THE ETHANOL boom is in full swing now. Farmers are increasing their corn acreage and any town bigger than a crossroads is hoping to attract one of the dozens of new ethanol plants springing up around farm country.
It is a brave new world of biofuels.
Or is it?
A week or so ago, Gary Mason dropped by The Gazette office. He’d been going through some old newspapers and had found something he wanted to share.
The something was a September 1938 advertisement for Marvin Baldwin’s service station at 728 Merchant St. At the station, Baldwin was selling Agrol, a blend of alcohol and gasoline. According to the ad, which showed some uncertainty about the rules of capitalization:
A Kansas Product — Alcohol — Made From Farm products and Gasoline made from Kansas Crude. AGROL gives greater mileage and finer performance at less cost per mile.
ASK FOR AGROL
By Name!
Who knew that alternative fuels predated the back-to-the-earth movement of the 1960s?
A search of the Internet found an article in Wikipedia on the history of alcohol fuels.
According to the article, Agrol was just one of many gasoline-alcohol blends sold around the world. It was produced in the United States in the 1930s. By 1937, around the country 2,000 service stations were selling the fuel. But just a year after Baldwin’s ad in The Gazette, Agrol production was ended because of the lack of a viable market.
Part of the reason was cost. At the time, alcohol was was selling for 25 cents a gallon and gasoline was around 18 cents a gallon, so Agrol cost more than straight gasoline. Another reason was resistance by the oil companies, which were accused of dirty dealings and sabotage to wreck the alcohol fuel market.
In the early days of automobiles, ethanol fuels had some strong supporters. Among them was Henry Ford, who designed his cars to work on gasoline, alcohol or kerosene and was a supporter of the “farm chemurgy” movement, which encouraged, among other things, the construction of alcohol stills to produce fuel right on the farm.
But a number of factors contributed to the end of the first ethanol push. In addition to oil industry resistance, the discovery of the Texas oil fields lowered the price of gasoline. After World War I, national prohibition became a factor. Revenue agents smashed any alcohol still they could find, whether it was producing moonshine or fuel alcohol.
So enthanol is not new. High gasoline prices have just revived interest in an old technology.
But the troubled history of ethanol production should serve to caution investors who are scrambling to get on the alternative-fuels bandwagon.
Good ideas are not always successful and nothing is constant in the world but change.