The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 585
teacher was born. (My choice for this particular Shakespeare piece was purely
coincidental. I didn’t choose this as a reflection of the topic’s value. Truly, it just
popped into my head.)
Bryce then wraps up the whole discussion when he writes: “Taken together, the
first two laws of thermodynamics provide the key to understanding why fossil
fuels are so dominant in today’s economy.”
This statement by Bryce must be a joke, there’s no other explanation for making
it. But he told the joke the wrong way; it goes much better when told like this:
The reason that gasoline is so dominant in today’s economy is because
of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. RIMSHOT!
There is one reason and only one reason why gasoline is the dominant engine
fuel. In the early 1920s, the world’s largest automobile maker, General Motors,
invented a formula that added tetra-ethyl lead to gasoline, thereby emulating
one of the best qualities of ethanol. Tetra-ethyl lead, while deadly to humans,
was able to quiet the knock that prohibited the use of gasoline in high compression, high-performance spark-induced internal combustion engines. This was
the birth of leaded gasoline.
GM was able to file for and get a patent on this process. GM combined that
patent with a similar patent owned by the world’s largest oil company, Standard
Oil. DuPont, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, and a large shareholder in GM, joined the group. John Rockefeller and his company Standard Oil
had become fabulously wealthy because of America’s need for a cheap fuel to
be used for indoor lighting and heating. The previous most popular liquid fuel
for indoor lighting and heating was alcohol, but because of a huge tax placed
on alcohol production during the Civil War, the public had no choice but to accept smelly, dirty kerosene that could be sold for just a fraction of the price of
alcohol. Consumer purchasing decisions had nothing to do with any of the 3 or
4 laws of thermodynamics.
GM, realizing that they would make billions of dollars during the life of the patents just from their share of leaded gasoline royalties alone, ceased any further
efforts to use an ethanol-gasoline blend and concentrated on building engines
that were optimized for leaded gasoline. Standard Oil also recognized the importance of leaded fuel in allowing all automakers to be able to design and build
high compression, higher performing engines. Having a lock on leaded gasoline, Standard was able to ensure that their service stations, and the service
