There’s nothing wrong with burning our food for fuel. Everything is wrong with trying to make gas less polluting by adding ethanol to it.
It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol you make. Ethanol can’t be stored in tanks designed for petroleum products, and must be shipped by rail in special ethanol tank cars (they’re blue). Your local station needs special tanks and pumps to get the stuff into your car at any concentration in gasoline greater than 10 or 15%. It sucks up water like sunshine on a sand dune, and often releases that water in parts of your fuel system other than the exhaust, especially in humid regions like Houston.
Withal, burning ethanol has only about 70% of the energy of gasoline. E85 only looks cheaper than gasoline for the same reason that gasoline only looks cheaper than diesel fuel. It costs way more, and the subsidies only appear to get the costs down a bit: When they come off, the cost of ethanol will soar as on wings of eagles.
If we took our entire corn crop to make ethanol — didn’t feed a single pig or cow; didn’t assuage the hunger pangs of a single starving kid — it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by less than six percent.
Truly, this substance redefines the entire concept of “crap.” It has one use and one only: to make White Lightning for our nation’s distilleries.
