Lobby Says Ethanol Helping Reduce Gasoline Costs
The debate over the merits of ethanol as an alternative fuel continues to rage.
The latest salvo comes from the American Coalition for Ethanol, which claims that the availability of ethanol is currently reducing the cost of gasoline by between 6 and 9 cents per gallon.
ACE cites recent price reports by Axxis Petroleum and the Oil Price Information Service, showing “ethanol for blending is selling for as much as 10 to 35 cents lower than gasoline, depending on the market.”
Factoring in the blender’s tax credit, this means that the wholesale cost of E10 is between 6 and 9 cents less per gallon than gasoline.
Marathon Oil Corp. has announced that beginning in May, it will switch to an all-ethanol product slate at 16 of its Midwestern terminals, offering only E10 and no longer offering any unblended product, according to ACE. ExxonMobil also announced a similar move, stating that beginning in May, the company is eliminating conventional gasoline at some of its terminals and moving to pre-blended E10 instead.
ACE also cites a study by the state of Minnesota on E20, the 20 percent blend of ethanol. The research, conducted at Minnesota State University-Mankato and the University of Minnesota, found that E20 presented no materials compatibility issues for current vehicles or fuel dispensing equipment. During the entire year of testing, E20 provided power and performance similar to that of E10, through a broad range of ambient weather conditions.
ACE says this corroborates the results of the “optimal blend” study, released in December, which found that blends of ethanol beyond 10 percent performed well in standard, non-flex-fuel vehicles. “That research also found the conventional wisdom about ethanol’s BTU-content mileage penalty to be unfounded.”
Not only did the ethanol blends of E20 and E30 perform much better than predicted on an energy-content basis, but in three of the four vehicles tested, these mid-range blends actually offered increased fuel economy over straight gasoline.
It’s doubtful, however that such evidence will make a believer of energy journalist and author Robert Bryce, who describes ethanol fuel as “the largest scam in our nation’s history.” The Wall Street Journal Review of his book “Gusher of Lies,” notes that he assembles “50 pages of evidence to show that, if anything, the energy-intensive effort to distill ethanol out of the nation’s corn crop diminishes our energy supply. Yet ethanol production has become entangled with that other impossible-to-repeal boondoggle, agricultural subsidies.”
But it’s hard to ignore Mr. Bryce’s main point — that politicians and pundits are woefully uninformed about energy. When you hear a presidential candidate or a TV talking head calling for energy independence, or claiming that we can reduce carbon emissions by 60% or 70%, or pointing to windmills, ethanol and solar panels as the energy future of the American economy, you can be fairly certain that they are wasting their own energy on false promises and futile schemes.
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April 4th, 2008 at 11:24 am
[...] in the debate over ethanol as an alternative fuel was fired by the American Coalition for Ethanol in Lobby Says Ethanol Helping Reduce Gasoline Costs. But the announcement this week of an 8% drop in US prospective corn plantings is not good news for [...]