Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9004010224
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Jerry Knight The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
The president and his media minions bounced over the boards that cover the subway tunnel on M Street, passed the winos who hang out on the street corner and turned into Dave Robinson's Sunoco station.
There, the president got out and pumped some methanol into a Ford Crown Victoria, posed for pictures and proclaimed that his plan to clean up the air is making progress because now you can buy clean-burning methanol right here in Washington.
"The availability of methanol in a metropolitan area like Washington is an important step toward the widespread use of clean fuels," he said.
Like a lot of things that happen in Washington, the president's pump-jockey performance was largely an illusion.
Oh, the methanol pump was real enough. You can buy the fuel commonly known as wood alcohol there - if you have a car that will run on the stuff.
It is not true, a Sun Refining and Marketing Co. spokesman insists, that the car the president posed with - driven daily by Deputy Energy Secretary Henson Moore - is the only one in town that can burn methanol. "There are two or three in Washington," said Sun's Paul Durkin. Three, for sure, the White House confirms. Not enough even to haul the president's security detail to the media event.
Out in Detroit - where Sun opened another station a week later - Ford Motor Co. has a small fleet of methanol-burning cars. In California, there are a couple of traffic jams' worth of cars running on wood alcohol. But you can't get here from there in a methanol-powered car because there aren't enough stations in between and the stuff is so nasty that you wouldn't dare carry it in a can in your trunk. Methanol is so poisonous that just getting it on your skin is dangerous, and exposure to spills can leave you blind.
That's not all the bad news about methanol, but first the good news: It forms ozone, the key element in smog, at a rate 80 percent less than gasoline. It's also vastly better than gasoline for "running-loss emissions," which means it doesn't evaporate out of the tank into the atmosphere the way gasoline does. And a methanol-burning diesel being developed by General Motors Corp. puts out only half the nitrogen pollution of a conventional diesel and almost none of the dreaded diesel soot that stinks and sticks to everything.
Methanol advocates - including the Bush administration - claim that using the stuff in cars could improve the air quality by 30 percent to 40 percent.
The bad news is that burning methanol in car engines puts out lots more formaldehyde - a toxic pollutant - than gasoline, and there are several other problems. Methanol is very tricky to handle. Not only is it highly toxic, but it burns with an invisible flame. (The pipes on Sunoco's methanol pump are double-walled to prevent leaks.) Methanol cars may be good for the air, but methanol-manufacturing plants are nasty polluters. They pour out vast amounts of carbon dioxide - the stuff blamed for producing the " greenhouse effect" and global warming.
Then there are the fuel efficiency and cost problems. Methanol has a lot less energy than gasoline; it takes 1.7 gallons to drive your car as far as you can go on a gallon of gas. That means you need a bigger gas tank, which means a heavier car, which means less fuel efficiency. As for cost, Sun says that if methanol could be produced as cheaply as gasoline, it would take $8.50 worth of methanol to drive your car as far as $5 worth of gas because of its poorer mileage.
Right now, however, you can't make methanol as cheaply as gasoline. It's made from coal - the hard way - or natural gas - the easy way. In the United States, natural gas costs too much to be used as a large-scale methanol feedstock. The world's best source of cheap natural gas is Libya. President Bush probably wouldn't want to have his picture taken at Moammar's Methanol Station and Poison Gas Works.
The point of all this is not to debunk methanol as an alternative fuel (save your letters to the editor on that point) but to discredit the practice of leadership by illusion. The president's trip to Dave Robinson's Sunoco station did not advance by even one micron the essential national debate over clean air, automobile-emission standards and alternative fuels.
The White House says Bush was making a statement when he filled up the methanol-burning Ford. "The bully pulpit goes with the presidency and this president is not afraid to use it," said a White House media-feeder, seemingly not the least bit embarrassed by the lack of cars to use the methanol pump or the lack of substance in the photo opportunity.
This was not a pulpit with a preacher elaborating on the lessons of scripture. The few words said while the pump and cameras were running hardly qualified as a homily. It was more like the pope blessing the believers in St. Peter's Square than an evangelist beseeching the unwashed to change their ways.
But the methanol media event was, unfortunately, a parable for the way Washington works these days. More symbol than substance, more photogenic than philosophical, it was an all-too-typical hour in the workday of the world's most important leader. Instead of pumping methanol and primping for the cameras, the president might more productively have spent that time talking with his energy advisers about the complexities of clean air, energy independence and post-petroleum societies.
George Bush is not to blame; there is nothing particularly Republican in this sort of staged no-substance non-event. It is every politician, it is the voters and their surrogates in the media. We don't want to understand the nuances of these issues, we don't want to balance the inevitable trade-offs or face hard choices about the implications of our lifestyles. We are more than willing to settle for the illusion of leadership. Fill 'er up, George.
by CNB