Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong
SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilization, if not before.
SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilization, if not before. The result burns. And when Henry Ford was experimenting with car engines a century ago, he tried ethanol out as a fuel.
But he rejected it—and for good reason. The amount of heat you get from burning a liter of ethanol is a third less than that from a liter of petrol. What is more, it absorbs water from the atmosphere. Unless it is mixed with some other fuel, such as petrol, the result is corrosion that can wreck an engine's seals in a couple of years.
So why is ethanol suddenly back in fashion? That is the question many biotechnologists in America have recently asked themselves.
The obvious answer is that, being derived from plants, ethanol is "green". The carbon dioxide produced by burning it was recently in the atmosphere. Putting that CO2 back into the air can therefore have no adverse effect on the climate. But although that is true, the real reason ethanol has become the preferred green substitute for petrol is that people know how to make it—that, and the subsidies now available to America's maize farmers to produce the necessary feedstock. Yet such things do not stop ethanol from being a lousy fuel. To solve that, the biotechnologists argue, you need to make a better fuel that is equally green. Which is what they are trying to do.
Clinical trials for biofuels—presumably pitting one against another, perhaps with petroleum-based products acting as the control, and without the drivers knowing which was which.
Whether biofuels will ever be competitive... depend(s) on a mixture of economics and politics. But the political rush to back ethanol, just because it is green and people have heard of it, is a mistake.
