Energy advice for President-elect Barack Obama

When the switch from MTBE to ethanol was taking place, the state of California took the EPA to court and proved that MTBE and ethanol worsen air quality. Then Bush and Cheney stepped in claiming the ethanol requirement wasn’t about air quality standards anymore but about replacing imported oil with domestic renewable fuels. The thing is that the kind of ethanol required by the EPA’s oxygenate program, anhydrous ethanol, is not a fuel and causes a larger loss of mileage in most engines than the 10 percent of it that is added to gasoline. The kind of ethanol that is used for fuel is hydrous ethanol.

The reason for the shell game is oxygenates get rid of smog by causing high emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds, VOC’s, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, that mix with smog from diesel engines and coal burning in the suns rays dissolving the smog while carrying it into the jet stream where it’s carried out over the Atlantic Ocean to fall in rain just like the other additive I read about that was turned down, or was it?

See the oil industry really wanted to use MTBE. In fact they were already using it as an octane enhancer and there was nothing stopping them from adding it at the higher rates like they wanted to get the Clean Air Act to force them to do. But they didn’t want to worry about lawsuits from polluted groundwater or the problems it might cause the atmosphere. So they pretended to be reluctant to agree to something they actually wanted environmentalist to force them to do so they could say they couldn’t be held responsible for the consequences of it.

After their idea was shot down the first time they brought it up, they needed a way to revisit it without anyone knowing that it was the same additive that everyone thought was a crazy idea. So they came up with this PIB additive to bring attention to a good gasoline additive and used a slight of hand play to switch the debate to MTBE claiming they were practically the same additive. I could write all day about how the Clean Air Act of 1990 game played out and how bad it was for this country. But that isn’t what this article is about. What I am more interested in is relaying to the future Obama administration the good news about this story rather than dwell future wars to prosecute against the dark personalities that brought our world to this desperate and despicable place in time we live in now.

Looking for the rest of the PIB story

One day when advocating about how bad anhydrous ethanol and MTBE are when writing about how they cause climate change while demonstrating the science that proves it, and also how hydrous ethanol additives can solve this and the mileage problem it causes, I told the Clean Air Act story I just told you. Then one of my readers argued that there is no way to make gasoline or diesel fuel give more mileage with less pollution. And it dawned on me that it was possible she was right because I had never seen any proof it actually worked because it never got used. So I became curious about what happened to PIB and went looking for answers. What I found will astound you.

In an article published in the Washington Times on August 25, 2000 in the Washington Times titled “Chemist claims fuel additive cuts pollution, boosts mileage,” I found a link to a company with a website at GTATech.com who held that patent for the PIB additive. I contacted the owner Jerry Trippe and inquired about why no attention had ever been given to the benefits PIB was supposed to give by adding it to gasoline after the Clean Air Act of 1990 debate ended. He stated the obvious, that it was because there is no way the oil industry is going to add an additive to gasoline that will allow Americans to buy 20% less gasoline. He however denied that it was ever part of the Clean Air Act debate.

He ended our correspondence when I told him I had copies of Washington Times articles that told the PIB/Clean Air Act story. I then went looking for answers for why he had no interest in following up on using the history of his additive to draw attention to its benefits so he could make a lot of money selling it. I found the answer at his own web site. PIB is already added to gasoline but in a slightly shorter form. It’s refined from crude oil just like gasoline, in fact it all happens in a one stream process. So really if the oil companies were forced to produce fuels with the same standards the longer form of PIB gives them, they wouldn’t have to buy his additive but simply come up with a way to refine it to have the same properties. Since there needs to be an exact amount of this kind of PIB added per gallon of gasoline or it doesn’t work, his additive would be banned from being added to any fuels that already had PIB refined into it.

I sent him one last email that I didn’t expect to hear back from about. I advised that he could come up with a way to refine fossil fuels with the properties his additive would give them and patented it so the oil companies would still have to come to him to produce it. Then he could draw attention to his products without risking putting himself out of business. I later forgot about having suggested this to him.

Viscon in Texas

Recently when trying to find a way to draw attention to the fact that our country’s energy and dependence of foreign oil problems could be dramatically bettered if our leaders in Washington would just wake up to how their ethanol programs would actually work if they looked into using hydrous ethanol instead of anhydrous ethanol, I thought about how we could actually win this war for energy independence if we also had a PIB additive program as well. This would strengthen the value of the dollar and end climate change problems as well. From the information I’m looking at, this country could go from dropping out of the race for superiority in the world’s economy to back into first place very quickly if the American consumer were just aware of what fuel products are available over what we’re being sold.  

My renewed search for information on PIB lead to finding out it’s being used in Texas under the product name Viscon. It’s mandated by the state to be added to diesel fuel in regions that weren’t meeting national air quality standards. There was no mention of it helping with mileage but it’s been thoroughly tested by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and certified as having the ability to reduce emissions from diesel engines. Since pollution is nothing but unburned fuel, it has to be assumed there must be more power being produced from the engine, which means more mileage.

This was the first time I had actual evidence that PIB really works, that it wasn’t just a hoax to try to get MTBE added to gasoline. So instead of then president Bush 41, Ken Lay of Enron, and Phil and Wendy Gramm, an ex-Senator from Texas and his wife who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for Reagan, simply coming up with a scheme to sell us MTBE pretending they had an additive that really worked, they actually had one and then turned down in favor of a defective product that had already been turned away from the Clean Air Act debate once when the truth about how it worked to dissolve atmospheric pollution and dump it in the ocean came out.   

I also found legislation authorizing payments to Viscon to consult with Texas diesel refiners on how to produce fuel with the same properties that Viscon gives it, just like I had suggested to Jerry Trippe of GTATech.com. And it turns out Viscon is owned by Jerry Trippe. So apparently he took my advice after all. Being without enough money to buy a refinery to practice perfecting how to produce his new fuels, he got Texas to pay him to use theirs, which was actually quite brilliant of him to think of doing. He got right under the oil industry’s nose and is getting paid to let them do his work for him. That’s the kind of thinking I hope Barack Obama doesn’t forget about after he takes his oath of office.

Texas gets cleaner air

So even though they’ve been using PIB in Texas for a few year where it’s likely they’ve already developed a way to refine diesel fuel with the same qualities that the Viscon additives give it, this doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for Jerry Trippe to bring his story to Washington. The truth is patents on refining fuels only need to be slightly altered to be taken over by the oil industry for their own use. So he might be reluctant to disturb the lucrative market he’s created for his services by trying to promote what he’s done.

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