David Blume
It’s no secret that foreign oil companies have quite a bit of economic and political power here in the United States. As a result, however, there are a few secrets those oil companies don’t want becoming common knowledge. With much of this information hiding in plain site, Pump is a documentary (narrated by Jason Bateman) that sets out to enlighten American fuel consumers on alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel. Pump reveals the high octane history of how we have become so dependent on gasoline and oil, including an oil industry conspiracy that uprooted electric mass transit systems throughout the country in favor or gas-guzzling buses. The thing that gushes at me most about Pump, however, is the accessibility of alternative fuels, particularly alcohol-based fuels. Though there are several alternatives to gasoline, ethanol is available at many regular gas stations in the form of E85 (85 percent alcohol, 15 percent gasoline). According to ethanol expert David Blume, author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas! and one of the featured experts in Pump, ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, is better for our cars and is readily available. All you have to do is find gas stations in your area that offer E85 (there are numerous websites and smartphone apps that make this a very easy task) and fill up your tank. I found out from Pump that if your car has a yellow gas cap, it is a flex fuel car and can run on ethanol or gasoline. Of course there are ethanol detractors out there, so you should still do your research to figure out if E85 (or other alternative fuel sources) are right for you and your vehicle. But if it’s as simple as Blume makes it sound in this Wrestling with Pop Culture interview, joining this revolution couldn’t be easier.
How did you come to be involved with Pump?
Over the years, the filmmaker, Josh Tickell, and I were both advocates for alternative fuel. He was a vocal advocate for biodiesel, which is a vegetable oil-based fuel, and what I promote is alcohol fuel. His solution was useful for diesel engines and alcohol is useful for both gasoline and diesel engines. When Josh decided to make the film Pump, he knew that I was a leading expert in the field and had us help with the storyline, interviews and all kinds of things.
How did you become an expert in this field? What was it that drew you to finding out more about alcohol-based fuels?
Electric street cars were burned in the streets during the 1930s and 1940s as gas-guzzling buses replaced them.
Back in the ’70s I was studying ecology and biosystematics. One of my professors pointed to a bottle of fermenting beer in the lab and said, “That stuff could even run your car.” I didn’t believe him at all, so I went to the library to disprove his statement. What I found instead were all kinds of books about the technology of alcohol fuel starting in the 1800s and going forward. I found out the first automobiles all ran on alcohol. Gasoline wasn’t even invented yet. So, like you were saying, here was an instance where there was a whole hidden history we weren’t being told. That’s what hooked me back in the ’70s.
So you discovered it in the ’70s, but this history goes all the way back to the invention of automobiles?
That’s right. It’s not like someone said, “Oh, here’s a big pool of this gasoline stuff. I wonder if we can make an engine that would run on that.” No, that’s not how it came to be. Engines were already running on alcohol. They were used as stationary engines in mines to pull ore cars. They were used as heating and lighting all over the United States in rural areas. Everybody on a farm had a distillery, it was a basic piece of farm equipment and people primarily used apples to make alcohol prior to the 1920s or so. Every little farm had an apple orchard, but these were not apples like today where you could eat them and they were sweet and juicy. These were what we called “spitters” because you’d take a bite of an apple and spit it out because it was so bitter. But they made great alcohol and all apples were used for making either beverages or higher-strength alcohol for many, many uses: lighting, heating, disinfection, making medicines and extracts, and, of course, running farm equipment and vehicles in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The Model T, Henry Ford’s first production car, ran on both alcohol and gasoline, gasoline only as an afterthought because he knew the big market was in the agricultural areas and that’s where alcohol was. Gasoline came along later in the big cities produced by [John D.] Rockefeller. You could go out into the country, driving out on gasoline. But to get home you’d stop by any farm and buy alcohol. You just turned a couple of knobs and levers inside the cab of the car and you’d be running on alcohol. When you got back to the city, you’d put them back and be running on gasoline. So we have a long history of running on alcohol all over the world.
The movie explains why we rely on gasoline so much these days with fuel industry conspiracies based on making money. What do you think is the easiest way for people to learn more about alternative fuels and start enacting some sort of change in their routines to make a difference?
“Pump” predicts gas pumps will look like this one in the near future.
I wrote the book Alcohol Can Be a Gas! to bring all this history and technology to light. So, go to your library and look up Alcohol Can Be a Gas! and you can learn all about this history, and learn how to make alcohol and/or use it in your car. The Fuel Freedom Foundation is a pretty good resource to opening our eyes to the alternatives to gasoline. But you yourself have a flex fuel car. That means your car was made at the factory to run on both alcohol and gasoline. You can put whatever you want in the tank and it will run just fine. There are 2,500 alcohol stations across the United States. So there are places almost everywhere – maybe only one or two in your city or town – that you’ll be able to get fuel. Compared to 120,000 stations that gasoline is sold at, it’s a small number. But they are spread out all over the country, throughout the Midwest for sure, but even on the West and East Coast.
After watching the movie I found several gas stations within a few miles of where I live that have E85 fuel.
What we didn’t talk about in the movie, because there were some concerns about whether there’d be liabilities, but it turns out current cars that aren’t made as flex fuel cars will run on up to 50 percent alcohol without a single change to the engine. That’s because modern fuel injection computers are very smart and they’re very flexible. In just about every case, they can go as high as 50 percent alcohol without any changes. So you have to find out what the maximum amount of alcohol you can use in your car is by experimenting to see. You put in a gallon the first tank, two gallons of alcohol the second tank and keep going until you start getting up to about 50 percent alcohol and 50 percent gas. Then you pay attention to how the car’s running. If it runs rough at idle or if it doesn’t quite have enough power at high speeds, you know you’ve reached the limit of how much alcohol you can put in the tank. So that’s the amount you put in in the future. What you’ll probably have to do in most places is fill up halfway with gasoline, then top the second half off with alcohol. So it’s a little more inconvenient. But more and more many of these alcohol stations have what are called blender pumps. So you can push a button and decide which proportion of alcohol and gasoline you want to put in your car. The thing about alcohol is it’s 106 octane. So it’s super premium. It’s really, really good for your car. You could put half alcohol and half regular in your car and you’ll still have 98 octane, which is still super premium. It’s much easier on the engine, it burns cooler, it burns pollution free and carbon free, so the inside of your engine stays bright and shiny and your oil never turns black. There’s no reason not to put alcohol in your car. Everything since ’83 has been designed to be tolerant of alcohol, so there are no problems with anything being incompatible with alcohol in your engine.
But if I have a flex fuel car with a yellow gas cap, I can fill up on E85 fuel without having to mix it with gasoline?
Ethanol is currently available at numerous gas stations throughout the country. Ethanol pumps are often marked in yellow or other colors to differentiate between them and gasoline pumps.
Yes, you can. You can run on straight alcohol fuel right from the pump. It’s called E85 at the pump, which means its 85 percent alcohol. That’s how we sell it in this country. In Brazil they sell E98, which is 98 percent alcohol. They don’t even bother adding gasoline to it because it’s a warm country. They only add gasoline to alcohol to make it easier to start on a cold morning. Alcohol is too safe. It doesn’t evaporate like gasoline does. The only problem with alcohol is that it makes it harder to start on a cold morning unless you have something volatile in the tank with it.
I really enjoyed this movie and I hope it enlightens more people, regardless of which type of alternative fuel they choose to seek out.
Well, the only one from the movie you can get now, practically, is ethanol or alcohol. The other fuels, you have to convert your car for $7,000 0r $8,000. Methanol is not sold anywhere at the pump right now. Electric cars, as you will surmise from the movie, are really not practical. Alcohol is something you can do today. The thing I’d like all of your readers to take home with them today is to go to fuelfreedom.org, which has a station finder that will tell you where the stations are near your home. Go today and put one gallon of alcohol in your tank so you can see that it runs just like it always did. That’s a gallon of fuel that you didn’t send your money to oil companies for. You sent it to American farmers, and that’s a good thing.