I don’t know about you, but I am tired of just eating Corn, so I’m going with the latest fad and starting to burn corn based fuel in my car. Sure it takes a gallon and a half of some other kind of fuel to make a gallon of corn ethanol. Yes, it takes 450 pounds of Corn to make a SUV tank full of ethanol, enough corn to feed me for a year. OK, it is 30% less efficient than gasoline, but it makes the farmers in Iowa and the hippies in Berkley happy, so what the heck…make that bowl of cereal into a few drops of fuel.
Corn based ethanol is expensive. It is in fact so costly that it wouldn't make it in any free market. When our brilliant Congress decides to go into the “fuel business” they enact major ethanol subsidies, about $1.05 to $1.38 a gallon, which is really a tax on consumers. Oops, it’s a double tax… one in the form of ethanol subsidies and another in the form of handouts to corn farmers. When we look past the charts and graphs, to how all this really works we notice that corn must be grown, fertilized, harvested and trucked to ethanol producers, all of which are fuel-using activities. It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol, and if our total annual corn output were converted to ethanol production, it would only reduce gasoline consumption by 10 or 12 percent.
But wait, there’s more. Our Imperial Congress says we need less reliance on oil and greater use of bio-fuels. We have heard that Brazilian ethanol, produced from sugar cane, is far more energy efficient, cleaner and cheaper to produce. Congress will have none of that. When no one is watching they impose a stiff tariff of 54 cents a gallon, on ethanol from Brazil. “Free markets ? Not on our election year watch” say the Legislators.
Ethanol production has driven up the price of corn-fed livestock 30 %. Basic foods such as beef, chicken and dairy products, and products made from corn, such as cereals, are rapidly rising. Government mandated demand for corn has driven up other grain prices, such as soybeans and wheat as farmers switch to the Corn business. Most farmers though are not benefitting from the high prices. They are just like the rest of us, suffering from higher costs for fuel, fertilizer, seed, herbicide and pesticides. Even farmers who own their land are suffering as the valuation of their land has risen so high that property taxes are increasing at an alarming rate. Not all states have a Prop 13 type tax system that controls the rate of tax increases.
But what about the ends justifying the means ? Ethanol does not burn as efficiently as pure gasoline in our car engines, as it has a much lower Octane Rating than gasoline. When ethanol is added to gasoline it requires higher Octane hydrocarbons have to be substituted in the gasoline to offset the lowering of the Octane Rating caused by the ethanol. This raises the cost of the gasoline, and the ethanol still lowers the power, combustion efficiency, and overall engine efficiency.
Ethanol also contains water that distillation cannot remove. As such, it can cause major damage to automobile engines not specifically designed to burn ethanol. The water content of ethanol also risks pipeline corrosion and thus must be shipped by truck, rail car or barge. These shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.
What needs to be done is to force the government to get out of the energy business entirely. Let the free markets work, and increase our extraction and refining capacity.
Say, what if we did something useful, like actually building new refineries? Or drill for oil in ANWAR ? We have not built a new refinery or Nuclear Plant in 30 years. Let’s uncap all the wells capped in the 80s’, drill for Natural Gas, build Hydroelectric power, build more nuclear generation plants. Why don’t we do something that unleashes the power of mass manufacturing, like standardizing on one grade of gasoline ? Hybrid cars are a glimmer of hope, but even Toyota has said that their hybrid cars do not break even unless gas reaches $5.00 per gallon and assumes continued massive government tax breaks and subsidies.
The demand for energy is not going to go backwards in our lifetimes, but the answer is not corn based ethanol with all its subsidies, payoffs and inherent drawbacks and inefficiencies.
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