older... hell 15% will violate even this years engine warranty's!!!
Posted on 12/15/2012 5:34:41 PM PST by Libloather
House GOP plans to put fuel standard on trial in next Congress
By Zack Colman - 12/15/12 04:13 PM ET
House Republicans plan to put the renewable fuel standard on trial next Congress, a House Energy and Commerce Committee aide told The Hill.
Committee staff is gearing up for hearings on the subject, citing recent concerns from the AAA motor club, automakers and the oil industry that the rule is pushing a high-ethanol fuel blend onto the market they say will damage cars.
“If Congress observes the data, I think they will conclude we are putting the consumer at risk currently,” said AAA CEO Robert Darbelnet.
He said his staff has been advised about potential hearings on the fuel standard and E15, the fuel blend comprised of 15 percent ethanol compared with the standard 10 percent.
The biofuels industry has heard the war cries growing louder in recent weeks, and is prepared to do battle.
“I say bring it on. We’re going to win this fight,” Renewable Fuels Association CEO Bob Dinneen told The Hill recently.
The renewable fuel standard requires refiners to blend 36 billion gallons of ethanol into traditional transportation fuel by 2022.
To meet accelerating blending targets, refiners will need to start pumping out fuels with higher ethanol concentrations.
The biofuels industry will therefore increasingly rely on E15 fuel. Refiners are expected to break through that “blend wall” beginning in 2014, which worries AAA, automakers and oil-and-gas lobby shop the American Petroleum Institute (API).
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined earlier this year that cars could fill up with E15 with no adverse effects as long as they were made in the 2001 model-year or later.
But AAA and the auto industry argue E15 fuel is dangerous for cars. They say EPA erred in only testing the fuel’s effects on emissions control systems, rather than the entire car.
AAA, along with API, says it is concerned about consumers. Darbelnet noted 12 major manufacturers can or will void warranties for E15-related damage on cars made before the 2012 model years.
“You can’t get around that. It’s not just one or two manufacturers. It’s all of them,” Darbelnet said.
Darbelnet said EPA should suspend all E15 sales — it currently is sold at just a handful of gas stations — to work on a solution with automakers and fuel retailers.
“If we’re focused on what we think should come out of the hearings, I see it as an opportunity to raise policymakers’ awareness about the concerns that have been made around E15,” he said.
API recently changed its tack and is now calling for a full repeal of the fuel mandate.
Bob Greco, API’s downstream group director, said he believes this year’s drought has incited more congressional opposition to the fuel mandate.
Meat producers contend the mandate for corn ethanol production choked off supplies they needed for feed, driving up prices. The EPA ruled the drought — not the fuel rule — was responsible for the price increase.
A potent opposition to E15 can be built from those lawmakers concerned about the feed vs. fuel issue, and those worried about the blend’s effects on cars, Greco said.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of interest,” Greco told The Hill. “There’s a growing chorus.”
Dinneen insisted any congressional hearings would exonerate the claims made against E15 and the fuel mandate.
“Hearings on the RFS (renewable fuel standard) are not necessary, but should they proceed, we believe the hearings would shine a spotlight on the success of the RFS in terms of energy independence, job creation and environmental benefits. It would quickly become clear there is no need to legislate changes to the RFS which is working exactly as intended,” Dinneen said in a statement to The Hill.
Dinneen has said the fuel is safe and will not damage cars, calling it the most tested fuel in EPA history.
Sensing an upcoming assault on the fuel rule, the biofuels industry has rallied in recent months to defend the mandate.
The industry says maintaining stability is vital for attracting investment in “advanced” biofuels made from non-edible feedstock, which are just now coming online in commercial volume.
But groups like API are determined to tear it down. Greco said last month that API is “bringing our resources to bear” to repeal the mandate in the next Congress.
Dinneen said that effort is designed to protect Big Oil’s market share.
“Ultimately, this probably isn’t a fight about corn ethanol. Ultimately, this is a fight about the next generation [of biofuels]. The ethanol industry has become a tremendous success. We’ve become a victim of our own success because we’ve awakened the oil companies,” Dinneen said.
Tom Buis, president of biofuels industry group Growth Energy, said the industry is “talking to everybody, and continually,” about the need to preserve the fuel mandate.
Buis said the policy has helped boost rural economies, and that the next generation of biofuels is poised to do the same. He said lawmakers from farming states and districts would likely defend the standard.
Still, with advanced biofuels starting to reach commercial production levels, Buis said he has made no mistake that the oil industry will take the offensive — and Capitol Hill could serve as the battleground.
“Yeah it is a fight. They don’t want to give up their market share,” Buis said. “Of course we’re going to be ready. You prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.”
This is just another version of Cash for Clunkheads.
...citing recent concerns from the AAA motor club, automakers and the oil industry that the rule is pushing a high-ethanol fuel blend onto the market they say will damage cars.Good idea -- more money for OPEC, flight lessons and boxcutters are expensive. It's not as if alienating even MORE voters is something they don't want to do.
Alternatively, go back to what we used to have a couple of decades ago: market pressure. Sell E15 blends and non-blends separately, with the car driver deciding which one he or she wants to put in their car. Just like we used to have leaded and unleaded gasoline for a time.
That permits a transition without force.
Harry Belafonte doesn't like transitions that don't require force.
He prefers for Ubama to act like a "third-world dictator."
His words.
Add water to E 15. Let it settle & seperate. Decant.
Sell the bottom as moonshine and put the top in your tank.
Somebody try it and get back to me how it worked out:)
ANY amount of ethanol in the fuel tank is too much.
This whole business is nothing but a crony capitalist scam disguised as “environmentalism.”
And the bio-fuel guys just keep crying, “More, more, more! We want more of your money!”
I know plenty of greenie environmentalists here in Vermont, and NONE of them think that ethanol is a good idea. They were fooled earlier, but none of them believe in it any longer.
This is how they will get rid of your older engines.....not make fuels that they can use.
My 2004 engine and the car around it has been paid for for a long time. Plus my car only has 75,000 miles on it. Not only can I not afford a car payment and an increase in my insurance and taxes, I don’t happen to like the new models. At least on the one I have I can still change the oil and do minor maintenance myself.
older... hell 15% will violate even this years engine warranty's!!!
Only works in cars made in 2001 lr later???
There are millions of cars which are running just fine on the USA roads right now, which are fr older than that.
Most of us who are driving such cars have no desire and no resources to purchase a newer car.
This is just plain wrong.
Everything in that sentence is false — using corn to produce ethanol doesn’t burn our food, waste water, damage the environment, or produce less fuel than it uses. Food prices have responded, again, to the climb of petroleum prices, and those prices are mostly the consequence of the oil cartel with its control of production, but also due to rising demand overseas in China, India, and other developing countries.
We must also drill and frack, and develop ocean floor gas hydrates and clathrates; currently much of the rising US petroleum production is going overseas, but the end result will be less cash headed for OPEC from the US, meaning less money for box cutters and flight lessons.
damage the environment,
Sorry, but ethanol as fuel has led to more farming and degradations of environment. Go look it up
or produce less fuel than it uses
Yes, it absolutely does. If not for the subisdies it would also be unworkable.
Food prices have responded, again, to the climb of petroleum prices, and those prices are mostly the consequence of the oil cartel with its control of production, but also due to rising demand overseas in China, India, and other developing countries.
It's not like droughts and bad weather count. But who cares about dead third worlders, when we can destroy our engines.
We must also drill and frack, and develop ocean floor gas hydrates and clathrates; currently much of the rising US petroleum production is going overseas, but the end result will be less cash headed for OPEC from the US, meaning less money for box cutters and flight lessons.
Production of hydrocarbons makes sense. Corn ethanol does not.
So, corn made into ethanol took food right out of the mouths of hungry babes? Can you name one? Didn’t think so. “Food” isn’t being made into fuel, and the price of corn is high because of petroleum prices.
The starving of the third world got that way because their rulers are corrupt, brutal, and indifferent. When people are starving, the US never lacks food to send, and when the food gets there, it sometimes actually makes it to the hungry. Other times, it gets re-sold by the corrupt regimes, or gets interdicted by terrorists, who are usually jihadists. And none of that has anything to do with ethanol in our vehicles, so forget it.
We could, I suppose, intervene in all those countries, but wouldn’t that make us all a bunch of NeoCon RINOs?!? Egad!
Bad weather and droughts are likewise not caused by corn ethanol.
The damage to the environment, aquifers, etc, is all agitprop bought and paid for by the petroleum industry — itself no stranger to environmental impact — and it will continue to spread it, not only because it’s basically lost the battle between petrochemical MTBE and ethanol, but also because ethanol is suddenly becoming invisible. I’ve been getting fuel at Costco for perhaps three years now, and until a year ago hadn’t noticed that it was a 10 percent blend.
Perhaps 20 years ago there were still those who avoided gasoline with ethanol, convinced that ethanol would destroy their vehicles from the inside out, but no vehicles manufactured from the US market have been in that category for many years now. And many of the very same people used Dry-Gas in the winters of the 1960s and 1970s, during the era of 35 cent a gallon gas.
The price of petroleum has an obvious and important impact on the wholesale and retail prices of everything, and in particular food, because we’ve gone from basically 100 percent agrarian 400 years ago to something like 1 to 2 percent agrarian through the magic of mechanized agriculture coupled with petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
One reason soybeans have become popular here in Michigan and probably elsewhere is that they fix nitrogen in the soil and make a two-year rotation viable between beans and corn. Generally the only chemical now in use is Roundup, sprayed at just the right time and just the right concentration to stunt or kill the emerging weeds while not doing anything to the Roundup-resistant food crops.
Tractors are, however, very long-lived, and for the most part will require conventional petroleum fuels, rather than the biodiesel and ethanol, for some years (decades) to come. It’s not uncommon around here for tractors to pass down at least one generation, and definitely to be auctioned off when farmers retire or pass away.
Ethanol production will continue to rise. There is no longer any ethanol subsidy, it vanished during the Bush administration. Ethanol is used as an oxygenating agent in gasoline, and due to actual (rather than imaginary) environmental poisoning by the other main oxygenating chemical, MTBE, it is winning. MTBE is banned in states where the locals care about their drinking water supply. The oxygenating requirement can be seen as a subsidy, but that’s not what it is.
If petroleum production in the US were sufficient to supply the entire US market, the US would remain an exporter of US petroleum, because OPEC controls so much of the supply and collude right out in the open to maintain production at a level sufficient to cover consumption, but insufficient for large surpluses to accumulate.
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