History of Alternative Fuels
August 1, 2008
Now that Congress has officially gone on recess for the summer (without doing anything about the high gas prices before they left) it’s time to look back and get some answers to one of the HOT issues that keeps coming up. In the debate of “to drill or not to drill”, the opponents of opening up oil exploration keep talking about alternative fuels. Here is a Q&A we did with Jane Van Ryan from American Petroleum Institute.
Question: Another question came up that maybe you can answer… maybe not. It is about renewable energy. There is a lot of talk from the opposition to drilling about giving alternative energy a chance. Haven’t we? My uncle used to grow soy beans in Iowa in the very beginning stages of creating ethanol. They called it gasohol in Iowa back in the (I think it was) 70’s? There is a lot of dialog about ethanol, but surely there are facts out there about it as an alternative to petroleum. Here was my thought.
Without too much trouble, oil can be converted to gasoline because it only exists to be used as fuel. Otherwise it is useless. Seems to me corn and other bio-fuels need to be turned into something (probably an alcohol derivative) so that it can then be burned as fuel. Somehow this doesn’t make sense to me.
The other problem I have when people say “alternative fuel”, is that this fuel is still being burned in internal combustion engines, so isn’t the output the same to the environment? Then for this reason, how can bio-fuels be any better for the environment than petroleum products?
The Reply: You’ve asked some questions that are critically important to the ongoing energy debate…and some of them do not have simple answers.
Let’s start with “gasohol.” Yes, you are correct. Gasohol, which was a blend of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent corn-derived ethanol — became quite popular starting in about 1979 and into the 1980s in many parts of the country. At the time, ethanol was seen as a way to increase fuel supplies when gasoline lines appeared in many major cities after the Iranian oil field strike and revolution in late 1978. After the gas lines disappeared, ethanol fell out of favor in many parts of the country, but gasohol continued to be sold in the Midwest states. [Probably because of the subsidies to farmers? - Editor] The ethanol distilleries in the central US had access to plenty of corn, and some of them continued to produce the fuel.
Ethanol experienced a resurgence a couple of years ago. Several states mandated that it be used in gasoline; the EPA changed the approved formula for gasoline leading to the use of more ethanol; and Congress passed the federal mandate requiring ethanol to be used in gasoline in increasing volumes over the next several years.
The federal mandate has raised many questions about the wisdom of using corn for fuel rather than food. In fact, studies have indicated that burning corn for fuel in the US is raising worldwide food prices and could be responsible for widespread hunger. Lester Brown is a proponent of this point-of-view; the Renewable Fuels Association blames the rising cost of food on the price of fuel. To get more information, you might want to google both opinions.
Oil has many purposes beyond being burned. In addition to being used to create gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, bunker fuel, it also is used to create a variety of chemicals that are used in nearly every consumer item available today — shoes, clothing, toys, sporting goods, furniture, carpeting, medicine, medical supplies, etc.
Oil is burned because there is no other fuel that is as cheap, portable and efficient. It contains much more energy (Btus) per unit than any other fuel today.
Corn, soybeans, sugar cane and other commodities can be turned into fuel, but the process isn’t cheap and the resulting fuels don’t have the same energy content as gasoline. Ethanol, for example, contains only 70 percent as much energy as gasoline. A lot of research is being conducted into the possibility of using wood chips, switchgrass, corn stover (stalks) and other waste products for fuel, but so far no one has figured out how to use these cellulosic materials to create large quantities of fuel at prices consumers can afford.
Now we get to the really complicated question: is the impact on the environment the same from all of the fuels? That depends on who you talk to and whether you factor climate change into the discussion. You can find studies that claim biofuels are worse for the environment than oil, and you can find studies that claim the opposite. Some studies say ethanol is a superior fuel in terms of its emissions when it’s burned, but others say it emits greater amounts of certain pollutants. Also, some studies on ethanol point to the fact that it is renewable, while others note that corn requires larger quantities of fertilizer and water and could be damaging to soil. Take a look at the EPA’s web page on “air”: http://www.epa.gov/ebtpages/air.html to see how complex this issue is.
Thanks to Jane for this alternative energy primer.
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