A Better Way to Halt Global Warming? Response to Dr. Chichilnisky’s Direct Air Capture Article

By Don Siefkes, Executive Director, E100 Ethanol Group

Special to The Digest

Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky’s process of direct carbon capture is technically elegant, but there is a lot simpler, lower cost and faster way to halt global warming that will ensure the future of the biofuel industry.

Gasoline is the single largest emitter by far of net, new CO2 in the U.S. – 3.5 trillion lbs/yr. Coal for electricity generation is 2^nd at 2.5 trillion lbs, but dropping fast due to wind and solar coming on line and replacement by natural gas.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to capture CO2 just so we can keep using the major source of it – gasoline.

We buy 17 million light duty (LD) vehicles per year over 98% of which are powered by gasoline. We scrap between 14 and 15 million per year so the fleet grows by 2 -3 million new LD vehicles per year.

This is why you can’t solve the problem of CO2 emissions by simply increasing mileage requirements or selling a few hundred thousand electric vehicles (EV’s) which are not zero emission when it comes to CO2.

The straightforward answer is to ban the sale of any new LD vehicle in the U.S. after model year 2023 that burns gasoline (or diesel) as the primary fuel, but do not specify what needs to be used in its place. Leave existing gasoline vehicles alone to lead out their natural lives.

Define primary as anything greater than 2% by volume for liquid fueled vehicles.

After all, the 1^st step to get out of a hole is to stop digging. This is what we did with DDT and Freon 11. We banned them over a period of years application by application, but didn’t specify what had to take their place. We left that solution up to farmers, chemical companies, and consumers.

It’s foolish to specify electric vehicles (EV’s) as the solution. It may be electric or it may not be. Leave that decision up to the car companies and consumers. Right now, they have their choice of 4 things — electric, hydrogen, ethanol, and natural gas, but you want to leave the solution open to any possibility.

In this case, the auto companies would certainly choose ethanol for the vast majority of LD vehicles since it doesn’t cost them anymore, even though there might be some fleet uses that remain for NGV’s and EV’s. Environmentalists would support this since ethanol made from cellulose and agricultural waste is a truly carbon neutral fuel.

After 15 years of selling LD vehicles burning something other than gasoline, we will have 255 million gasoline-free vehicles (almost the entire fleet) in the U.S., global warming will be a thing of the past, and the ethanol industry will prosper as never before.