Ethanol Answer or Disaster - 5/18/09

With commodity prices on the rise again including grains, one can blame a weaker US dollar.  The food for product, ethanol is in the news again.  I believe it is the poorest use of a food crop “corn” imaginable.  Ethanol is very corrosive making it impossible to transport using pipelines.  Ethanol itself is not corrosive but it allows moisture to gather in the pipelines.  So, it makes you wonder what it will do to engines and gas tanks.  It can dissolve certain non-metallic boat fuel tanks. 

Ethanol is now hitting a blend wall.  By law ethanol can be no more than 10% a blended gasoline.  The nation’s corn growers are lobbying hard to increase that blend limit to 15%.  The EPA is reviewing the petition by the ethanol producers and corn growers.  Opposed to this increase to 15% are the oil companies, livestock industry and the “greens”, which is a very strange coalition.  I think corn growers and ethanol producers   will succeed in raising the blend limit to 15% corn and could go higher.

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