April 18, 2007 — If President George W. Bush's Twenty in Ten Initiative works to increase renewable and alternative transportation fuels, the United States will have 35 billion gallons of ethanol at its disposal by 2017.
Sounds great. After all, alternative fuels reduce our country's dependency on foreign oil and are gentler on the environment. Right?
Maybe not. A new study shows that ethanol could pose the same or even greater health risks to humans than gasoline and does little, if anything, to make the air more breathable.
"Ethanol is a really poor solution to the climate problem and it is not a good solution for the air quality problem," said Mark Jacobson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Jacobson reports his research in the April 18 online edition of Environmental Science and Technology.
The results are based on a comprehensive computer model that combines human population distribution and health data with complex environmental conditions, including chemical reactions, temperatures, sunlight, clouds, wind and precipitation.
Jacobson used the model to simulate two air quality cases for the year 2020 — one that showed what the air quality would look like if Americans were still driving gasoline-powered vehicles and another that illustrated air quality if everyone were driving vehicles powered by E-85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
Jacobson compared the two scenarios and found that although using ethanol, instead of gasoline, will reduce two dangerous carcinogenic emissions (benzene and butadiene), it will increase two others (formaldehyde and acetaldehyde).
Ethanol also escalates ground-level ozone, otherwise known as smog. (The same ozone located 10 to 30 miles high in the stratosphere protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation.)
