QUEBEC WANTS TO TRIPLE AMOUNT OF ETHANOL IN GAS
Idea is not as eco-friendly as it sounds, and could damage fuel tanks, says David Booth.
Never mind that it’s yet another case of politicians citing numbers that simply don’t add up. Or that optimism doesn’t even begin to describe the claims of environmental impact. Pay no attention to the fact that a precedent just south of the border has been set on precisely how not to implement cleaner gas. Quebec’s new government is thinking about implementing new fuel standards and the result just might clog your fuel line.
According to an article in La Presse on Oct. 4, the ruling Coalition Avenir Québec is thinking about tripling the amount of ethanol required in fuel from today’s five per cent to a whopping 15 per cent by 2025.
In making the announcement, Jonatan Julien, the province’s minister of energy and natural resources, claimed that the changes would eliminate two million megatonnes of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of taking 500,000 cars off the road.
That would be akin to converting a tenth of all the cars currently registered in Quebec to full zero-emission, battery-powered EVs.
According to Daniel Ciolkosz, an assistant professor in Penn State’s department of agricultural and biological engineering, the chemical formula for ethanol means that a molecule of ethanol contains about 52 per cent carbon. Gasoline, meanwhile, is 87 per cent carbon. That’s an admirable 40 per cent less carbon.
Except that, thanks to something called energy density, you need to burn about 30 per cent more ethanol to produce the same power as gasoline. Net it all out and, theoretically, ethanol could reduce emissions by 30 per cent. In other words, a 10 per cent increase in ethanol use might get you a reduction in GHG emissions of three per cent. So perhaps the reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be quite as dramatic as envisioned.
Then there’s the fact that fuel-grade ethanol isn’t readily available in Quebec.
In fact, according to Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor at the university of HEC Montreal and the chairman of its Energy Sector Management program, at the current five per cent blend, Quebec produces only two per cent of the ethanol it uses. The rest is imported, much of it from the United States.
Then there’s something called net energy balance. Essentially, it compares how much energy it takes to produce a specific fuel to the amount of energy that fuel produces.
In other words, the less energy required to produce, refine, and distribute a fuel compared with the amount of energy it releases once in a gas tank, the better.
Corn-fed ethanol doesn’t fare well in this calculation. At least a few scientists think corn is energy negative, meaning it takes more energy to produce than is released in our engines. Even favourable ratings still have corn only modestly energy positive, requiring one unit of energy to create 1.2 to 1.4 units of corn ethanol energy.
Brazil, which is highly dependent on ethanol as an automotive fuel but produces it from sugarcane, gets about eight units of energy from every unit used to process its favoured crop. In other words, refining ethanol from corn is extremely inefficient.
And there’s the fact that ethanol is not particularly good for our cars and is especially toxic for classic cars.
Ethanol is hygroscopic (it attracts moisture), which means that, over time, the ethanol in your gas will attract water, bringing with it rust and corrosion in your gas tank, fuel pump, and fuel lines if they aren’t suitably protected.
Furthermore, many gas tanks and/or carburetors left full of ethanol-blended gasoline over winter will require a complete disassembly, thanks to the gummy varnish left after ethanol-infused gasoline evaporates.
I will leave those of you living in a Canadian province other than Quebec with these cheery thoughts. There’s at least an outside chance the Bloc Québécois could be the power broker in a soon-to-be minority Liberal government. With Trudeau desperate to burnish his environmental bona fides, it’s not hard to see the Bloc foisting its automobile emissions policies on the rest of our fair land. Sleep tight.