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Ethanol Can Be too Much of a Good Thing
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Do you want a tiger in your tank or a bureaucrat?This isn't an idle question, because the federal government, under successive administrations, has been keenly interested in the gasoline you burn, not just in your car but also in your boat, lawn mower, chainsaw and off-road vehicle.When a series of challenges have worked their way through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, right in the middle of the 2012 elections, the composition of gasoline is likely to change.If the Environmental Protection Agency has its way, the ethanol content of gasoline will rise from 10 percent to 15 percent. This may not sound like much, but it's enough to wreak havoc on old engines in cars and on many marine and other engines, according to opponents.The arguments are:
- Ethanol is good because it reduces most tailpipe emissions, is made from U.S. corn and provides a steady and growing market for the nation's farmers.
- Ethanol is bad in quantity because it is a solvent that attacks various rubber components in engines and fiberglass in boat fuel tanks and can lead to catastrophic failures and fires. The U.S. Coast Guard has drawn attention to what it sees as potential loss of life with the failure of marine engines.
The EPA, charged by Congress with managing the ethanol in gasoline, says that all of these considerations can be met.The agency has approved the use of E15 fuel (15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline) in newer vehicles, in addition to E10 (10 percent ethanol). It doesn't propose taking E10 off the market, but merely adding E15 as an option at the gas pump.The crux of the appeals court action is whether the EPA meets its obligations if the new fuel is not of a standard suitable for all engines.Opponents who are led by the American Petroleum Institute and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and who include an array of groups from automobile makers to food processors, say that to offer both fuels would require a reconfiguration of gasoline stations, that the stations aren't equipped to handle the two similar products and that in reality E15 will drive out E10. They also say that E15 will have devastating effects in older automobile engines, marine engines and all other engines, including your emergency electric generator.Nonetheless, the EPA is hanging tough. It has to. Congress has put it between a rock and a hard place. Congress has mandated that ethanol use grow: The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 stipulates that renewable-fuel production and use must reach 36 billion gallons by 2022. Until something else comes along, this means ethanol.Blending in additives to gasoline goes back to the days when lead was added to reduce knocking and improve combustion. With the removal of lead, a compound called MBTE got in the mix; but this was found to enter groundwater from leaks. Meanwhile, the EPA wanted an oxygen-rich fuel to ensure fuller combustion and fewer nasties coming from the exhaust.Ethanol, which has had proponents since the early 1970s, was favored by the farm lobby and by those who thought it would reduce our dependence on imported oil, though it uses nearly as much oil to produce as it replaces.Democratic and Republican administrations nodded at ethanol, and President George W. Bush was passionate about it. In theory, Congress could reduce the pressure to use more ethanol. But in reality, Congress won't undo what it has done.Government has two tools to shift the market: mandates and subsidies. Ethanol has both tools working for it, unless the courts rule against the EPA on the technical issue of whether the new fuel will operate in all engines and meet the statute requirement for consistency.E10 helps combustion and octane-rating and reduces emissions as it is. E15 may just be too much of a good thing. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate - 3 responses
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The Benefits of Natural Gas
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Natural gas is nifty stuff. It burns twice as clean as other fossil fuels, leaves no ash to be disposed of and is critical to many industrial processes.
It is used for everything from drying grain to distilling liquor. It also can fairly easily substitute for oil as a transportation fuel. Buses in big American cities increasingly run on it, as taxis in Australia have for years.
Its history is a tale of how markets work, how technology can broadside the best futurists, and how planners and politicians can get it wrong.
More important than the lessons of history is the fact that we appear now to have more natural gas than was ever predicted, and we can look forward to possibly hundreds of years of supply at present rates of use. And it could slay the foreign oil dragon, or at least maim the brute.
Trouble is, because of its tortured history, natural gas has often been put on the back burner.
When the first commercial oil well, the Drake, was sunk in western Pennsylvania in 1859, natural gas, or methane to give it its proper classification, was not on anyone’s mind except deep miners, for whom it was a lethal hazard. The Oil Age began without natural gas. When it was found in conjunction with oil, it was unceremoniously burned off: a process known as flaring.
In the United States, natural gas faced political problems as well as infrastructural problems. Natural gas production was regulated by the predecessor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Power Commission. It was bound by a legal ruling known as the Permian Basin Decision that kept the price of natural gas artificially low, discouraging new supplies and new infrastructure, such as processing plants and storage. This led to shortages and to a lack of confidence in the future of natural gas.
During the energy shortages of the 1970s, natural gas was discounted by the government and much of industry. Congress panicked and passed a piece of legislation called the Fuel Use Act, which forbade the use of natural gas for many things, including pilot lights in new kitchen stoves. Utilities were told not to even think of burning natural gas: It was too precious and there was too little of it.
Gas demand declined precipitously in the 1980s. And in 1987, the Fuel Use Act was repealed. Along with deregulation of gas, a gas boom resulted.
But it was technology that changed everything. New drilling techniques increased supply. New turbines, based on airplane engines, started to enter the electricity market. They were clean, easy to install, and reached high efficiencies of fuel-to-electricity conversion. Today, 30 percent of our generation comes from these “derivative” machines.
So successful was natural gas in the 1990s that new concerns about supply shook the industry; and the public was told that gas would have to be imported from the Middle East, especially from Qatar. Permission was sought to build dozens of liquefied natural gas terminals around the coastlines.
Now it looks as if natural gas is a fuel with an enormous resource base–thanks to technology. The technology in question is horizontal drilling. Imagine you sink a hole 2 miles into the earth and then send out horizontal roots in all directions from this vertical trunk. That, in essence, is horizontal drilling and it makes available trillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped in close formation shale deep in the earth.
Ironically, or fittingly, this takes the energy story back to Pennsylvania where a vast shale field called the Marcellus is being developed and will write the next chapter of hydrocarbon energy. This is good because it is plentiful, it is here and it builds on extant pipeline infrastructure.
Of course, it makes investments in many “alternative” sources of energy, particularly ethanol from corn, look like very poor investments. Cars and trucks that run on natural gas are an appealing alternative to ethanol with less disruption of the food chain and stress on the farms. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
January 30th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011