My new car takes either regular gasoline or E85, and I’m trying to decide which one to use. E85 is a lot cheaper, but I also get less miles to the gallon with it, and based on my rough calculations it comes out to a wash costwise. That leaves environmental impact as the deciding factor. It seems like ethanol would be the obvious choice, but the more I read about it online, the murkier it seems. I don’t know if there’s a genuine controversy or if I’m reading biased sources or what.
So what’s the straight dope on gasoline vs. ethanol?
Using E85 actually INCREASES oil imports, because:
-your engine uses more fuel on E85 vs. gasoline
-it takes more energy to distill corn-based ethanol than the ethanol yields
Plus, the demand for corn (as a result of the ethanol subsidies) is rising, driving prices up (tortillas - staple food in Mexico-have gone up 105% in price).
It is a lose-lose situation-unless you are getting the Feberal subsidies!
A key word here is “current”. Our current means of making ethanol or other biofuels from corn or sugar cane are a lose, but the situation is likely very different if anything at all pans out from current research and development into things like cellulosic ethanol. If you believe in sufficient improvements in the processes for producing biofuels, think of the current E85 push as establishing the awareness and infrastructure for the future. Those things take lead time, and it may be justifiable to be building vehicles now which will burn E85, so they are on the roads in sufficient numbers when the process DOES make sense.
Corn is pretty much the worst possible choice for producing ethanol, for several reasons. We’re only using it due to technological inertia. But the thing is, you don’t need to make ethanol out of corn; there are many, many possible sources. The most promising of these sources is cellulostic ethanol. Cellulostic ethanol research promises to change the game entirely, producing ethanol out of waste materials, like corn stalks, wood chips, orange peels, and other garbage.
If you buy an E85 vehicle, you’re investing in the future more than the present. It’s not a question of whether an alternative fuel will emerge; by necessity it must. The question is what that fuel will be.
When I first joined the sdmb, I wanted to know about how cellulosic ethanol changed things from Cecil’s original column on ethanol. He has since written another column addressing my question, but I had asked in GQ prior to that. A guest named joema noted that one problem with cellulosic ethanol is that we only have sufficient feedstocks (including agricultural and municipal waste) to produce about half (I am consulting my memory here, so bear with me…) of the ethanol we would need to displace fossil fuels for transportation. He also noted that petroleum is also the feedstock for many non-transportation uses. He personally felt that algae was the only thing that could be grown in sufficient quantity to displace fossil fuels.