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Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm was out pumping for ethanol Thursday at a Marathon gas station in Ypsilanti.
Granholm joined Indy Racing League drivers Buddy Rice, Vitor Meira, Jeff Simmons and Kosuke Matsuura, arriving for the event with Simmons in a special 2-seater IRL show car.
The event, sponsored by the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council, was the latest in a series to promote ethanol-blended fuel at the pump and raise public awareness. 
Regular unleaded E10 normally sells for $3.09/gallon but for the promotion the price was $2.20/gallon from 11:15 am to 12:45pm. All blends at the Huron Fuel Depot, a Marathon affiliated station, contain 10% ethanol. A record 231 cars were filled with 3202 gallons during the promotion.
Listen to Governor Granholm’s comments to kick off the event. 
Granholm Remarks (2 min MP3)
Read more on 
July 28th, 2006 at 9:34 am
There are a lot of great things about Ethanol - for a start, it’s nearly a direct substitue for gasoline.
But when you make it from corn, there’s a real question of whether it scales.
I think it doesnt scale for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, grains are a feedstock for animals and for people - and both those uses directly compete with ethanol from fuel. If there is a drought or some other sort of supply crisi, it’s likely that people will be more willing to pay an extra 20 cents on a loaf of bread or a packet of cornflakes than an ethanol plant is to increase it’s OpEx numbers.
Secondly, there doesn’t appear to be many quick technical fixes that will improve ethanol from corn technology. We’ve been making the stuff for a long time and it’s probable that any technical fixes would have already been implemented by the industry.
At the moment, ethanol is selling for more than for gasoline, and I think that’s giving us a hint about the state of the markets.
Finally, grain production uses quite a bit of fuel, both directly for tractors and harvesters and indirectly for ag chemicals and fertilizers. Ramping up grain supply to provide feedstocks for ethanol from corn is going to increase demand for these hydrocarbons … from where I sit, the amount of liquid fuel you are getting out as ethanol looks pretty similar to the amount of liquid fuels that are being put into the system.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:58 am
Good comment Ian. One of the reasons we started this news blog was to provide good factual information. If you read through the posts we’ve done you’ll find some information that should allay your concerns.
1. Food vs. Fuel: There is no credible evidence that using corn for ethanol production will create any feed or food problems here or anywhere else in the world. I just interviewed the VP of ADM a couple days ago and he said there is no reason to fear this. Food will come first as it should but we can grow a lot more corn. Syngenta is currently developing a drought tolerant gene into corn which will be on the market in a few years so it can be grown in even more areas of the world. The only competition effect for using corn for ethanol might be in the price of corn and that’s a good thing for our corn growers who need a better price for their commodity!
2. We haven’t even scratched the surface of improving ethanol production, including from corn. If you look at this post on Domestic Fuel: http://domesticfuel.com/index.php?s=syngenta you’ll find a link to an interview with Syngenta which covers a new corn trait that will increase ethanol production efficiency when it come on the market in just a couple years. There’s a lot of work ramping up on ethanol production improvements as we speak.
3. The current high price of ethanol is a short term market aberration caused by dropping MTBE as a fuel oxygenate which only left ethanol as the replacement. This tight supply situation will change as ethanol production increases over the next year or so.
4. There’s an overwhelming amount of research that shows the positive energy return from the production of ethanol.
The bottom line is that ethanol is good for the environment, good for your car and good for America. I have yet to find the down side in creating less green house gas emissions, increasing the performance of my car and keeping my money in America, helping people like our farmers instead of foreign terrorist-supporting nations.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
The bottom line is that ethanol is good for the environment, good for your car and good for America.
You tout ethanol from corn as the path to energy independence and clean air and as an answer to global warming. How innocuous and wholesome these fuels must seem: They come from things we eat; the smell of biodiesel is no more offensive than that of french fry oil; ethanol is nothing more than the same alcohol we find in all alcoholic drinks; and the carbon dioxide which both fuels release into the atmosphere gets reabsorbed by the following year’s planting.
That, anyway, is the extent of the story one might get from recent coverage of the biofuels boom. But are these fuels really the renewable wonders they seem? That may hinge on what people mean by renewable. If they mean that for a limited time the crops from which liquid biofuels are made can be repeatedly grown, harvested and processed to make biofuels, then they are perhaps in a very narrow sense correct. If what they mean by renewable is sustainable, then they are just plain wrong.
Biofuels produced the way we are producing them today are not even close to sustainable. In truth, the current production methods for biofuels are more like mining operations than farming operations. That calls into question whether such fuels can deliver the benefits which are now being so incessantly trumpeted in the news media.
July 28th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
So what’s your solution? The people I know in this business are working as hard as they can to move us in the right direction. Are you demanding an immediate silver bullet solution or are you willing to acknowledge that there isn’t one and that the long term answer to our energy independence is going to take lots of people working on lots of different ideas.
July 28th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
…are you willing to acknowledge that there isn’t one and that the long term answer to our energy independence is going to take lots of people working on lots of different ideas.
I acknowledge biofuels made from industrial agricluture aren’t a realistic solution.
To understand why this is so, we have to go beyond the fleeting glimpses of farm fields that we get from our cars–glimpses that for many of us form the sum total of our knowledge of farming. If one were to stand across from a field of corn or soybeans for an entire season, one would, in most cases, witness the following: plowing done with a tractor, planting using large mechanical planters, the spraying of herbicides and pesticides, the application of fertilizers, irrigation (in some cases), and harvesting done by large machinery. In fact, one would see that all of the heavy field work is done by petroleum-powered machines.
This style of industrial farming involves huge petroleum and natural gas inputs to fuel the machinery; to make and apply the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; and to irrigate and harvest the crops. Many people don’t know that oil is the basis for most herbicides and pesticides and that natural gas is the basis for most of the world’s nitrogen fertilizers. (Nitrogen fertilizers are used heavily on corn, but not on soybeans which produce their own nitrogen.) Both oil and natural gas are finite resources; their use to help grow crops for fuel can in no way be called sustainable. In effect, we are mining finite hydrocarbons to grow crops for biofuels.
Growing a corn crop each season doesn’t necessarily mean fuel made from that corn is renewable — the vast majority of Americans don’t realize growing that corn is totally dependent on finite and unrenewable fossil fuels.
The long term solution to energy independence is education and conservation.
December 2nd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Kurt
You need to realize that we are at the beginning of the move to produce these bio fuels, and that in the long term many of the concerns you voice will be reduced or eliminated . To begin with, as ethanol production increases we will see a shift to farm equipment that runs on ethanol, not just for economic reasons but also becuase the American farmer is fiercly independant and patriotic and will like the idea of U.S. born fuels. The market will eventually move to favor what makes the most efficient use of energy unit consumed to energy unit produced, rather than simply the maximum yield per acre.
Fuel feedstocks will not need herbicides and pesticides in nearly the amounts used on foodstock, it simply will not matter if the corn is perfect.Likewise the fuel corn will not need to be irrageted and fertilized to the point of making absolutely perfect plump grains that we expect to see on an ear at our summer BBQ. Also we will gladly use fertilizers on fuel corn that Western society would find distasteful to use on food we are going to eat.
Currently most of the ethanol production comes from the grain, but as we progress we will also use the rest of the plant for some of this as techniques to break down and ferment mash made from the fibrous stalks etc come into use. I have also seen the complaint that conventional fuels are used to power the distilleries, in many cases this is true, but these too will be run on bio fuels such as the stalks and other chaf. Some will of course be turned under to help renew the soil, this is another function of the energy economics that I mentioned earlier.
For that matter I have heard people question if corn is indeed the best crop for this use, answere, maybe not for the whole country.. but corn is a good source, we are very good at producing it, we are familiar with it, we have an infrastructure and machinery already designed to grow , harvest and handle it. Eventually we will likely see other crops used in the U.S. in areas where they make more economic sense than corn does, but we need to start somewhere, corn has a strong and powerful lobby pushing…why not start with corn. If my vision is correct this will lead to far more acres in cultivation at a lower yeild per acre, but we have land.
Are Education and conservation important? YES!! I am a mechanical engineer with a good grasp of thermodynamic principles, do we waste energy? YES!!! Can we be more efficient? YES!! Will we need to drive more efficient and MUCH smaller and less powerful vehicles in the future on the whole? YES!!! etc. etc. etc. But in the end we are not ready or even able to regress to a society without the modern conveniences we love and depend on.
We need to face facts, without a nearly endless supply of extremely cheap or free power, the so called hydrogen economy of the future is a joke. Fossil fuels are limited and possibly bring other problems of global impact, Nuclear is limited, partly due to a limited amount of feedstocks but also due to public fear. Solar, wind, hydro ( current use plus low velocity flow hydro and wave action), geothermal etc will all play a part, but we need a potable fuel that is easy to use and ethanol is easily used in our current infrastructure to either stretch , replace or reduce use of current fuels. This is a part of the answere, spend you energy and time working towardsfinding and implementing others, not attacking this one.
Just a thought
Scott