"Many in the environmental community embrace the idea of a performance standard rather than a prescriptive standard. Rather than telling oil companies that they must add a specific element - oxygen - to their product, why not establish a rigorous performance standard and allow them the flexibility to formulate their product any way they want, as long as it meets that standard?

"The oil industry stays it can meet any standard. The ethanol industry says, "We've heard that before." After World War I, when the car industry introduced powerful engines, the oil industry feverishly searched for an additive that would prevent knocking. It had two choices: ethanol or lead. It chose lead. That solved the octane problem, but as we discovered a generation later, gave us tens of thousands of brain-damaged kids.

"In the 1970s the federal government finally phased out leaded gasoline. Oil companies had a choice of using ethanol, or reformulating their own product. They chose the latter, raising the percentage of light aromatics to as much as 40 percent of gasoline by the late 1980s. That again solved the octane problem, but used cancer-causing chemicals - benzene, toluene and xylene - to do so.

"The Clean Air Act reduced the proportion of aromatics in the gasoline and, to reduce carbon monoxide emissions, required oil companies to add oxygen. Again oil companies opted for a fossil fuel derived product, MTBE, rather than ethanol. They achieved the desired air quality benefits, but as we have recently discovered, ended up polluting the water.

"Given this grim record, the ethanol producers say we should be wary of believing that one more reformulation will do the trick. As the saying goes, 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.' This could be the fourth time."

Excerpted from an article by David Morris
in the Spring 2000 issue of
The Carbohydrate Economy