“If ethanol really boomed we could see the ludicrous result of planet-saving rain forests being decimated in the name of saving the planet”

“extra fertilizer, water, transportation, energy to convert it to industrial alcohol, 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”

Europe’s car manufacturers, led by Saab and closely followed by Ford and Volvo, are endangering their credibility with buyers as they exaggerate the environmental benefits of ethanol and hide its disadvantages in a desperate scramble to catch up with the need to appear green.

After soft-pedaling the problem for years, Europe’s automotive manufacturers have been caught out by a sudden sea change in public opinion, which now wants more attention paid to the need to conserve fuel and protect the environment. Tire-squealing, macho advertising campaigns underlining speed and performance are on the way out; green, tree hugging is in.

Saab, General Motors’ Swedish upmarket subsidiary, is running a TV ad campaign which claims its new ethanol Flex Fuel engines, powered by renewable fuel which sucks in CO2 as it grows, can cut green house gas emissions by up to an amazing 70 per cent. Ford Europe claims a Flex-fuel powered little Focus sedan also cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 70 per cent compared with a petrol-engined car. Volvo has topped that, claiming its flex-fuel cars cut CO2 by 80 per cent. At the same time, in theory at least, a significant amount of imported gasoline would be replaced by homegrown fuel.

But these claims are coming under attack from experts, who say the real savings from using biofuels like ethanol are closer to neutral. Others say if you examine the whole life cycle and implications of growing fuels like ethanol, more energy is consumed than produced. If ethanol really boomed using a huge amount of new agricultural land, we could see the ludicrous result of planet-saving rain forests being decimated in the name of saving the planet.

And buried in the small print of Saab’s claims for its Flex-fuel engines, is the admission that ethanol or E85 is much less efficient than gasoline, penalizing fuel consumption by about 30 per cent. (Saab protests vigorously that its claims can be justified. I’ll return to this story in the weeks ahead).

These ethanol-enabled engines are engineered to run on normal gasoline or E85, which is just as well in Europe because very few gas stations actually sell the stuff. Here, close to a large town on the south coast of England, the nearest ethanol gas station is 40 miles away. According to Saab’s own ethanol locater web site, there are only 13 gas stations in all of Britain which sell it.

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.

Hype
And 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 now offers what it calls a BioPower flex-fuel technology option (cost:£600-€880) right across its model range and says this means these vehicles effectively emit 50 to 70 per cent less carbon dioxide than conventional engines when you fill up with biofuel like ethanol.

Saab flex-fuel engines using E85, a mixture of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent petrol, emit roughly (well, 30 per cent more actually) the same amount of CO2 as other cars while being used on the road. But the crop growing process effectively slashes emissions overall.

“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 fertilizer, water, transportation, energy needed to convert it to industrial alcohol, 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.

Cellulosic
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.

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.

But Al Bedwell, analyst at J.D. Power’s European headquarters, doesn’t expect ethanol market penetration in Europe to reach much beyond 5 per cent of car sales.

“This is not (yet at least) the panacea that some manufacturers would have us believe. Maybe with second-generation (cellulosic) biofuels we will see greater penetration. As far as ethanol is concerned I don’t see a tremendous mid-term market for it above the 5 per cent or so that is targeted,” Bedwell said.

Consultants Frost & Sullivan expects a European market penetration of 4 per cent for flex-fuel vehicles by 2015.

Garel Rhys, Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University Business School, said ethanol is a palliative, not a solution to the CO2 issue, and can make a minor contribution, with hybrids and other ideas, while the drive to hydrogen takes place in a minimum of 20, perhaps 50 years.

Muddle through
“In the interim we will muddle through with various technologies where none are really obviously better than others. Ethanol does use more fuel but some will say ethanol is better for them – the Swedes with their huge wood crop for instance, Brazilians with sugar cane, while Americans are perhaps more interested in hybrids, others in (bio) diesels,” Rhys said.

Some experts hold out high hopes for cellulosic biofuels which promise more energy intensity and use parts of crops which would usually go to waste so do not affect food prices. But this development will be very expensive.

For ethanol to become a mass-market fuel, according to Bedwell, 4 conditions must be met – governments must cut taxes on ethanol (currently it is only pennies cheaper), availability must be improved, sales incentives are needed for flex-fuel vehicles, and exemptions invoked from road pricing schemes.

Despite these sobering disadvantages, led by the fact that fuel economy is a major negative, more European manufacturers plan to add ethanol vehicles including Ford’s Volvo, and Renault and Peugeot of France, Bedwell said.

Skepticism on biofuels is coming from some unlikely sources, including global warming activists like the Brussels-based European Federation for Transport and the Environment.

“We have a series of concerns about biofuels, and there are signs that policy makers are now realizing that they are not a straightforward solution,” said Dudley Curtis, communications officer for Transport & Environment.

He points out that a jump in the cost of some staple food in Mexico recently caused riots because U.S. demand for corn to make ethanol squeezed out crops for food.

Sustainability
“There are good biofuels and bad biofuels. The bad ones result in more CO2 overall than using crude oil. We need sustainability criteria to ensure that biofuels sold in Europe don’t come from cleared rainforests, for example,” he said.

Other experts say a massive increase in ethanol use will cause health problems, worse than those caused from gasoline including ozone and particulates.

Despite the efforts of Europe’s carmakers to push ethanol, J.D.Power’s Bedwell, doesn’t think the sums add up.

“At present it is difficult to make a case for flex-fuel cars in most European markets as a result of their poor performance in a cost-benefit analysis versus both gasoline and diesel alternatives,” Bedwell said.

The only European country where E85 has taken off is Sweden, where the government offers substantial financial incentives to motorists.

Meanwhile, the long-term solution will be hydrogen, according to Rhys.

“It could be fuel cells; it could be liquid hydrogen in internal combustion engines, which would be a good way to go using existing engines. But it’s going to take a huge amount of research and huge expenditure to be commercially attractive. Also there has to be a clean way of making hydrogen, because using fossil fuels will end up making things (greenhouse gases) worse. Nuclear, or wave power or solar power; you simply can’t use existing CO2 based methodology to provide hydrogen,” Rhys said.