Drivers increase use of E85 fuel
CAPITAL REGION — Albany County Comptroller Mike Conners doesn’t drive a flex-fuel car, but he said he loves using E85 fuel anyway.
The mixture — 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline — is available at two retail gas stations in Albany and two state-owned pumps not available to the public, making Albany the city with the highest concentration of E85 pumps in New York state.
Conners said he likes using ethanol because it’s made in America, it’s less expensive than gasoline and releases less carbon dioxide — which is linked to global warming — into the atmosphere.
“I splash mix my own [gas tank],” Conners said. “Since last May I’ve been mixing regular gasoline and E85. [Recently] I put in 17 gallons [of regular unleaded gasoline] and then I put in 11.33 gallons of E85 in, which will give me approximately 7.7 gallons of ethanol. It does two things, it drops the fuel economy but increases the performance of the engine.”
Ethanol contains less energy than gasoline and will greatly decrease fuel economy in all but flex-fuel engines designed for greater than 10 percent ethanol. The New York State Research and Development Authority estimates there are 200,000 flex-fuel engine vehicles in New York state.
Enthusiastic response
Christian King, owner and president of Albany-based gas station operating company KNC Holdings Inc., said he discourages motorists from doing what Conners does, but he encourages ethanol use. King’s company owns E85 pumps at gas stations in Albany and Warrensburg, and said he plans to install another one soon on Route 7 in Latham.
“We’ve been very, very successful with our rollout of E85 at the two locations, to the point where it makes all of the sense in the world economically, as well [as being] the right thing to do, to add it at Latham,” King said.
Conners and King are not alone in their enthusiasm for the corn-alcohol based fuel. Federal and state officials have supported ethanol production and consumption with subsidies, mandates and incentives for years.
Until recently, many government officials have acted under the assumption, supported by reports from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that corn plants absorb as much CO2 as burning ethanol emits.
That assumption led to policies that make King’s ventures possible, such as state waivers allowing his E85 pumps to be sited without Underwriters Laboratory safety approval, and grant money from the NYSERDA to help pay for 50 percent of the cost of putting in the pumps.
Whether ethanol production is “the right thing to do,” from an environmental standpoint, was called into question earlier this month when a report by Princeton University researchers published in Science Magazine and its online edition, ScienceXpress, said that ethanol production has caused land use changes around the world that actually increase CO2 emissions.
Environmental controversy
The report says farmers around the world are plowing forests and grasslands, releasing tons of stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, because they need to increase field crop production to make up for lost U.S. food production as U.S. cropland is diverted to corn sold for ethanol.
“We basically concluded that the [CO2] emissions from land use changes are very large … and as a result there is a large net increase in global warming gases,” said Tim Searchinger, the lead researcher for the Princeton team.
Federal officials shot back in a letter to ScienceXpress Feb. 15 arguing the Searchinger report’s conclusions were in error.
“Production of corn-based ethanol in the U.S. so far results in moderate [green house gas] emissions reductions. There has also been no indication that U.S. corn ethanol production has so far caused indirect land use changes in other countries because U.S. corn exports have been maintained at about 2 billion bushels a year,” wrote federal researchers Michael Wang and Zia Haq. “It remains to be seen whether and how much direct and indirect land use changes will occur as a result of U.S. corn ethanol production.”
Searchinger b lasted the Wang letter calling it full of “lies and errors.” He said his team will respond with a rebuttal soon.
NYSERDA President and CEO Paul Tonko said authority officials are aware of the Searchinger report and will factor its conclusions into future decisions regarding ethanol.
“Our effort here is a work in progress. As we move through the change — and change is not always easy, usually isn’t easy — we want to make sure we deal with facts not fiction. We look at full picture views and we hear everyone’s expression, good or bad, related to the topic,” Tonko said.
Government support
Last year, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there was a 90 percent chance that man-made CO2 emissions are helping to contribute to global warming, ethanol became one of the more popular renewable energy choices championed in Washington.
In December, President Bush signed the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which requires gasoline refineries to increase the use of ethanol sixfold, to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, voted for the act. He said he’s hopeful that the bill’s increased support for research into developing cellulosic ethanol, made from corn stalks, wood chips and switch grass, will benefit the economy and the environment more than corn-based ethanol.
“For corn-based ethanol, for the moment I’m supportive of building [refineries] in New York because the big cost of ethanol is not the production, it’s the transportation. But I don’t think it’s a long-range solution and I don’t think we should put all our eggs in that basket,” he said. “[Corn-based ethanol] is cumbersome, economically inefficient and has been mainly dictated, I would say, by politics. If Iowa weren’t the first [presidential caucus] state, I don’t think we would have done as much for ethanol.”
The EISA mandates at least 21,000 billion gallons of ethanol production must come from feedstocks other than corn by 2022.
Safety standards
New York state government has promoted ethanol for the past few years. In July 2006, Gov. George Pataki and the New York State Thruway Authority announced that an E85 pump would soon be built at the New Baltimore Travel Plaza in Greene County, the first part of a plan to put up an E85 pump at all 27 Thruway travel plazas.
But that program was stymied when Thruway authorities discovered no E85 pump system had yet received the Underwriters Laboratory seal of safety approval, Thruway Authority spokeswoman Sarah Kamp said.
UL officials first released safety standards for E85 dispensers in October 2007 and have not yet approved any ethanol dispensing system, although UL officials said they anticipate approving one sometime in 2008. Before issuing safety standards, UL officials said they spent a year studying how the corrosive ethanol would affect a dispensing system.
Kamp said the Thruway Authority is paying for the pumps without any state funding and will not open them to the public until UL approves them. She said the Thruway Authority now only plans to put up just two others, rather than 26.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to say we aren’t going to have them everywhere in the future, but at this point we don’t have any plans for anything except those three,” Kamp said.
State funding
Each of the E85 pumps now operating in the Capital Region received a state waiver to operate without UL approval, according to a spokesman for the New York State Department of State.
Tonko said four retail E85 stations in New York state have received $80,000 in grant funding from NYSERDA to help pay for the cost of installing the pumps. He said in 2006, NYSERDA received a $30 million state appropriation to support renewable energy projects, $9 million of which was mandated to promote E85 pumps with grants of up to $50,000.
“Because it was an initiative from the executive and legislative branches, that we were assigned the responsibility of, that mandate still exists, and our effort here is to assign our experts or deal with subcontracting forces to implement the program charged us,” Tonko said.
According to NYSERDA officials, an additional 31 E85 pumps have been approved for $472,000 in grant funding, 12 of which will be selling blended biodiesel as well as E85.
According to performance reports to NYSERDA, required of the E85 stations that received grant money, the four retail pumps have so far sold about 230,000 gallons of ethanol since installation. Sales of E85 are generally equal to or greater than sales of premium unleaded fuel at the stations on a pump-to-pump basis, NYSERDA said. Two of the stations have been in operation for about eight months and the other two stations have only been operational for a few weeks.
Ethanol Economics
Some of the ethanol supplied to E85 pumps in New York state comes from DEB Distribution Inc, owned by Christian King. He said his company gets ethanol for the Capital Region from the major ethanol hub of Logibio Albany Terminal at the port of Albany.
“E10 in Albany has proliferated to the stations at a much higher level than say Syracuse, where ethanol is not readily available. It’s all about distribution right now. [Ethanol] is hitting here because there is a vast amount of ethanol flowing through Logibio,” King said.
Corn-based ethanol can be brought to market only by trucks or rail cars, because current pipeline technology cannot protect the fuel from being contaminated by water, according to the U.S. EIA.
Schumer said the cost to transport ethanol is one of the reason’s he’s dubious of corn-based ethanol. Another is it’s effect on food prices.
“Dairy prices are way up. Why? Because the cost of [dairy cattle] feed is up,” he said.
King said he thinks the ethanol industry has been good for the local and national economy.
“We have to do something to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. [Ethanol] is cleaner burning as far as carbon dioxide emissions, compared directly with gasoline out of a tailpipe. I’m not going to get into land use issues like [those discussed] in Science Magazine. And it helps the economy. It’s American-made,” he said. “Ethanol is just a piece of our solution to reducing our dependence on foreign oil. It’s not a silver bullet, never will be. Biodiesel isn’t, wind farms aren’t, solar isn’t, but all together, in a collaborative effort, we will start to reduce our dependence.”
Montgomery County corn farmer Leonard Logan disagrees. Logan said he plans to plant about 1,500 acres of corn this year. After corn prices spiked last year he said it was like winning the lottery, but in his opinion the overall influence of ethanol has been bad for agriculture.
“The people it’s affecting are the people who use [corn feed]. The chicken farmers and the pig farmers, they’re in dire trouble. You notice the price of eggs has gone up from 79 cents a dozen to $2.79 then $3 a dozen,” Logan said. “With ethanol, the best thing they could do is cut all of the government subsidies and put it back in a jar and drink it. It’s a political joke. That’s all it is. It’s tree-hugger food. I don’t like the whole thing because it’s adding to this damned price sum and it shouldn’t be there.”
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