General Motors Suddenly Remembers that Ethanol is Good

SEE ALSO: Alcohol and Driving DO Mix

AUTO CENTRAL - August 24, 2010: Just when it was looking like GM was turning its back on ethanol (after the years they spent promoting flex-fuel vehicles - not to mention a fortune of money), the automaker's top alt-fuel executive made some rather remarkable statements in support of ethanol during a recent interview with GreenTechMedia.

Britta Gross

In the interview, Britta Gross, GM's Director of Global Energy Systems and Infrastructure Commercialization, was apparantly given permission to once again state that GM's position that ethanol and biodiesel are the best and lowest cost, near-term solution to our becoming energy independent and getting America off foreign oil. "The whole ethanol strategy is a get-off-gas strategy," she said.

Although Britta, as a GM employee, strongly supports the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt electric car, she contrasted the electric solution to the alcohol solution by making the following points:

--Ethanol cars cost less. A car that runs on E85, or 85 percent ethanol, only costs a few hundred dollars more to make than an equivalent gas car. "The incremental cost is affordable," she said. Producing a similar green diesel adds $3,000. A plug-in hybrid or all-electric costs even more to manufacture. Advantage: ethanol.

--Electric cars will likely always carry a premium. Batteries for electric cars now cost around $700 per kilowatt hour. While that price will decline, it won't be a precipitous decline.

"Some people are unrealistic" when it comes to estimating how cheap lithium batteries will become, she said. "Batteries are going to end up being more expensive than combustion engines."

--Ethanol is already in the market and so are the cars.

The remarkable nature of these new comments is that just a few weeks ago, C. Coleman Jones, the biofuel implementation manager at General Motors, made several outrageous public statements in which he repeated the anti-ethanol camp's mantra, that "more testing is needed" before the EPA mandates increasing the percentage of ethanol in today's "regular" blend to 15% from the present 10%. Statements that we believe, further entrenches the Oil industry's self-serving position that "we are not yet ready for ethanol", while maintaining their much loved and profitable 100 year monopoly and status-quo.

When The Auto Channel's president Bob Gordon asked GM's Jones about his surprising (to us) remarks, Jones continued to insist that the additional 5% of ethanol in E15 might harm engines, contrary to the many published studies from independent sources, including the National Renewable Energy Labs.

Conversely, The Auto Channel (and now it seems once again, GM among others) remains convinced that electric cars won't have a serious impact on our country's reduction in the use of gasoline for decades, perhaps until 2040, 2050, or maybe even 2090. We feel that the hype about electric cars is just a diversionary tactic used by the pro-oil and gasoline interests to take our collective minds off our nation's dire need to get rid of gasoline as our primary engine fuel (see Electric Vehicles - Solution or Diversion). This managed and controlled (all too successfuly, we're sorry to say) collective placidity provides the cover national politicians need to delay the needed mandate to replace oil based fuels with domestically produced ethanol, made from locally grown and harvested raw materials, that is the answer to the energy question and it satisfies many environmental issues as well. Moreover, this would be true for nearly all democratic nations.

So if it pisses you off that Saudis and Kuwaitis pay about 60 cents per gallon of gasoline, while we pay (in money and young American's lives) to protect their oil wells and then pay five or six times that amount for gasoline, turning to ethanol now gives us the chance to right a whole bunch of wrongs.

Welcome back to the fray Britta, we are glad you are here!