Earthanet

Motor Trend’s blog recently posted this exoneration of gas-guzzling passenger cars on the claim that they emit only 18% of all CO2 in the United States. Trust Motor Trend to give us good objective reporting on issues affecting the car industry–not! But then what can you expect from someone who opens his blog post with this:

Crock or not, global warming is a problem for the automobile.

Hellooo? I know your job is important to you, but what about the problem for humans?

The charts he’s referring to can be found in the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory. (choose the Executive Summary .pdf file). I’ve tried to break down the numbers so you don’t have to perform the heroic act of actually reading this thing. All CO2 emissions are measured in teragrams of CO2 equivalent (Tg CO2 Eq.).
Total CO2 emissions: 5983.1
CO2 emissions from transportation sector: 1850.1
1850.1 / 5983.1 = 30.9% (not 30% as Motor Trend Guy says)

For the next step, I had to go into the “Energy” pdf on the EPA page to get past Motor Trend Guy’s spin. (I don’t recommend that you do this either. Whew.)
Total CO2 emissions from passenger vehicles: 630.4 gas + 4.0 diesel (Jetta TDI type cars)
Total CO2 emissions from light duty trucks: 488.0 gas + 26.0 diesel (Dodge Ram type trucks)
Total CO2 from all passenger: 1148.4 / 1850.1 transportation sector total = 62.0% (not 60% as Motor Trend Guy says).

So, 62% of the aforementioned 30.9% of total transportation CO2 emissions (30.9 *.62) gives us 19.16% of total CO2 emissions (not 18% as Motor Trend Guy says). Multiplying the 1148.4 from all passenger vehicles times the 5983.1 for all CO2 gives you 19.19 percent, so I’m comfortable with 19.2%.

OK, so that’s about one-fifth of all CO2 emissions, which supports Motor Trend Guy’s argument that passenger cars are only a small part of the problem, and that we should address the Big Demon, electricity generation, at 40% of all CO2 emissions, while we keep driving our Hummers and G8s.

One small problem with that argument: he left out heavy duty trucks, among other things. Back to the EPA “Energy” chapter. I’ll keep it short and just say that heavy duty trucks (Peterbilt and the like) and buses, gas and diesel combined, account for 21.9% of all transportation CO2. (I’ve left off the remaining categories, because they’re not likely to change anytime soon, but will note that jet fuel is responsible for 12.9% of transportation CO2 emissions.)

So:
Passenger vehicles: 62% of transportation CO2
Trucks and buses: 21.9% of transportation CO2
Total for passenger vehicles, trucks, and buses: 83.9% of transportation CO2
Passenger, trucks, and buses as a percentage of total CO2: 30.9 * .839 = 25.9%

That’s way higher than Motor Trend Guy’s 18%–over one-quarter of total CO2 emissions. The EPA report shows U.S. CO2 emissions up by 14% since 1996. If we could cut our vehicle CO2 emissions by half, we could wipe out that increase.

Now why would Motor Trend Guy single out passenger cars from the huge variety of vehicles with four or more wheels using our nation’s highways to haul people and goods for his statistical analysis? Oh, I get it–he likes cars. I like cars too, but even I’m ready to bury the internal combustion engine, and it’s going to happen across the board. Rail is much more efficient than diesel tractor trailer for moving heavy loads of goods, and buses can be converted over to much cleaner compressed natural gas (many already have).

Remember the part in “An Inconvenient Truth” where Al Gore has to stand on the hydraulic lift to show us where carbon emissions will end up on the graph if we keep up present trends? The whole point of alternative energy is to make that red graph line go down, instead of up. avs4you discounts and downloads

Green is the word at this year’s auto shows as the car manufacturers slowly admit that oil is now over $100 a barrel and the public is more interested in fuel economy than gewgaws and brute force. I attended the Chicago Auto Show on February 16, 2008, where at least 30 out of the more than 40 exhibitors featured at least one alternative fuel vehicle as part of their display. (Hummer wasn’t one of them, in case you were wondering.)

That’s the good news. The bad news is, I saw very little commitment to alternative fuel beyond concept vehicles and marketing hype (lots of the latter). Everybody knows that Green Sells. What they haven’t figured out is how to make cars that sip gas, don’t release tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and are affordable the average consumer.

To be fair, only part of this is due to the big auto companies resisting new technology for as long as possible so they don’t have to go through expensive retooling that will eat into their quarterly profits and make their shareholders unhappy. The other half of the transportation conundrum is that even the most cutting-edge technologies we have right now are at best interim. By interim, I mean they’ll triage the damage we’re doing to the environment while we get our act together and come up with an energy source that will work long term (along with conservation measures like mass transit, ride sharing, and better community planning).

What will that long-term energy source be? I didn’t see it at the auto show. But I did see a few good interim technologies from companies that are actually taking risks and releasing alternative fuel vehicles as (gasp!) production models. Look below the fold to see who the good guys are (and aren’t).

Honda has proven itself the most willing to take risks this year with production models. Check out the Civic GX, which runs on compressed natural gas (CNG).

Advantages of CNG: named by EPA as the cleanest burning internal combustion engine in the world by the EPA (particulates very low, CO2 emissions 25% less than gasoline engines); performance similar to the gas Civic; fuel cost half of gasoline; equivalent mpg 39 highway, 28 city (natural gas isn’t measured in mpg so a conversion formula is used); range on one tank is 280 miles; and you can fill it up at home if you’re hooked up to the natural gas pipeline with the Phill refueling device.

Disadvantages: currently only available in California and New York; refueling stations available because CNG has been used for years in commercial fleets but still not as common as gasoline; and a complete switch to CNG would stress our natural gas supply to the breaking point.

Honda deserves even more kudos for developing the FCX Clarity (which was not displayed in Chicago)–a production model hydrogen fuel cell vehicle with an optional home refueling station similar to the Phill that hooks up to your natural gas line. Advantages: zero emissions. Disadvantages: only available in California, and the above-mentioned problems with a complete switch to natural gas for our transportation needs. But there are other ways to make hydrogen.

Honda also has the Civic gas-electric hybrid to compete with the Prius. It’s a sharp-looking car that starts at $22,600.

Toyota of course has led the charge toward greener cars, and they’re proud of it–their auto show display made alternative fuel vehicles their centerpiece, complete with a revolving LED display above the floor that flashed out “ten ways to save the earth.” They’ve been making the gas-electric hybrid Prius and Camry long enough to get the technology right, along with the hybrid SUV Highlander which manages to wheeze out 28mpg on the highway. Toyota is exploring a plug-in electric/gas hybrid Prius as a concept model (supposedly available in 2010), along with a very cool hybrid electric/hydrogen fuel cell concept car, the FCHV.

I’m sorry to say that U.S. manufacturers are so far behind Japan. Ford is the best of a sorry bunch–the Escape gas-electric hybrid has been tweaked to raise highway mileage to 34mpg from 31mpg in the 2007 model.

GM is, well, GM. They’ve implemented a two-mode hybrid system (a large-scale version of the Prius) in the 2009 Sierra full size pickup that boosts the gas mileage of this behemoth 25% above the 18mpg in the gas version. (Sorry, no EPA figures–because of its high gross vehicle weight, EPA doesn’t even test it. Go figure.)

The same two-stage hybrid system will be available in 2009 in the Tahoe and the Cadillac Escalade. It’s interesting that GM has focused exclusively on their truck lineup for implementing true hybrid technology, but maybe not so strange when you consider the profit margin on large vehicles with all the bells and whistles known to man.
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Carbon sequestration technology in the United States was dealt a setback at the end of January 2008 when federal energy secretary Samuel Bodman announced that the Department of Energy will radically restructure its FutureGen “clean coal” R&D program. Bodman’s announcement pulled the plug on the Bush administration’s showpiece FutureGen facility in Mattoon, Illinois, operated by the FutureGen Alliance. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization of private investors and utility companies who pledged 25 percent of funding for the project, with the other 75 percent coming from U.S. taxpayers.

Funding for the Mattoon plant had been projected at $1.8 billion, with hopes of recovering about $300 million of that amount by selling electrical power generated by the site. Bodman cited cost overruns and the need to secure more funding from private sources and less from taxpayers. The Illinois congressional delegation, which had pushed hard for the plant to be built in Mattoon, responded with fury, claiming that

“Many have argued that this abrupt about face by Secretary Bodman was the direct result of the FutureGen Alliance choosing Mattoon, Illinois as the site, over Texas applicants,” the congressional delegation wrote. “While we’d like not to believe this theory, there is no other plausible explanation.”

The Mattoon plant would have conducted R&D for several technologies centered around coal generation of electricity with low to no emissions:
1. Coal gasification: turns coal into “syngas” composed of hydrogen and carbon monixide, by applying heat under pressure in the presence of steam. Coal gasification has some similarities to Plasma Arc Gasification of municipal waste, in that the syngas requires steam to strip out the carbon monoxide. The difference is that PAG doesn’t use much water, because unlike coal, there’s plenty of water for the process in garbage itself. Also, coal produces some nasty byproducts besides carbon monoxide that need to be stripped out:

Sulfur impurities in the [coal] are converted to hydrogen sulfide and carbonyl sulfide, from which sulfur can be easily extracted, typically as elemental sulfur or sulfuric acid, both valuable byproducts. Nitrogen oxides, another potential pollutant, are not formed in the oxygen-deficient (reducing) environment of the gasifier; instead, ammonia is created by nitrogen-hydrogen reactions. The ammonia can be easily stripped out of the gas stream. (DOE website)

The hydrogen sulfide comes from using high-sulfur coal for the process. Southern Illinois, where the FutureGen Alliance’s plant is sited, sits atop millions of tons of high-sulfur coal that can’t meet today’s emission standards for traditional coal-burning power plants. I would add that phrases like “valuable byproducts” and “easily stripped out” should be taken with a grain of salt unless the process can pay for itself.
2. Carbon capture: Stripping the carbon monoxide out of syngas produces carbon dioxide, also known as greenhouse gas. The CO2 then has to be stripped out so it can be sequestered.
3. Carbon sequestration: Compressing the CO2 and pumping it deep underground into saline aquifers. This Scientific American article lists some of the challenges associated with carbon sequestration technology.

The FutureGen plant in Illinois was built to sequester 1 million metric tons of CO2 a year. That sounds promising until you consider that coal burning produces 9.3 billion metric tons a year. The Scientific American article points out the need to sequester carbon on a massive scale in order for it to have any effect on mitigating global warming.

Meanwhile, Secretary Bodman plans to shift the FutureGen program’s emphasis from one large-scale government funded R&D facility, to several commercial-scale facilities located throughout the U.S. Each plant would have a maximum carbon sequestration capacity of 1 million metric tons, as planned for the Mattoon plant. The miffed Illinois congressional delegation plans to push the Mattoon site in Congress.

In a comment thread over at DailyKos that reminds me pleasantly of the blog’s braininess in its early days, one commenter with ties to the energy industry says,

Clean coal in general and FutureGen specifically, are descriptors for pigs feeding at the public trough. Taxpayers have spent many billions of dollars on “clean coal” R&D going back at least to the 1970s, and the Beulah is the only thing we have to show for it so far.

The projected cost of the Mattoon plant would be pocket change for any one member of the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, Inc., or for the alliance collectively. For that matter, such a small demonstration plant is well within the capabilities of Basin Electric, which is not part of the FutureGen alliance.

Looking at the number of companies pursuing non-coal gasification technologies like PAG, I have to wonder why private industry isn’t all over coal gasification and carbon sequestration. Could it be because the process is so expensive that it can never deliver significant returns without government support? The problem as I see it is that coal is such a dirty feedstock for electrical generation that the technology for cleaning it up will still be putting on its track shoes while cleaner technologies are already crossing the finish line.

Want to know how much electricity you use? Your electric bill should give you a month-by-month breakdown by kilowatt hour for the current month plus previous year. Here’s mine, courtesy of Consumers Energy:

January 2008 Energy Use: 507KWH (total electric bill $51.25)

Dec 07: 409KWH, Nov 07: 467KWH, Oct 07: 381KWH, Sept 07: 415KWH,

Aug 07: 439KWH, July 07: 518KWH, June07: 507KWH, May 07: 420KWH

Apr 07: 404KWH, Mar 07: 156KWH, Feb 07: 258KWH, Jan 07: 293KWH

My electricity consumption of 507 KWH last month isn’t bad compared to the national average,which is about 1,134 KWH per month according to the 2001 US Department of Energy survey (the latest numbers we have). Of course, my household is smaller than the national average too. And I don’t like the fact that my usage is 73 percent higher on this month’s bill than last January’s 293 KWH. In fact, my usage this month was the same as last July, when I was running a medium size room air conditioner from time to time. What gives?

Look below the fold for the basic math and the online calculator I used to find out.

First let’s define KWH, or “kilowatt-hour.” Watts and kilowatts are the units your utility uses to measure electricity. Typically, anything in your home that runs on electricity is rated by the number of watts it burns in one hour of use. A 60-watt light bulb burns 60 watts of electricity every hour it’s on. If I leave it on for five hours, it burns 300 watts (60 watts x 5 hours=300 watts).

One kilowatt equals 1,000 watts, so a kilowatt-hour is an electrical consumption of 1,000 watts over a period of 1 hour. Unless you’re an electrical engineer, that’s probably confusing, so try thinking of your electric meter as a clock that runs faster when you use more electricity, and slower when you use less. Your utility’s billing department counts how many times the clock’s hands go around and sends you a bill based on the total, measured in KWH.

Next, let’s plug into this energy usage calculator which figures out how much each appliance in your household uses.

In the first field, fill in your month’s total electric bill (mine is $51.25)
In the second field, fill in your month’s KWH used (mine is 507)
In the third field, enter the wattage rating of the electrical appliance (60W light bulb)
Skip the fourth and fifth field for now.
In the sixth field, estimate how many hours a day the appliance is on (I estimated 5 hours)
Hit “calculate.”
The calculator will use the first two numbers to calculate your cost per KWH–my utility charges me 10.1 cents per KWH. The results you see above are the impact on my electric bill of a 60-watt light bulb that stays on 5 hours a day. 92 cents a month tells me the short winter days and the need for more indoor lighting isn’t the problem with my bill.

While I was figuring this out, the light bulb went on (so to speak), and I went downstairs to look at my dehumidifier. I have office space in my basement, and I like to keep things nice and dry, but in previous years the dehumidifier stayed off on its normal setting during the winter months. This year it’s stayed on all the time. I looked on the back of the appliance (which is basically a mini-refrigerator with condenser coils and an electric motor), but it isn’t rated in watts. It does have an amp rating, though–4 amps.

This time, since I didn’t have a wattage rating for the dehumidifier, I skipped the third field and for the fourth field I entered the household current standard 110 volts (always do this if you’re calculating based on amps–for a 220 volt appliance such as an electric dryer or electric range enter 220 in the fourth field intead of 110). Then I entered the dehumidifier’s amp rating of 4 in the fifth field. I entered 24 in the sixth field because it’s been staying on 24/7.

I hit “calculate,” and voila, the culprit–a whopping $32.45 a month. I went back downstairs and looked at the setting I had left the dehumidifier on, and it was way higher than what I was using last winter–I was hasty the last time I set the dial. Nothing like throwing money away—and that’s not to mention the greenhouse gases I’ve been responsible for.

In this case, the drain should have been obvious to me, but now I’m interested in tracking down other energy wasters in my household that might not be so obvious. My carbon clown shoes just got a size smaller, and I’m going to make them smaller yet, with the goal of reducing my winter electricity bill to under $15 a month.

(Updated with new research 1-29-08)
Plasma Arc Gasification is a new waste disposal technology that turns garbage into usable byproducts without burning it. The heart of the PAG “plasma converter” is its “electrical arc gasifier,” which passes very high voltage electrical current through two electrodes, creating an arc in the space between them.

Inert gas under pressure is passed through the arc into a sealed container of waste material [garbage]. Temperatures as high as 13,871°C (25,000°F) are reached in the arc column. The temperature one meter from the arc can reach ~4000°C (~7,200°F). At these temperatures most types of waste are broken into basic elemental components in a gaseous form, and complex molecules are atomized – separated into individual atoms.

25,000ºF is hotter than the surface of the sun.

The byproducts of PAG are:
1. Syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The plant scrubs the syngas and uses two-thirds of it to generate the electricity that powers the plant. The remaining one-third is sold to utility companies. Syngas can be produced from just about any organic material, and PAG is only one method of producing it.
2. Heat. The uses of this byproduct aren’t addressed in lay sources, but presumably it could be used to power a steam turbine in the plant, generating more electricity.
3. Slag, a solid residue resembling obsidian. Once it’s cleaned of contaminents, slag can be processed into bricks, synthetic gravel or asphalt, and other materials that we currently mine out of the ground.

What is the potential of PAG to reduce the stream of trash landfilled each year? Tremendous–if the gas and slag can be cleaned up–because PAG doesn’t burn trash; it gasifies it in a closed-loop system. Burying garbage in the ground is primitive technology with numerous harmful effects that aren’t taken into consideration when figuring cost per ton. No matter how miraculous the liner material in today’s modern landfills, they all eventually leak and dump a nasty toxic stew into the groundwater below.

Currently there are no large-scale PAG plants processing municipal waste in the U.S.–the ones in Tallahassee and St. Lucie County, FL, are the closest to coming online and according to this article they’re still in the permitting phase. I believe there are some very small U.S. operations being used to process medical waste, which the process is ideal for, as it obliterates every possible contaminent.

This Slate article does a nice job of summing up the pros and cons of the process:

So, why doesn’t every hamlet in America do away with its landfills and build one of these wondrous plants? The plasma gasification industry claims it’s mostly a matter of economics: Burying garbage has long been a lot cheaper than zapping it, even if you factor in the money to be made selling electricity. Landfills charge municipalities an average of $35 per ton of trash; according to a recent study in Hamilton, Ont., dropping off a ton of garbage at a plasma gasification plant would run $172 per ton.

Plasma gasification companies dispute this figure, contending that their method has become more affordable because of increasing efficiency in electricity generation: Canada’s Plasco Energy Group, for example, says that 46 percent of zapped waste now becomes energy, compared with 18 percent with earlier plant designs.

This is the cost/benefit issue that led Honolulu to reject its plant initially as mentioned in the Wikipedia piece linked above. I’m not impressed with the 46 percent efficiency figure–it needs to improve, and it probably will, because this technology is still in its infancy. I also think the cost/benefit ratio will pull even with and then surpass landfilling once the demand for electricity goes up because of the switch from gasoline to electric transportation.

This USA Today article lists some of the environmental questions surrounding PAG. It says that the facilities already processing garbage in Japan are doing so on a much smaller scale than the Florida plants would. Japan’s air quality standards are slightly stricter than those in the United States. If the plants are passing inspection over there, then critics can’t very well say the process is unavoidably dirty. The Slate article has some limited material on cleaning up the gas and slag byproduct. Proponents claim that burning Syngas produces CO2 emission on par with a natural gas power plant–pretty low, in other words.

One criticism of PAG worth consideration is that it provides an excuse for people to keep pumping out trash. The biggest opponent is the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, (GAIA) a very vocal and well organized nonprofit with an international presence. They’re quoted in the USA Today article:

We’ve found projects similar to this being misrepresented all over the country,” said Monica Wilson of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. Wilson said there aren’t enough studies yet to prove the company’s claims that emissions will likely be less than from a standard natural-gas power plant. She also said other companies have tried to produce such results and failed.

GAIA was formed to fight traditional trash-burning incinerators being dumped into third-world countries, which is a legitimate form of NIMBYism. It raised red flags with me that a plant is being proposed for New Orleans (which has become a third world country of its own)–but then there has to be tons and tons of flood trash to get rid of down there, some of it hazardous waste. Why not process it with PAG and get some use out of it, as long as the people of New Orleans benefit from the money saved?

GAIA has said that PAG plants in Australia and Europe were “closed” because they couldn’t meet emission standards. This quote is all over the internet, but in two days of exhaustive searching I haven’t come up with anything resembling a primary source.

Here’s my quarrel with GAIA: it’s immoral to block a developing but basically sound technology because you want to modify the public’s behavior. Humans will always produce trash. I’m about as far from advocating Friedman free market economics as a blogger can get, but trash disposal one area where the marketplace will modify our behavior effectively, because the oil crisis is about to make wastefulness very expensive.

I do suggest that communities hold back on offering public funds to PAG companies that want to locate in their area until PAG has proven itself. The glut of ethanol plants is a caution against committing public money to an economically volatile technology, no matter how promising it might look.

Did you know that a natural latex pillow is 100% biodegradable?

Over at Blogging for Michigan, AikoAdam has written a nice post on PAG.

The words “miracle fuel” in this column by Jack Lessenberry caught my eye, because a miracle is about what this world needs when it comes to fuel.
Coskata’s process sounded promising when I first read about it.

Our technology enables the low-cost production of ethanol from a wide variety of input material including biomass, municipal solid waste and other carbonaceous material. Using proprietary microorganisms and patented bioreactor designs, we will produce ethanol for under US$1.00 per gallon.

Ethanol from garbage? Even better, Coskata says it can make ethanol from old tires, according to USA Today.

General Motors (GM) says it is investing in a fledgling company that claims its secret process could be able to make ethanol from waste in large quantity as soon as 2010 for $1 a gallon or less, half the cost of making gasoline.

Bill Roe, CEO of 18-month-old ethanol maker Coskata, says the company’s process uses bacteria developed at the University of Oklahoma and existing gasification technology to generate 99.7% pure ethanol, plus water. He says the method should leapfrog cellulosic production, which has been seen as the next step from today’s ethanol production using corn.

GM won’t disclose its investment, but Roe says it’s enough to make Coskata “a speed-to-market play. I don’t think most people saw this coming,” he says. “Most talk about cellulosic ethanol is futuristic.”

Coskata’s process can use garbage, old tires and other waste, but Roe says wood waste probably will be used at first because it’s available, cheap and easy to handle.

I can see exactly why GM grabbed this. Ethanol is the closest substitute we have for gasoline right now, so it would take the least R&D and changes in infrastructure to implement of all the alternative fuels currently under development. GM wouldn’t even have to retool its production to any large extent; it’s already producing flex-fuel (E-85) vehicles, which have very minor modifications from a normal gasoline internal combustion engine:

E-85 ethanol is used in engines modified to accept higher concentrations of ethanol. Such flexible-fuel engines are designed to run on any mixture of gasoline or ethanol with up to 85% ethanol by volume. The primary differences from non-FFVs is the elimination of bare magnesium, aluminum, and rubber parts in the fuel system, the use of fuel pumps capable of operating with electrically conductive (ethanol) instead of non-conducting dielectric (gasoline) fuel, specially-coated wear-resistant engine parts, fuel injection control systems having a wider range of pulse widths (for injecting approximately 40% more fuel), the selection of stainless steel fuel lines (sometimes lined with plastic), the selection of stainless steel fuel tanks in place of terne fuel tanks, and, in some cases, the use of acid-neutralizing motor oil. For vehicles with fuel-tank mounted fuel pumps, additional differences to prevent arcing, as well as flame arrestors positioned in the tank’s fill pipe, are also sometimes used. (Wikipedia, E-85)

The drawbacks of producing ethanol from corn and other food crops are numerous. The biggest drawback is that the fossil fuels used to produce ethanol nearly cancel out the net energy gained from using it in place of gasoline. According to a University of Minnesota study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Researchers tried to account for all the energy inputs of the process, from growing corn (even the energy use of farm households) to energy burned in transportation and the construction of processing plants. They found that corn-derived ethanol yields only 25 percent more energy than is required to make it. (Studies by researchers at Cornell and Berkeley even contend that ethanol actually produces less energy than goes into its production, though U of M researchers dispute those findings.)

It gets worse. According to Green Car Congress, fuel consumption in an ethanol vehicle is 33% higher, which makes a wash out of the the 27% reduction in greenhouse gases per gallon of ethanol compared with a gallon of gas. Deforestation, soil depletion, and silt runoff into watersheds because of ethanol farming are a problem in the United States and even worse elsewhere—Grist says that Brazil has lost one-fifth of its rainforest acreage since the 1970s, much of it to make room for sugar cane to be used in ethanol production. Considering that one acre of rainforest can store up to 400,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, ethanol from crops is not a good tradeoff for the environment.

Coskata’s process would go a long way toward replacing ethanol from crop farming and eliminating its attendant problems if its press release is credible. (You see a lot of press releases in the alternative fuels business, and a lot of proprietary technology that no one wants to release hard numbers on.) And that $1.00 a gallon price tag is a big fat cherry on the sundae. True or not (and I’m very skeptical), it will steer Congress toward supporting ethanol in future transportation bills, and away from supporting more difficult solutions to global warming–like more fuel efficient cars that would require expensive retooling to produce. $1.00 a gallon tends to make most voters stop complaining about most things.

I live in Michigan and I have no desire to see GM, Ford, and Chrysler go belly up, even if it would be just desserts for their clinging to the past instead of embracing the future that Toyota and Honda are already profiting handsomely from. GM hasn’t said where the new ethanol refineries will be built, and I hope that the money that GM puts into Coskata doesn’t all end up it its new R&D shop in China. Even if it does, $1.00 a gallon fuel would practically guarantee that some manufacturing jobs stay in the Midwest, where people are not doing so well these days.

Is Coskata’s technology really a “magic fuel” as Lessenberry wonders? Not likely. Although GM would love for us to stop with ethanol, there’s some chilling news about it that should send us scurrying back to the drawing board. Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson recently developed a computer model to predict what would happen to our air by 2020 if the United States switched over from gasoline to E-85 as its primary fuel. The result:

(Jacobson) “We found that E85 vehicles reduce atmospheric levels of two carcinogens, benzene and butadiene, but increase two others—formaldehyde and acetaldehyde,” Jacobson said. “As a result, cancer rates for E85 are likely to be similar to those for gasoline. However, in some parts of the country, E85 significantly increased ozone, a prime ingredient of smog.”

Inhaling ozone—even at low levels—can decrease lung capacity, inflame lung tissue, worsen asthma and impair the body’s immune system, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The World Health Organization estimates that 800,000 people die each year from ozone and other chemicals in smog. The results were published last month in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. (PDF FILE)

Jacobson encourages the exploration of advanced technologies like wind and solar generation to produce electricity and hydrogen power, rather than investing in ethanol production.
More on Coskata’s process here.</a