It's Not Big-Biofuel's Fault?

Simon Robinson, writing at ICIS’ Big Biofuels Blog (sorry, I have no idea what the acronym stands for and their website isn’t any help) has a response to my recent post about the inefficiency of E85.  In my original post I complained that despite E85 being approximately $0.64/gallon cheaper than regular 85 octane gasoline, because of the ethanol blend’s inefficiencies (in my experiment using E85 cost me 6 miles to the gallon) I was still actually better off buying regular gasoline.

This was Robinson’s response:

Fundamentally, if you’re only getting 19 mpg from your motor on gasoline, maybe you should buy Japanese or something. Unless you have to haul building materials/farm animals around.

His answer is that I should buy a new car?  Who is Simon Robinson to tell me what I should or should not be driving?  As a staunch individualist, I can tell you that it chafes my tookis a bit for someone to tell me that I need to buy some little foreign-made car.  Not that I have a problem with foreign made cars, but I bought my Yukon because that’s the sort of vehicle that best suits me.  I’m a big guy.  When I drive those little cars my knees hit the dashboard, plus getting in and out is a pain.  Also, a little car can’t pull my ice house out on the lake.  Or pull my four wheelers around.  Or take me through the blizzards we get up here so that I can get to work on time.

It’s more than a little arrogant to tell me that I should solve the biofuel’s problems with efficiency by changing what I drive.  I’m the customer in all this, and I’m always right.

Robinson also takes issue with my blaming the biofuel industry for the fact that ethanol is be subsidized to the point where it’s almost being shove down our throats.

I think he’s wide of the mark blaming Big Biofuel, for a couple of reasons, firstly compared to big oil, big biofuel is like a flea on the back of a rhino and secondly biofuel companies are usually squeezed between the consumer, and the farm companies that dominate the US corn market.

If I was going to blame anyone, and I’m not into the blame game as a rule, I’d blame the shareholders/owners of firms like ADM and Cargill first before the biofuel people.

Personally, I blame the politicians for the ethanol subsidies more than anyone else.  They’re obviously subsidizing the domestic production of ethanol (while keeping ethanol produced on foreign soil out with a massive $0.54/gallon tariff) to please someone.  If it Big Biofuel then maybe Big Ag, but whoever it is it isn’t right.

Robinson concludes:

This may seem a long post about a chap called Rob in North Dakota. And it is.

Who is he? How influential is he?

I don’t know but he is representative of a group of people in the US that the biofuel industry needs to persuade that there is a point to swapping to ethanol blends, because otherwise, when the chickens come home to roost about the unstainability of corn ethanol it will have a difficult time persuading people that cellulosic ethanol, is different and better for the environment.

He’s right that I’m the sort of person who needs to be persuaded about ethanol, but his point about the unsustainability of corn ethanol is off the mark.  I wasn’t talking about the sustainability of corn ethanol (though obviously that’s a problem), just that E85 as it’s currently priced still isn’t a cheaper product overall than regular gasoline despite the billions of tax dollar subsidies that are being spent by the pandering politicians I mentioned above to force it cheaper.

I’ll use ethanol.  I don’t have any bias against it, and I’m all for whatever research and design it’s going to take to make it a good alternative to traditional gasoline.  Because I do believe we need to move away from traditional gasoline, both for environmental reasons (I’m not an Al Gore disciple, but smog is a bad thing no matter how you slice it) and to end our economic dependence on the middle east and rogue, dictatorial regimes like Hugo Chavez’s in Venezuela.  But I’m not going to choose ethanol until it’s a sound economic choice for me.  I’m not going to use it when there’s a cheaper alternative, especially with the expenditure of my tax dollars on the fuel thrown into the mix.