San Antonio-based utility to increase E85 fleet by 100 vehicles

San Antonio’s CPS, the nation’s biggest city-owned utility, will increase its E85 fleet by 100 vehicles. CPS has converted 230 vehicles to E85 since 2003. San Antonio’s failure to meet EPA clean-air standards has been a catalyst for the switch.

Biodiesel has been the preferred fuel for city based conversions, although Colorado Springs officials recently established a municipal E85 pump that will fuel 92 city and utility flex-fuel vehicles. The Colorado city fleet manager confirmed that the city was paying $2.21 a gallon for E85 compared to its unleaded fuel contract price of $1.96 a gallon, and a saw 3-30% drop in mileage depending on the vehicle. The E85 vehicles emitted 13 percent less greenhouse gases.

Earlier this year, the San Antonio Express-News opposed ethanol in an editorial:

Little or No Net Savings in CO2 Emissions.

“Unfortunately, what passes for mitigation and aversion of global warming often amounts to doing nothing under the guise of doing something. Take the nation’s new infatuation with ethanol. Ethanol derived from corn, as it is in the United States, is so energy intensive to produce that it provides little or no net savings in carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the diversion of corn from the food supply to government-subsidized energy production has some unintended consequences of its own, driving up feed and corn syrup prices at home and tortilla prices in Mexico. Ethanol is a boon for corn farmers. As a way to limit global warming, it’s a spectacularly inefficient bust.”