E85 Ethanol Explained
E85 is the dumbest thing I've seen in a while! It had potential to be a really good thing, but with how its being run now, it will never be a success. The whole point of E85 is to have a fuel source that we can make right here in the United States. This would supposedly reduce the dependency on foreign oil. Oil prices flucuate freely and unexplainably, but since we can produce ethanol domesticly you would think that the prices would stay fairly constant and affordable, like most other products on the market. Instead, the E85 prices just mimmick the gas prices, staying around $0.30 cheaper. Now sure, I like cheaper fuel as much as the next guy, but the problem with E85 is it doesn't get the same gas mileage as regular gasoline. When you fill up with E85, you will only see about 80% of the gas mileage you see with gas. This really defeats the purpose of ethanol. It actually costs you more to use it. I've seen people interviewed on the news, the reporter asks them if they knew their gas mileage suffers with ethanol. No one had a clue that this was the case. One person did say that they would still use it because it supports our local farmers instead of the middle eastern nations.
Also, if you think about the economics of the whole thing you will see another problem. Ethanol is made from corn in the United States. It can be made from a number of other things like sugar and potatoes, to name a few, but we use corn because it's abundant. It is actually more efficient to produce ethanol from sugar, but since the federal government enacted high import taxes on foreign sugar, we use what we have...corn. So now that we're using a large amount of our corn for ethanol, what happens to the price of corn? It goes up of course, simple supply and demand. Now think of the other products we get from corn, corn syrup is in nearly all soft drinks and other sweetened products, also corn is fed to a lot of the animals we use for meat. So what happens when the price of a product used as an ingredient or feed goes up...the price of the product goes up thus diminishing any savings that you may achieve at the fuel pump.
I am just really frustrated with how E85 has been introduced to the US population. It could have really been a good thing and could have delivered us from the dependence of foreign oil. Instead, greed got in the way. If E85 was priced at $1-1.50 a gallon, everyone would scramble to buy vehicles that could use it. It would be a HUGE success, and then it would be actually worth using despite the decrease in gas mileage. I think the government needs to step in and regulate the prices (something I never thought I would say). But until they do, I really don't see the E85 market succeeding in this country.
