Fort Wayne Gets E85 Stimulus - Ugh…
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 9/4/09 @ 10:27 am - Filed Under Featured, Local Politics
From the city’s press release:
Fort Wayne, Ind. – Through the Clean Cities program, the City of Fort Wayne will get cost-sharing stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of an American Reinvestment and Recovery Act competitive grant that will reduce petroleum consumption.
Next year, the City will receive a $2,000 reimbursement for the purchase of each hybrid vehicle, up to $18,000, through the Central Indiana Clean Cities Alliance Comprehensive Alternative Fuels Implementation Plan.
Working in cooperation with the City, Lassus Bros. Oil will get more than $200,000 to add three E85 stations, which will bring Lassus’ total in the Fort Wayne area to five. E85 is an alternative fuel made from a blend of ethanol and gasoline.
Ethanol!?! E85 is such a scam. For those that don’t know E85 is a corn-based fuel that is 85% ethanol and can only be used in newer flex-fuel vehicles that have fuel systems (pump, lines, etc) modified to accept the higher alcohol level.
The catch is, due to the higher octane rating and compression ratios needed to run in a standard gasoline engine, vehicles running on E85 are about 20% less efficient. That means the consumer must pay 20% less per gallon in order to break even - a spread that I’ve only seen a couple of times at my local Lassus station.
Fort Wayne Police will be able to refuel their E85-compatible vehicles at these stations as well as the fuel being available to the public starting in about four months at these three new locations.
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“We [Lassus] are pleased to provide E85 fuel to our customers helping to reduce foreign oil dependence while contributing to the growth of Indiana’s economy.”
That’s what we need, the FWPD spending even more money on fuel than they do now. And the answer for reducing our dependence on foreign oil shouldn’t be to burn food - the answer is more fuel efficient vehicles and investment in technology towards cost-effective renewable energy.
Corn based ethanol is heavily subsidized and simply cannot compete oil and probably never will considering it requires so much of it to make its final product - thus when oil increases in price, ethanol goes up with it. There is some hope for cellulose-based ethanol but that’s still in the research and development stage.
But even if there was a solid financial case to be made for supporting E85, which there certainly isn’t, I still would not support it as I think it’s immoral to burn food for fuel. There are so many other energy technologies we could invest our money in to make this country, and the planet, a better place for everyone - why in the world would we choose this? It’s asinine…
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11 Responses to “Fort Wayne Gets E85 Stimulus - Ugh…”
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We MIGHT be able to sugar based ethanol as a viable option as Brazil is trying to do. But it won’t be economically viable until the US drops ethanol and sugar tariffs, or at least creates an exemption for sugar that is intended for use as a fuel.
NICE, we’ve been “investing” in ethanol as an alternative fuel since the Nixon adminstration. Now we need more subsidy as our prices for milk, cheese, meat continue to rise. i’m lovin me some feel good legislation. We’ll be off foreign oil just about the time that Beldar the Conehead runs for his 11th term as premier of Fort Knuthville.
Ever hear the saying “You cannot get something from nothing?” Well it certainly is true with energy. Energy can neither be create nor destroyed, only changed in form. With all processes there is an energy loss. This is simple fact.
No matter how much politicians want to believe in the motto “Something from Nothing” it does not work. When it comes to Ethanol here are some facts. E-85 is nothing more than 85% ethanol with 15% gas. Regular ethanol blended gas is 10% ethanol and 90% gas.
Ethanol has 83,500 btu’s of energy while gasoline is greater than 120,000 btu’s. Using ethanol versus gasoline requires more frequent fill ups, transportation by truck versus pipe lines, is corrosive to aluminum parts and reduces fuel economy by 30%.
To make a gallon of ethanol requires the following: Some agricultural product (corn in the US, sugar cane in brazil). In Brazil the ethanol purity is under 99% which means they leave a lot of water in the ethanol. The reason for this is simple: to get the last 1% out it takes twice the energy already expended. Running a car on this type of ethanol lowers fuel efficiency, ruins engines and more. This is why the US requires 99.99% pure ethanol and a main reason why US Ethanol production consumes greater than 120,000 btu’s of energy to make one gallon.
Mathematically, it takes more energy to create a gallon of ethanol than the energy content of ethanol. Now to get around this they use smoke and mirrors saying the byproducts of ethanol production can be used for feed. Yes it can, but how much of this by product can be used? In addition when all ethanol plants were running the price of a bushel of corn went to over $8 a bushel, four times what it was three years ago. The price of cereal and corn syrup went up. Corn syrup is used in sodas (coke, Pepsi). Farmers switched from wheat and bean production to corn for higher prices, driving the price of bread and pasta through the roof.
Who did this to us, our politicians? Because it cost more to produce ethanol than competing gasoline, politicians voted to give a tax credit (tax abatement) to ethanol producers of 51 cents per gallon in order to give it a fighting chance to survive. Ethanol is not a new process. It has been around for hundreds of years. Moonshine, whiskey, etc. It is a well known process and the easy efficiency changes have been implemented. Now the process has reached the diminishing return phase where each dollar invested produces less return to the point where it becomes more costly to produce than its value.
If you want energy independence and reduce oil dependency, then you need to move into the 21st century and out of the burning of fuels to convert energy to useful work. Oil is a compact energy source. Do we need to use oil in stationary fuel conversion processes like oil heat, burning oil to make electricity, etc, no? Onsite energy conversion should use low density energy supplies. Low density energy supplies are wind power, solar, hydro electric to name a few. Natural gas is a compact energy source, but it is widely used in the product ion of electricity in backup generators and heating of water and homes which are stationary uses that can utilize low density conversion processes to electricity.
Sorry for the length, but Ethanol is one of the truly boondoggle programs in this country and people are falling in love with it. IT IS NOT GREEN! It takes coal to make the electricity and it requires diesel to plow the fields, transport the grain and natural gas to dry it.
Jeff,
This sounds like almost all of the alternative energy investments the Democrats want to make. They all tend to cost more money…
I wonder how many of the five million green collar jobs President Obama promised have been created so far?
Mike
What this country needs is an energy policy that does not subsidize one energy form over another. Nuclear power plants are subsidized by never having to deal with highly radioactive waste. Sure they pay a fee yearly to the DOE to take the waste and bury it in the future. However, the fee paid is o where close to the actual cost of transporting, storing and monitoring it for 10,000 years.
As for coal we subsidize the healthcare of workers and retirement of coal miners. Mitch Daniels gives tax breaks to Indiana coal mines as well as new coal power plants. Tax abatments, TIFS and credits are subsidies.
Solar and wind get tax credits of 30% to those who install these power generating systems (up to a limit).
Ethanol gets 51 cents a gallon tax credit.
Why not remove all credits, incentives and let the price of energy find its own natural equilibrium. Then we will be able to see actually what each costs. When we know the true cost of each energy source, then the consumer will switch to save money.
It is hard for any startup to make money when the politicians keep handing out our money to energy companies who have their hands out.
While adding a small amount of ethanol to gasoline is useful as an oxygenate to reduce noxious emissions (it doesn’t reduce greenhouse gases) corn based ethanol is not a viable replacement for gasoline. It’s being pushed by the farm lobby and their Midwestern legislators as way to increase profits for corn growers, and in that respect it’s a been successful thanks only to huge government subsidies. Taxpayers would be better off letting them dilute it with 50% tap water instead of 15% gasoline and selling it as vodka (you can’t tell the difference) instead of putting it in our cars.
Whip me up a Martini Evert!
Abe - I’m going save that for a future city council meeting when they vote on making Calhoun street one way. Right now I have to figure out how to get the gasoline out of the E85. Would you like to invest in a joint venture?
Evert,
My roots are from Kentucky. We can just build a still in my backyard.
http://www.happinessonline.org/images/old_pot_still.jpg
I rented an E85 car last year for trip south (the week gas went over $4/gal and shortages in Atlanta). I compared the cost effectiveness of straight gasoline and a tank of E85. Mileage went from 32mpg hiway to 23. I had to travel over 3000 miles and $1 price/gal difference before I saw any savings. If the price difference is less and city driving mileage is less, there is no way in the near future an individual would see any savings.
But you are helping the president.
Steve G, you did an empirical experiment and over 3,000 miles realized the fallacy of ethanol. They talk about reducing oil imports, but what about all this corn that was not available for export? The value of the corn that was not exported was worth more than the oil that was not imported. This only resulted in an increase in our trade deficit.
We cannot drill our way out of our oil dependency, but we sure could make a dent in our trade deficit by drilling. For every barrel we do not import, we reduce the trade deficit by $68 or there about.
My task is not to help the president, but to help my country.