Energy Secretary Steven Chu gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday in which he argued that all cars sold in America should be E85 capable. “I’ve been told it costs about $100 in gaskets and fuel lines to turn a car so that it can go all the way to E85,” Chu is quoted as saying in the Des Moines Register. “But a new car, it would only cost $100 out of $15,000. Wouldn’t it be nice to put in those fuel lines and gaskets so that we can use any ratio we wanted?” Sure, if E85 were a viable alternative fuel, and not just an agricultural subsidy.
But Chu understands that top-down pronouncements of 100 percent flex-fuel capability might come across as government meddling that could be resisted by the OEMs. “It’s one of those things where I think with virtually anything, once the government steps in the natural tendency is to resist government intervention,” says Chu. Not that the idea bothers Monte Shaw of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. “Clearly, if the White House decided they wanted GM and Chrysler to do this, they would do it,” Shaw said. “I think it would be good. Once one company goes that way, I think it puts pressure on the other automakers not to be left out.” Except that it won’t because ethanol has only been remotely commercially viable because of this kind of heavy-handed intervention. Saddling GM and Chrysler with a 100 percent flex-fuel mandate would not draw other OEMs into the ethanol game, rather it would simply help destroy GM/Chrysler’s already-fragile profitability by requiring extra costs that do not increase consumer demand.
On one hand, making a car that can burn a more flexible range of fuels isn’t really a bad thing. Heck, mandating it, as a measure of future-proofing, isn’t a bad idea either. There might, someday, be a viable way to make ethanol fuels in quantity.
On the other, this makes it easier to just mandate the fuel itself, which, until it’s net-energy positive, is bad.
When we buy tankers of crude oil from Brazil, why not send the tankers back full of ethanol instead of empty. That way Brazil can increase its percentage of ethanol in their already-ethanol-capable cars.
Or, we could just cancel all the non-viable ethanol projects and go back to fundamental research. Think of how much fertilizer and aquifer water we could save for later when a viable agricultural solution might be found.
I really don’t understand why the US doesn’t just import more Brazilian Ethanol, made from Sugar Cane, which has been economically viable for decades in that country.
“‘It’s one of those things where I think with virtually anything, once the government steps in the natural tendency is to resist government intervention,’ says Chu.”
Mr. Chu, we liberty-loving neanderthals aren’t waiting for the government to “step in” to resist government boondoggles.
I saw a news report that two–only two–ordinary gas stations in Broward County, Florida were selling non-adulterated (ethanol-free) gasoline. Down there it’s mainly found at marinas. I guess even legislators draw the line at ruining their boat engines. Well, the stations were doing a booming business as people learned where they could fuel their cars with non-adulterated gas. Here in Oklahoma stations put up big banners advertising “100% gasoline!” That’s the market speaking. Will the government listen? Nah.
I think flexibility is its own reward. Erase the subsidies, sure. But E-85 is going to make sense in some situations and with new/different processes; guaranteeing a market for it is sensible.
I really don’t understand why the US doesn’t just import more Brazilian Ethanol, made from Sugar Cane, which has been economically viable for decades in that country.
Three words: Archer. Daniels. Midland.
Oh, I suppose you could throw Monsanto in there, if you wanted.
Fritex, no need to import ethanol from Brazil. There’s no sense for Brazil producing ethanol and then shipping it 1000 miles to a country not currently well suited to using it when they are well set up to consume all they make already. Even if Brazil increased production by 2x or 3x they would be able to consume all they make; most of the cars down there are compatible with E85.
I’m only 1/2 joking when I suggest that the USA ship ethanol to Brazil. It would still allow ADM to rake in the subsidized $$$ as psarhjinian mentions. Farmers can continue to strip the country of natural resources (fertilizers and water). Brazil could ship us some of their crude oil in exchange. Brazil already has the cars and infrastructure to handle E85.
I really want to see an itemized breakdown of the cost of adding flex-fuel capability to a car. Depending on cost, I could see some limited flex-fuel mandate for high volume vehicles. E-85 from corn is liquid pork, but making methanol from coal might make economic sense in the future. Methanol might be a good fuel for fuel cell electric vehicles too.
http://www.ethanol-gec.org/clean/cf05.htm
I agree that the environmental and renewable-energy benefits of E85 are dubious at best… At least with corn-based ethanol.
But, I just moved to the Midwest from the east coast of the USA… And I’d much rather subsidize the economies of the corn-growing states out here in the Midwest, then send tonnes of money to the middle east and to other places that don’t like the USA very much. Using less gasoline would also make everyone happy by providing less incentive for us to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries.
So, sign me up for a flex-fueled car next time around! That Subaru Legacy with the CVT sounded like a good match for my needs, except for the lack of any alternative-fuel capability… Or maybe I’ll be able to hold out for a Volt, if the hype ever materializes into a real car, of course.
50merc is right, the battle is big down here in the Sunshine State where ironically sugar cane is a major product.
Ethanol is HORRIBLE for use in boat engines, lawn mowers, weed-eaters, chainsaws, etc. The marine industry is fighting ethanol as best it can, as many an engine has been ruined by this crap being added to gas. The guy who turns wrenches on my outboard swears by Star Tron. The more I learn about ethanol the more I hate the stuff.
I think that one of the big issues with flex-fuel cars is one of optimization. You can build a car that can run off of a variety of fuels, but it will only run well off of one fuel.
E85 is very resistant to detonation. (Like having a high octane rating.) So, if you were to put a turbo on an engine and optimize it to run only off of E85 with a really rich mixture (compared to gasoline), you’d get really good power (for a given displacement) and acceptable mileage… Even though E85 is a less energetic fuel than gasoline (or especially diesel).
But, if you run an ethanol mix it in a regular gasoline engine (I’ve tried, up to about E40), I saw about an 17% decrease in mileage, and a very noticeable decrease in power, and a noticeably different clutch-feel. Those who drive proper flex-fueled vehicles seem to report a similar experience when running on E85.
P.S. It also seems to have cleaned my throttle-body for me, though, which was nice. I’d been meaning to get around to that!
JMII,
My lawn mower runs fine off of E85. I’ve only run it on E85 for one season, though, and I really won’t be disappointing if it dies. It does sound like it’s running a little lean, and possibly a little hot — but not problematically so.
The biggest gotcha is that the fuel evaporates from the tank very quickly… So if I fill the tank, and store my mower for a couple of weeks, I have to refill it again. The tank in my mower is vented.
Fortunately, my gas cans are not vented — so I can store whatever fuel with almost no evaporation or going stale. It looks like I’ll be able to get away with refilling my gas-can about once a year, even with the E85 evaporation problem that I mention above.
So ADM now controls our energy policy along with our agricultural policy? That’s great. This announcement represents change ADM can believe in.
I have 0 interest in ethanol. I can think of ONE e85 station nearby my regular hangouts and it’s 40+ miles from home.
Also, this politician seems to think that ONLY cars run on gas. How much would it cost to make all other devices that use “normal” gasoline e85 capable?
How about:
* gas powered lawncare machines
* boats
* motorcycles
* go-carts
* atvs
So a cheap motorcycle new is maybe $3k. adding $100 adds 3% to the price…
All I need to know is that one SUV tankful of corn based E85 is distilled from more than enough foodstuffs to feed a person for a year. Thirty gallons of E85 is 25.5 gallons of ethanol. If that’s all corn and no crop residue, that in turn is 678 pounds of corn. Sure, you can’t survive on nothing but corn, but you get the point.
Do we eat food or do we burn it? I hope to never have an E85 car.
Oy vey, here we (still) go (again). This guy Chu doesn’t appear to know a spark plug from a strawberry. He’s high on ethanol (or ADM dollars) if he really thinks $100 worth of replacement gaskets and fuel lines will make a gasoline car run reliably and without damage on E85, let alone run efficiently on it.
If we mis-fuel a gasoline car with ethanol, it will show an even greater loss in mileage than can be calculated just from the simple difference in energy content of ethanol vs. gasoline. That’s because the gasoline car’s fuel system and engine are designed, calibrated, and optimized for the energy content and combustion characteristics of gasoline, not ethanol. One example is compression ratio, which can be much higher in a vehicle designed to run on ethanol — this extracts more energy from the fuel, reducing (but usually not eliminating) the mileage deficit.
Gasoline contains about 115,000 BTU per U.S. gallon, LHV. Ethanol contains about 75,700 BTU per U.S. gallon, LHV. That means ethanol contains about 66% of the energy that gasoline contains.
Therefore:
E10 — gasoline with 10% ethanol — contains 111,070 BTU per U.S. gallon (3.4% less energy than straight gasoline; 19.3 mpg instead of 20 mpg).
E15 — gasoline with 15% ethanol — contains 109,105 BTU per U.S. gallon (5.1% less energy than straight gasoline; 19 mpg instead of 20 mpg).
E85 — ethanol with 15% gasoline — contains 81,595 BTU per U.S. gallon (29% less energy than straight gasoline; 14.1 mpg instead of 20 mpg).
Let’s plug in some pump prices from last summer and see the effect of E85 upon walletary negative cashflow:
$2.85/gallon for E85 means $2.85 for 81,595 BTU of energy. That’s $3.49 per 100,000 BTU.
$4.10/gallon for gasoline means $4.10 for 115,000 BTU of energy. That’s $3.57 per 100,000 BTU.
The visually enormous difference between $2.85 and $4.10 per gallon, does it actually deliver big savings? No, you’re paying all of six cents less per hundred thousand BTUs by buying E85 instead of gasoline. And that’s without factoring in the cost (in money, time, and nuisance) of the damage being done to a fuel system not designed for high concentrations of alcohol. Or, if you’d prefer, you can spend that money, time, and nuisance on one of Mr. Chu’s mythical “conversions”, which will cost a great deal more than the $100 figure he’s “been told”. Don’t forget to add in the additional driving (with attendant exhaust, tire wear, and engine oil consumption) caused by more frequent trips to the gas station — both your trips and the supply trucks’ trips.
A large Federal study was done of the effects of ethanol-blended gasoline in cars and small engines. They didn’t test cars older than 2001 or so, but the highlights of the findings are pretty revealing: significant loss in fuel economy and small engines ran progressively worse and hotter with increasing ethanol concentration in the fuel. They didn’t see any driveability problems in cars because they didn’t look; they do note no “cold” starting problems when tried as “low” as 50°F. Given those findings, it looks disturbingly like the contradictory conclusion (hooray for ethanol, let’s add more of it to our gasoline!) was prescribed before the “study” was carried out. That’s disappointing, but not terribly surprising given the large and very successful ethanol lobby.
And burning ethanol doesn’t even reduce car exhaust toxicity, it just changes which toxic chemicals come out of the exhaust pipe.
psarhjinian :
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
On one hand, making a car that can burn a more flexible range of fuels isn’t really a bad thing. Heck, mandating it, as a measure of future-proofing, isn’t a bad idea either. There might, someday, be a viable way to make ethanol fuels in quantity.
It’s a shame that the ethanol boondoggle creates opposition to alcohol capable cars, because while corn ethanol has many drawbacks, ethanol from sugar cane, as done in Brazil, makes energy sense, and many believe that methanol is a superior fuel to ethanol. We have lots of coal that can be made into methanol. Butanol, which is being promoted by DuPont and like methanol has abundant feedstock, can also be used as a liquid fuel.
While I’m no fan of gov’t mandates, instead of E85 boondoggles, I’d much rather see a mandate that all “gasoline” vehicles have to be truly flexfuel. That would create all sorts of opportunities for competition from a variety of fuels.
Also, the flexfuel technology is way cool, very elegant. There’s an IR spectrometer that monitors the fuel lines, the ECU can then tailor the induction and ignition to the exact fuel composition. Theoretically a flexfuel car could run on a tank with a random mixture of octane, heptane, ethanol, methanol and butanol.
Bluecon,
Speaking of natural gas, Fuel System Solutions has acquired the assets of the Phill home NG filling station so it looks like it will stay in production. Honda pulled the plug on financing the original manufacturer, Fuelmaker, which then went bankrupt.
You can still buy a Phill for about $4,500. Buy a low mileage dual fuel Ford Contour from a gov’t agency for about $4,000, throw on some SVT parts, and for less than ten grand you have a nice car that saves you money. Natural gas is cheaper than equivalent btus of gasoline. Fill up at home and if you run low on gas, you can still get home on gasoline.
E85 is very resistant to detonation. (Like having a high octane rating.) So, if you were to put a turbo on an engine and optimize it to run only off of E85 with a really rich mixture (compared to gasoline), you’d get really good power (for a given displacement) and acceptable mileage… Even though E85 is a less energetic fuel than gasoline (or especially diesel).
What you’re describing, more or less, is Saab’s concept E100 BioPower engine.
Fill up at home and if you run low on gas, you can still get home on gasoline.
The problem with Phill is that it takes a long, long time to rephill your tank. A long time as in “hours”. The other problem is that dual-fuel systems is that the trunk space resulting from the conversion could best be described as “notional”.
I am curious about the coming carbon-rationing market and ethanol.
It’s been proven that the total cycle for ethanol, from the ground back out your tailpipe is a net zero at best on carbon footprints relative to Evil Fuels.
How will the carbon credits get doled out to keep ADM on the positive side of the ledger? That will be interesting to see.
Edward,
Check the typing on your quotes.
I think what was meant was, it costs $1000 (thousand) to retrofit an already produced car, but $100 (hundred) if done at initial assembly. The difference of x10 was the point of imposing the creeping requirement at the factory level.
Ethanol does make sense in some cases. Subsidizing it as a national fuel does not. It makes sense to use it areas near where it is produced (instead of where it has to be trucked long distances)
The Mid west could have it for a regional fuel.
If all vehicles were flex fuel, the cost per vehicle would even be less (reduced costs coming from simplified supply chain management)
Imagine driving cross country from coast to coast using E85 in ethanol producing areas and gasoline in the rest of the country.
With all vehicles being flex fuel, the midwest would naturally move to more ethanol use, thereby reducing the demand for the rest of the country.
I agree that ethanol is not the environmental silver bullet and doesn’t deserve the large level of federal propping up, but it does have its place.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to flame, but suggesting that gasoline powered vehicles be flex fuel is a low cost solution that can provide one piece of the puzzle and I don’t think that said suggestion qualifies as a boondoggle.
I really don’t understand why the US doesn’t just import more Brazilian Ethanol, made from Sugar Cane, which has been economically viable for decades in that country.
Three words: Brazilians. Don’t. Vote.
(Not here, anyway.)
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to flame, but suggesting that gasoline powered vehicles be flex fuel is a low cost solution that can provide one piece of the puzzle and I don’t think that said suggestion qualifies as a boondoggle.”
I absolutely agree. Calling it a boondogle is narrow minded and short sighted. It doesn’t mandate E-85 corn ethanol, it just gives us many more options for a national fleet of vehicles. I forsee a time when as you travel across the country you put in your vehicle whatever fuel combination is the cheapest and/or available. That might be E-10, E-20, E-50, or E-85 made from all sorts of stuff, corn, switchgrass, sugar cane, or some other exotic organism. But if you don’t have flex fuel vehicles to begin with, you don’t have the option.
Lets see…it wastes alot of time, water, fertilizer, diesel fuel, money, causes major driveability problems especially in the cold, marine and small engine, corrodes fuel systems, is not transportable in pipelines, evaporates easily, sucks up water way worse than brake fluid. Other than it displaces a minimal amount of gasoline/crude and supports corn prices, WHAT Fing GOOD is it?
Bring on the Biodiesel, the Real Deal. Ill be here all week.
fred diesel: “Bring on the Biodiesel, the Real Deal. Ill be here all week.”
Can’t have diesels. California doesn’t like ’em.
50merc,
Can’t have diesels. California doesn’t like ‘em.
I thought that the new Jetta TDI was 50-state legal. Maybe some of the Mercedes diesels are too.
bill301972,
Re: E85 as a regional fuel
I think you’re right there. When I lived in Virginia, I thought E85 was a Really Bad Idea. Now that I live in the Midwest, I think it’s not perfect, but it’s better than foreign oil since the fossil fuel inputs don’t have to be oil (it could be coal). Also, making money for the farmers who live just outside of my new town seems just fine. It’s weird how where you live seeps into you like that. So, I agree that what makes sense for one region really might not make much sense for another.
One of the really fun things about alternative-energy is that since there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are lots of interesting variations to think about depending on the needs and resources in any given person or place. It’s like engineering, or something. :-)
*sigh*
Steven Chu is the most pathetic choice for Energy Secretary since, well, ever. He’s a scientist, not an administrator, and he has absolutely no real world experience. (as this quote shows) The only reason Obama chose him is because he’s a ‘yes’ man that will agree with all of his CO2 regulation and his hate of anything fossil-fuel powered.
The most pathetic part is actually how NOT ONE of the commenters has read Bob Zubrin’s case for the E85 mandate (which is where Mr. Chu picked it).