Alcohol's Been Fuel the Whole Time
Ethyl Part 1/Intro
(I’ve put a whole introductory preamble at the bottom so you can read the “good” stuff first. However do note that this is but a shadow of Bill Kovarik’s work)
Imagine the hypothetical counter history: What if, all other things being equal, there were no petroleum reserves in the earths crust? If the natural processes that buried accessible stores of hydrocarbon muck had been interrupted, what if. First of all, there would also be no natural gas, because gas is simply the final stage of the breakdown of flesh into component chemicals. However, there would still be coal. Coal was formed at an earlier era in geologic history, and by a different mechanism. That still happened.
The ideology of oil says says that without petroleum and its products, there would not have been a modernity. No technology, no rapid transportation; that the world would have continued to look as it did in 1859 indefinitely. In fact, I have asserted that myself.
This assumption is supported by the entire mythmaking apparatus of petrohistory, which holds that the only liquid fuel that existed before the arrival of kerosene was whale oil.1 The oilmen get to ideologically inherit the narrative space shaped by whale oil. Kovarik summarizes the mythmaking:
The Prize [by Daniel Yergin] hailed kerosene as “the new light which pushed back the night and extended the working day.” It was a “marvel to eyes that had strained to see by means of a lighted rag,” A recent Smithsonian exhibit provided a similar perspective: “It was the discovery of petroleum in 1859 that kindled the revolution in artificial lighting,” the exhibit said. “Kerosene …was cheap and relatively clean. Lamp companies had sprung up immediately and by the 1870s virtually everyone could enjoy indoor lighting.” 15 This traditional error is found in many other accounts of the history of energy. According to a 1960 history, “petroleum arrived on the scene in answer to a world-wide quest for a new source of artificial light.”
This whole narrative ignores alcohol entirely. It obscures the very existence of alcohol fuels, as if they had never been an option. I had never once thought about alcohol fuels in the five years I’ve been working on this project—maybe others wouldn’t have been as blind as I. Alcohol is the shadow fuel, the fuel that everyone knows about, and yet nobody acknowledges. Of course we blend ethanol into our gasoline. It’s a farm subsidies thing. The environmentalists don’t love it.
The first engines ran on alcohol, and they could have continued to run on alcohol forever. In fact—and this will become important later—alcohol works better as an engine fuel because it explodes faster than gasoline, which means it has a higher octane number. it contains a higher concentration of the most volatile molecules, of which iso-octane is one. Spirit lamps exploded—alcohol is more explosive than kerosene. Alcohol has less energy density—fewer BTUs than gas—but the amount of energy matters less than pressure differentials that are generated within the engine. Its fast ignition allows alcohol engines, or fuel with an alcohol-gasoline or alcohol-diesel mix, to run at higher pressures and therefore at higher levels of performance.
Alcohol is produced by the same agricultural system responsible for our food—the very limiting factor that determines population growth. Its price would balance how much grain was going to the distilleries versus into the food system (although fermented grain can be fed to animals, so the grain does not leave the food system entirely). In years of agricultural surplus, fuel would be cheaper, in times of scarcity, more dear. It wouldn’t be so expensive so that working people couldn’t afford it, at least sometimes. You could also make it yourself out of almost any plant. And the entire complex system of our society would have continued to be bounded by the natural limits of a stable earth system. Plus coal, I guess. Petroleum is not responsible for technology. Cars are not an inherent product of fossil gasoline. What it is responsible for is the wild exponential growth that the world began in the 1950s.
Go back to the beginning. By the 1830s, alcohol fuels had outcompeted the increasingly expensive whale oil in most of the country; whale oil was becoming a luxury commodity of the status-conscious power elite. This is why Melville’s whaling industry was sinking into obsolescence even at the moment of its peak productivity. Jamie Jones’ book on this is good.
Most people just burned “burning fluid” which was usually labeled camphene: a blend of ethanol (vodka; also ethyl alcohol), turpentine, and a little camphor to cover the smell of the turpentine. It was cheap enough to be available to working people. The spirit lamps that were so fed were quite bright. The only problem was that they tended to explode fairly frequently, and a certain number of people died every year from this cause. In fact, November 1888, John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Cettie, was seriously injured in what we are told was an alcohol-lamp explosion. However, Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow can’t help but “wonder whether the lamp was actually burning Standard Oil kerosene and whether Rockefeller turned it into an alcohol lamp in his correspondence. Would the wife of John D. Rockefeller have used alcohol lamps?”2
It would have been a bizarre choice of illuminant, but a good choice for engine fuel. The earliest internal combustion engines, like the one developed by Samuel Morey in 1826, and the four-stroke engine developed by Nicholas August Otto in 1860, ran on ethyl alcohol (ethanol).3 In America, this development was interrupted by the Civil War tax on alcohol, but in Europe by the 1880s, alcohol engines were beginning to replace steam engines in light machinery, in manufacturing, and even in trains.4 In America, backlash against Standard Oil fueled the passage of the 1906 Free Alcohol bill, which eliminated the taxes on fuel ethanol and methanol. Even without the taxes, alcohol sold for a minimum of 30 cents per gallon, while gasoline sold for ten cents and kerosene for eight cents per gallon.5 So, at that time, Standard Oil didn’t feel like it needed to publicly fight against alcohol to capture the fuel market. Indeed, they allowed Henry Ford to vocally support the “farmer’s fuel,” and to feature an adjustable carburetor on the Model T, which allowed the user to choose between alcohol and gasoline.
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Gasoline’s dominance of the 20th century in the form of the fuel for the internal combustion engine was never pre-ordained, especially when there was and always had been a viable alternative—alcohol—which brought its own class of deeply invested advocates in farmers. While Rockefeller, Marcus Samuel, and Baron de Rothschild battled with each other for control of the oil industry, Germany and France found themselves completely cut out of the petroleum craze. Hoping for an alternative, both invested heavily in the development of alcohols as fuels.
In fact, alcohol was the oil industry’s occulted enemy; the alternative that preceded petroleum (spirit lamps) and then subsequently lived on in its shadow. Oil’s agents persistently try to suppress knowledge and discussion of alcohol fuels, a task which is easy at some moments in petrohistory when petroleum felt abundant and cheap, and difficult or impossible at other moments when it seems like the oil’s about to run out. If petroleum reserves had never been discovered in the crust of the earth, our cars would run on ethanol and methanol, and they would work well.
And internal combustion engines would not be a contributing factor to global warming. The combustion of one gallon of pure corn ethanol produces about 17.73 pounds of CO2, but all of that is biogenic and therefore offset by carbon update during new biomass growth. Combusting ethanol does emit ammonia (CH4) and laughing gas, nitrous oxide (N2O).6
The first four-stroke engine built by Nicholas August Otto ran on ethanol, as did the entire generations of “horseless carriages” of the 19th century. Today, race cars often run on pure ethanol, and as you surely know, gasoline is blended with ethanol before it is shipped to your gas station. Henry Ford built his very first car to run on what he called “farm alcohol,” which he lauded as plentiful and easy to make—“fuel from vegetation,” from an interview with the Christian Science Monitor at the late date of 1925, “fuel of the future.” His Model A was equipped with a dashboard knob to adjust its carburetor to run on gasoline or alcohol, and the model T could run on ethanol or gasoline. While the oil industry was able to maintain its profits in the lighting sector, it was possible to imagine that alcohol would fuel the horseless carriage, but after the light bulb began to outcompete gas and kerosene lighting, the petroleum companies started lobbying the federal government to maintain steep alcohol taxes to guarantee their market share in automotive fuel.7
The massive quantities of cheap gasoline that these oilmen could provide made gasoline the cheaper option in most historical contexts, and yet utopians including Henry Ford have long dreamed and fought for alcohol fuel. This usually covert conflict between alcohol and gasoline has spilled over into the public gaze at a few moments in history, beginning in the Civil War.
In 1862, the Internal Revenue Act, designed to raise money for the war, began to impose a $2.08/gallon tax on alcohol. This tax was meant to apply to beverage alcohol, but there was no specific exemption for fuel and industrial uses of alcohol, and so the consumer price camphene and other alcohol lamp fuels immediately shot up at a moment when a competitor had just entered the market.8
That had been at Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, when a company operated by two New York lawyers, George Bissell and his partner Jonathan Greenleaf Eveleth, struck oil. Years earlier, Bissell had been traveling through Pennsylvania and noticed the locals selling “Seneca Oil” as medicine for an unbounded set of ailments. He brought a sample to Benjamin Sillman, a professor of chemistry at Yale, who told him that the substance could be distilled into a variety of useful potential illuminants. They formed their company, Seneca Oil, and hired Edwin Drake to drill the famous hole, touching off a chaotic market frenzy of the type only to be seen in a wildly competitive and unregulated early-capitalist context. The area was greenlit for murder by extractive capital. Refineries were easily and hastily erected both in the oil regions but also in nearby cities including Cleveland to refine the crude oil into kerosene (literally “sun fuel”), which had been the brand name of a coal oil that used to be sold alongside camphene and whale oil.9
In 1860, before the tax was imposed, the Department of Agriculture said that 90 million gallons of alcohol per year were used for lighting, cooking, and industry before the tax was imposed. By 1904, the total production of denatured alcohol was twenty-six thousand gallons. While the use of oil shot up from almost nothing in 1860 to over 200 million gallons in 1870. “Our industries making many of these articles [alcohol products] have been crippled.”10
Newsletter Introduction: I’m focused on creating a manuscript, and my intention was not to post on substack until it is complete. One hole in the book was leaded gasoline. When I started researching it, I encountered the work of Bill Kovarik, who tells the actual story of tetraethyl lead much better than I. He was kind enough to email me his research library and his dissertation on the topic, which is better than what is found here or in the next part when we actually get to Ethyl.
Kovarik upended the basic assumptions of my project. I’ve been clear that what gets posted on Substack is a first draft. I now realize that in some ways I had bought into aspects of petroideology that need to be questioned. So in that spirit I’m going to go ahead and throw up what I’ve got at this moment, rewriting the intro below etc. I will load up the second part about tetraethyl lead in the 1920s now, but I’m going to schedule it to publish in a month or so. There’s no rush, and I’m hoping the algorithm likes once-a-month posts more than a burst of posts every six months.
Importantly, Kovarik challenged a set of basic assumptions that I was working with and caused a massive rewriting of the introductory sections of the manuscript, and throughout, so what’s here is a bit of a pastiche from different sections.
The kindest thing you can do to support my project at this moment is to help spread the word, rather than paying for the paid subscription. However, if you do want to do that, I will make sure you get a copy of the book for free whenever it occurs. Best, though, to save your money now and plan on preordering. I won’t be able to get a publisher before I finish the full manuscript, but I’m confident that when I do, I will.
See Jamie L. Jones, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of U.S. Whaling. University of North Carolina Press: 2024.
Chernow continues, “If Cettie was the casualty of impure Standard Oil kerosene, her husband might well have viewed her accident as celestial judgement upon him.”
Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Ctrl+f the quote or just Cettie, you’d be surprised how rarely she comes up.
Information available widely but I’m looking at “Henry Ford, Charles Kettering, and the Fuel of the Future” by William Kovarik. https://billkovarik.com/bio/henry-ford-charles-kettering-and-the-fuel-of-the-future/
I didn’t happen to cite Kovarik’s dissertation in this post but it’s got all the good stuff.
Hal Bernton, William Kovarik and Scott Sklar, The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol. reprint 2010 pg 9. ←pdf available via google search
Ibid.
ICF, A Life-Cycle Analysis of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Corn-Based Ethanol. Prepared for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, September 5, 2018 https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/LCA_of_Corn_Ethanol_2018_Report.pdf
Bill Kovarik, Automotive History Review, Spring 1998, No. 32 reproduced at https://www.energyresourcefulness.org/Fuels/ethanol_fuels/history_of_ethanol.html https://billkovarik.com/bio/henry-ford-charles-kettering-and-the-fuel-of-the-future/
Kovarik cites Rufus Frost Herrick, Denatured or Industrial Alcohol, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1907), p. 16. https://archive.org/details/denaturedorindus00herruoft
John Kudlich Brachvogel, Charles Jennings Thatcher, Maximilian Heinrich Märcker, Industrial Alcohol, Its Manufacture and Uses” Munn & Company, New York: 1907. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Industrial_Alcohol_Its_Manufacture_and_U/jWwJAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Ibid.