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April 18, 2007
Study: Ethanol May Cause More Smog, Deaths
WASHINGTON (AP) - Switching from gasoline to ethanol touted as a green alternative at the pump may create dirtier air, causing slightly more smog-related deaths, a new study says.Nearly 200 more people would die yearly from respiratory problems if all vehicles in the United States ran on a mostly ethanol fuel blend by 2020, the research concludes. Of course, the study author acknowledges that such a quick and monumental shift to plant-based fuels is next to impossible.
Each year, about 4,700 people, according to the study's author, die from respiratory problems from ozone, the unseen component of smog along with small particles. Ethanol would raise ozone levels, particularly in certain regions of the country, including the Northeast and Los Angeles.
"It's not green in terms of air pollution," said study author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor. "If you want to use ethanol, fine, but don't do it based on health grounds. It's no better than gasoline, apparently slightly worse."
One of our regular readers decided to poke me with this little gem. Of course my first reaction was to scream "We must abandon Ethanol, let's shovel more money into foreign oil providers to hold us hostage", but then good sense overtook me and I started to think. I took a couple of minutes and read over the entire study, which yielded a whole bunch of reasons to question the author's conclusions, but on the surface it makes perfect sense. Ethanol is an oxygenating additive to our fuel now, so since Ozone is made out of Oxygen, it would follow that it would create more of it in the combustion process, but a few things jump out at me immediately in his study.
First the vehicle test beds used in the study were all American except for a single Mercedes-Benz C which one could hardly classify as a "regular" foreign car model. Foreign car companies represent a lot more than 1/8 of the cars on the road, so saying Americans make crappy cars isn't exactly news, but to really know you'd have to see what the numbers were for the Japanese automakers cars with E85 (which I don't think any currently sell an American version of their E85 vehicles). The Japanese represent about 45% of the California car market and about 35% of the overall car market nationwide and yet not a single one of their models are represented in the study.
Secondly it appears that he assumes no rise in fuel economy of the cars on the road in 2020, which I don't think is a safe bet really and there is no acknowledgment of the effects of hybrids on the calculations. One would have to assume that hybrids would also be converted to run on E85 and that they will continue to rise in percentage of car sales going forward for at least the Japanese automakers. That improvement in fuel economy would mean less E85 being burned and less Ozone released and I'm not even going to go into the rise of PHEV's either.
Thirdly the entire compression ratio discussion I had last weekend on the blog. These are all cars in the study that are made to run on gasoline, so there is a lot of incomplete combustion going on when they are running E85. The logical answer will be to move to E100 with higher compression ratios, E85 is just the upper limit that can be supported by a motor built for running regular gasoline. He may be absolutely right that E85 would be a bad choice. Also the creation of VCR (variable compression ratio) engines like the one at SAE last week would likely change the formulas for the output of waste products.
The reality is that if we were trying to introduce gasoline to the world right now there is no way we could convince the public to do it because it's poisonous and dangerous. Everything that we have to replace it with will be slightly better on both fronts. There are always things to worry about with new technologies, but we've got to start making forward progress because we know the path we are on now leads to our doom. I think we can take a look at these numbers after we get some realistic ones and decide if we need to improve the catalytic converters or CAFE standards to off set the side effects of the move to Ethanol.
Read more over at WTOP.
Posted by Jamison at April 18, 2007 1:40 PM
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