This from a news story on WCCO Minneapolis the other day. A kit already exists that can retrofit almost any vehicle for ethanol. It's a big secret; guess why?
Letters from big oil companies show they stand in the way of ethanol.
"We're addicted to it, unfortunately," said Pawlenty. "And sadly in our country they want to keep the monopoly and when some alternative suppliers come up and say, 'Hey, we'd like to be in the market too,' the incumbent monopoly isn't real excited about the competition."
That means we're stuck in a chicken and egg debate. Automakers won't make more ethanol vehicles because there's not enough ethanol pumps because there aren't enough ethanol vehicles on the road.
There are roughly 200 million passenger cars in this country. If starting Thursday, every new car built was a flex-fuel model, it would take about 17 years to switch out every car.
That could be done faster if current cars could be converted to flex-fuel and that's what Larry Olsen, a South Dakota corn farmer, did with his 1997 Lincoln Town Car. After 5,000 miles, he's noticed only a few gallons difference per mile with ethanol over gasoline.
"Most of the time, it's been the average of one to two miles a gallon," Olsen said. "It hasn't been the, you know, 20 percent loss like what the industry is claiming."
Olsen used a conversion kit made by Flex Tek. The technology was invented in Brazil, where no foreign oil is imported and the country runs on an ethanol fuel economy.
"More than 50,000 vehicles are running on this technology in Brazil today," said Kevin Whited, the sales manager of Flex Tek.
Critics have said E85 can ruin engines but most vehicles are already built to run with 10 percent ethanol and ethanol is cleaner.
"It will perform much better with ethanol," Whited said.
At a shop in Long Lake, Minn. Brad Bristol and Flex Tek mechanic Kevin Burrell converted a BMW so it can run on either ethanol or gasoline.
It took 15 minutes, but the little engine modification, according to an obscure Environmental Protection Agency memorandum, is a violation of the Clean Air Act.
The memo was written at a time that didn't even envision ethanol conversions.
"We don't have to invent the wheel here," Pawlenty said. "Brazil already did it. The company that did it in Brazil also has a presence in the United States. We could take those kits, we could have the University of Minnesota or Minnesota State at Mankato do tests on various makes and models of cars about emissions, deliver those research results to the EPA and encourage them to use us as a pilot project or change the law all at once."
Changing the EPA rules would require congressional action.