New edition of The Forbidden Fuel in print

The new edition of The Forbidden Fuel is now in print,  published by the University of Nebraska Press. The book is also available through Amazon and other booksellers.

The Forbidden Fuel is the definitive history of alcohol fuel, describing in colorful detail the emergence of alcohol fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the political and economic forces behind its popularity, opposition, and eventual growth.

What comes after ethanol?

By Bill Kovarik
Roanoke Times, Sept. 4, 2011.

The ethanol industry has attracted many critics over the years. Much of the criticism is well meant and should be well taken. The yardsticks that are usually applied to the industry – carbon footprint, biodiversity, competition between food and fuel, government subsidies, air and water quality – are certainly appropriate, even if they are rarely applied equally to all energy industries.

But the critics tend to miss the most important point about the historical reason for the development of the ethanol industry.  The primary reason for blending ethanol in gasoline is NOT to replace Middle Eastern oil. (That was always a secondary issue.)

The reason that today’s corn ethanol industry has become so large is that the oil industry does not have a safe additive to bring gasoline up to 87 octane.

The whale oil myth

Q: How many conservative economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. The darkness will cause the light bulb to change by itself.

H.R.Spalding Co., Boston, 1852, was one of thousands of stores selling various liquid fuels, including an ethanol blend, before kerosene was introduced with a tax advantage in the 1860s.

History is loaded with myths, and they are often used to lead is in one direction when, in fact, a more accurate historical account might provide a rather different lesson.

Take, for instance, the Whale Oil Myth — the idea that the free market, without any government intervention, is fully capable of making energy technology transitions. People who believed in the myth have argued against environmental regulation and energy research.

Ethanol and the V2 rocket

There’s a new fractured history lesson on ethanol hitting the blogs.

“Stop the Ethanol Scam,” Roanoke Times March 20, 2011 is one.  “Ethanol a Massive Waste” is  another one. Both fail to take basic historical facts into account.

They say that the Nazis commandeered “the entire European potato crop in 1944 and turn(ed) it into ethanol to fuel V2 rockets.”  So people starved in order to

NPR ethanol series Dec. 2010

From NPR: The recent tax cut bill preserves a pretty sweet deal for corn ethanol. It extends a tax subsidy, along with an import tariff supporting a fuel that already enjoys a guaranteed market. But what do taxpayers get for all the help?  In the first of our three-part series on ethanol, Frank Morris of Harvest Public Media reports that the heated debate over ethanol tramples some basic realities.

Ethanol may seem modern, but people throughout Appalachia have been making it for hundreds of years.

“We are known for our moonshine industry,” says science writer Bill Kovarik with a laugh, “very well known for our moonshine industry. It is still flourishing.”

Kovarik, who’s also a professor at Radford University, says that ethanol is, first and foremost, a way to make corn more valuable. More than a century ago, Henry Ford built cars to run on it, with just that in mind.   “So, you could replace the transportation income that farmers used to have by [their] growing the fuel for the cars, instead of growing horses and feed.”

Link to the rest of the story  /  Link to the longer Harvest Media version

Postscript: Bob Dineen of the Renewable Fuels Association had an interesting take on this series:

“Where in this series is the comparison to Big Oil?  You can’t talk, weigh, or dismiss an alternative without talking about the problem it is trying to solve.  So where, perhaps in the final piece, will we hear NPR discuss the billions in subsidies and tax breaks that go to Big Oil conglomerates and dangerous dictators in oil rich countries?”

The ongoing controversy over ethanol

By Bill Kovarik

Remember all the cute news items two years ago about how the price of movie popcorn just went up $2 thanks to ethanol, or how your grocery cart (or your wallet) just got lighter, thanks to ethanol? Turns out, it was mostly fiction.

Recognizing the complexity of biofuels issues

By Bill Kovarik and Scott Sklar

At a time when the need for public understanding of environmental science and energy technology issues has never been greater, the debate over biofuels illustrates a serious problem.

Because the issues are extraordinarily complex, participants in the debate often resort to misleading oversimplifications even when their concerns are quite legitimate.

Ethanol needs to be seen in historic perspective

By Bill Kovarik

1926 cartoon from Ethyl Corp. papers.

The grain ethanol industry has always been controversial.

These days, critics point out that the corn ethanol industry is not going to help avert climate disaster since, at best, it has a slightly positive net energy balance (or carbon footprint).

Fair enough. But the corn ethanol industry was  not originally created as a way to shift to low-carbon fuels

The original ethanol industry was the main fuel in the lamp fuel industry before  kerosene.  It was taxed out of existence in the US during the 1860s, but returned with the backing of Henry Ford and Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.

When geologists said oil was  running out just after World War I, ethanol was seen as one important answer.  When engines needed better fuels in the 1920s, ethanol was seen as superior to tetra-ethyl-lead (“leaded gasoline”) octante boosters.  When farmers needed new markets in the 1930s, ethanol was billed as a way to avoid farm relief. And when the Arabs cut off oil supplies to the US in the 1970s, an ethanol industry was built to provide emergency fuel supplies.

Shallow takes on ethanol

Its easy to be smug about opposing ethanol. Critics say:

• If ethanol was so great, it wouldn’t need a subsidy.

• It robs food from the poor to give fuel to the rich

• It takes more energy to make ethanol than it produces

• Ethanol causes more air pollution than gasoline.

• Even if all America’s corn were turned into ethanol, it would only come to 12 percent of the country’s fuel.

There are grains of truth in each of these statements, but this is a complex argument, and each of these statements contains omissions, distortions and  inaccuracies.  So lets take them in turn …

From poplar to ethanol: Plant could help save Northwest’s biofuels industry

By Hal Bernton

Seattle Times staff reporter

BOARDMAN, Ore. — The poplar trees here grow 10 feet a year, transforming an irrigated stretch of desert near the Columbia River into a neatly pruned forest. For now, the trees provide lumber for cabinets and pulp for paper.

But in the years ahead, energy entrepreneurs hope the pulp from poplar can be turned into ethanol, helping resuscitate the Northwest’s floundering biofuels industry.

MORE>>>

Who was that muse? Props to Polyhymnia

By Bill Kovarik

This illustration – from the Congress des Applications de L’Alcool Denature, Dec. 16 – 23, 1902 (published by the Automobile Club de France) — popped off the cover of a book I happened to pick up at the National Agricultural Library archives in Beltsville, MD while I was a grad student in the 1980s. At the time I was reading Leo Marx’s “Machine in the Garden,” and I was instantly struck by the beauty of the visual correspondence to that metaphor.

This “muse of biofuels” is probably an adaptation of the image of Polyhymnia, the muse of agriculture and lyric poetry, one of the nine muses of Greek mythology. Of course, the hair style and the cog-wheel brooch are modern for the year 1902, but the flowing robe and the diadem in her hair  would be typical of depictions of a Greek muse through the ages.

Historic moment for second generation biofuels

By Bill Kovarik
For SEJournal, Summer 2009
(w/ some updates,  2011)

The US and Canadian biofuels industry is struggling to pull through an historic shift to second generation production feedstocks and production technologies.

There is pressure coming, in part, from  low carbon fuel standards passed by the California Air Resources Board  in April 2009, and also from the need for some return on federal development funding injected into the industry since 2007.

At least  eight major cellulosic biofuels plants  are in production or under construction in the US and Canada.

So, it’s now or never for cellulosic biofuels — the “fuel of the future” for almost a century, and long seen as the only source of renewable fuel that could replace petroleum.

“We think, ultimately, cellulosic materials are the only materials where you can produce enough under environmentally sustainable conditions,” said Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California at Berkeley at the 2008 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Somerville is restating  an opinion expressed by Henry Ford, Isaac Asimov, and even, 90 years ago, by the scientist who founded the Cellulose Chemistry division of the American Chemical Society – Harold Hibbert, who said:

“It looks as if in the rather near future, this country will be under the necessity of paying out vast sums yearly in order to obtain supplies of crude oil from Mexico, Russia and Persia,” Hibbert said in a 1921 journal article.   “It is believed, however, that the chemist is capable of solving this difficult problem…. (and) it would seem that cellulose in one form or another is capable of filling that role.”