Sam Avro, Energy Trends Insider editor, recently received an inquiry
from a reader about the popularity of ethanol free gasoline in the
Midwest. Coincidentally, I recently visited Indianapolis and had noticed
a large billboard advertising ethanol free gasoline.
Why is ethanol-free gasoline so much more popular than E85? I poked
around in comment fields to come up with a short list of reasons, some
rational, some not so much.
Many consumers realize that E85 reduces gas mileage, but this is
largely irrelevant when E85 is cheap enough to make up the difference.
Maybe people don’t want to bother running the numbers every time they
use E85 to figure out if it’s cheaper or maybe they don’t want to visit
gas stations thirty percent more often.
Others fear that gasoline with ten percent ethanol might harm their
car. This is a rational concern only for owners of older cars.
Some consumers don’t want to use gasoline with corn ethanol for
ethical reasons. Using food stock to produce car fuel increases the cost
of basic food staples like corn meal and eggs, which impacts the
poorest of the world far more than it does the richest.
Still others don’t want corn ethanol in their fuel because of its
negative environmental impact. When farmers plant corn instead of some
other crop it causes a dominoe effect where farmers in other parts of
the world create farmland to plant the crops replaced by corn. Many
thousands of acres of wildlife habitat (conservation reserve land) has
been converted back into corn fields as farmers understandably use
unproductive land to capitalize on the record breaking high price of
corn thanks to government mandated consumption of corn ethanol creating a
demand that continues to exceed supply (thus the tripling in the price
of corn).
Yet others buy ethanol free gasoline as a way to protest government
mandated consumption of what they believe is an inferior product.
Although I am unaware of any environmental organization that supports
corn ethanol, some states have made it illegal to sell ethanol free
gasoline. Go figure.
As part of writing this article, I discovered that there are two gas
stations serving ethanol free gasoline within a few miles of where I
live. If I didn’t drive an electric car, I might be buying ethanol free
gasoline, for some rational reasons and maybe a few not so rational
ones.
Back in 2009 two researchers released a study that suggested corn
ethanol was saving American’s money at the gas pump. I wrote to one of
the authors asking for clarification. His reply:
In the paper, we conclude that evaluated at the average
ethanol production level of 01/1995-03/2008, the wholesale gasoline
prices is $0.14/gallon lower. The change of retail gasoline prices
varies across refinery markets from $0.29-$0.40/gallon.
He also added that the results were unique to prevailing conditions in 2009. According to Wheels,
the report has been updated and now claims corn ethanol saved Americans
a buck a gallon. However, thanks to ads trying to make hay from this
study by the nation’s largest corn ethanol lobbying firm, aka, The
Renewable Fuels Association, the study caught the attention of two other
researchers:
Mr. Knittel of M.I.T. said in an interview that ethanol
most likely reduced gasoline prices, at most, by 10 cents a gallon,
after adjustments were made to account for the biofuel’s lower energy
potential relative to pure gasoline. He described claims made by the
trade group, which have appeared at bus shelters and billboards,
particularly around Washington, as “false advertising.”
Economic studies of this nature can be hard to refute because the
only people qualified to critique them are other agricultural economists
or statisticians. Common sense can only get you so far. However, Mr.
Knittel and Mr. Smith are qualified to critique the study:
To illustrate their critique, the professors employed the
same statistical models used in the Iowa State report to draw
intentionally absurd conclusions, among them that ethanol production
depresses the price of natural gas and increases unemployment in the
United States and Europe. “We also used their model to show that ethanol production is causing
my daughter to grow older, and if it was taken away she’d get younger,”
Mr. Smith said in a telephone interview. “We know that’s not true, or at
least we hope it isn’t true.”
Now that’s what I call good use of sarcasm. Shockingly, a spokesman
for the RFA defended the scholarship their ad was based on, and never
mind that he is no more qualified to defend it than you or I.
The study results are based on regional restraints on supply caused
by refinery capacity, so the results will change if you enter a period
of lower domestic fuel demand, increasing export of refined petroleum
products, and record high prices for corn. Don’t expect to see results
of the next study on any bus station billboards if it finds that ethanol
is costing Americans $billions.
1200 x 112,000,000 = 134,400,000,000
Bob Dinneen, head of a very well-funded corn ethanol lobbying organization, has a new press release in the Huff Po green blog which begins by claiming:
Other nations, including Brazil, with at least as many older vehicles on their roads, allow higher levels of ethanol blends with no discernible damage to their cars and light trucks.
In reality, unlike American cars, cars in Brazil where ethanol blends have been 22% since 1993 are all designed to run on that higher blend. According to Wikipedia:
"All Brazilian automakers have adapted their gasoline engines to run smoothly with these range of mixtures, thus, all gasoline vehicles are built to run with blends from E20 to E25, defined by local law as "Common gasoline type C". Some vehicles might work properly with lower concentrations of ethanol, however, with a few exceptions, they are unable to run smoothly with pure gasoline which causes engine knocking, as vehicles traveling to neighboring South American countries have demonstrated.."
Next he tells us about a study conducted specifically "for" his lobbying organization and paid for in part by the Illinois Corn Marketing Board:
In fact, the internationally recognized automotive-engineering firm, Ricardo, Inc., recently conducted a study for the Renewable Fuels Association [my emphasis] that used EPA's own engineering assessment methodology to determine the efficacy of E15 in vehicles MY2000 and older [not exactly true, the study went back only 6 years]. The report concludes: "... the adoption and use of E15 in the motor vehicle fleet from the studied model years should not [my emphasis and note they did not use the term "will not"] adversely affect the vehicles or cause them to perform in a sub-optimal manner when compared with their performance when using the E10 blend that is currently available."
Hmmm, who to believe? An organization chartered to protect the environment or a company that designs fuel systems for the car industry? Your call. According to the Ricardo study:
Six automotive manufacturers were identified as representing the overwhelming majority of vehicles sales for the study period, and the top selling platforms of these manufacturers thus became the focus of the Ricardo study. This approach enabled Ricardo to carry out engineering analysis without individually inspecting or testing each of this very large number of vehicles.
...this study demonstrates for the first time that raising the blend ceiling to E15 is "likely" to have a "negligible" [my emphasis] impact on vehicles manufactured between 1994 and 2000.
That's right. They only actually physically tested a handful of cars. In other words, if a 15 percent blend screws your car up immediately, or slowly over time, too bad for you because they never said it wouldn't, they said the higher blend is "likely" to have a "negligible" impact.
Bob goes on to tell us that EPA mandated labels on gasoline pumps to warn consumers that they are about to put a 15 percent blend into their cars "will ...confuse gasoline marketers, retailers and consumers.."
I own four cars (because my family has four drivers--myself, my wife, and my two daughters who are still in school). Half of our cars are quite a bit older than the study covered using statistical methods. What about all the poor people in America driving older cars, Bob? Is your organization going to pay their repair bills, (assuming the Ricardo study is correct, which is not "likely")?
...while making it more difficult for the nation to transition from imported oil to clean-burning, American-made renewable fuels. As it says in Scripture, "For if the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle?"
Above Dinneen(along with quoting scripture that references violence), continues to claim that corn ethanol can scale up to the point of replacing imported oil. It can't. Using a third of our corn crop it barely displaces five percent of our gasoline use. And this fuel is not what you could call clean. In addition to being the major cause of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone:
"..would likely worsen health problems caused by ozone, compared with gasoline, especially in winter.."
Although his overarching concern appears to be national security, below he plays the global warming card:
On the environmental front, according to an analysis conducted by the EPA, ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 61 percent, compared to gasoline.
At its worst, lifecycle GHG emissions from corn ethanol exceed those from gasoline in all three scenarios. At its best, corn ethanol is not that much better than gasoline on a climate basis, and certainly not good enough to warrant the soil degradation, water resource depletion and water pollution it continues to cause.
Bob continues distorting reality:
On the economic front, the US ethanol industry supports nearly 400,000 jobs
"..by some estimates, fully 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the jobs were already there... But US farmers would have been growing crop any way thanks to domestic agricultural subsidies and just exporting more than we do today. Thus if there’s any significant job creation in agriculture, it’s probably internationally where farmers are trying to make up for the higher level of exports our farmers would have been able to supply."
Next, Bob tells us ethanol paid $15.9 billion in federal, state and local taxes. What he does not tell us is that those taxes would have been paid by the gasoline the ethanol replaced, so no new income was generated as he suggests.
When it comes to energy security, the production of a record 10.75 billion gallons of ethanol last year replaced 364 million barrels of oil that would otherwise have been imported from unstable nations with unfriendly governments, such as Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran.
America has not imported any oil from Iran since the hostage crisis during the Carter administration and 10.75 billion gallons barely represents five percent of our gasoline use. Considering that it took about a third of our corn crop to do that it's easy to see that corn ethanol can't scale up enough to provide a modicum of energy security.
Meanwhile, the Blend Wall also stands in the way of developing the next generation of biofuels from feedstocks such as woodchips, corncobs, native grasses, and even garbage.
The above quote is a beautiful example of what Orwell called "doublespeak." In reality, it is thanks to corn ethanol that there is little market left for alternative versions of ethanol. It has hogged the entire market up for itself. The greatest impediment to alternative forms of ethanol ...is corn ethanol.
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For the full effect, turn your speakers on and click on the box with four arrows in the lower right-hand corner of the video before playing it.
I see it has already drawn a video response from a company that retrofits cars to run on E-85. I cringe at the thought of the hateful comments this video will elicit. Human nature can be an ugly thing to behold.
I put the above video together as an example of anti-propaganda propaganda. The truth is complex; propaganda is simple. The $13.7 billion number in the concluding Google search applies to all lobbying in the united states, not just corn ethanol or biofuels.*
About $8 million was spent on lobbying by various biofuel groups in 2009.
Also note that my title is, ah, presumptive and with a little time may grow into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Propaganda hit its zenith during the World Wars. All sides used it to garner support from the public by fanning the flames of xenophobia. Germany's propaganda in particular was appallingly effective at this.
The concept of evil is all in our minds. In reality, everyone thinks they are the good guys. Here's a recent article on that subject.
Growth Energy has launched this $2.5 million dollar campaign to secure an additional $30 billion in subsidies in the next five years and to get the amount of ethanol blended into our gas increased by 50%, oh, and they are also planning to get our government to fund a dedicated ethanol pipeline to the coasts (so they can export it) making corn ethanol too big to fail.
General Wesley Clark is one of the main players behind this blitz. He has a typical militarist's "us against them" worldview, which I'm guessing overrides the rational, scientific, environmental, and economic arguments against government support of corn ethanol.
IMHO, he's being used by the corn ethanol industry, which would happily export every drop of corn ethanol if they could get a higher price for it overseas as the biodiesel producers were doing (before being slapped with countervailing import duties). And if he protests when they start doing that he will more than likely have to find a new job because this is not really about national security; it's about profit. He just doesn't know that yet.
The following is a screen shot of a Google search I did yesterday on "food vs fuel:"
Note at the top the three sponsored links meant to deflect what you will find with this search term. Is Google being used as a propaganda mill by the highest bidders?
Go here to their $2.5 million dollar propaganda blitz er, ad campaign you have probably already seen on television (note that the word "corn" never precedes the word "ethanol" even though 99.8 percent of all ethanol produced in the United States comes from corn and that the word "food" is also conspicuously absent):
ETHANOL has not shipped a single job overseas--AMERICA'S "ECONOMIC" FUEL--Growth Energy
Well, that's not entirely true. The fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel fuel used on farms and the trucks that transport ethanol, and many of the components in farm equipment as well as the ethanol refineries came from overseas.
I'm not a big fan of fossil fuels but let's be honest here. Which fuel is worse? Imported oil is refined in America, creating many jobs. Saudi Arabia imports its refined gas and diesel. Oil does not send jobs overseas, although buying a Prius or any computer certainly does.
We don't have to wait millions of years to replenish our ETHANOL reserves--AMERICA'S "RENEWABLE" FUEL--Growth Energy
Roughly 75% of the energy contained in a gallon of corn ethanol came from non-renewable fossil fuels. Not to mention, the corn is wholly dependent on fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels. You can't call a fuel that is utterly dependent on fossil fuels renewable. Well, I guess they just did, but not with a straight face.
ETHANOL has contributed $0 to the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela--AMERICA'S "SENSIBLE" FUEL--Growth Energy
Here they are fanning the flames of xenophobia to hawk their product. Last time I checked, Saudi Arabia was our ally in the Gulf war and even paid for half of it. We still have five air bases located there.
We have not imported oil from Iran for decades. Note, however, that they still manage to sell every last drop to someone. That's because the world is now flat and oil is highly fungible (look it up). We can't crush our "evil" enemies by not buying oil from them.
No wars have ever been fought over ETHANOL--AMERICA'S "PEACE" FUEL--Growth Energy
...yet. Corn ethanol only represents about 2% of our supply. Using all of our cropland for corn ethanol would replace maybe 12%. To replace all of our imported oil with ethanol will require a lot of imports from places like South America where sugarcane ethanol is about ten times more energy efficient to produce.
The "NO WAR FOR OIL" bumper sticker was invented by big biofuel. If you have one on your car you are a dupe. Corn ethanol is not a ticket to world peace and note that our military budget has not been impacted by increased ethanol production.
Our efforts to maintain peace in the Middle East has to continue, oil or no oil, because the world is now flat. Mutually interdependent trading partners are the best chance for maintaining world peace. An energy shortage that brings our trading partners down would bring us down with them, as our banking and housing debacle just did to them.
No U.S. soldiers have been deployed to defend our ETHANOL reserves--AMERICA'S "INDEPENDENT" FUEL--Growth Energy
...yet. According to George W. Bush, our soldiers were deployed to root out weapons of mass destruction and to punish the guy responsible for bringing the Twin Towers down (who actually had nothing to do with it). Is Growth Energy saying our president lied to us? Are they saying he really went to war to protect our oil "reserves?" I'm stunned.
No beaches have been closed due to ETHANOL spills--AMERICA'S "CLEAN" FUEL--Growth Energy
...yet. Remember, corn ethanol only represents about 2% of our supply. Ethanol tanker spills have been causing their share of damage already. The largest fish kill in Illinois history occurred last year when a train pulling corn ethanol tankers derailed. The year before that 25,000 fish were killed and an entire population of an endangered mussel species was wiped out when another biofuel refiner dumped waste into a river in Missouri.
*I tried to replace the words "total spent on lobbying 2009 ...$13.7 billion" with something less potentially misleading like "$30 billion in subsidies, a 50% blend increase ..." in an updated video but was abruptly censored by somebody at Google (who I suspect is a big corn ethanol proponent) with the message, "We're trying to keep these appropriate for everyone ..."
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[Update: Take a gander at the comments on this NYT article published on 5/8/09. Commenter # 43 was called on the carpet by the Times journalist for not divulging his relationship to an ethanol company.]
I have always voted Democrat.
A 10 percent blend of ethanol in your full tank of gas will use enough corn to feed an adult for 40 days.
The world population is expected to increase by about 50 percent (ten times the present population of the U.S.) in the next forty years.
The number of chronically hungry human beings is approaching one billion souls for the first time in human history (over 3 times the population of the entire United States).
At least eight peer-reviewed studies published in the last two years have found that today's food-based biofuels are worse for global warming than the fossil fuels they replace.
I took the above photo with my cell phone while filling up our Prius. Your elected politicians are forcing you to fuel your car with food. Why aren’t you morally outraged?
The above cartoon was created last summer by Michael Ramirez. And he wasn't the only cartoonist covering the topic. There were food riots in over thirty countries that summer. Big Biofuel tells us their product had nothing to do with it, but think about it. Although the corn ethanol lobby would happily do so if they could get away with it, no sane politician would back a plan to turn all of America's corn and soybean crops into biofuels. Doing so would starve millions of impoverished children around the world and wreak havoc on our food system. If turning all of it into biofuels would wreak havoc, turning a quarter of it into biofuels (which we just did last year) wreaks one quarter of that havoc.
Attempts to get consumers to use corn ethanol as a fuel have a long history in our country. It has been marketed under the names Alcoline, Agrol, Gasohol, and finally, E-85. Gasohol, which is a 10 percent blend of ethanol, was sold in the eighties. You got to decide if you wanted it or not and most people decided they didn't as the above picture attests. The ag and biofuel lobbyists got together with our politicians and found a way to fix that. They simply blend it into our gas without our permission and charge us an extra dollar a tank to subsidize the biofuel industry that is forcing this crappy fuel down our throats. I say crappy because, in so many words, that is what Consumer Reports concluded it was when they tested it.
Five bills are pending in Oregon to to scale back ethanol use. Now, why would you limit use of a fuel that exacerbates global warming and hunger in the third world, costs taxpayers an extra dollar per tank of gas, an extra 12 9 billion in food costs and over 10 billion dollars in lost gas mileage annually? [Update: A commenter pointed out an error in my calculations.]
The ethanol complaints tend to come from Republicans, but three of the bills have Democratic supporters. The politicians said they're hearing widespread complaints from voters.
The stereotypically well intentioned but math, science, and logic challenged local vocal environmentalists want to keep the ethanol blend. They think another 30 years of government support for this fuel will finally lead to a biofuel that isn't quite as destructive.
Just last week I met, along with two other people, with a local politician to lobby him to drop his city's use of a 40 percent blend of food-based biodiesel. He finally perked up when someone mentioned that dropping the biodiesel would save the city $350,000 annually. There was potential political gain to be had. As a politician, his next step should be to determine if banning of the biodiesel blend would make more political enemies than it would gain. The mayor of this city is a huge biodiesel proponent and the employee's retirement fund of this city invested ten million dollars last year in the largest biodiesel refinery on the West Coast, which is now on the edge of bankruptcy. All of the congress people in this State are huge proponents of biofuels.
A word of encouragement for this politician, as Washington State's King County Executive, Ron Sims stopped use of biodiesel in King County vehicles last year citing budgetary concerns. That move certainly didn't cost him any political points. He is now deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Maybe taking the moral high ground on this issue will be the politically smart thing to do in the future.
These fuels cannot make a dent in our fuel imports. Only high mileage cars and mass transit can do that. It took an area equal to all of the cropland in Indiana (almost a quarter of our corn crop) to replace a mere 4% of our fuel supply last year.
The real question is, will the Democrats cede that moral high ground to the Republicans?
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