A Chance For Clean Air And Cheap Fuel
Published by gwen September 29th, 2008 in Energy.Last week I received a press release anouncing a discount on E-85 fuel on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008. It appears to be part of a national event aimed at promoting alternate fuel vehicles. Some of the information can be found here.
From the press release itself:
Bismarck, North Dakota – (September 26, 2008) – Bismarck may not be the first city in America that comes to mind when you think of alternative fuel vehicles, but there are many vehicles in North Dakota that are capable of running on something other than petroleum, according to The North Dakota Clean Air Choice Team. On Thursday, October 2, from 4-7 p.m., the Cenex station at 1160 W. Divide Avenue in Bismarck will be part of the National Alternative Fuel Vehicle Day Odyssey, a national event that celebrates cleaner-burning alternatives to traditional fuels. The station will reduce the price of its E85 fuel by 85 cents a gallon, with a limit of 30 gallons per vehicle. E85 is for use in flexible fuel vehicles only – visit www.CleanAirChoice.org to see if your vehicle is one of the many models that can use E85 as well as gasoline. There are an estimated 29,000 flexible fuel vehicles currently on the road in North Dakota.
E-85 is a blended fuel of up to 85% ethanol with gasoline.
Thanks for helping us spread the word on this event, Gwen!
Bob Moffitt
Communications Director
Clean Fuel & Vehicle Technologies program
American Lung Association of the Upper Midwest
I got the same thing submitted to my site, but I’m not buying it. You have to do some pretty sketchy math to make ethanol come out even, much less a winner.
I want the clean air study to factor in the cost of growing, transporting, and fermenting the corn; the energy input of the ethanol process; the amount of diesel fuel burned transporting ethanol that can’t be pipelined; and the extra amount of ethanol one has to burn to get equivalent mileage and performance to gasoline.
Once the emissions of the farm equipment, the ethanol facility, the rail or truck transports, and the FlexFuel vehicles are quanitified and compared, then let’s factor in the federal subsidy. Once all the numbers are in the equation, I would be absolutely astonished if ethanol even had a prayer of being “cleaner.” I’m not beyond convincing, but I’d need some verifiable and credible data that I don’t believe exists.
Cf