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Ethanol: Fuel Of The Future?November 15th, 2007If you are like most Americans, you're nothing like Don Brown. Brown, aretired truck driver, not only knows that E85 is a blend of 85 percentethanol and 15 percent gasoline, he loves it. "I'm the E85 man," he said when a KARE11 crew approached him and askedwhy his car - and clothes - were covered in stickers and patchespromoting the much-hyped fuel. We asked him why he believes so strongly in E85. Because this is theUnited States of America, (and) we got to take care of our countryfirst," Brown said. But most Americans are not putting ethanol in theirtanks. Ethanol, which simply is grain alcohol you could drink - if it weren'tmixed with other chemicals - accounts for just 3.5 percent of all thefuel we use, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Outside of Minnesota, which is home to one-fourth of all E85 pumps in the entire country, E85 is extremely difficult to find. Bev Meier, the manager of an Exxon station in Lake Dalton, Wis., said,"I don't have a car that uses (E85), and even though I manage aconvenience store with gasoline, I don't know anything about it." At the other end of town, Matt Steigerwald, manager of a Shell station, said none of his customers are asking for ethanol. "Not here, no," he said. "As far as I know, there's only one gasstation in (Lake Dalton) that even has E85 around here. So we don't getit at all. We don't get questions about it whatsoever." However, the demand for the fuel, which car commercials tout as "a fuelthat lowers greenhouse gas and can reduce our dependence on oil," iscoming from somewhere. This year's corn crop covered almost 93 million acres of farmland.That's 19 percent more than last year, an increase widely attributed tothe ethanol boom. Dan Erickson, a farmer near Albert Lea and member of the Minnesota CornGrowers Association, said he will take 40 percent of his corn crop thisyear to the ethanol plant. "It's always a good time to be a farmer," hesaid. "But yeah, now it's really good." But if most car drivers aren't asking for ethanol, if most cars are notengineered to run on ethanol, if top foreign car makers Toyota andHonda don't currently sell any cars in the U.S. designed to handle highblends of ethanol, why producers producing so much ethanol? Because thegovernment is pushing ethanol. Politicians in both parties promote ethanol when they say we need to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. "It is not good for our country, as a matter of national security, tohave that much of our country's future hooked to people who don't likeus or want to do us harm," Gov. Pawlenty told a cheering crowd at anethanol conference this summer. KARE11 looked into that claim and found the suggestion that we'rerelying too heavily on enemies is at least a little misleading. Quickresearch tells you the United States' top two sources of foreign oilare Canada and Mexico, countries that generally are considered friends. Among the top five countries supplying oil to the U.S., Saudi Arabia isthe only one in the Perisan Gulf region. Venezuela, which is rankednumber four, has a blustery president but it is not generallyconsidered a threat. That said, few people would argue it is a bad goal to find a clean,renewable source of fuel. It's just that people who have studiedethanol say corn is not the answer. "We're not going to ethanol our way out of reliance on foreign oil,"said C. Ford Runge, a distinguished McKnight Professor of appliedeconomics at the University of Minnesota. His colleague, David Tilman,another Knight Professor and ecologist, said ethanol would only make adent in our usage of gasoline, even if every kernel of American cornwere used for fuel. "If we took all the corn we grew in 2005, in thewhole United States, and used that to make ethanol, it would only getrid of 12 percent or our gasoline," Tilman said. Yet government is spending taxpayer money as if corn were the solution.In Minnesota, the government has paid nearly $376 million in ethanolsubsidies since the 1980s. At the federal level, the government is budgeting $14 billion in taxcredits over the next four years. On top of that, a tax on foreignethanol - a 54-cent tariff on every gallon of imported ethanol - is aroadblock to competition. "The American ethanol industry subsidies are a reflection of itsrelative inefficiency, compared to lower cost ethanol sources, such assugar cane based ethanol from Brazil," Runge said. Runge said, if youtake away the subsidies, there would be no market for ethanol made fromcorn. "The ethanol industry is the creation of government subsidies,"he said. Runge has many concerns about ethanol. In an article he co-authored inthe journal Foreign Affairs, he notes corn prices have surged becauseof ethanol. In March, corn futures hit their highest level in 10 years."Really, what is happening is, we are filling the tanks of our vehicleswith ethanol fuels that are bidding corn away from food uses," Rungesaid. There also are environmental concerns. A study by the Institute forAgriculture and Trade Policy found it takes, on average, more than fourgallons of water to produce just one gallon of ethanol. David Tilman, who has studied ethanol extensively, found the amount ofenergy that goes into making ethanol is almost as large as the amountof energy ethanol produces. "Twenty percent of the energy in a gallonof ethanol is new energy," he said. "Eighty percent is all the energyit took to grow the corn and convert the corn to ethanol. And thatenergy it took was fossil energy." It also takes fertilizers to grow corn, fertilizers that have run offfields and into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone" the size ofNew Jersey, according to NASA, that can't support aquatic life. "In thelong term, corn's not going to do it for us," Tilman said. Tilman istesting native prairie grasses, which he said can be converted toethanol without the consequences of corn. But prairie grasses don't currently have the same political allies as corn. "The problem really is that corn and soybean growers didn't spend 30years paying the campaign bills of members of Congress to maintainthese subsidies to just give the game away to grass," he said. The corn lobby does have deep roots, and over the years, just a handfulof big companies have benefited the most from the ethanol boom. Today,four companies produce more than 40 percent of the ethanol made in theU.S. Ethanol's biggest supporters have begun to acknowledge corn is at best, part, of the answer. "We'll look back 25 or 30 years from now, and what we have now will beviewed as the Model T of renewable energy," Gov. Pawlenty said. General Motors, which builds more than one-third of all flex-luel carson the road today, also is adding hybrids to its fleet and working on afuel cell car, which could be available to the public in 2010. GM's director of communications for biofuels, Alan Adler, said ethanolisn't going to replace gasoline, but GM believes using it now is betterthan the "status quo." In the meantime, more efficient ethanol plants are being built. But isE85 a practical fuel - from a performance standpoint - for anyone whodrives a car, pays too much for gas and is concerned about theenvironment? KARE 11 tested E85 on a road trip. We'll tell you if it performed like real alternative to gas in Part Two of our story. - By Scott Goldberg, KARE 11 News Click here for your Free Ethanol Futures Trading eGuide | |