Flex-fuel fraud?
Alternative fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel are popular stump speech material for politicians in the rural South and Midwest. It's good for farmers who grow the crops used to make bio-fuels, and everyone agrees anything that reduces our dependence on foreign oil and also provides beneficial side-effects for the environment can't be all bad.
Yesterday, President Bush met with automakers to discuss his energy plan. According to the article, he inspected alternative-fuel vehicles and declared them "a major technological breakthrough for the country," while urging Congress to "'move expeditiously' on legislation the administration recently proposed to require the use of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017 and seek higher fuel economy standards for automobiles."
Not so fast, says consumer watchdog group Public Citizen:
President Bush's support of Flexible-Fuel Vehicles (FFV) as a way to curb the nation's addiction to oil will have the net effect of lowering the overall fuel efficiency of the fleet, according to Public Citizen.
How can this be? According to Public Citizen, it seems there's a loophole in Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards that gives them a credit for flex-fuel vehicles:
This reduces the fuel economy their fleets must achieve under an assumption that these vehicles use gasoline 50 percent of the time and E-85 (a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline) the other 50 percent. Using this loophole, Ford saved itself as much as $135 million in fines it would have received for model years 2003 to 2005 for not meeting the actual fuel economy standards. In reality, Ford and other automakers are cheating the system because E-85 is not widely available, and some vehicles designated as FFVs do not operate properly with the fuel.
The article says that Ford received a 2003 fleet rating of 43 MPG for its flex-fuel vehicles, when in fact they only got 26 MPG which is less than the 27.5 MPG minimum standard for passenger cars.
And not only that, there is some question regarding the environmental efficiency of bio-fuel production. According to Grist Environmental News and Commentary:
Conventional agriculture relies on fertilizer and pesticides derived from fossil fuels. Diesel powers the tractors and other machinery that plow, plant, and spray crops, as well as the vehicles that haul away the final product (due to ethanol's tendency to absorb water, it must be transported in special containers on trucks or trains instead of in the cheaper pipeline system used for oil and gasoline). Figure in the fuel -- mainly coal and natural gas -- burned in the distillation process, and experts reckon each gallon of ethanol takes the energetic equivalent of roughly three-quarters of a gallon of ethanol to produce.
Then there are greenhouse-gas emissions. After accounting for the coal and natural gas burned to process it, the nitrous oxide -- a greenhouse gas hundreds of times more potent than CO2 -- generated from fertilizer production, and other factors, a recent study in Science found that ethanol use reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by just 13 percent compared to gasoline use.
Despite this, the article notes there is continuing government support for ethanol, including a 51 cents-per-gallon tax credit for producers and a 54 cents-per-gallon tariff on sugarcane ethanol imported from Brazil.
This Grist article chronicles the rise of ethanol, and how Archer Daniels Midland has profited handsomely from the corporate welfare surrounding it.