06/02/08 Mechanic Rebuttal

Mechanic Rebuttal. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Once again there has been a shot across the bow of the biofuels industry. Last week a report by Texas TV station KHOU told of mechanical problems that are being caused by the use of ethanol blended fuel. According to the Deputy Director of the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council, Robert White, the report picked up on old data. WHITE: The report was definitely pointing out misnomers from the mid 80's that we went through a couple decades back on everything from ethanol will gum up your fuel injectors  it will cause increased erosion of components  it will not work as well  it may cause pinging  you could have octane issues, I mean it literally pulled out every issue that I've heard on the mechanic side. Interesting that KHOU is out of Houston where a large amount off-shore oil refineries are located. White says it was a wide sweeping attack that has no merit. WHITE: There are obviously some issues along the way if retailers don't do their proper housekeeping but for the most part states like Missouri and Minnesota and Hawaii that have E10 mandates don't have cars littered up and down the highway and byways. It's just a false claim. White says it's interesting too that ethanol is being blamed for clogging up engines. WHITE: Early on, back in the 80's when we were seeing a transition from leaded fuel and ethanol was introduced into a leaded fuel economy, there were a lot of cars that had gunk and buildup from that petroleum product in their tanks and their fuel lines. And when they introduced ethanol into that system, it did what it was supposed to do and cleaned them. Some people at the time were having issues with clogged fuel filters, etc but it was due to the ethanol actually cleaning the petroleum gunk out of the system. White is also confused by the numbers. WHITE: What the consumers need to understand is that whether they use ethanol or not, that 6% of the fuel supply now is ethanol and it is saving them up to 15% a gallon because that ethanol is there. If the ethanol industry today turned all the spigots off and gasoline shot up 15% across the country, what would happen in the world? What would the politicians now say? What would the oil companies now say? They always are poking the ethanol industry but they never appreciate, all the way from the consumer to the politician level sometimes how much impact is really being done. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.