The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 328
could simply ferment whatever grows and then use a stone-age technology to
distill it into alcohol.
The serious point I'm making here, and it's a point that most people overlook, is
that ethanol isn't the perfect fuel for a gasoline-optimized engine because the
engine is optimized to run on gasoline, not because ethanol is not as good or
better. In an engine that is optimized to run on ethanol (with proper fuel injectors, appropriate spark timing, and greater piston compression), ethanol will
perform equal to or better than a gasoline-optimized engine. Furthermore, if you
tried to use pure gasoline or E10 in the ethanol-optimized engine your results
would probably not equal the results of pure ethanol or a high ethanol-gasoline
blend in a gasoline-optimized engine.
What we need is a fuel whose source and availability is not dependent upon
foreign interests; a fuel whose success doesn't contribute to the war chests of
terrorists and terrorist regimes; a fuel that doesn't poison us; a fuel that can be
produced inexpensively; a fuel that can be produced in any geographic region.
And we need a fuel like this right now, not 50 years in the future. Ethanol is that
fuel. Ethanol's cousin, methanol, also meets these qualifications, particularly if
the methanol is produced from easily sourced waste materials (not from CNG).
Being able to power our vehicles from a fuel produced from an increasingly
endless supply of human excrement is better than any Star Trek fantasy we can
imagine, because it's doable right now.
As The Auto Channel opined in June 2008, we need legislation that mandates
the end of new gasoline-powered vehicles. If you live in fear of a New World
Order controlled by the people who occupy the United Nations building in Manhattan, you should be equally afraid of the people who occupy the OPEC headquarters in Geneva and their minions who are housed in the API office building
in Washington, DC.
* Why did Ricardo Labs only okay E15 for vehicles manufactured since 1994?
In the early 1990s nearly all auto manufacturers changed certain metal and
rubber components that were susceptible to corrosion from ethanol, in order to
allow ethanol to be used without any harm. Typically, any ethanol-gasoline
blends with higher ethanol levels are not recommended for use in cars manufactured prior to about 1991-92. In any event, the great preponderance of vehicles on the road today were manufactured after the mid-1990s.
