Ethanol, A Terrible Fuel Alternative

The Bulletin ^ | 11/26/2008 | Paul M. Weyrich

[IbJensen]

The use of ethanol and other renewable fuels supposedly helps gasoline burn cleaner creating less pollution. It also reduces America's reliance upon foreign oil.

Last Monday the Environmental Protection Agency increased the amount of renewable automobile fuels required to be sold in the United States next year from 7.8 percent to 10.2 percent of the 138.5 billion gallons of gasoline projected to be consumed. This mandate mainly directs that higher levels of ethanol be mixed with gasoline.

The higher standard is required by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, a law that requires the increased use of renewable fuels each year in order to reach an annual use of 36 billion gallons by 2022. While burning cleaner gas is an admirable goal, the federal government's ethanol mandate has ensured that the American corn industry has consumers and businesses in a stranglehold without producing quantifiable benefits. In fact, some scientists now argue that there are few, if any, environmental benefits to using ethanol.

According to an April Hudson Institute report, "The Case for Ending Ethanol Subsidies," by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, "converting undeveloped land to cropland - in order to grow more corn and facilitate bio-fuel production - releases a massive amount of carbon dioxide. Only if bio-fuels are made from waste products or grown on abandoned agricultural lands does the production process actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

In addition, since ethanol separates from gasoline in the presence of water, the blends of ethanol and gasoline that we put in our cars cannot be transported through traditional petroleum pipelines. Instead, ethanol is shipped by rail, at greater cost than gasoline and mixed with gasoline near the point of distribution. That is why the 10 percent ethanol-gasoline blends are not available all over the country, only in major metropolitan areas.

Meanwhile American taxpayers subsidize the ethanol industry with $3 billion every year. These subsidies are given to corn farmers and ethanol producers no matter what the price of corn is on the market. These are extremely high because of the EPA requirement for biofuel usage. So many corn farmers have become wealthy from this two-tier system of subsidies and federal environmental mandates which inflate the price of corn on the open market.

Food prices around the world have risen dramatically in the last few years because of this system. Corn, beef, milk, butter, tortillas, gasoline and many other basic food commodities have become more expensive than ever because of the artificial government intervention in the market. This increase in food prices has hurt the world's poor more than anyone else but even middle-income American consumers have felt the pinch at the pump and the grocery store.

And then there is the question of energy independence, which is both an economic and a national security issue. Relying upon bio-fuels, predominantly ethanol, to make ourselves independent of foreign oil is a false hope. It has far less energy density than traditional gasoline, meaning nearly twice as much ethanol is required to equal the energy output of gasoline. We simply cannot convert enough of the land required to make ethanol into cornfields. There isn't enough land in America to do so.

Instead of releasing new federal mandates for ethanol consumption, Congress and EPA ought to overturn our artificial dependence on bio-fuels and begin building clean nuclear-energy power and coal plants, drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska and off our coasts, and building more traditional petroleum refineries. Then we seriously could discuss the possibility of energy independence while working to clean up air pollution.

[thackney]

I understand, I walk that line sometimes as well.

I hope KTI has lots of success in these ventures.

[AmericanVictory]

Our objection is to the nothing else plan. Missouri is a classic case of where there are shallow deposits, coming up from deeper deposits across the river, whose production needs to be explored more effectively but because its politicians such as Kit Bond are obsessed with ethanol, have not been. Our whole point about ethanol is that it has blinded politicians to what could and should be done and while it has promoted certain local economies it has been at the expense of achieving energy independence. By the way tax breaks are subsidies. I can tell you from hard experience that in almost every state you cannot under present law achieve tax breaks for better gasoline equivalent to those for ethanol biodiesel and the like and that is certainly true for the feds.

[o_zarkman44]

I am a business and I take every tax break allowed. it would be fiscal stupidity to not take a tax break. We give enough of our hard earned money out in taxes for BS. So I will take a BS tax break every time.

As for Kit Bond, it is time for him to go. He has done good things for parts of the state of Mo. But I am tired of pork marking the ballot. Common sense needs to prevail.

[AmericanVictory]

Don’t get us wrong. We don’t fault anyone for taking tax breaks. But it is disturbing and extremely shortsighted that there are tax breaks for everything except better oil technology that would actually solve the problem.