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Saab BioPower Flex-fuel – Boon Or Boondoggle?
CO2 Claims OTT, Economy Penalty Harsh, Availability Limited
Are There Any Plusses? – Smug, Feel-Good Factor Is About It
Cutting Down Forests In The Name Of The Planet Makes No Sense 

“Biofuels actually lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions than traditional fuels like petrol and diesel”  

“Before launching Flex-fuel cars, shouldn’t Saab lead the lobby to slash tax on biofuel, come clean about the real lifetime CO2 costs, and make sure you don’t have to drive 40 miles there and back to fill it up?” 

I’ll try and be generous about this, but it’s going to be difficult.

·      Strike 1! Saab’s Carbon Dioxide (CO2) saving claims are spurious, to say the least. Saab says its new BioPower Flex-fuel engines emit up to 70 per cent less carbon dioxide (CO2) than their petrol equivalent. Not true. The real figure is closer to neutral; some experts say if you examine the whole life-cycle and implications of growing fuels like ethanol, more energy is consumed than produced.

·      Strike 2! Ethanol is a pathetically inefficient fuel, raising consumption by about 30 per cent. Saab’s press statement on the wonders of its Bio fuel fleet - “Saab’s entire range goes flex-fuel” - has a table at the end comparing its 1.8 litre petrol engine with the E85 ethanol version. The average fuel consumption for the manual petrol version is 36.7 mpg (7.7 l/kms). Guess what. “No certification figures available” occupies the E85 box in the table. Buried deep in another Saab statement on the next step in ethanol development – “Saab BioPower 100 Concept” is the damning admission that overall fuel consumption of E85 engines is about 30 per cent higher than petrol.

·      Strike 3! Almost zilch availability of E85. If you buy a Saab with a flex-fuel engine, you’ll have great difficulty actually finding any E85. Down here on the South Coast near Worthing, the nearest filling station with E85 is 40 miles away. When you find one, the cost is more or less the same as regular petrol. (For E85 near you see http://www.saabbiopower.co.uk/pumplocations/).

·      Strike 4! Saab charges you £600 extra (€880) for a Flex-fuel engine so that you can benefit from all of the above.

Bearing in mind that it takes only 3 strikes to be out in baseball, that’s a pretty tough indictment for Saab to answer, so I’d better show you how I come to such a damning conclusion.

You don’t have to believe that humans are destroying the climate to acknowledge that fossil fuels will run out sooner rather than later, and any new technology which seeks to address that problem must be a good thing.

Hyped way past capabilities
Saab claims that its flex-fuel engines burning corn or sugar derivatives can slash CO2 emissions by more than half. But some experts say if you examine the data carefully, this is not the case, and that the role of these renewable fuels has been hyped way past their capabilities.

Saab, the Swedish upmarket subsidiary of General Motors Corp, is leading the use of agricultural resources to power cars. Saab now fits what it calls BioPower flex-fuel technology right across its model range and the company says this means these vehicles effectively emit 50 to 70 per cent less carbon dioxide than conventional engines.

Saab flex-fuel engines using E85, a mixture of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent petrol, emit roughly the same amount of CO2 as other cars on the road. But the crop growing process effectively slashes emissions overall.

Virtuous circle
“Bioethanol fuel is produced commercially from agricultural crops like wheat, corn, grain, sugar beet and sugar cane. Unlike petrol, its consumption does not significantly raise atmospheric levels of CO2, which some scientific research suggests is a major contributor to global warming. This is because emissions released during driving are balanced by the amount of CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere when crops for conversion (into ethanol) are grown,” Saab said.

However, this advantage is disputed by some experts like Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, who said the resources used to expand ethanol production – extra fertiliser, water, transportation, not to mention the need to expand agricultural land and cut down CO2 friendly forests – will actually lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions than traditional fuels like petrol and diesel.

Tiffany Groode of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published research casting doubt on the benefits of ethanol, saying converting corn into ethanol may use more fossil energy than the fuel provides. Groode’s research, for MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, did though hold out hope for so-called “cellulosic” ethanol, capable of much higher energy content, but which won’t be available for years.

Bush pushes ethanol
U.S. President George W Bush has said Americans must use 20 per cent less petrol over the next decade. Hybrids, which use electric power to enhance the economy of petrol engines, will contribute to this, but Bush expects ethanol to be a major provider. The European Union has said biofuels should account for 10 per cent of the energy used for transport by 2020.

So Saab is pushing at an open door with its flex-fuel fleet, and claims to be the biggest-seller of ethanol fuel cars in Europe. Its 1.8t BioPower engine is tuned to produce 17 per cent more power than its 1.8 litre petrol equivalent. These flex-fuel engines will also run on standard unleaded petrol, which is just as well, given the lack of availability.

Saab concedes that an engine running on ethanol uses about 30 per cent more fuel than a conventional petrol engine.  So if the public is going to embrace this new idea, governments will have to make some concessions on fuel tax to kick-start the green revolution. Saab should be congratulated for investing in alternative fuels, but it seems to have been carried way by its enthusiasm.

This is a pup
Anyone buying into this green future will soon find out that they’ve been sold a pup. That’s not to say that one day biofuel will provide a viable, if limited, alternative. Before launching Flex-fuel cars, shouldn’t Saab lead the lobby to slash tax on biofuel, come clean about the real lifetime CO2 costs, and make sure that if you buy one, you don’t have to drive 40 miles there and back to fill it up? 

Neil Winton – May 1, 2007

Saab 1.8t BioPower

	Petrol	E85
4-cylinder , 1.8 litre150 bhp	150 bhp	175 bhp
0-62 mph/100 km/h	9.5 seconds	8.4
Top Speed	130 mph/209 km/h	137/220
Fuel consumption	Average 36.7 mpg7.7l/100kms	25/30% less

Saab E85 compatible engines are now available across Europe.