Quote:
|
Originally Posted by xepherys
I don't think your point really follows logically. Especially the part about cutitng gas supply. There are going to be a finite number of cars and a finite amount of fuel pumped into them regardless of whether every car in the country ran on 87 Octane Unleaded or whether there were 20 types of petro. How does this change the bottom line supply? If there are 1000 people driving cars that take unleaded, and you have 87, 89 and 91 octane, then 200 of those people start driving on E85, and then another 50 start driving on E70, that's actually an INCREASE in petro supply compared to consumption because the E70 and E85 fuels use less actual petro.
|
Yeah, I see where you're coming from, but in practice it just hasn't worked that way. E85's already here, and it certainly hasn't *lowered* gas prices. E10 is also very common, especially in the midwest, and that, too, hasn't done anything to lower prices. In fact, recent studies have shown that ethanol has raised gas prices because of the abovementioned infrastructure issues.
Here's the core problem: First off ethanol is expensive to make. If it weren't for government subsidies, such as the federal blend credit which takes off 50 cents in gas tax per gallon of ethanol, then ethanol and ethanol-blend gasolines would be MORE expensive than regular gas. We might lower the price of a barrel of oil due to slightly reduced demand, but we'd end up paying more anyway because of the higher cost of production for ethanol.
Second, let's say GM starts making these new E70 cars (dunno why they would since their flex-fuel vehicles already take E85 OR regular gas. That indicates they'd work on E70 as well). Not enough people will buy them to make a sizeable difference in the fuel supply - in other words, most cars on the road will still be gasoline-users. BUT we have to have the infrastructure in place to support the E70 cars anyway, so we have to divert gas, which could be fueling the regular cars, to instead sit largely unused in the E70 pumps.
This theory is verified by looking at the history of E85 pumps. When it first came out, lots of gas stations in the midwest installed E85 pumps. Now many of those stations have emptied the E85 and refilled the tanks with regular gas because the E85 just wasn't selling.
Now more, especially in Iowa, are reinstalling the E85 pumps, but that's largely because the state government is strongarming the fuel industry to do so so that all the new corn-ethanol plants they've been building all over the place have somewhere to ship their fuel. Great news for the farmers, who have yet another place to sell the corn they shouldn't be growing in the first place, but not such great news for the motoring public.