Using ethanol won’t free us from imported oil. Here’s why.

Note: I invite reader comment for this post and welcome fact and arithmetic checking. Please study my comments policy before weighing in!

E85 is a motor-vehicle fuel consisting of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline by volume. Pure ethanol’s ambient-temperature properties require it to be combined with gasoline to useful as a consumer fuel. Fifteen percent gasoline is the most common mixture.

There are two major drawbacks to using E85. George Will explains one:

Ethanol produces just slightly more energy than it takes to manufacture it. But now that the government is rigging energy markets with mandates, tariffs and subsidies, ethanol production might consume half of next year’s corn crop. The price of corn already has doubled in a year. Hence the tortilla turbulence south of the border. Forests will be felled (will fewer trees mean more global warming?) to clear land for growing corn, which requires fertilizer, the manufacture of which requires energy. Oh, my.

In fact, I read not long ago (sorry, no link) in another article that it takes about one gallon of diesel fuel to produce one gallon of ethanol. Diesel is used in ethanol production to clear fields, produce and apply fertilizer, harvest the crop and transport and store it. Because processing the corn into ethanol requires electricity, diesel or some form of fuel oil is likely used to produce the electricity, too, since hydropower is the corn states is pretty rare. Further, E85 can’t be piped except for short distances, certainly not state to state.

[A]n ethanol-gasoline mixture can’t be piped, because the two ingredients separate, which could cause the fuel to damage a car’s engine. Ethanol has to be transported on the road, a much more costly endeavor than sending it through a pipe. …

“‘Corn is in the center of the country and gasoline consumers are on the coasts,’ he [Dr. Darren Hudson, a professor of agricultural economics at Mississippi State University] said. ‘So transportation costs can be quite high — roughly double the cost of shipping gasoline’ or about $1.20 per gallon of ethanol.”

Transporting E85 will require diesel fuel and lots of it. That aside, a gallon of E85 - 109 ounces of ethanol and 19 ounces of gasoline - has less usable energy than 128 ounces of of plain gasoline.

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Three days ago, I asked whether global warming was really worse than the alternative, global cooling.

I’ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis. For the earth will either get warmer or cooler, but it definitely won’t stay the same. Even if everyone were to agree that the globe really is warming, can we please see some scientifically-sound documentation that it is worse than the alternative?

Comes now the estimable syndicated columnist, George Will, with a Newsweek piece, entitled, “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths,” subtitled, “Was life better when a sheet of ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there?”

Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?

It’s a meme, folks! Get aboard! Now, to be fair, Will wrote his column before I posted by essay, given the lead times in the mainstream punditry industry. But, still, it’s pretty good company, eh wot? (I mean that Will is keeping . . . .)