is ethanol gas right for your car?

“Soaring fuel costs drive many to ethanol

Lone Nashville station that sells the fuel runs out on Monday as drivers take advantage of the $2.39 price.
By NAOMI SNYDER
Staff Writer

The bright sunny logo on the state's only publicly available ethanol pump, at the Main Street Citgo in east Nashville, belies the fact that the pump is generally ignored.

That changed last week.

The little-known E85 pump, which is an 85% blend of corn-based ethanol and gasoline, went from selling about 50 gallons per day to closer to 600 or 800 gallons. Monday, the pump ran dry, and another delivery was expected by the end of yesterday.

As Nashville prices soared for regular gasoline above $3 per gallon in many cases after Hurricane Katrina, consumers began to discover that ethanol was cheaper than regular gasoline. It was $2.39 per gallon until it ran out Monday at the Main Street pump, a 72-cent discount to the average price of regular in Nashville of $3.11 early yesterday, according to the American Automobile Association.

"My secret's out,'' said Darin Rutledge, an EMT from Franklin who recently discovered the E85 pump in east Nashville after doing an online search.

He waited in line behind three or four other drivers Monday to get to the E85 pump, a normally vacant spot at the Citgo gas station.

"I didn't think (the country) had ethanol anymore,'' Rutledge said, remembering the last oil crisis in the 1980s and the more frequent corn cob signs stuck on gas pumps back then. "Maybe this will come back."

Zack Massad, the former owner of the Citgo gas station and cousin of the current owner, said that until recently most E85 customers were driving state-owned vehicles. During the past week, most E85 customers were driving regular cars and SUVs.

Not everyone can use E85, an 85% ethanol to 15% gas mix. There are an estimated 4.5 million vehicles on the road that do run on it. A list can be found at www.E85fuel.com

they are exclusive to DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General Motors, Isuzu, Mazda, Mercedes, Mercury and Nissan.

Manufacturers have been able to get credits toward meeting fuel efficiency standards by creating the flexible-fuel vehicles, even though many people don't know they can use E85.

Another hurdle for the industry has been higher prices for ethanol, until just this year.

"This year is one of the first years I can recall when ethanol was consistently lower than gasoline," said Spencer Kelly, Oil Price Information Service ethanol and biodiesel editor.

Ethanol advocates have said prices are generally running 20 to 30 cents cheaper than regular gas this year.

Projections of continued high prices for crude oil are giving farming communities hope. Farmers expect increased demand for ethanol will provide a ready market for corn, and E85 burns fewer fossil fuels, reducing pollution.

"We really have an opportunity to become much more self-sufficient in this country,'' said David Nichols, a grain farmer near Dyersburg. "Right now, we're exporting grain and importing oil. That's the opposite of how it should be."

A drawback to E85, however, is that it generally reduces gas mileage, anywhere from 5% to 15%, depending on the vehicle.

Monte Shaw, a spokesman for ethanol trade group the Renewable Fuels Association, said he hopes manufacturers will begin to design the vehicles to increase mileage for ethanol fuels.

The trade group estimates the country will produce 4 billion gallons of ethanol this year, and an additional 1 billion gallons of capacity is under construction.

"If oil prices stay about $40 or $50 bucks, the demand for ethanol is going to be huge,'' Shaw said.
last edited: 9/07/05 10:17:33 AM”

“better be OK...I've been using it for years...it's pretty impossible to find gas without it in Minnesota...”

“My father was an engineer for Ford. He said it has long term damaging effects on cars engines and not to buy it if you have a choice.”

“There's a difference between the E85 stuff menitioned above, and gas that has some ethanol in it. If you see a pump that says "contains ethanol", that means it has a small percentage of ethanol - like around 15% (and 85% gasoline).

The E85 is the exact opposite - it has only 15% gas (and 85% ethanol).”

“Man, am I going to catch some flames for this post! That’s OK, I am only posting some ideas I have read about.

I can understand the allure of ethanol as a fuel. It’s clean-burning, can be developed from domestic sources and is much less toxic to the environment than fossil fuels. It is a very “green” fuel. I burn it myself on backpacking trips for these very reasons. If I spill it in my pack I don’t smell like a gas station for a week!

I have thought about this and done some limited research. I am not an expert on this topic like many other people. Yet I believe there are a few key problems with ethanol as a fuel.

First, the delivery infrastructure isn't focused on ethanol, and mass transit of ethanol has significant problems over traditional fossil fuels. The big problem is that ethanol absorbs moisture (that’s why it’s used in gas-line additives like HEET). So the current pipelines aren’t fit to transport ethanol since the fuel would change state significantly as it was transferred. That means the existing infrastructure would have to be scrapped, rebuilt or significantly “upgraded”. Whatever the case, this is a terribly expensive and time-consuming venture.

This transportation issue is not negligible since ethanol is not the most energy-rich fuel. A pound of ethanol has roughly one-half the amount of energy that a pound of fossil fuel would contain. So to deliver the same total amount of energy from one point to another requires the transportation of twice the amount of ethanol as compared the fossil fuels. That is, the transportation system for ethanol would have to be twice as large as what one would need for the same volume of fossil fuel.

It’s not that different from the studies that were done for fuel/stove selection based on the duration of a backpacking trip (these are very interesting to me).

Also, it doesn’t necessarily provide a change in the way motor fuel is priced. That is, the price of a gallon of ethanol isn’t tied to the cost of the corn from which it is produced. It’s a market that, like fossil fuels, is driven by demand for an under produced product. Also, like fossil fuels, the cost remains seasonally dependant. So the demand-driven market will still set the price and suppliers will charge “what they can get” based on demand. Just because it’s made from corn which is cheap (compared to crude oil) doesn’t mean the final product will be cheap. It only means that ethanol producers have more of an opportunity to make profit on the demand for what they produce.

But the worst reality is that fermenting renewable crops into ethanol, when taken as a full process from planting to burning, actually may use more energy from fossil fuel than the ethanol itself contains. That is, you use more energy from fossil fuel to create a gallon of ethanol than you get from the gallon of ethanol you produce. The reason ethanol looks so “green” in many studies is because they don’t take into account all the pieces that go into production of ethanol such as the steel that goes into the tractor, the fuel used to make fertilizers and corn seeds, transportation costs, wastewater disposal, etc. Some papers I have read show that it takes more than 4 times as much energy to produce ethanol than what you actually get out of it.

It’s worth noting that the same economics apply to fossil fuel (you can’t get more energy out of a fuel than what you put into its production… it’s a 1st Law of Thermodynamics thing). That said, the ratio of cost to produce the energy output is vastly superior for fossil fuels.

I realize that the economy and technology of oil and refineries has been primed for many decades and we have gotten really efficient at converting crude oil into the products we need. We aren’t nearly that good at this same process for ethanol. So research and priorities may make this a more viable option in the future. That doesn’t change the fact that right now it’s not.

I am sure a lot of these studies were driven by the petroleum companies, but the ones I have read in years past seem pretty straightforward to me. That said, if the implication of these studies (that it takes more fossil fuel energy to produce ethanol than you get out of the ethanol itself) was true why wouldn’t the evil bastards in these companies be supporting increased ethanol production? Why would they be publishing these results? They would want to see more ethanol produced under these conditions…

In the Presidents February State of the Union address, President Bush talked about increasing the production of Ethanol from 3.57 billion gallons/year up to 5 billion gallons/year as part of his energy bill. I am highly skeptical that this is a good policy for these reasons. In fact such a move may increase our dependency on fossil fuels, coal in particular, and foreign oil.”

“E-85 is only to be used on Flexible fuel cars and SUV's. I know Ford makes such cars as my Explorer is one of them. The E-85 fuel is cleaner burning and makes less emissions but it also decreases gas milage like 20%. My Explorer goes from 18-20 mpg to 14-16 mpg when I use E-85. As far as the 10-15% ethanol I can tell little difference in MPG and have never seen any bad effects on the engine and Iowa has been using 10-15% fuel since I started driving back in 1994”

“Good points. But consider that there are transportations costs, steel needed for pumps, etc. when pumping oil. So those things may negate each other. Labor needs to be considered, too. It might be much more efficient per gallon to produce ethanol than oil. Oil needs many people to design oil platforms, build them, run them, and then move all that oil to shore (land-based pumps need a lot of labor, too). I wonder if the studies considered that, too.

Something to consider too, is often petroleum is needed to make the fertilizers.

I think ultimately we need to develop the tech to harvest sunlight directly, and efficiently. The best tech now is 30% efficient - that needs to get up to 70, 80 or even 90%+. ALL fuel we use is really just stored sunlight engergy, so why not cut out all the middlemen (conversion of sunlight to oil or wood or corn, pumping/harvesting, refining, transporting) and just get it right from the original source? Of course the technology needs to get there first...”

“Just need to figure out the Cold Fusion thing. Lemme see E=???? :)”