The White House has just announced the Environmental Protection Agency will allow the ethanol content in E85 gas to increase from 10% to 15% over the summer when it is normally banned. The move stinks of politics and will affect very few.
Never heard of E85 gas? Except for the decal on the tailgate of my F150 that says it will accept Flex Fuel, I hadn’t. And from what I know of the damage that ethanol can cause to engines, especially small ones like lawn equipment, I won’t use it. I won’t run regular gas that has a 10% ethanol content in my boat either, though that is mainly due to condensation issues.
The move is expected to lower the cost of a gallon of gas by a whopping 10 cents. Besides the paltry savings, the added ethanol is usually not allowed during the summer months because it increases smog levels. The fuel is available at 2,300 gas stations nationwide, with only a handful near me. It’s a move that sounds big, but has little impact and was introduced at a speech in Iowa, the number one corn-producing state—by a lot.
Increasing the demand for corn will increase its price. Which is already affected by inflation. The trickle-down effect is that everything corn, or corn-related will become more expensive. Of major concern is our meat supply which uses corn as a main feed source for livestock. The price hikes affecting food, which are already higher due to inflation, will surely overshadow the savings in gas.
So, as long as we’re talking about ethanol let’s talk about ethanol. The fuel, made from corn is a house of cards. Growing corn is hard on the soil and takes more irrigation water than other crops. I’ll grant its importance as a large portion of our livestock is corn raised, though it’s not high on the nutrient scale for us humans (cows either for that matter.)
The problem is in the production and the subsidies involved. Corn subsidies from the Farm Bill cost taxpayers billions with most of the money going to large companies, not small independent farmers as it was intended. In addition to that, there are additional subsidies for biofuel production including Ethanol Blender Pumps.
Even with the subsidies, ethanol costs more to produce than oil. At roughly 1.36 per gallon compared to .97 (2015 price comparison was all I could find). It looks to me like the government is propping up a failing business model.
Farming and mining (which I’ll get to soon in another post about electric vehicles) require heavy equipment, which uses large quantities of diesel in engines whose emissions are not regulated to the extent of other vehicles. The greenhouse gas effect of growing corn to replace oil as a source of fuel for the internal combustion engine is a little counterintuitive to what we have been taught—but it is true.
The truth is, however, that growing corn in the U.S. heartland still has a major environmental impact — one that will only increase if we add even more ethanol to our gasoline. Higher-ethanol blends still produce significant levels of air pollution, reduce fuel efficiency, jack up corn and other food prices, and have been treated with skepticism by some car manufacturers for the damage they do to engines. Growing corn to run our cars was a bad idea 10 years ago. Increasing our reliance on corn ethanol in the coming decades is doubling down on a poor bet.
Source: https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_for_environment
As another unintended consequence of our sanctions against Russia (I agree with sanctions, they just need to be better thought out—like with an end game that benefits us), the world is on the verge of a fertilizer shortage. Russia and Belarus provide about twenty percent of the world’s fertilizer. Cutting off that supply will surely have a downstream effect on the cost and availability of food.
Of course everything that comes out of the White House these days stinks of politics and is only intended to benefit the conmen who perpetrate this garbage!
Very well stated and factual. I also enjoy your books!