[trebuchet03]

That was a long read, but I read the entire post

...that forms the basis our new climate change policy says VOC's are responsible for the weather pattern changes we've been seeing since ethanol use started in the spring of 2006.

I find this sentence amusing... Why do we assume that there is only one country's contribution?

Sure, as soon as we started E10 max, we started consuming more ethanol than Brazil (starting in 2006) - but that doesn't mean their 4+ billion gallons of ethanol is a trivial amount. I can't really draw any conclusions from that though

Since we started making anhydrous ethanol from our most precious national asset, corn, our economy has fastly been falling apart.

Sounds like a bit of a a fallacy Corn farmers have been in hard times long before 2006

Which brings me to

For whatever reason, no one challenged him with the fact that Brazil uses hydrous ethanol, not anhydrous ethanol

False, Brazil's blends are anhydrous - their E100 is hydrous. I think that's been slowly changing, but last I checked - they're still producing more anhydrous ethanol

But just the admitted 3% is a pretty big cut in our national fuel supply. So now that will be increased to twice as much of a loss if we move to using E20.

Going along with the 3% number.... That's a 3% increase in vehicle consumption with a 10% reduction of fuel. Insinuating that -3% results in a net increase in raw gasoline consumption is quite biased. I've personally noticed a range between 1.5% and ~5% reduction (purely anecdotal of course).
As for the E20 statement... The 20mpg flex fuel vehicles DO NOT get 3mpg (20*(1-.85)).

With respect to VOC's

Oxygenates were designed to enhance emissions from gasoline engines, not as fuel. They purposely cause mileage losses to increase emissions of VOC's.

This is like looking at your left hand while your right hand is bleeding....
The purpose of an oxygenate is to reduce CO emissions among others. Turns out it's a double edged sword - it does reduce CO et. al. but at the cost of increased VOC's.

And with MTBE - it was/is ruining groundwater... MTBE in water tastes pretty freaking nasty (and it doesn't take much) - not even a Brita filter was able to get it all out :/


Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it.... But some of the statements are blatantly wrong... And some of the conclusions are just terrible. I personally hope that ethanol is a very short term thing unless there's a significant production efficiency breakthrough.