Pumping Up Ethanol

By Amanda Griscom Little, Grist.org. Posted February 28, 2006.

It was as befuddling to see the "Live Green, Go Yellow" slogan splashed across the General Motors ads running throughout the Olympics as it was to hear the term "switchgrass" uttered by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last month. Here we have GM and Dubyah, two of the world's most entrenched and heavy-hitting advocates of fossil-fuel consumption, suddenly trumpeting homegrown biofuels as the up-and-coming alternative to oil.

Greenwashing, you wonder?

On some level, of course. But there's more to it. GM's new high-budget campaign, which promotes the use of ethanol (hence the "yellow"), is tethered to a decision to manufacture 400,000 flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) in 2006 that are capable of burning either gasoline or an ethanol/gasoline blend. That's nearly 50 percent more than the company produced last year.

GM wants to do for FFVs what Toyota has done for hybrids. It's working with politicians and other companies including Chevron to expand the distribution of E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, to gas stations across the nation. "Our goal is to eventually remove the automobile from the energy and environment debate, to neutralize its impact on the planet," GM spokesperson Dave Barthmuss told Muckraker. "That's why we're so bullish about alternative fuels."

Nicholas Eisenberger of the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder, which has been working with GM on its FFV campaign, says, "It's hardly just a PR gambit -- it's a big bet. You can't put that many vehicles on the road -- before a nationwide infrastructure exists, mind you -- and put all this energy into helping fuel providers and retailers make the switch to ethanol if you don't believe in it."

Bush, for his part, pledged last month to promote the development of "cellulosic" ethanol, which can be efficiently produced from agricultural waste products like wood chips or from, yes, switchgrass, and which is far more environmentally beneficial than the corn-derived variety. "Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years," he said in the State of the Union -- a far more definitive show of support for oil alternatives than we've heard from him in the past.

There's plenty of reason to doubt the president's sincerity -- for one thing, he has not yet committed nearly the level of funding necessary to pull off such a feat. But some enviros are hopeful nevertheless. "We were amazed to hear him voice this commitment," said Nathanael Greene, a renewable-energy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "He framed it exactly as we would have."

And rather than temper his ethanol boosterism in the weeks since the State of the Union, Bush has been pumping it up. "All of a sudden, you may be in the energy business," Bush joked to a crowd of supporters in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month. "You know, by being able to grow grass on the ranch and have it harvested and converted into energy. And that's what's close to happening."

Last week, Bush sent six cabinet secretaries to over a dozen states to tout renewable energy; he alone hit three states in two days to promote the cause. On Feb. 21, the president planted his biofuels bully pulpit in Golden, Colo., at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (which, in preparation for the visit, scrambled to rehire nearly three dozen researchers who'd been given the boot because of budget cuts approved by Bush's own pen).

"There is a fantastic technology brewing -- I say brewing, it's kind of a catch on words here -- called ethanol," he said to an audience well aware of this development. "I mean, it's -- there's a lot of folks in the Midwest driving -- using what's called E85 gasoline ... This is exciting news for those of us worried about addiction to oil."

The unexpected commitments coming from both the White House and Detroit are occurring against a backdrop of other public- and private-sector efforts to promote biofuels. Ford has increased its FFV production by about 15 percent this year. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress, state-level officials, venture capital firms, and environmental groups have also been ramping up their efforts to promote both FFVs and E85.

Against the Grain

Though we're witnessing a sudden onslaught of interest in ethanol, there's nothing new about the technology. Ethanol is essentially grain alcohol, and was used in early versions of Ford's Model T. FFV technology has been around for decades and spread through parts of Europe and the developing world. About half of the vehicles sold in Brazil last year were FFVs. In fact, there are already some 5 million FFVs on the road in the U.S. -- the vast majority just rarely if ever run on E85 because it has such limited availability. Only about 600 of the approximately 168,000 fueling stations in the U.S. sell the ethanol blend.

Amanda Griscom Little writes the Muckraker column for Grist Magazine.

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