The Open Fuel Standard Act Has a Better Chance Than Previous Attempts

In an article in Ethanol Producer Magazine is an interview with Anne Korin and Gal Luft, who said that the Open Fuel Standard Act has a much better chance of being passed than previous attempts because it requires the cars to be able to burn both ethanol and methanol, instead of one or the other.

The author of the article, Holly Jessen, writes:

Laws mandating FFVs (flex-fuel vehicles) have not gone anywhere, Korin says, because legislators coming from states outside the Corn Belt have no reason to support ethanol FFVs. If methanol were added to the mix, however, FFVs would become much more attractive to legislators from states strong in coal and natural gas production. While most methanol is made from natural gas, China makes a large amount of it from coal. If the producers and supporters of corn, natural gas and coal were to join together to ask lawmakers to mandate FFVs, that would be a nearly unbeatable coalition, she says.

Congress is currently divided into two categories when it comes to ethanol — those that love it and those that hate it, Luft says. Often legislators from coal and natural gas producing states are among those that are very hostile toward ethanol. However, if all FFVs also operated on methanol, those states would be much more sympathetic to the goals of the Open Fuel Standard, Luft says, because their states would get a bigger piece of the liquid transportation fuels pie. And, so would ethanol. Read the whole article here.

The good news is, the Methanol Institute has come out in favor of the Open Fuel Standard Act (see their statement here).