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Home  Latest News Latest China gets ethanol right while US still floundering
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China gets ethanol right while US still floundering |
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by Bobby Fontaine
July 11, 2008
I have been talking about ethanol for a long time and I even think some people are listening. But clearly the ones who need to are deaf and dumb when it comes to how to implement a working ethanol program that might actually have a chance of lessening our dependence on foreign oil. Fortunately for us the Chinese have arrived with a working model for how ethanol can be used to benefit an economy rather than shred it apart.
| I’m so glad that in the past, our former attitude about free market competition took root in other parts of the world before we forgot how it works here in the US. So who we used to look at as inept and wasteful in their approach to how they governed from Beijing, with everything in their country being managed by communists mandates,
|  | | now the Chinese have begun to allow free market competition take place where the spirit innovation and the entrepreneur now rules the better half of their economy. |
We on the other hand are lending a great lesson to posterity by taking up where the rest of the worlds communist and socialist countries left off when they were beaten by our free market approach we are now mandating our future from Washington DC. So by contrast to the kind of path we used to follow as opposed to the new one our leadership has chosen for us, we’re teaching the human race a very important lesson about how our past free market approach to running an economy was not successful by means of any shell game economics or fast talking with there being no smoke and mirrors in how we won the cold war that we came out on top of with a booming economy inspiring a new future for the whole world as developing countries now pursue our old approaches to being successful.
See we’re required to add ethanol to gasoline much like China still requires married couples to have only one child. No one is really sure why we’ve adopted China’s policy on family values and applied it to our energy markets. There are different reasons for different days of the week depending on who’s asking the government the questions of why we are required to add ethanol to gasoline. But almost none of them either asking or pursuing the answers to what’s going on with our energy policy knows what ethanol is. Thank God the Chinese do.
See what we’re adding to gasoline in an effort to become energy independent is anhydrous ethanol. But anhydrous ethanol as a gasoline additive is an oxygenate, not a fuel. It’s supposed to be added to gasoline to help with issues related to pollution. But new studies conducted many years after the once popular theory of why we need oxygenates have already been debunked showing that anhydrous ethanol added to gasoline actually worsens air quality to a great degree, and dangerously so. But when the Bush administration was confronted with this reality after Bush’s father’s favorite oxygenate MTBE was removed from the market for polluting groundwater nationwide and was replaced with anhydrous ethanol, the White House’s answer was that it was no longer being added to gasoline for air quality but as an alternative to importing foreign oil. The assumption that this works is based on that fact that we produce anhydrous ethanol domestically from corn.
So the choice made in Washington was to worsen air pollution in favor of less dependence on oil. The problems with that argument being realistic it too numerous for me to write about here without sounding redundant because I’ve written so much about it already. But lets suffice it say that there is not one aspect of using anhydrous ethanol added to gasoline, especially when produced from corn, that can be defended as beneficial to our air quality or the need to put fuel that works into the engines of our vehicles.
My fear since this oxygenate/gasoline replacing program started was that it will give ethanol such a bad name that the US will never want to hear the word again once we fully understand what our leadership is doing with it. See in the good old days, if we didn’t take the lead on something, it didn’t happen. And since we went the wrong way with ethanol, then when we got smart and walk away from it, that would have meant that everyone else in the world would follow us in never giving ethanol a second look. But now that we’ve taught the Chinese our competitive ways, when we fail, we can turn to them to see how to get it right.
See ethanol comes in many forms. Anhydrous ethanol is one that has very little water content. Hydrous ethanol is like the whiskey you might drink, it has a fair amount of water in it. It might surprise you to know however that hydrous ethanol is a better fuel. Even with the water in it, it can be added to gasoline if it is reformulated with a emulsifier first. Then it can be added to gasoline where it doesn’t cause the problems that anhydrous ethanol does to engines while it’s far cheaper and less harmful to the environment.
In fact as backwards as it is to even think of making fuel from corn, if we were doing it the way the Chinese are with their ethanol program, it would be working at least to a degree that we could see a future benefit from relying on hydrous ethanol for our fuel needs while learning that making it from corn is the wrong direction for us to go.
So three cheers for the Chinese for picking up the ball where we dropped it on ethanol and another three for us for teaching the Chinese that there old ways of federally mandating their future was wrong by us adopting their failed direction and proving that it indeed does not work.
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