The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 622
octane gasoline, which was to blend in ethanol. The second choice was to pick
another poison (they had such good luck for more than half a century with tetraethyl lead), so MTBE was it.
Bryce writes, “…due to some leaking underground storage tanks, MTBEBLENDED gasoline was also causing some groundwater problems. And those
leaks led to lawsuits over the refiners’ use of the additive.” Some? Some
groundwater problems, as if it was a couple of isolated incidents. Well, those
very few number of spills are still with us today. Fresh water lakes and ponds
and reservoirs that were contaminated with MTBEs still have MTBE’s in them
years after outlawing its use in gasoline.
Some estimates are that it has taken $30 billion to clean up the more egregious
MTBE damage. Guess who gets to pay for that? You and me. Sounds like another subsidy to the oil industry that they get to ignore.
Bryce continues, “Like MTBE, ethanol is a good oxygenate. But it creates big
problems for oil refiners because it increases the volatility of gasoline.”
Volatility in this instance relates to evaporation. So this sounds like Bryce is
saying that because ethanol evaporates too quickly, or more quickly than
MTBE, the gasoline industry chose MTBE over ethanol.
Interestingly, the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, located near
Bonn, Germany, describes MTBE as “very highly volatile, with a boiling point of
55 degrees centigrade.” The same institute labels ethanol as “highly volatile
with a boiling point of 78 degrees centigrade.” Consequently, it looks like MTBE
would evaporate more quickly than ethanol. Therefore, if the problem for the
refiners was that ethanol was too volatile, then they should have considered
MTBE as too, too volatile.
I’m not a chemical engineer; I’m not any kind of engineer; I don’t even have a
Lionel model train engineer cap and whistle any longer. So I could easily be
wrong on my interpretation of the statistics I just presented. If so, okay Robert
now you have something to bash me with; have at it.
But if I’m not reading the stats incorrectly, then it sounds like Bryce did the ol’
doublespeak thing again: blame ethanol for gasoline’s problem.
However, let’s not quibble over a few temperature points, volatility – that is,
quick evaporation - and easy solubility with water is one of ethanol’s benefits. If
there’s a large ethanol spill, cleanup is relatively simple. In addition, the ethanol
