Ethanol Futility

Recently there has been a lot of hoopla — some of it originating, unfortunately, from our President — about ethanol and its potential for helping us become energy independent.

It’s a load of bull.

The only people who really ought to get excited about ethanol are those who will benefit financially from its production — they’ve got a genuine reason for joy in the federal ethanol mandates, present and proposed. The rest of us should be plotting how to defeat the politicians who handed us this mess the next time they come up for re-election.

Here are the key problems with ethanol:

— When ethanol is used as an additive to gasoline, the car using that formulation gets lower gas mileage — 25% to 30% lower, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That means that a car using an ethanol and gasoline mixture uses more gasoline than a car using gasoline with MTBE (the alternative oxygenate). That’s right, folks — if we drive with ethanol, we’ll use more foreign oil, not less.

— When ethanol is used as an additive to gasoline, the price of that mixture is higher than gasoline using MTBE. And because we’ll use more of it to drive the same distance, the real cost is even higher.

— Unless the price for ethanol increases drastically (which of course we’ll pay for with higher pump prices), the U.S. cannot produce enough ethanol to be independent of foreign sources. So…on top of all the other problems, we’ll be adding a new foreign dependency — on ethanol!

See here for a good primer on all these fun facts.

I don’t suppose our politicians will let facts get in the way of good sound bites like “energy independence” and “renewable energy”. Nah, that would require a dramatic advance in their collective and individual IQs…