Filed under: Ethanol, Flex-Fuel, GM
Wagoner: Our nation has a "woefully low number of E-85 pumps"
There are already millions of flex-fuel vehicles on the road today, and manufacturers like General Motors have committed to building many, many more. In fact, GM has plans for half of their entire fleet of automotive offerings to be flex-fuel capable by the year 2012. According to Jim Wagoner, GM's CEO, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that are currently on the roads were actually powered by E85, the U.S. could displace 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. This raises a serious problem, though, considering that there are only about 1,400 E85 pumps in the entire country. Many of those are all clustered in a few Midwestern states. In view of this, Wagoner suggests that the U.S. needs about ten times as many E85 pumps than are currently operational.
No matter what your view of E85 may be, you likely agree that using food crops such as corn is not the best choice. In lieu of corn, Wagoner suggests investing more heavily in cellulosic ethanol (which is exactly what GM is doing with Coskata in the deal announced today). There is plenty more to read here, where you can read the text of the Wagoner's entire speech. You'll also encounter a couple of very, very bad jokes. Enjoy!
[Source: General Motors, CNET Green Tech blog]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dad 8:16PM (1/13/2008)
"No matter what your view of E85 may be, you likely agree that using food crops such as corn is not the best choice. In lieu of corn, Wagoner suggests investing more heavily in cellulosic ethanol (which is exactly what GM is doing with Coskata in the deal announced today). "
Exactly, but it has to start somewhere. And bravo for GM to work on cellulosic. GM should be listened too, they are bright folks.
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BlackbirdHighway 8:23PM (1/13/2008)
GM has a very good reason to make all those flexfuel vehicles, especially the larger ones. They get a huge break on the CAFE rating on all flexfuel vehicles.
Unfortunately, so far very few of them have ever seen E85. We need to work on that. When gasoline hits $5, we're going to want to have a lot more E85 pumps.
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mike 8:23PM (1/13/2008)
There is no shortage of PLUG receptacles.
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Dad 8:56PM (1/13/2008)
"They get a huge break on the CAFE rating on all flexfuel vehicles."
Wow, did not know that. Makes sense.
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steven 9:32PM (1/13/2008)
@1 & @4: It make sense if it was actaully true... It amounts to somehting like $250/vehcile for teh frist 5 years and $50 less per year until it expires in 2014. But GM and Ford, and everyone else participating will get penalized by the same E85 program if their overall gas mileage does not improve. They will receive payment each time they produce more flex-fuel vehicles as a percentage of their fleet than the top three automakers. Considering it costs $100-150 to make a vehicle "flex-fuel", I'm not sure how "huge" of an incentive GM is getting. The new CAFE law also has a sliding scale of what % of flex fule vehicles can be applied to a manufacture's overall mileage.
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please 9:49PM (1/13/2008)
black bird highway
poor misinformed people. What makes all the people who support E85 think that it's better than gas? Do you know how they are made? It takes 3 times more energy, just the same amount of pollution as a gallon of gas burns to make the same amount of ethanol to burn one gallon of gas. Listen up. E85 is a perfect solution for making our environment worse. The initial tail pipe emission might be lower but before it gets there it does more harm than good. In fact I would recommend gas over ethanol esp. when you're taking perfectly good food that we can eat into fuel.
why not use electricity?????
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GreyFlcn 2:04AM (1/14/2008)
Well
The reason there's no E85 pumps is because there's no E85.
A whole 1% of the total US ethanol in 2006 was sold as an E85 blend. Why? Because E85 isn't as profitable as E6 or E10.
http://greyfalcon.net/gao
_
That said, it doesn't matter what magical liquid conversion technology you come up with.
There just isn't going to be enough domestic raw biomass to do the job. Period.
http://greyfalcon.net/biolimits.png
(It's even worse when you consider Switchgrass's conversion efficiency is 1/3rd lower than Sugar Cane)
_
But then again, the other far more important aspect to consider Greenhouse Emissions.
Taken Cumulatively, BioFuels as they are now, without a doubt simply make things worse.
http://greyfalcon.net/n2ostudy.png
There's some glimmer of potential to make them stop increasing loading greenhouses into the atmosphere, in the long run. But then again, you'd have to deal with the previous massive "carbon debt" accumulated by previous biofuels.
Much the same way that someone might say Coal-to-Liquids might someday be a "greenhouse safe" approach, but thats no reason to charge ahead with the conventional stuff right now.
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BlackbirdHighway 3:12AM (1/14/2008)
@5, I'm not talking about direct incentives, I'm talking about how the CAFE rating is calculated. Check out what Car&Driver says:
"The irony here is that although E85 in fact gets poorer fuel economy than gasoline, for CAFE purposes, the government counts only the 15-percent gasoline content of E85. Not counting the ethanol, which is the other 85 percent, produces a seven-fold increase in E85 mpg. The official CAFE number for an E85 vehicle results from averaging the gas and the inflated E85 fuel-economy stats.
Calculating backward from our test Tahoe’s window-sticker figures (which are lower than but derived from the unpublished CAFE numbers), we figure the E85 Tahoe’s CAFE rating jumped from 20.1 mpg to 33.3 mpg, blowing through the 22.2-mpg mandate and raising GM’s average. What’s that worth? Well, spread over the roughly 4.5-million vehicles GM sold in 2005, the maximum 0.9-mpg benefit allowed by the E85 loophole could have saved GM more than $200 million in fines. That’s not chump change, even for the auto giant"
@6, I don't favor ethanol at all. I'm simply pointing out that as gasoline gets more expensive, we're going to want alternatives. Ethanol is an alternative, although it's not a very good one, at least not unless or until we come up with a more efficient way to produce it. EVs would be a much better alternative, and we'll need those too.
When oil went from $20 to $40, all the media said it was just due to speculators and had nothing to do with supply and demand. Then it went from $40 to $60, and they blamed speculators. Then it went from $60 to $80 and they blamed speculators. Now it's hit $100, and again speculators are blamed. We need to accept that oil will be more expensive in the future, and we need alternatives.
"My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode in a car. I fly a jet airplane. My grandson will ride a camel." -Saudi Saying
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GreyFlcn 3:58AM (1/14/2008)
Well the real question to ask.
Why do we care about conversion efficiency?
Shouldn't physics based logistics limitations and greenhouse emissions trump that in spades?
Even if they achieved 100% conversion efficiency.
If it can't meet those two previous requirements, then it's not even worth considering.
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mike 7:12AM (1/14/2008)
>> Not counting the ethanol, which is the other 85 percent, produces a seven-fold increase in E85 mpg.
Let me guess, Dingle put this in.
I think the VOTER's need the Line Item Veto.
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Emil 3:02PM (1/14/2008)
The question of pumps vs. vehicles is exactly the question of egg vs. chicken.
I fully accept the opinion of Robert Zubrin
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/18/zubrin.htm
Instead of all those CARB, CAFE, 35 MPG etc. just enforce all the automakers produce FFV cars. Drivers will decide about unleaded,E10 or E85.
Also it will be a trigger to buy US cars abroad (in Sweden,Brazil etc.)
One can study from http://www.e85prices.com that e85 prices are quite competitive.
Another way is to require all gasoline in US to be at least E10. according to
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=1744
and many others even today about half of all gasoline sold in the US contains ethanol. So require the other half and also test must be performed to check E20.
I fully understand the concerns of Grey Falcon and others, but everyone admits, that the corn ethanol is only an interim solution.
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jcwinnie 8:25PM (1/14/2008)
Emil,
Define interim
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