Tyler Hamilton has an intriguing article in Monday’s Toronto Star, It’s time to ‘flex’ our energy muscles, about a proposal from Robert Zubrin that all cars (and, I presume, light trucks) made in North America to be flex-fuel capable, meaning they could run on gasoline or E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.

Zubrin points out, quite correctly, what a disaster it is for countries like the US to continue importing incredible amounts of oil (about 12.2 million barrels of the 20.5 the US consumes every day, according to the US Dept. of Energy’s latest Annual Energy Review). It truly is a national security issue, from money being funneled to people we would like to see not funded to trade deficit issues. His solution is to force flex-fuel vehicles onto the market, which he says would cost about $100/vehicle, thereby blowing open the market for E85, which would greatly reduce the US’ imports of oil.

Sorry, but I’m not buying it, and not just for the reasons Hamilton brings up, such as the questionable environmental impacts of ethanol production, at least as we do it today. Let me elaborate:

There are already about six million flex fuel vehicles on the US roads, including most (all?) Chrysler minivans sold here for years. I used to own one when I had my woodworking business, and I never once put E85 into it, because despite being surrounded by other flex-fuel capable vehicles in NY State, there were precisely zero gas stations that sold E85 anywhere close. I wanted to try E85, and I would have if I had had the chance, but I was out of luck. (Rochester now has two gas stations that sell E85, although my minivan is long gone. But those gas stations are about 20 miles away, round trip, and far out of my normal travel pattern, so I wouldn’t bother using the fuel, anyway.)

The problems with ethanol go far beyond the classic chicken-and-egg issue of how you sell a fuel before the vehicles that use it exist. Those vehicles do exist, and in numbers that would support the sale of E85, but transporting ethanol beyond the corn belt is expensive, thanks to difficulties in shipping it via pipeline.

Transportation and retail infrastructure problems pale in comparison to production. The US is already consuming 20% of our entire US corn crop to make about 7.2 billion gallons of ethanol. (Other numbers I’ve seen quote the 2007 production at only 6.4 billion gallons.) What would happen if we wanted to fuel all those newly mandated vehicles on E85? Selling about 16 million vehicles/year in the US over three years would ensure about 20% of the rolling stock (currently about 241 million vehicles) was flex-fuel capable. And 20% of the US’ yearly motor fuel consumption of 140 billion gallons is 28 billion gallons of E85, or 23.8 billion gallons of ethanol.

Where will that additional 16.6 billion gallons of ethanol/year over the amount we currently produce come from? And what happens in another three years when we’re trying to come up with not 23.8 but a total of 47.6 billion gallons of ethanol/year? Converting the entire US corn crop into ethanol, every last kernel, would still produce “only” 36 billion gallons/year.

How much would this scheme help our basic problem of importing so much oil? Ignoring the relatively small amount of ethanol currently used as an oxygenate in regular gasoline, in three years we would be replacing 23.8 billion gallons of gasoline/year with ethanol, or about 1.6 million barrels of oil per day. That would still leave the US importing 10.6 million barrels of oil per day. After six years, we’d be displacing about 3.2 million barrels of oil/day and importing 9 million barrels/day.

Assuming, of course, that we could find a way to produce and distribute that enormous amount of ethanol, which simply won’t happen without a truly astounding technological breakthrough coupled with a massive and exceedingly quick infrastructure change. By far the more likely scenario is that the overwhelming majority of those millions of new flex-fuel vehicles would simply be run on regular gasoline, as I fueled my minivan, and for the same reason–a lack of available E85.

Zubrin and Hamilton mention PHEV’s and the potential to run their on board engines with E85. This is clearly a winning combination, and it’s one I’ve written about in the past. But that’s an entirely different option than the proposed mandate, given that non-PHEV vehicles will dominate sales for a long time. Plus, those PHEV’s are likely to be flex-fuel capable, anyway. GM has already stated that the Volt will be, for example.

If you think that I’m judging Zubrin’s plan by a too strict set of rules, then use your own numbers. Make your own assumption about the percentage of those mandated flex-fuel vehicles that will actually use E85, and see what the numbers tell you about how much ethanol we’d have to produce (and remember that detail about 20% of the US corn crop turning into only 7.2 billion gallons of ethanol) and how much it would therefore reduce the US’ oil imports.

I agree completely with Zubrin’s goals, but I don’t see any way that the numbers support it. You just can’t get there from here, no matter how much we’d like the destination.