I just read this article about the ethanol industry and it's applications as a "cleaner burning fuel" and it goes against everything I've read about reformulated fuels.
It's not a painfully long article but it's longer than what I think would be appropriate to paste in the thread. In leiu of doing that, I'll post the introduction paragraphs to interest you and let you guys read the rest.
http://magazine.audubon.org/incite/incite0408.html
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The answer is the American public.
The question was: Who would spend 10 cents to 20 cents more per gallon for gasoline that reduces mileage, degrades your car, destroys fish and wildlife, increases air pollution, and makes the United States more dependent on foreign oil?
With its 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, Congress tried a revolutionary strategy: regulating not just how gasoline was burned in motor vehicles but how it was made. The idea was to require the use of gasoline with at least 2 percent oxygen-containing chemicals (oxygenates) in areas where clean-air standards weren't being met. This way more carbon monoxide, toxic hydrocarbons, and smog-producing volatile organic compounds would get burned up.
Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), and other politicians from the Corn Belt who had pushed this "reformulated-gasoline program" were ecstatic. The amendments created a new future for the corn-produced oxygenate ethanol (a.k.a. "white lightning" or grain alcohol), which hadn't found a decent market for anything save drinking despite $5 billion in federal subsidies. With the mandated use of "gasohol" (one part ethanol, nine parts gasoline), the moribund ethanol industry would spring heel-clicking from its wheelchair.
Agribusiness would prosper. And America would get cleaner air and homegrown energy. It was going to be a win-win-win-win.
Fourteen years later there are 78 ethanol plants in 19 states. More than half are being expanded, and scores of new ones will soon come online. Fully 10 percent of all corn grown in the United States goes into ethanol. And Senator Daschle, Representative Dennis Hastert (R-IL), and President George W. Bush have been trying to legislate a mandate requiring states to increase the amount of ethanol used in reformulated gasoline from about 3 billion gallons to 5 billion gallons by 2012.
But the reformulated-gasoline program has turned out to be a colossal failure, and the ethanol industry has transmogrified into a sacrosanct, pork-swilling behemoth that gets bigger and hungrier with each feeding. Ethanol dirties the air more than it cleans it. Its production requires vast plantings of corn, which wipe out fish and wildlife by destroying habitat and polluting air, soil, and water. Of all crops grown in the United States, corn demands the most massive fixes of herbicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers, while creating the most soil erosion.
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This was also interesting:
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Pimentel found that ethanol costs $2.24 a gallon to produce, compared with 63 cents for gasoline. Other costs of allocating corn to ethanol production, reports Pimentel, include higher food prices, because about 70 percent of the corn grown in the United States is fed to cattle.
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Like most people, I've been told by enough sources that oxygenated fuels as so much better than just using 100% gasoline. However, as the article points out, this is based on vehicle technology surrounding the 1990 revision to the Clean Air Act. Since that time cars are running much more cleanly than they used to and when you factor in all the pollution caused by ethanol production and the way blending it into fuels increases the cost of gas the story appears to change.
This is not a problem created by either political party. The ethanol industry contributes to both parties and has influenced the decisions of Clinton, and Bush, and many former Presidents. If the topic starts to grow, try to keep that in mind.