shakran

I'll give you a few:

1) Ethanol takes more energy to make than you get out of it. This means you are using coal, oil, gas, or nuclear power to produce an energy source that does not give you as much energy as you'd have gotten by just using the original energy source in the first place.

2) Ethanol has lower energy output than gasoline. This means your car will be less powerful, and will use more fuel to go a given distance than a gasoline powered car. This is partly due to the fact that ethanol has a higher octane rating. A politician from south dakota attempted to use the fact that ethanol is high-octane to say that ethanol gives you more power. Unfortunately, this politican did not understand how octane works, and that a LOWER octane number translates to a more volatile fuel.


See the trick with ethanol, and with hydrogen, and all the other "alternative" energy cars is that when people tout their low pollution and environmental friendliness and renewability, they fail to take into account the entire fuel cycle.

In order to make ethanol, we have to grow something. Corn is pretty popular (even though corn is not by any stretch the highest yield source for ethanol - but that would be the midwest corn farmer lobby's influence there). So we use all that fuel for the tractor, the combine, sometimes an airplane depending on the size of the farm, the trucks to transport the corn, etc etc etc.

Then we have to convert the raw corn into ethanol. Basically you do this by running a giant distillery - ethanol is also known as moonshine until they add chemicals to it that makes it undrinkable. So it takes a whole lot of energy to make the ethanol.

Then you have to transport that ethanol, but there's a trick. You can't transport it via regular gas pipelines because ethanol absorbs water - you'd end up adding water to the gas if you ever ran gas through the pipe again, and that can't be allowed to happen. So we have to build a whole new pipeline just for the ethanol.

Once you've transported it, you now have to blend it with regular gasoline. This right here is proof that ethanol is crap. A viable fuel does not have to be blended with another fuel in order to be useable as a fuel. You do not fuel your car with peanut butter because you'd have to mix it with gasoline in order to get any combustion out of it. It's the same with ethanol. All ethanol is doing is reducing the volatility of the gasoline.

So after you get done with ALL those steps, you finally have your finished ethanol/gas blend that you then rely on government subsidies to bring its costs down so people will actually buy it. In some states, such as Iowa, a major corn producer, you also rely on government mandates saying that certain gas MUST be a certain percentage of ethanol.

Interestingly Iowa is now using that requirement (midgrade gas must be 10% ethanol) and its subsidies, which makes the midgrade gas cheaper than the low octane stuff, to essentially force consumers into buying the ethanol. After all, if you have a choice between $1.90 a gallon and $2.15 a gallon, you're gonna go with the $1.90. BUT Iowa's governor also recently said that Iowans are choosing ethanol over regular gas, conveniently leaving out the fact that it's a price per gallon choice that was forced by the government in the first place, and NOT an alternative energy choice.


Now let's examine the effect of boutique fuels.

Each state has different gas blend requirements. Iowa requires 10% ethanol in their 89/90 octane gas. Minnesota does not. That means that Iowa is getting different midgrade gas than Minnesota is. Some other states have differing requirements. In other words we have oil companies making all these little batches of boutique fuels for various markets instead of making big batches of gas for the whole country. As we learned in economics 101, the more you make of something the cheaper it is to make it. Therefore, all this ethanol blending crap is actually INCREASING gas prices.

Meanwhile while we're happilly making ethanol (using vehicles fueld by middle east oil-derived gasoline) we're still having to buy scads of oil in order to blend it with the ethanol. And since the ethanol gas has less energy than normal gas, we're getting worse mileage out of it. So we're really not reducing our dependence on foreign oil all that much, but what we ARE doing is enriching corn farmers at the expense of government dollars which are coming out of our pocketbooks every April in the form of taxes.

The ethanol industry is a scam industry that has been fleecing the American people for decades. It's high time that it be exposed for the disaster it is rather than the savior of all energy it is portrayed to be.