Tiger Cars for Tiger Fuels: E100 Group calls for more ethanol-tuned engines

What do E100 cars look like? The 2010 Koenigsegg CCXR Platinuss E100 Ethanol car

The E100 Group points to a superior path to ensuring ethanol distribution – more engines tuned to ethanol, not gasoline.

Is a flex-fuel vehicle mandate needed? At what cost? E100’s Don Siefkes addresses ethanol’s market opportunities in an unpublished letter to the Wall Street Journal.

In Michigan, the E100 Ethanol group wrote a letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, in response to their “The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle” editorial on December 13th.

The letter from executive director Don Siefkes remains unpublished, but deserves a wide audience, because of its unique perspective on the opportunities and paths for expanding the market for ethanol.

How indeed is all the mandated ethanol going to find its way into the market?

To: The Editors of the Wall Street Journal

Cellulosic ethanol has been a debacle, but not for the reasons stated in your editorial “The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle” of December 13.

Cellulosic ethanol has not become a reality because there is no market for it. Who, in their right mind, would shell out millions of dollars for full scale plants if they can’t sell what these plants produce?

Corn ethanol is at the gasoline blend limit (14 billion gallons into 140 billion gallons of gasoline). It is next to impossible for a new supplier to break up an established supply chain such as the corn ethanol–oil company chain we currently have.

The WSJ may be correct about the Cello Energy process, but there is proven technology from other processes and suppliers that can produce cellulosic ethanol at prices below that of gasoline without interfering with our food supply.

The DOE, the NHTSA, the National Academy of Sciences, and Congress have all been focused on trying to specify the fuel when the focus needs to be on the engines that burn motor fuel.

As long as all engines in the U.S. are optimized for gasoline, cellulosic ethanol cannot grow. The U.S. will continue its absurd dependence on imported oil and continue to pour 1.4 billion tons of CO2 from gasoline emissions into the air every year.

What is needed is a mandate that 50% of all light duty vehicles sold in the U.S. be E100 flex/fuel with the engines optimized for ethanol, not gasoline. These engines would perform spectacularly on ethanol, but performance would be compromised when burning gasoline.

Since ethanol costs less than gasoline, consumers would flock to these vehicles.  Cost to an OEM supplier would be less than $100 per vehicle.

A market for 70 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would be created and supplies would quickly rise to meet this demand. We would become independent of imported oil in short order.  CO2 emissions would be dramatically reduced with no need for a complicated cap and trade system or expensive new pipelines.

E100 flex/fuel engines would be like air bags, seat belts, and catalytic converters. At their inception, critics called them too expensive. Once a mandate was imposed, a market developed, costs dropped precipitously, and now they are accepted standard items. The same process will take place with E100 engines.

Very truly yours,

Don Siefkes
Executive Director
E100 Ethanol Group