Corn-Based Ethanol Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

By Doug Demmons

Don’t go looking for NASCAR to win any environmental awards for its latest NASCAR Green initiative -- switching to a 15 percent ethanol blend of fuel for 2011.

That’s because ethanol made from corn is one of those fuels that makes a lot of political sense but not a lot of environmental or economic sense.

The political sense is obvious. Corn ethanol is made in the USA. Growing your own fuel is like thumbing your nose at Saudi Arabia.

NASCAR had the political angle down pat on Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway when NASCAR chairman Brian France announced the switch. There was even a video presentation during the announcement that featured amber waves of grain and plenty of American flags.

But corn ethanol isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

For one thing, using so much of the corn crop for ethanol tends to drive up the price of other corn products, including meat because corn fed to livestock also rises.

Unlike oil, ethanol is not just pumped out of the ground. It requires a significant amount of energy to process corn into fuel, more so than to convert sugarcane or sugar beets into fuel because corn has to be processed into sugar before it can be made into alcohol.

It should go without saying that the more energy that is expended to create energy, the less efficient the process. It’s sort of like a race team that spends $50,000 to go racing at a track where the prize money for winning is $40,000.

But ethanol works economically because it is heavily subsidized by the government to the tune of about $6 billion a year. Corn ethanol, in fact, sucks up the lion’s share of government money for alternative fuel.

There are more environmentally friendly alternative fuels. Ethanol from cellulose-based sources like grasses and wood pulp are the wave of the future because they utilize plant material that doesn’t impact food production.

But that’s down the road. For today, for NASCAR, the choices are the corn-based ethanol being produced by fuel supplier Sunoco or the sugarcane ethanol from Brazil that the IZOD IndyCar Series uses at all of its races except Iowa, where it uses corn ethanol for obvious reasons.

So, while corn-based ethanol isn’t a panacea and won’t put any Persian Gulf oil sheiks out of business, it does burn cleaner than gasoline. And it does employ hundreds of thousands of American workers.

And testing done so far indicates that Sunoco’s E15 fuel will provide a bit of a boost in horsepower, which is never a bad thing in a racing series.

So for NASCAR, which only stopped using leaded fuel a few years ago, it’s a good step. Corn ethanol won’t save the planet, or even the economy, but it at least has NASCAR engaged in alternative fuels.

Hopefully NASCAR won’t stop there. Ideally, NASCAR could become a pioneer in the search for alternative fuels that make economic sense as well as sense from a performance standpoint.

Who knows where that could lead? Maybe one day Sprint Cup cars will be powered by ethanol produced from kudzu.

source: insiderracingnews