I made a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico this weekend for my sister's graduation. (The greenhouse gas implications of flying 970 miles will have to wait for another post) Because of the boxes we needed to haul to the post office and all the bags we needed to get to the airport - plus a family of four - Dad opted for a Dodge Durango, an SUV, as a rental car. This Durango, almost all the Durangos we saw on the lot, and other SUVs from other automakers, happened to be "flex fuel" vehicles. Indeed, there are nearly five million flex fuel vehicles on the road today. A flex fuel car can run on either gasoline or E85, which is a blend of 85% ethanol, a fuel made from corn, and 15% gasoline. I thought, "Great! My first opportunity to ride in an ethanol-fueled car!" While ethanol doesn't seem to be all that it's hyped up to be (read our article on ethanol), this new fuel does seem to hold its share of promises, and I thought it would be fun to try a fuel touted by farmers and presidents alike.
One of the ethanol market's biggest hurdles is availability. In a farming state like Minnesota ethanol is fairly easy to come by - a number of local chains carry E85 across the state. But nationally ethanol represents only about five percent of all available fuel, and there are only about a 1,200 E85 stations nationwide, about 0.75% of all gas stations. This is no more apparent than in a desert state like New Mexico.
I hoped we would simply stumble across a station offering E85 and fill up like it was no big deal, which is how ethanol supporters would imagine it to be. When that proved to be impossible, we searched on the internet and found that there are five - count 'em - stations serving E85 in the state of New Mexico. Two of them are in the National Labs of Los Alamos, leaving three for the rest of the state. None of them were nearby, and it seemed disingenuous to have to drive out of our way to fill up with ethanol, so the Great New Mexican Ethanol Hunt ended sadly in front of a computer screen in a hotel room.
The question, then, is why all the flex fuel vehicles and no flex fuel? One answer is that American carmakers are diligently preparing for the day when ethanol will be pumped easily and cheaply anywhere in the country. Another answer is that carmakers recieve fuel economy credits for every flex fuel vehicle they build. Carmakers in America are required to meet what are called CAFE standards, company-wide minimum fuel economy standards. When these companies build flex fuel vehicles, they recieve a credit against those standards, allowing them to produce cars, trucks, and monster SUVs that do not meet CAFE standards but avoid the hefty fines. They are allowed these credits regardless of whether the vehicle produced ever sees an E85 pump. And many of them perhaps never will.
