Ethanol is coming to the Turnpike

July 4th, 2008 • environmentalism

Well, at least at the Port St. Lucie service plaza according to TCPalm.com (don’t bother reading the comments, they’re pretty much focused on bashing Crist). While this is a welcome addition to the CITGO pumps already in place that readily provide gas for travelers approximately every 45 miles, is this “too little, too late”? Quite possibly. They’re adding E85 pumps to this service plaza in order to help people squeeze more value from every tank although, it’s at a cost anda disadvantage. This pump will more than likely carry the highest priced E85 gasoline in the state — all of the plazas already have gas prices some 7%-10% higher than the rest of the state. It’s going to be a distinct disadvantage because the number of cars able to easily run on E85 are much smaller than people realize. Ford’s dual fuel cars and Chevy/GM’s Flexfuel cars probably number 1 in every 200 or less, it’s not a very high ratio. Even when I was commuting heavily for work, I probably saw only a few Flexfuel vehicles a week (and of course, they were all trucks and SUVs, not vehicles that can benefit from it the most).

So why use E85 if it’s not going to be selling like hot cakes?

Because I believe that Governor Crist is trying to do everything he can to help his state out. After approving the state-funded buy-out of US Sugar, Crist’s green-o-meter shot up quite a good bit. He’s looking to hit another sweet spot with us environmentalists with his latest move, thinking we’ll kowtow over getting a readily available E85 distributor on the Turnpike. However, why not simply go the route that Shell’s going and put E10/E15 in all the gas as a standard? I suspect this has more to do with CITGO than Crist, though. Nearly all gasoline-powered cars manufactured in the last 10 years can run on up to 15% ethanol without any modifications whatsoever. About 90% of all Fords manufactured in the last 8 years state this very clearly in their manual and I’m fairly certain my 15 year old Saturn will have no issues with it as well. I do whole heartedly admit that adding this option is a step in the right direction but it’s leading with the wrong foot entirely. Besides the fact that the ethanol will probably be more expensive than the stations in both Tallahassee and Miami, many people may simply ruin their engines thinking they can run it in their cars without any modifications whatsoever. Using E85 not only means you’re using more fuel due to lower detonation pressures, you also get lower miles per gallon because of this.

Is this state approved greenwash?

I’m going to have to side with “yes” on this one. Besides the above points (potentially higher cost, can’t reliably run in unmodified engines, loss of MPG, etc.), most people have absolutely no idea what E85 really is. All they know is it’s “gas made from corn” and that it’s supposed to be better for the environment. My father, who pays little attention to news other than local news and politics, even knows that ethanol sucks and is doing damage to the food industry and food stream. I can’t even get him to recycle on a regular basis but he knows that using corn for fuel is boneheaded. And he’s 66. Well past the target market of most green/sustainable advertising and marketing. Sure, he’s an outlier because he knows that I care about what’s going on but that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be made aware. I know this is posited in so many other places and much better than I can say: using food stuffs for fuel kills our appetites. I know that corn is over $7 a bushel now thanks to ethanol and that’s great for farmers who primarily grow corn. But it’s bad for the fact that other farmers are jumping on the bandwagon and converting their well-bedded plots to corn fields. Why is this an issue? Just ask any corn farmer and they’ll tell you growing corn simply destroys soil after a meager number of harvests, this is why they routinely rotate corn for something else and wait a few harvests before planting corn again (some even wait a full season or two just to let the soil regain nutrients). This means that with more farmers converting to corn, it has a two fold effect: 1. it’s taking corn from the food stream, driving up the price of food (many farm animals eat corn and if it costs more to feed them, it costs more to make your hamburgers or hams or buffalo wings or whatever), 2. it reduces arable land for other crops and corn (leading to infertile soil and lots of soil erosion, I only know this part because friends of mine in NC had to rotate corn in their harvests). If you take your 2000 acre farm that’s used to grow many different food stuffs and convert a large portion of that to corn just to see a short return on investment, you’ll be missing out after harvest time comes and your soil is incapable of growing your other crops.

But back to the greenwash. Little other alternative sources are as available right now as corn-based ethanol is in the US but that’s going to change since much of the Midwest was flooded this year, killing hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land. This now means that 9 ethanol production plants are now getting canned altogether or building is delayed since there’s suddenly a whole lot less corn to go around to waste on fuel production. And based on data from previous studies (this was also covered in National Geographic Magazine, October 2007 edition), corn — by the ton — is shown to be extremely inefficient in fuel production compared to other biofuels like soy and algae (not that soy is much better, nor are grasses). People are making biofuels out of almost anything these days and much of it is more efficient than corn. But hey, it’s not gasoline — totally — so it must be good for the environment, right? That’s what Crist is banking on most people thinking, I can guarantee you.

Where to go from here

Combine fuel production inefficiency with the fact that E85 can make your engine explode or simply eat through your fuel lines, placing these pumps on the Turnpike is a terrible idea. Besides the infrastructure cost required (pumps can cost upwards of $200,000 and will require an entirely different fuel delivery truck thus doubling the gas wasted to deliver gas to the station), I doubt that there will be usage warnings posted about what E85 works in and what it doesn’t work in. Consumer education will go leaps and bounds higher than these pumps would and could easily be more effective in teaching people to simply develop better driving techniques. What is going to be more costly for a consumer who already has a car in this situation and they decide they want to use E85? Sure, they’ll save a few dollars at the pump but if their engine decides to detonate from ethanol’s higher explosion pressures or eats their fuel lines, they’ll then get to spend untold amounts of money on repairs and a rental car. Or they can simply trade in their current car for a new flexible fuel vehicle that will cost more monetarily and more than likely, environmentally as well. You can go and buy a new Chevy Impala with FlexFuel (since it’s the only car option they offer, everything else is a truck, van, or SUV/cross-over) and happily spend what little money you have left on a biofuel that’ll make you feel better.

Would I like to shell out a few thousand dollars to replace the engine in our Focus? Yeah, I would but not because I blew it up using the wrong fuel. I’d rather spend that money overhauling the engine, boring out the throttle body, using lighter engine parts, adding a more efficient air supply system, and a whole host of options to make it run more efficiently. I can think of much better ways to spend that money.

I don’t know how much research was conducted on the viability and consumer usability of ethanol biofuel, but I can almost guarantee you that Crist was telling his team to do anything to help his constituency save money at the pump. Unfortunately, this was a bad move on their part. Opting to institute E10 on all pumps would’ve been much cheaper because you don’t have to replace anything at all and all it requires from CITGO is another delivery to completely replace the current one and then some signage to proudly display the use of ethanol for all engine types. Hell, they can take it one step further and add in biodiesels to help out our trucking industry since their rigs can readily run biodiesel with little or no modifications at all and would benefit from it much more than a regular consumer ever would. If we can drive down the cost of logistics and over-land transport, we’d be solving a lot more economic problems than a few new gasoline pumps will.

I congratulate you, Charlie Crist (especially now that you’re engaged!), but you need to make sure that your aides and staff members are doing research that makes sense for all of us, not a minority of the auto-owning population. There’s so much more that you could be persuading companies and consumers to do than gobble up even more gas in their corn cars.

Tags: crist, environmentalism, ethanol, florida

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