There was a major article in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Ethanol and there are glaring errors in their ideas being foisted on the Cincinnati public.
Sometimes I wonder if the editors of our mainstream media setup these articles on ideas that would change our lives specifically to include such obvious and gross errors as to provoke the readers to write in and play a sort of publishing game of tag. Unfortunately the Cincinnati Enquirer seems to be serious about their errors.
The latest in this pattern was the Fourth of July Forum front page story on "Ethanol: Fueling Debate".
Anyone who's been awake and reading for any amount of the last 50 years must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the hypocritical standard set for ethanol to 'compete fairly' with gasoline. Please, really. Where have the editors of this paper been? Over the last 50 years, our taxes have funded $350 BILLION in subsidies for oil and gas, whether they were called that or not. (International Center for Technology Assessment) That's $7billion each and every year of windfall support from your taxes. Specifically, these included tax breaks, accounting tricks, direct subsitides, R&D support and something euphmistically called royalties. And the 2005 Energy Bill was no exception. In the middle of oil company profits pushing record billions of dollars, the bill had a new slick sleight of hand royalty that could net the oil industry a minimum of $7Billion, maybe as much as $30Billion over the life of the royalty -- another $140-360 million annually over the usual.
We scoff at the Enquirer's claim that the ethanol and biodiesel newbie's are unfair players. Renewables would just LOVE to have a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
And then there's the claim that ethanol doesn't deliver the power that gasoline does. Let's straighten this out. Gas has more BTUs per gallon, but lower octane. The bottom line on power is the compression ratio. Ethanol runs very well on compression ratios as high as 13:1 whereas gas is limited to numbers around 8 or 9:1 so later model cars with turbo-charging are closer to thriving on ethanol's power. Cars may get slightly lower mileage. The Indy500 is running on ethanol this year. But less power, my foot.
Next is the timetable the Enquirer's writers grudgingly set for the emergence of ethanol as 'America's "second" fuel', -- sniff, second, sniff -- suggesting that years and years of research and 'scientific innnovation' was lacking yet. FFV's have been on the road in the USA for over 10 years, TEN, with millions of them. We not only have a good handle on what they perform like, we have far more knowledge about their viability than on any other alternative. Even more, among those comparing notes online at the open encyclopedia -- wikipedia -- Americans have been informally experimenting to determine with their own non-ffvs just what ratio of ethanol blending is compatible with our everyday cars thanks to the automotive engineers' conservative standards. It currently looks like something in the vicinity of e30 -- a 2-to-1 mix of regular gasoline and e85.
On top of that there are two Canadian groups building commercial plants to produce ethanol from cellolosic waste. This year and next, not 'long term'. Maybe the Enquirer editors should read the business pages instead of whatever their usual sources are. The world's largest investment bank, Goldman and Sachs, just layed $27 million onto the table for Iogen, one of the Canadian-based biotechs specializing in ethanol made from cellulose, to start building on a commercial scale. The US has BRI in Arkansas, and Vancouver has Syntec Biofuel, both of whom have near term construction plans. With about 3-4 years of nuts-and-bolts adjustments, all of these should be at the finish line. Are you ready for it. Let's free ourselves from oil and WWIII.
Meanwhile, we have corn-based ethanol providing us with launching platforms to work from and with stable long term potential since the ethanol's the same whether corn or cellulosic. Especially since we have a lot of car buying to re-direct to FFVs and diesels. And for those thinking of a new car right now, simply order the FFV version. Unlike the big step necessary to produce a hybrid, the tinkering necessary to give you an FFV -- at assemply line time -- instead of a non-ffv is around a mere $100. For lack of that measly amount we could have been driving FFVs by now.
Which brings us to the Enquirer's curiously blind 'worry' about a failed crop from drought as a reason to back off. A failed crop is just another source of cellulosic feedstock for the other ethanol producers, not a risk at all by the time we have shifted to ethanol. But most of all, the Enquirer totally ignores our knight in shining armor who came to the aid of our rescuers in Katrina-land. It wasn't the sheiks and the oil barons, it was the farmers with their biodiesel and ethanol. They are the ones we should stand with and choose renewables.
The Enquirer frets about the impact on the price of food if we are using corn for ethanol, but they blithely ignore the real source of the already rising cost of food, namely the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, which we can get rid of by diverting some corn to ethanol for a moderate time while we convert our vehicles away from the really frightening risks of gasoline.
We have genuinely massive worries over the big risks in depending on gasoline -- from the increasing likelihood of hostile political embargos, or simply the unpredictable success of terrorists with firepower aimed at oilwells because they know our craven dependence on oil, to the sudden needs of increasingly frequent category 4-5 hurricanes.
On top of these sudden nightmares, we have the realization that the convergence of the high price of 'cheap oil' and the greed to tap the oil-sources where the damages of drilling and removal -- like the tar sands -- and damages to our pristine treasured remote sites are colluding to produce nightmares in our air and water, the life support of our children's future as well as all those we compatibly share this planet with. Is the Enquirer seriously clinging to petroleum oil in the face of these and advocating fear of a minimal shortterm risk? Yeah, that's what it amounts to, but should we? Hardly.
And last, but not least, ethanol is not as impotent as the Enquirer and the politicians think, not when we combine it with its renewable cousins, namely TDP-oils -- thermal depolymerization of industrial and municipal wastes. Do the numbers. For example, TDP can produce 150 gallons of the equivalent of home heating oil from each ton of turkey offal at their fully functioning plant in Carthage MO, which would be wildly profitable if the playing field were level. That's an amazing 60% by weight, and the process can be applied to industrial and municipal waste, much as Rumpke is producing natural gas from Cincinnati's garbage for DukeEnergy, formerly Cinergy. And for the record, industrial wastes per the EPA, are 5 times as great as agricultural waste, which alone would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. And for the capping achievement, Rocky Mountain Institute has a method to make carbon-fibre car bodies -- ultra light, ultra strong and safe -- affordable which would give us the last and final piece of the puzzle, namely genuinely high fuel mileage.
If you don't want to do the numbers yourself, come look at the displays at the website of www.bergerac.tv in the top story, a substantial article on the oil topic. The pages within called The Solution have what Enquirer readers really need. More soon.
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