WKOW reports a crack in the blue sky optimism over Wisconsin’s favorite alternative energy. Too much ethanol in gasoline is prone to problems.
E-85 Gas Pumps Lose Certification: An Illinois-based branch of Underwriters Laboratories, an organization that tests the safety of thousands of products, pulled its certification off many of the parts inside E-85 pumps last month.
Ethanol's Corrosive Little Secret: The infrastructure for transporting oil or fuel is through the use of metal pipelines, tanker truck or railway tanker. But there's just one slight problem. High concentrations of ethanol are corrosive to the metal pipelines. When you stop to think about it, that's actually a major problem.
The U.S. may have large supplies of corn or biomass to convert to ethanol, but without using pipelines, how will the massive quantities of ethanol be transported to gas stations and the end consumer? In the short term, the transportation of ethanol will be handled by railway or tanker truck. But in the long term, a whole new infrastructure of pipelines may need to be built to transport ethanol. That's not going to happen over night and it will certainly add to the costs of using ethanol as an alternative fuel.
Personally, I don’t want an alternative economy with energy limits, restrictions and barriers. I have no desire for some fantasy America withdrawn from the world in pursuit of guilt driven self imposed energy independence. What would be nice is a world without authoritarian rulers enriching themselves skimming unearned wealth from good energy sources.
