Gasolinegate: What's in Our Gasoline is Killing Us

By Burl Haigwood

Do you know what's in your gasoline?

Our addiction to gasoline threatens our lives as we breathe toxic carcinogens in our fuel. For over 100 years, the oil industry duped the public and collaborated with the federal government to protect i

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889266938

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Gasolinegate

Gasolinegate

What’s in Our Gasoline Is Killing Us

Burl Haigwood and Doug Durante

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Burl Haigwood and Doug Durante

All rights reserved.

Gasolinegate

What’s in Our Gasoline Is Killing Us

ISBN

979-8-88926-692-1 Paperback

979-8-88926-693-8 Ebook

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Bill Holmberg, the friend, mentor, and warrior we learned from and miss daily.

Bill Holmberg. Photo by Anne Ruthling.

This book is also dedicated to those who have passed but inspired us to write this story. They worked with us in the trenches for decades and played an essential role in the success of our movement.

Fred Potter, Former President, Information Resources, Inc.

Harry Griffiths, Former Chairman, Clean Fuels Development Coalition

Jim Glancey, Former Chairman, Clean Fuels Development Coalition

Jim Peeples, Former Legislative Director, Information Resources, Inc.

Dr. Max Shauck, Former Professor and Head of the Renewable Aviation Fuels Development Center, Baylor University

Orrie Swayze, Former Fighter Pilot and Ethanol Champion Extraordinaire

Dr. Roger Conway, Former Director, Office of Energy, US Department of Agriculture

Ron Sykes, Former Senior Washington Representative, General Motors Corporation

In gratitude and in memory of those buried in Arlington Cemetery’s Section 60, whose life stories were cut short fighting to protect the world’s access to crude oil.

Arlington Cemetery Section 60. Photo by Burl Haigwood.

A Special Thanks

We thank the subject matter experts who shared their time, insights, and expertise to help us tell this story.

The Honorable Thomas A. Daschle, Former US Senate Majority Leader and US Senator from South Dakota

The Honorable E. Benjamin Nelson, Former US Senator and Governor of Nebraska, Chair, Governors’ Biofuels Coalition

The Honorable Boyden Gray, Former Counsel to President George H. W. Bush and Ambassador to the European Union

Ron C. Alverson, Former Farmer, Current Dakota Ethanol Company Board Member

Reid Detchon, Senior Advisor for Climate Solutions, United Nations Foundation, Former Executive Director of the Energy Future Coalition

William (Bill) Kovarik, PhD, Professor, Coauthor of The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol

David E. Hallberg, President, Dakota AG Energy, LLC, Founder and Former CEO, Renewable Fuels Association

Seth Harder, General Manager, Husker Ag

Robert Harris, Former Director Nebraska Energy Office and Bioenergy Coordinator, EERE, US Department of Energy

Jim Lane, Editor and Publisher, The Daily Digest

Philip Madson, President, KATZEN Associates

Reginald Modlin, Biofuels Consultant, Former Director of Regulatory Affairs, Chrysler Corporation

Plinio Nastari, President, DATAGRO Group & IBIO Brazilian Institute of Bioenergy & Bioeconomy

Edwin Rothschild, Former Public Affairs and Energy Director, Citizen Action

Loran Schmidt, Former State Senator, Nebraska

Jim Seurer, Chief Executive Officer, Glacial Lakes Energy, LLC

Ernie Shea, Founder, Natural Resource Solutions, LLC, Former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Maryland

Scott Sklar, President, The Stella Group, Ltd & Adjunct Professor; George Washington University, and Coauthor of The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol

Todd C. Sneller, Biofuels Consultant; Former Administrator, Nebraska Ethanol Board

Doug Sombke, President, South Dakota Farmers Union

Marc J. Rauch, Author, The Ethanol Papers and Yes, Tin Lizzie Was an Alcoholic, Co-Publisher The Auto Channel

Terry A. Ruse, Operations Manager, Benchmark Renewable Energy, Former Petroleum and Ethanol Marketer

David Vander Griend, President and CEO, ICM, Inc.

Steve Vander Griend, Former Technical Director, Urban Air Initiative

Eric Washburn, Former Legislative Director, Senator Tom Daschle

Carol Werner, Director Emerita, Environmental & Energy Study Institute

Contents

Dedication

A Special Thanks

Foreword

Authors’ Notes

Burl Haigwood

Doug Durante

Part 1

Chapter 1. A History of Illusion and Collusion

The Evolution of Our Benzene Revolution

Chapter 2. The True Cost of Gasoline

Consumers Pay the Ultimate Price

Chapter 3. The Anti-Ethanol War

Duped, Hoodwinked, Bamboozled—Gaslit

Chapter 4. Tales from the Battlefield

The Fight for States’ Cleaner Gasoline Rights

Chapter 5. Ethanol Myth Busters

Combating Disinformation Campaigns

Part 2

Chapter 6. A Sacred Oath

EPA Circumvents Energy and Environment Laws, Regulations, and Its Mission

Chapter 7. EPA’s Actions Obstruct Environmental and Alternative Energy Progress

A History of Missed Opportunities, Noncompliance, and Creating Regulatory Hurdles

Chapter 8. The Smoking Gun and the Poison Squad

We Are What We Eat

Chapter 9. 2018–2021: It’s Déjà Vu All over Again

Should’a, Could’a, Would’a, Ought’a, and Didn’t

Chapter 10. Environmental Justice

Death by Breath

Chapter 11. Environmental Injustice

Can We Get an Amen?

Chapter 12. The People versus Big Oil, Congress, and EPA

Preserving Power and Wealth at Any Cost

Part 3

Chapter 13. Reality EV

The Gaslight Is On, but Nobody’s Home

Chapter 14. Moving Forward

To Follow Suit

Chapter 15. Missing in Action

Where Have All the Champions Gone?

Chapter 16. Back to the Fuel Future

Now You Know What We Know

Afterword. Why I Say Yes to Renewable Fuels

By Jim Lane

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Foreword

By Carol Werner

Director Emerita, Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Gasolinegate tells a story that involves geopolitics, national security, public health, the environment, food security, energy and transportation, economic development (power and profits), and now the existential threat of climate change that is urgently confronting our global societies today. Yes, these are all elements of the story of biofuels, especially ethanol and oil, and that story continues to unfold to this very day.

Burl Haigwood and Doug Durante have been my respected colleagues for more than thirty years. They are both steeped in history and the facts of this important issue. They are well-equipped to give readers a solid, factual understanding of the background of ethanol and other biofuels, why it is important, and why we should care, particularly if we want to protect public health for us and our children.

My interest in biofuels stems from my long tenure working on environmental and energy issues in the public interest and nonprofit world. It did not take long for me to understand that our use of fossil fuels and their presence in our everyday lives is the source of most of our environmental problems, including public health and environmental justice. I sought to instill in staff the lesson that so much in our world is inextricably intertwined. Therefore, it is extremely important to consider issues as part of systems and to understand their interconnections; otherwise, you can inadvertently create or exacerbate another problem. After all, failure to consider the whole results in important conflicts slipping through the cracks unsolved. Our environment bears the scars of such unsolved problems. The mantra we should learn is do no harm.

A good example of the impact of unsustainable fuel sources is the auto industry. As fuel economy standards for automobiles and light trucks have increased, the auto industry has needed better fuels to help them achieve the standards. For example, improved engine efficiency requires higher-octane fuels to achieve those fuel economy goals. But where does that octane come from? Does it come from the oil industry’s preferred choice of aromatics compounds comprised of the highly toxic, polluting, and greenhouse gas-intensive aromatic/BTEX compounds (benzene/toluene/xylene) or does it come from ethanol, a high-performing, clean, renewable source? Don’t forget you can drink straight ethanol, but it has been denatured for commercial sale for blending with gasoline. In fact, ethanol is so nontoxic that should we experience an ethanol spill, we would not cause nearly the same amount of damage as we do with any oil spill. So why have we not been using it to its full potential?

The fossil fuel industry, especially the oil and gas industry, has long sought to exercise its enormous power to suppress the use of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. They have invested billions of dollars and decades of time to relentless misinformation campaigns to sow doubt in the mind of the public about the potential of ethanol.

These campaigns have been very successful. A December 16, 2022, article in The Washington Post reported that, between 2008–2017, the American Petroleum Institute (API) spent $663 million on communications alone. That same article stated that in 2021, five large oil/gas companies—ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, and Total Energies—spent a total of $750 million on communications (Farhi 2022). Think of the impact of seeing the same misinformation over and over, misinformation designed to sow doubt and to raise opposition toward renewable fuels, in this case, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The RFS is a federal law that requires transportation fuel sold in the United States to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. Regardless, the highly profitable petroleum industry still enjoys billions of dollars in annual public subsidies, as it has for more than a century. This continues even though we now know how dangerous the use of fossil fuels is to our health and to our air, water, land, and oceans.

Despite the facts, many in the environmental community have been influenced by these disingenuous efforts and have opposed the use of biofuels—especially ethanol—even as they talk about the imperative to transition away from fossil fuels. Why is this? The unfortunate truth is that a mythology has developed around topics such as food versus fuel, land-use change, and the emissions and carbon footprint of biofuels. Those who claim that growing corn, currently the predominant feedstock of ethanol, is displacing food production generally do not understand that when ethanol is produced in a biorefinery, one gets numerous products: From a corn kernel is produced not only vegetable oil but also high protein animal feed in addition to the starch that makes the fuel. The ethanol molecules can be used to produce a myriad of renewable chemical building blocks. This is very important as our society needs to wean itself away from its dependence on highly toxic and polluting petrochemical products, which we use with great abandon throughout our daily lives. Those products have brought us much of the ease of modern life, but we now know they are creating enormous waste and health problems, such as toxic air and water pollution, and produce many greenhouse emissions.

In the United States, the biggest issue threatening land-use change, which is the impact human activity has on shaping our environment, is development. Development brings carbon-intensive construction, including cement for buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, as well as greater use of transportation fuels to support sprawl. It is important to keep as much land as possible open for forestry, grasslands, and agriculture.

Another conflict in the ongoing competition between biofuels versus ethanol and gasoline versus oil is the use of old and inaccurate data. The oil industry and others, including the Environmental Protection Agency, have failed to use the most up-to-date data and analysis. Because crop yields have gotten better and better, inputs have decreased, and the biorefinery production process continues to become ever more efficient, the greenhouse emissions associated with the growth of the feedstock and the ethanol production process, called the carbon footprint, continues to get smaller and smaller. Ongoing improvement and sustainability practices need to be expressed through current and accurate data.

While policy actions are being taken and auto manufacturers are gradually becoming more committed to eventually fueling transportation solely by electricity, liquid fuels will remain a necessity during this transition. Much has yet to evolve, but as long as liquid fuels are a part of the picture, should we not choose the low-carbon, clean, renewable option? As our global societies make choices, it is incumbent that we also choose to stay informed, make our goals clear, understand the interconnections of the systems we depend upon, and do no harm.

About Carol Werner

Carol has fought for clean energy, environmental protection, and climate change for thirty-five years. As the Executive Director of the Energy and Environmental Institute for over twenty-one years, she organized hundreds of Congressional briefings and built numerous broad coalitions.

Carol serves on the boards of the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the National Association of State Energy Officials Institute, the Ukrainian/American Environmental Association, Morningside University (her alma mater), and the Advisory Board of Planet Forward at George Washington University.

Carol was the founder and long-time Steering Committee member of the Sustainable Energy Coalition and co-founder of the US Climate Action Network and the Surface Transportation Policy Project. She previously served on the Advisory Board of the President’s Climate Action Project (PCAP), the steering committee for the peer review of the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy R&D Program, the Environmental Advisory Committee of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, the Policy Committee of the American Solar Energy Society, and the editorial board of BioCycle Magazine.

Authors’ Notes

Why Us and Why Now

Burl Haigwood

Hardly a day goes by when the news does not cover a crisis about energy. The war in Ukraine, healthcare costs, climate change, the battle to create new jobs, and the goal to shine back on Middle America’s growing Rust Belt are connected to the gasoline you use daily. And nearly every one of those days for forty-five years, I have thought about how cleaner fuels could positively impact each of those issues. Since 1979, I have had the great fortune to work on this crusade as a professional, volunteer, or advisor. The fight for alternative fuels ignites my entrepreneurial spirit, passion for advocacy, intellectual curiosity, and love for my country.

In 1985, I helped start Information Resources, Inc. (IRI). IRI was a publishing and consulting firm focused on alternative transportation fuels. While at IRI, I supported the start-up of the Renewable Fuels Association, the Clean Fuels Development Coalition, and the Clean Fuels Foundation. During that time, I also worked with the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition and served as a member of the Sustainable Energy Coalition. Some previously written works include being coauthor of Homegrown Defense: Biofuels & National Security, the Fuel Ethanol Fact Book, dozens of articles and white papers, including What’s in Your Gasoline Is Killing You and The True Cost of Oil.

I created public education campaigns and special events like the Flex Fuel Vehicle Club of America and the Environmental Inaugural Ball. I also created special characters such as Hexxon Blowbull and Jack, the fuel test dummy you will meet in this book. If you search YouTube for Gasolinegate, you will meet our friend Jack.

Writing Gasolinegate was our next right thing. I am grateful for meeting my coauthor, Doug Durante, who founded the Clean Fuels Development Coalition. Doug and I will introduce you to a host of champions who still share the same dedication, passion, enthusiasm, and unbridled commitment to help our country. This book is a shared story of hundreds of others we have collaborated with over the past several decades. You can find their names in the acknowledgments section.

For me, it all started in the summer of 1972. My father and I occasionally skipped church when my mother declared she wasn’t going. We would go to his favorite pub for beer, orange soda, and peanut butter crackers. My father retired as a Senior Master Sergeant after twenty-two years in the Air Force and was a prisoner of war (POW) for three and a half years in Japan. He rarely talked about prison camp unless he’d had a few beers with his brother, who was also a POW at the same time.

This was the first time I tried to get him to talk about it. I asked, "What did you and your POW friends do for fun? Was it like the TV show Hogan’s Heroes? He looked a bit puzzled, frowned, and said no. I pressed him again. You had to have done something fun."

He said, We used to drink the fuel out of the Japanese trucks that brought supplies into the camp.

I gasped, You can’t drink gasoline! It will kill you!

My father proceeded to tell the rest of his story.

In 1942, the US was the largest oil producer in the world. The US government threatened the Japanese with an oil embargo if they sided with Germany. Their response was to bomb Pearl Harbor. Without crude oil and refined petroleum products from the US, the Japanese had to save their limited aviation fuel and gasoline supplies for their war machine. They turned their sake makers into motor fuel producers to make up the difference. They increased the proof of the ethanol high enough to burn in vehicles. He said, And that’s why I’m here; I didn’t drink gasoline. I drank high-proof sake, which turned hell into a little bit of fun for a brief moment or two.

A couple of years after we talked about his prison camp experience, the US suffered its first oil embargo in October 1973. Later the following year, I got my driver’s license and my mom’s second-hand car. Gasoline had gone from twenty-five cents to a dollar a gallon. The memory of what happened after an oil embargo weighed heavy on my mind. I had long hair, a faint mustache, and my older brother’s hand-me-down bell-bottom jeans. Raised in an Air Force family and frequently experiencing life on a military base, I considered myself a country-loving, God-fearing patriot. I admit there were times when I was more afraid of war than God. As a child, I had nightmares about nuclear war and toxic orange skies from Ozone Alert days in Washington, DC. I would get chills reading the Book of Revelation about what I thought would be World War III in the Middle East over oil. It was clear to me that if we were willing to fight communism in Vietnam, we would fight for our jobs, low-interest rates to keep our homes, and the right to drive as fast and far as we wanted on any given Sunday.

I was driving home from college one Friday night during my freshman year. I was not thinking about how to chase my dreams; I was thinking about how to avoid my nightmares. While driving over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, an idea came to me like Saul meeting the angel in the Bible. I saw the light. The country could take all the poop they were dumping in the Potomac River just upstream from our swimming area in Fort Washington, Maryland, and turn it into ethanol. Instead of buying bullets, boots, and bombs, the government could pay people a little money to convert their cars to run on the ethanol produced from the newly renovated poop plants. Surely if the Japanese could do this in 1943 and the United States figured out how to land on the moon in 1969, American ingenuity could end the oil crisis.

That night, I ran into the house yelling, Dad, Dad, the president’s gonna love me, the car companies are gonna love me, and the oil companies are gonna love me too. We don’t have to go to war over oil in the Middle East. We can make booze out of poop and convert cars to run on high-proof alcohol just like the Japanese did when you were a POW.

My father looked puzzled and said, I think we should have some ethanol and a talk. He told me, The car and oil companies sit on each other’s board of directors. One makes the fuel and the other burns it. They both spend lots of money getting the president and people in Congress elected. The public has no choice in what fuel they buy, and I can assure you those folks won’t love you or help you.

I was devastated. I asked a few more questions, but the air in the room and hope in my heart rapidly escaped. I went to bed confused about the past and future.

At breakfast, my father could see the smile return and asked, What do you think of your idea today?

I said, I am going to spend the rest of my life either proving you wrong or proving you right.

I started searching for the truth by working for a company selling ethanol to independent gasoline marketers. After the second oil embargo cut their supplies from refiners, they needed more fuel. I soon realized the free market was not so free, and my father was right. He told me, If you can’t get companies to do the right thing, go to Capitol Hill and make them.

The following year, I met Dave Hallberg. Dave left his job in the US Senate to start the Renewable Fuels Association. His goal was to unite companies interested in creating and protecting government incentives to produce and use fuel ethanol. I met Doug Durante a few years later when he started the Clean Fuels Development Coalition. He built a coalition of diverse like-minded companies that included ethanol producers, automakers, chemical companies, technology developers, and agriculture groups.

We knew the road ahead needed to be paved with bipartisan common ground. We would need to appeal to the most extensive base of constituents required to influence Congress. It worked, but the mission is only 10 percent complete. The nation is desperately looking for a cleaner-burning, lower-carbon, lower-cost, higher-octane, better performing, job-creating, food-producing, farmer-protecting, non-OPEC, non-terrorist funding, renewable, and safer fuel for cars. We believe we have found the answer, so we are compelled to do the next right thing and share our story.

I often remember my father saying, Do the right thing, and the right things will happen. My father, Joseph Burleson Haigwood, died on January 20, 1985, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery, Section 60. In the same section in Arlington Cemetery rest too many soldiers who lost their lives fighting in the Middle East over oil.

My passion and compassion are refueled daily by:

My family for never doubting me, especially my father, who shared his story, which gave me the idea and courage to challenge our leaders and try to change the status quo.

My coauthor, Doug Durante, who, after four decades of working together, continues to return my emails and share in my never-wavering passion for finding and defending the truth.

All the families with loved ones buried near my father in Section 60. Their stories were cut short fighting wars in the Middle East to protect the supply of crude oil to the United States and its allies.

The amazing cast of characters who supported our mission and shared our dream to build a better future for our children and country.

Doug Durante

After four decades of working to have a positive impact on people’s lives, the temptation to write a book and capture those decades in print is natural. But like many people who dream of being an author, I found a lot of reasons and excuses not to—until now.

The genesis of this book is a research project we launched several years ago after finally reaching our limit of frustration while watching the US Environmental Protection Agency, the petroleum industry, narrow-minded environmental special interests, and pseudo-academics doom us to a lifetime of oil dependence.

That research yielded a mountain of evidence that