Jim Belcher didn’t know what was going on. His 2000 Cadillac Escalade had been running just fine, but then out of the blue the “Service Engine Soon” light blazed on.
The scoop from the mechanic: bad sensors and damage to his catalytic converter. He was looking at a $2,000-plus repair bill.
The what-caused-it is something that bothers Belcher.
“Your car is running on 16 percent ethanol, and that probably caused your problems,” Belcher was told.
But the stickers on gas pumps in Virginia and three dozen other states say that the ethanol content is a maximum 10 percent, which is generally considered safe to use in conventional car and truck engines. So how would Belcher end up with a potentially hazardous 84/16 mix in his Escalade?
“A lot of gas retailers are taking over and blending the ethanol in themselves. And the fuel distributors are getting upset because they’re losing money, so they’re blending in their 10 percent. So you get 10 percent from the retailers and 10 percent from the fuel distributors, so they can all get the subsidies from the government, and you get problems with cars that aren’t equipped to handle that kind of motor fuel,” said Gail Alexander, the owner of the Atlanta-based Fuel-Testers, which markets fuel-test kits to consumers and gas stations that can gauge ethanol content at the pump.
Sales are strong for Alexander as more and more people like Belcher take their vehicles to the shop and hear back that the engine problems that they’re experiencing is the result of high ethanol content, which can shorten the life span of catalytic converters and damage internal fuel-system components in addition to adding what Alexander calls “dirty gas” to an engine’s fuel line.
“I call it dirty gas because many gas stations didn’t properly clean and prepare their tanks before switching over to ethanol, so what happens is alcohol, being such a strong cleanser and solvent, cleans years of debris that’s in the tanks and the pumps, and dispenses gas that’s filled with rust, sediment and all kinds of things,” Alexander said.
Ethanol can have the same effect on your engine. “Sometimes alcohol, being such a cleanser and solvent, can remove years and years of dirt and rust and debris in your engine,” Alexander said.
Another issue with ethanol – water contamination. Ethanol readily attracts and absorbs water, Alexander explained, “and it can absorb up to 50 times its volume in water,” which obviously isn’t good for an automobile engine.
Belcher wants to know why the government doesn’t appear to be doing anything to combat the problem, particularly because it’s the government at the federal and state levels that is leading the push toward ethanol through subsidies and incentives. I can confirm that at the state level precious little is being done. A spokesperson at the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services told me that the office responsible for motor-fuel standards has just five inspectors working the state, which is akin to trying to find the needle in the haystack given the volume of gasoline sold in Virginia each day.
Steve Biser, the shop foreman at Berrang, has a GM test kit that he uses to measure ethanol content at the pump. “All the gas stations in the area have stickers on their pumps saying the ethanol content is a 10 percent mix. I’ve measured as much as 20 percent,” said Biser, who told me that he sees people come in with problems like the one Belcher experienced with his Escalade once or twice a week year-round, with the numbers increasing over the winter months.
“It was worst two winters ago. It was so bad that every car that would come in, we’d say, I bet I know what that is,” Biser said. “We had other dealers call us to ask us if we were seeing the same thing. One of them thought they had it narrowed down as far as what gas station was the source of the problem. But it’s hard to do that because people will tell you, I filled up here, then topped it off there.”
“Why,” Belcher said, “are we pumping ethanol into our engines and we have no idea what the actual ethanol content per station is, or range of percent from full to empty in the station tanks, when this ethanol is eating cars apart from the inside, damaging engines and costing us millions of dollars nationwide in preventable damage?”
I’d say it seems to me that we need to do more on the lines of thinking this whole thing through.
– Story by Chris Graham
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