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What people 'know' about ethanol

Posted: July 12, 2010 at 11:37 AM CST

EPM associate editor Holly Jessen writes about misinformation about ethanol in her guest blog.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. When I took a job at Ethanol Producer Magazine, I wasn’t an ethanol supporter.

That doesn’t mean I was against it, however. I was just one of the general population members that knew—and, frankly, cared—very little about ethanol. I didn’t pay much attention to whether I was putting straight gas or E10 into my vehicle. As long as it got my car from point A to point B, I was happy. The phrase, “addiction to foreign oil” hadn’t yet crossed my radar. I had no clue, or any curiosity about, where or how the gas I was putting in my car got to the gas station. If asked, I could not have correctly answered if the U.S. was conducting off-shore drilling for oil.

Of course, that was almost four years ago. (I worked for the magazine for about a year in 2007 before moving, and returning to the job at the beginning of the year.) Since that time, there’s been enough media coverage on the subject that most people know at least a little bit about ethanol. Certainly the Gulf oil spill has brought the issue of petroleum use to the forefront.

Unfortunately, what a lot of people “know” about ethanol is misinformation. Even more unfortunate, the mainstream media doesn’t always get it right either. Not too far in the past, I remember reading a story that quoted a person off the street saying that ethanol caused problems with clogging filters. The individual being quoted was not an expert and got ethanol confused with biodiesel. The reporter, also not an expert, didn’t know enough about biofuels to catch the mistake.

Misinformation is one problem and bias against ethanol is another. Although a newspaper journalist is supposed to present both sides without picking one, some reporters have a hard time with this. Perhaps they missed that day in class. Or maybe it was more like a week or two.

The most recent example I’ve seen was in the Claremore Daily Progress, which is based in Oklahoma. On July 1, this newspaper published a story about a gas station manager that, due to “outcry over his recent move to ethanol-laced fuel has convinced him to switch back to real gas.”

Let’s dissect that for a moment, shall we? First, let’s look at the last two words. The writer, perhaps following the lead of the interviewee, perhaps not, referred to gas with no ethanol in it as “real gas.” So, what is the 90 percent gas in E10? Baloney juice?

Now let’s move on to the phrase, “ethanol-laced fuel”. Talk about biased. In a short 311-word article, the writer used the phrase four times and the phrase “non-ethanol fuel” another four times. Out of curiosity, I looked up the word “laced” in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Out of the six definitions, the closest one to this use has three sub-definitions.

a : to add a dash of liquor to
b : to add something to impart pungency, savor, or zest to
c : to adulterate with a substance

Personally, I do not feel that any of these definitions fit with E10, the fuel in question. Due to the tone of the article, definition “c” seems to be the closest to what the writer was trying to convey. Or, if he didn’t intend to convey that, it certainly came across loud and clear anyway. That’s a pretty negative slant. In that scenario, it’s obvious the guard isn’t aware his coffee contains a sedative, nor would he drink it if he was aware.

I told you in the beginning that, before I took this job, I wasn’t an ethanol supporter or an ethanol detractor. But the last year and a half writing about the industry has shown me what good it has done and has the potential to do in the future.

It’s so important that the industry continues to get the word out there. The message needs to get to the uneducated public citizen, much like I was four years ago, and to reporters like the one from the Claremore newspaper. Whether they mean to or not, many people are spreading misinformation that is doing real damage to an industry that deserves a chance to make a dent in petroleum use.

-Holly Jessen