ETHANOL: New corn-based fuel available at North Tonawanda Wilson Farms.

By Neale Gulley

gulleyn@gnnewspaper.com

NORTH TONAWANDA — With promoting alternative fuels among President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign promises, North Tonawanda now sits with a relative few cities in offering motorists a choice.

The first few customers in the Buffalo area’s history to pump E85 ethanol into their cars did so amid a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the 1060 Niagara Falls Blvd. Wilson Farms where the first such pump was unveiled Thursday.

Elsewhere, in the Midwest, a substantial industry has already begun to emerge around ethanol.

Most refineries for ethanol are located in the Midwest and the corn belt, all but a few dozen of the nation’s 145 such plants.

Reid Petroleum buys the fuel from many producers, but some of what they use is already being produced in Orleans County, said Scott Sterry, fuels marketing manager for Reid Petroleum Corp., which has been a supplier for Wilson Farms since the middle 1980s.

A $90 million ethanol plant started production in November 2007 in the Town of Shelby in Orleans County.

The only facility of its kind in the Northeast, it purchases up to 40 percent of its corn from area farmers.

The plant processes 20 million bushels of corn a year — nearly one third of the state’s total crop — to produce 50 million gallons of pure ethanol for use in gasoline. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Every bushel of corn creates 2.8 gallons of ethanol, 17 pounds of distilled grain and a certain amount of corn oil, said Western New York Energy Executive Vice President Michael Sawyer, whose father brought the plant to fruition.

Once completed, the 200-proof ethanol is sent to gasoline distributors, where it is typically blended at 10 percent. The E85 gas sold at limited area gas stations is an 85 percent ethanol blend.

“I think it’s important to distinguish that it can only be used in flex-fuel vehicles,” Sterry said

Making cars suitable for E85 has occurred since the 1980s according to some accounts. That process requires only modifications to certain engine and fuel system components by auto makers, and drivers are encouraged to check their owner manuals for flex-fuel compliance.

So the program is ready for increasing implementation as companies like Reid vie for early emergence into the marketplace, but comes down to a number of tradeoffs when mileage, cost and the environmental impacts of its very production are concerned.

Information from a U.S. Department of Energy Web-site states E85 produces 24.1 percent less energy than gas per gallon, meaning drivers may have to fill up more often.

“It’s a question of making it viable to our consumers. Our sales figures will tell us how supportive they are of the product,” he said.

The National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition Web-site lists newer models by Chrysler, Ford/Lincoln/Mercury, General Motors, Isuzu, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan and Toyota capable of converting E85, which as the name suggests, contains about 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent conventional gasoline. The solution is not radically different from standard gas, except the portion made up of ethanol is much higher.

Ethanol is made using fermented sugars primarily from corn in the United States, but from sugar cane and other organic materials in other countries.

“Every Sunoco, for example, is E10,” Sterry said. “It’s kind of the inverse of E85.”

Wilson Farms’ new pump as of Thursday was selling the stuff for $2.29 per gallon. That’s 36 cents higher than the national average price for E85, though the price is also cheaper than regular unleaded gas in this area and nearly mirrors the national average; the U.S. average is $2.26, according to the Web-site.

“For both environmental and economic reasons, there is an increasing number of flex-fuel vehicles on the road throughout the U.S., including in Western New York,” Reid Petroleum’s President Paul Quebral said.

Sterry said the company invested for months to determine a location and poll the numbers of registered flex-fuel equipped vehicles already driving around.

“We spent quite a bit of time and money trying to figure that out,” he said. “Things are going well.”

The decreasing price of regular gas may not have been ideal for the launching of the alternate fuel, but Sterry was thrilled with Thursday’s event and the benchmark it represents.

Not everyone studying methods to reduce dependence on oil and clean up the environment is perfectly in love with the stuff, however, and it is widely claimed that the “carbon footprint” for producing so much corn — irrigation, use of petroleum-fueled equipment, etc. — represents only scant progress. Some say food prices will continue to rise as more corn (used in a wide variety of domestic food products) is diverted to fuel production.

That said, there is data showing many benefits to diversifying the range of fuels available. A study by a group called LECG, LLC, claims the push created 238,000 jobs in all sectors of the economy in 2007, contributed $4.6 billion in federal tax revenue and reduced oil imports by 228 million barrels.

In 2007, Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which requires:

• The use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels annually by 2022.

• That 16 billion of the 36 billion gallons must come from cellulosic feedstocks (considered at the forefront of the technology, using the stiff cell walls in plants like wood and switchgrass in lieu of food products like corn).

The act also creates greenhouse gas emissions requirements, works to counter potential discrimination against E85 in marketing and calls for a study into the viability of a national ethanol pipeline.

Across the nation, the relative inefficiency of corn has become a political issue, with growers here seeking a place in the future of energy production but scientists pointing to the far more efficient use of sugar cane in Brazil, for example.

An article posted on CNNmoney.com last year called sugar cane ethanol six times more economical to produce than corn ethanol. The report states the industry as of 2007 has created about a million jobs there.

Contact reporter Neale Gulley

at 693-1000, ext. 114.