has been popping up in cities from New Jersey to New Mexico – a company that reportedly “plans to build a billion-dollar string of ethanol plants.”

The Seattle Times did some research to find out who is behind the company and what they hope to accomplish.

Mark Dassel, E85’s senior vice president, says there’s no real mystery — he and a skeleton staff have simply been too busy to answer inquiries: “This is a 7-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day job.”

Skimping on details, he lays out an exceedingly ambitious agenda: E85 plans to quickly put up 10 ethanol plants costing about $150 million each. Together these will produce more than 1 billion gallons of ethanol annually; the company will buy an additional 1 to 2 billion gallons from other plants, he says.

Dassel contends E85’s rapid, cookie-cutter approach means “we’re going to be the low-cost producer” when a shakeout comes.

E85 Inc. is also planning plants in Michican, Ohio and North Carolina.

News coverage in advance of the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday is comparing the rhetoric of last year’s speech to what has really been accomplished so far when it comes to energy independence.

The Associated Press reports President Bush is expected to renew concerns about energy security in his State of the Union address. But will the rhetoric be followed by action? Up to now, the record has been mixed.

The president is expected to call for a “sharp escalation of ethanol use in his speech,” which is a “political sure bet as ethanol has widespread bipartisan support.” But the article says the administration has been criticized for “not living up to the rhetoric” since not enough funding has been provided for research into cellulosic ethanol development, as promised last year.

Saab has become the first car maker to introduce a flex-fuel vehicle in Australia.

Saab officials say the BioPower program will help them gauge demand for ethanol powered vehicles and renewable fuels in Australia, even though E85 is not yet commercially available in the country.

According to AutoWeb Australia, Saab introduced the vehicles this week at a promotional event in Queensland and they will now be “loaned to media, government, industry and fleets for real world evaluation. Vehicles are already scheduled to join the fleets of the Queensland Government and ethanol producers such as the Manildra Group.”

A Dallas company plans to built three new ethanol plants in Iowa that could produce up to 300 million gallons of fuel a year.

According to the Des Moines Register, Harvest BioFuels LLC is scheduled to begin construction of a plant near Galbraith in eastern Kossuth County in April, with onstruction of plants near Garner in Hancock County and near Gilmore City in Pocahontas County to begin later this year.

Iowa is already the top ethanol producing state in the country with 25 ethanol plants producing 1.7 billion gallons a year. Twenty-one more plants are either under construction or being expanded.