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As concerns about global warming, renewable resources and rising gas prices have become more prevalent in recent years, more attention has been paid to the longstanding debate over ethanol and ethanol blends as alternatives to gasoline. Automakers considered ethanol as an alternative fuel as long as 100 years ago.  Henry Ford and Charles Kettering of General Motors spent a great deal of time looking to it as a renewable and less-volatile way to power cars.

Ethanol is made by fermenting and then distilling starch and sugar crops - maize, sorghum, potatoes, wheat, sugar-cane, cornstalks, fruit and vegetable waste.   And since the mid 1980s, ethanol has also been produced from cellose fiber sources - enzymes and production processes convert cellulose to sugar thus enabling the production of ethanol from almost any biomass, including agricultural wastes, straw, leaves, grass clippings, sawdust or old newspapers.  Because it is easy to manufacture and process, and can be made from very common materials, it is steadily becoming a promising alternative to gasoline throughout much of the world.  And unlike other alternatives - electric cars or fuel technologies such as hydrogen - today's cars can run on ethanol-rich blends with only minor tweaks.  Beginning with the model year 1999, an increasing number of vehicles in the world are manufactured with engines which can run on any fuel from 0% ethanol up to 100% ethanol without modification.

There are several advantages to using ethanol as an alternative to gasoline or, more commonly, as a blend with gasoline.  When blended with gasoline, ethanol increases the octane rating and lessens, or eliminates, engine knock without additives like lead.  It also is renewable, biodegradable, and burns cleaner than gasoline thereby reducing harmful emissions - ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide levels by 25-30%, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

When Henry Ford told a New York Times reporter that ethanol was "the fuel of the future" in 1925, he was expressing an opinion that was widely shared in the automotive industry.  "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust - almost anything," he said.  "There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented.  There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."

Studies of ethanol as an internal combustion engine fuel began in the U.S. with the Edison Electric Testing Laboratory and Columbia University in 1906.  Elihu Thomson reported that despite a smaller heat, or B.T.U. value, "a gallon of alcohol will develop substantially the same power in an internal combustion engine as a gallon of gasoline."  And tests by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that same year also demonstrated the efficiency of alcohol in engines and described how gasoline engines could be modified for higher power with pure alcohol fuel or for equivalent fuel consumption, depending on the need.

Ethanol-blended fuel was adopted in isolated instances in America during the 1920s and early 1930s.  One blend was "Alcogas" although little is known about it today save for references to it in the technical literature of the time.  A blend called "Vegaline" was made from potatoes and was widely sold in Idaho and Washington state, but it ceased production in 1934, a casualty of the Great Depression.  These and other sporadic attempts to market an ethanol-blended fuel never caught on, due to primarily to economic disadvantages but also to Prohibition and opposition by the oil industry.

By the 1930s, with the country caught in the depths of the Great Depression, new ideas were welcome.  Corn prices had dropped from 45 cents per bushel to 10 cents causing businesses, scientists, and farmers to begin thinking about new uses for farm products.  It was thought that making using crops to make ethanol would help put people back to work and ease the severe problems of the Depression and almost three dozen bills to subsidize ethanol fuel were taken up in eight states in the 1930s.  The movement for ethanol fuels came to be seen as part of a broader campaign called "farm chemurgy".  Farm chemurgy was, in part, a populist Republican alternative to Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's agricultural policies and sought to bring science and chemistry to bear on farm products and find new commercially-viable uses for them.  Henry Ford backed the idea by sponsoring a conference in Dearborn in 1935.  This conference resulted in the creation of the National Farm Chemurgic Council, and annual conferences followed.

A gas station selling corn alcohol gasoline in Lincoln, Nebraska, 1933

The onset of interest in ethanol fuel in the 1930s caught the oil industry off guard, but once alarmed, it reacted swiftly.  In the spring of 1933, the American Petroleum Institute (API) introduced a coordinated program to combat ethanol gasoline blending.  In a set of memos, API stated that the blend of ethanol and gasoline, as was used in France, Italy and Germany, "will harm the petroleum industry and the automobile industry as well as state and national treasuries by reducing [oil] consumption."  The memos further proclaimed that the only ones to benefit would be distillers, railroads and bootleggers "to whom would be opened brand new fields of fraud."  Editorials paid for by oil industry sponsors claimed that ethanol fuel would make "speakeasys" out of gasoline stations because bootleggers could easily separate out the gasoline and sell the alcohol.

Ultimately, gasoline emerged as the dominant transportation fuel in the early 20th century because of the ease of operation of gasoline engines with the materials then available for engine construction, a growing supply of cheaper petroleum from oil field discoveries, and intense lobbying by petroleum companies against ethanol blends.

For different reasons, Henry Ford and Charles Kettering both saw the fuel of the future as a blend of ethanol and gasoline, eventually leading to pure ethanol.  A dedicated agrarian, Ford thought new markets for fuel feedstocks would help create a rural renaissance. On the other hand, Kettering, as a scientist, was concerned about the automotive industry's long-term need for oil.   Whether the fuel envisioned by the scientists and agrarians of the early 20th century is appropriate today is a valid question.

"Many years may be necessary before the actual development of such a [fuel] substitute," Kettering concluded.  According to Kettering's friend Charles Stewart Mott, there was always the possibility that, " if a time ever came when the sources of [fossil] heat and energy were ever used up. . . that there would always be available the capturing of. . . energy from the sun. . . through agricultural products ."

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