Posted 4/28/2006 05:17:00 PM by Douglas

I know I've ranted on ethanol, which is different than ranting while on ethanol, but still. This has to be the best article I've seen that sums up the sheer stupidity of the "ethanol as fuel" movement. This article has it all. CAFE mileage requirements, EPA emission requirements. Not to mention ADM corn subsidies and Brazilian exports to support their ethanol industry. But you can't make up this stuff:

But the government site's automatic calculations are based on E85 selling for 37 cents per gallon less than regular gasoline, when the USA Today article reports that at many stations in the Midwest E85 is actually selling for 13 cents per gallon more than ordinary gas. Using the corrected prices for both gasoline and E85, the annual cost of fueling GM's Suburban goes from $2,709 to $3,763. Hence the suggestion that truth in advertising should come back into play. Possibly GM could rename this ad campaign "Shell Out Green, Turn Yellow."

Well, no shit. If it were cost effective, don't you think we'd been doing it years (decades) ago? Pardon my libertarian head poking through, but the market has a strange way of bringing about the most cost effective way of doing business. But it gets better:

Even more damaging, the EPA's own attorney admitted to the judges that because of its higher volatility, putting ethanol into the nation's fuel supply would likely increase smog where it was used. One of the judges, on hearing that the EPA was actively promoting a substance that could in fact diminish air quality, wondered aloud, "Is the EPA in outer space?"

What GM left out of its ads was that the use of this fuel would likely increase the amount of smog during the summer months (as the EPA's own attorneys had admitted in 1995) -- and that using E85 in GM products would lower their fuel efficiency by as much as 25%. (USA Today recently reported that the Energy Dept. estimated the drop in mileage at 40%.)

So not only does it make more smog, it takes more fuel to power the same internal combustion engine? Take ADM's profit's out of this equation, and I'm having a hard time seeing any advantage, but what do I know? I'm just an engineer. Here's the final nail:

The other negative aspect of this inefficient fuel is that numerous studies have found that ethanol creates less energy than is required to make it. Other studies have found that ethanol creates "slightly" more energy than is used in its production. Yet not one of these studies takes into account that when E85 is used, the vehicle's fuel efficiency drops by at least 25% -- and possibly by as much as 40%. Using any of the accredited studies as a baseline in an energy-efficiency equation, ethanol when used as a fuel is a net energy waste.

Corn ain't cheap. It's cheap to ADM because they get it for free (courtesy of your federal government). Ethanol as fuel is a thermodynamic nightmare, and we're better off using alchemy to turn rocks into coal than we are using switch-grass into a renewable energy source.

Labels: ethanol