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Ethanol health threat might surpass that from gasoline
If ethanol ever gains widespread use as a clean alternative fuel to gasoline, people with respiratory illnesses may be in trouble.
A new study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases.
"Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution," Mark Z. Jacobson, the study's author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in a statement. "But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage."
The study appeared in Wednesday's online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. It comes as the Bush administration is pushing plans to boost ethanol production and the nation's automakers are required by 2012 to have half their vehicles run on flex fuel, allowing the use of either gasoline or ethanol.
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More from StateJacobson used a computer to model how pollution from ethanol fuel would affect different parts of the country in 2020, when ethanol-burning vehicles are expected to be common.
He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far the hardest hit because of the city's reliance on the automobile and environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there.
His study shows the city would experience a 9 percent increase in the rate of ozone-related respiratory deaths 120 more per year compared with the projection in 2020 assuming continued gasoline use.
Pollution from ethanol would be riskier than pollution from gasoline because when ethanol breaks down in the atmosphere, it generates considerably more ozone. Ozone is a highly corrosive gas that damages the delicate tissues of the lungs. In fact, it's so corrosive that it can crack rubber and wear away statues, Jacobson said.
Posted by ThinkingForMySelf on April 19, 2007 at 6:40 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I've known about this for along time. As a runner, when the new winter gas formula came out several years ago, I new by the smell and by the reaction of my lungs. This is going to be a big issue, but I'm afraid not until it does it's damage as was the case with MTBE: Methyl tert-butyl ether.
All this ethanal production might cut back on imports of oil but will, and already has jacked the price of food commodities such as, you guessed it, Corn, thus all other food products that you normally would not relate as or to corn. Start looking at ingredient labels in anything you know is sweet and those that are not. You will see Fructose Syrup from Corn. That is but one of many examples how this production will inflate the prices for a long time in the food sector.
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