The problem is that one can find articles going either way. No one wants to do the hard work of life-cycle calorimitry on the blending of Ethanol to fuel. It's a lot of inputs, and to include the secondary, and maybe the tertiary components of the blending of Ethanol in fuel makes for very hard or absolute conclusions.
Do we add the diesel fuel burned by the tractors and trucks associated with the planting, and harvesting of corn for Ethanol production? This would be an avoided fuel use if Ethanol were NOT blended in the fuel.
Do we substitute the increased hydrocracking required to increase the octane level, plus the other octane additives that take the place of Ethanol in raising octane to required levels?
Ethanol has a lower specific energy content by mass, and volume. That much is certain. So the fuel mileage in a vehicle goes down(consumption goes up) due to needing a minimum amount of calories to produce the same motion.
I can easily make an argument that the total environmental damage caused by blending Ethanol to fuel is greater than the modest cleaner burning of Ethanol in cars. Since the addition of catalytic process to the modern cars makes them pretty clean, the delta between emissions between E-10 and non-Eth fuels is vanishingly small. On the order of micro-grams or tenths of Parts Per Million of CO and NOx. In some case, the difference in emissions is so small it can't be measured.
It's also safe to say that blending Ethanol avoids using the other blend constituents and increased oil cracking needed to produce better octane fuel.
So, the answer is, it depends. If I were a ag company like ADM, and was getting hundreds of millions of $$$ per year from the fed govt, I would surely buy the best science I could get to prove that Ethanol blending was favorable. So - follow the money, and buy the science one wants to use.
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