I'm not fully convinced on the benefits of ethanol as a gasoline additive - there have been reports it causes worse pollution than regular gas. On the other hand it makes sense for govts to use alternative vehicles, particularly in densely populated cities, to help work out the kinks in these vehicles and improve them for mass consumption.
And if these measures help MN to continue to move to the GOP and help Bush win MN in 2004 then ok.

This guy's a very bad-news RINO. The party needs to find a way to purge these types.

I heard ethanol produces more H2O than gasoline?

M:

Back to 40% but pure!

Oh no! Not the dreaded dihydrogen monoxide!

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

M - I wouldn't be so quick throw the RINO tag at Pawlenty. He is a GOP governor in a normally Dem state but he appears to be holding the line on taxes and other GOP issues. Working to improve the environment through govt agency purchases, as opposed to a huge new regulatory scheme like the Dems would propose, is probably a workable solution.

By requiring a certain level of ethanol, this is just a way to subsidize corn farmers. A little payoff to one of your state's more powerful constituency groups is just good politics, especially when you aren't dipping into the state till.

(And unless they've cleaned them up in the past couple of decades,downwind of a corn-to-ethanol conversion plant is where every "alternate fuels advocate" should be required to live. Imagine taking the contents of a refrigerator that hasn't been cleaned or emptied in years, and then cooking the contents in one big vat. Not the smell of a slaugherhouse or hog farm in August, but just as rich in it's own way.)

AWW's right--calling Pawlenty a RINO based on this one move is patently absurd. The ethanol move is a very "Minnesota thing," and it will be generally popular there.

Besides, considering how pricy gas is right now, doesn't ethanol become a better and better idea as prices go up? That's not to say it's a good idea, but the more expensive oil is, the more sense it makes to replace it with corn.

The whole thing smells of a political boondoogle masquerading as environmentalism.

I vaguely recall Steven Den Beste debunk biomass (and ethanol in particular) as a practical energy saving method. Biomass is an indirect and inefficient form of getting solar power. He said something like that it takes more BTUs to grow/fertilize/harvest/ship/process the corn than the BTUs of oil it replaces (or maybe it's approximately a wash; I don't remember).

There's also something about Archer Daniels Midland having a near monopoly on processing corn ethanol and lobbying heavily.

What's the difference between ethane and ethanol? One atom of oxygen.

Why do we need to bulk up our fuel with oxygen? For combustion, we get that from the air (for the oxygen; nitrogen's just along for the ride, so to speak).

old maltese;

Storage issues. It's a lot easier to store and manipulate ethanol than ethane. Not to mention that ethanol has much more energy per unit volume than ethane. Otherwise we'd use pure hydrogen.

Are we sure that this ethenol business is not just a scam to tranfer money from the rest of us to the s***kickers? I'm all for hybrids, electrics, or anything else that works, but I'd like to know just how the cost per mile shakes out here.

Pawlenty is OK on taxes, guns, de-regulation, and other issues. He (as discreetly as he could) helped engineer the license extension of MN's nuclear plants through a hostile legislature. He has proven to be more rock-ribbed than people expected him to be, and is all for "growing" the GOP is MN to be a true majority party.

Planting, growing, and harvesting an acre of corn would take about 210 gallons of ethanol, and produce enough corn to make about 330 gallons.

Due to the steps required to produce an ethanol fuel from corn potent enough to use in vehicles, it takes a total of about 131,000 BTUs, including those used to grow the corn, to produce a gallon of ethanol which yields 77,000 BTUs.

Thus, ethanol production would have to get a lot more efficient in order to fully replace gasoline.

This is a terrible idea. As Michael pointed out, it is an energy wasting exercise. It is an agricultural subsidy, pure and simple. Having a special grade of gasoline that is only used in Minnesota will put us at the mercy of local refiners. I will be calling my lawmakers on this one.

Ethanol probably will never make sense if you grow a crop just to make alcohol, although that's what Brazil has done for generations.

It could make a minor contribution if you had a feedstock that was a byproduct of something that otherwise supports the farm.

Such byproducts exist. Molasses, for example.

It would make more sense, probably, to harvest the oil in peanut shells. There's more oil (though inedible) in the shell than in the nuts, and millions of tons of shells that have to be disposed of each season.