The History of Leaded Gasoline

The Historical War of Leaded Gasoline:

An overview of the history of leaded gasoline

Lead was a chemical added to gasoline by the oil industry to boost “octane” or anti-knock ratings for fuel.  It was discovered by GM in 1921 at their research lab. It was introduced in the market because at the time GM thought this chemical could have helped them solve this problem of “knock” that pre-existed in their automobiles.

They wanted to be the first company to create a highly efficient engine and thought that leaded gasoline would have helped them reduced the “knocks.”  Surely enough in 1921 GM discovered that a solution of “tetraethyl lead” to have stopped the engine knock so well that in 1924 GM joined with Standard oil (Exxon) to form a partnership  that would become known as the Ethyl Corp.

Government Action to Protect the Environment & the Forces That Had Influenced Government At The Time:

However, for public health reasons, lead had been ordered to be removed by government. Starting from 1975 -1990 it had been discontinued in almost every European nation. It had been advocated by the world health organization and the Clean Air Act legislation to be removed completely from the U.S. market.

The problem with the leaded gasoline was pronounced by the Health Organization as being a poisonous chemical which could have been absorbed by way of contact with gasoline. And it could have also been inhaled into the lung by way of automotive exhaust. This was the most serious pollution of the 20^th century since the outcome had exposed so many people to health conditions that were so deadly to humanity.

The real public controversy begins when “five workers at a grossly unsafe Standard Oil refinery went violently insane in 1924.”  Health experts such as Alice Hamilton of Harvard and Yendell Henderson of Yale immediately opposed the use of lead in gasoline as a mean to public safety, had this problem rest sorely on individual concerns such as people like Alice Hamilton & Yendell Henderson, very little could have been done to resolve the issue. Since Ethyl Corp was no small company, Government had to intervene considering the magnitude of the problem at that time.

One of the major forces that had influenced government policy towards ethanol production occurred under President Nixon. In 1972 President Nixon provided financing for $700 million sale of U.S. Gain to the Soviet Union. It was that sale that had caused political fallout between the republicans and democrats. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture felt pressure to bring down food prices. And to do so, the agency radically transformed farm policy that had been in place since the New Deal.”

Ever since that time the U.S. Policy makers find it necessary to keep a floor under prices as a backup plan to prevent trade deficit. The way it would work is that government would pay farmers to store excess grains during good production years as a way to prevent producer’s surplus. And during the times when production fell behind with poor harvests, the grains that were stored will be added to current supply to help keep up with demand and market value of grains.

Although there were a lot of factors that had influenced the 1929 stock market crash, some have concluded that “Public utilities, utility holding companies, and investment trusts were all highly levered using large amounts of debt and preferred stock.”Ethyl Alcohol was very expensive to produce considering that the industry didn’t have the necessary technology available to filter other means. Thus, it is evident that the cost of ethanol production and addition to government regulation triggered the October 1929 panic that had caused many shareholders to sell their stocks which did contribute to the stock market crash of 1929.

Then we had the Civil Right movement which some of us seems to have thought started in 1954 while neglecting the waves of the Civil Right Movements such as Marcus Garvey’s called for the return of all African American back to the Mother Land, The formation of NAACP and the influence of the Muslim Brothers. All of which contributed to the reduction of ethyl alcohol production and the market crash of 1929.

We’re going to prove to you how the Civil Right Movement affected the Utility Companies which at the time produces ethyl alcohol as fuel. We’ll begin by drawing a relationship between the lands that were allocated for ethyl alcohol production and the people who actually worked on those lands.

Now, keep in mind that all of this is happening after the Civil War, at a time when the Federal Government had expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Whites who owned lands had also owned slaves for agricultural purposes and when those slaves became free they had lost the most vital means of their production, which was free labor.

We can say any company that does not have to pay for labor will off course retain a lot more of their profit. And if the land owners were producing gains for ethyl alcohol production they would have had to sell them a lot more being that they now had to pay the freed slave to work the earth.

All of the aforementioned had influenced government decisions and therefore were all part of the major forces that had shaped U.S. Public Policies in America. And among those policies some were directed to ethyl alcohol production which had affected the stock market.

Solve One Problem Create Another:

There you have it, GM solve the engine knock problem by way of “tetraethyl lead” but the company had created another problem that was beyond their control, a problem that would have placed the whole humanity at risk for the benefit of a profit that did not have the public interest in mind.

In 1995 a conference on leaded gasoline had been held. It was in that conference that Hamilton called GM VP Charles Kettering a murder for selling leaded gasoline to the population. It appeared that Hamilton new that lead was poisonous since it had been known to be problematic throughout the centuries of Europe history. Hamilton had also mentioned in that conference that they were also other methods of solving the anti knock problem.

Kettering & Midgley’s Dirty Game:

Kettering & Midgley who were at the time the two heads of Ethyl Corp, with Kettering as the president and Midgley the vice stated that “No alternatives for anti-knocking were available, although private memos showed discussion of such agents. One commonly discussed agent was ethanol, although it was not as cheap. The public Health Service created a committee which reviewed a government-sponsored study of workers and an Ethyl lab test, and concluded that while leaded gasoline should not be banned, it should continue to be investigated. The low concentrations present in gasoline and exhaust were not perceived as immediately dangerous.  A  U.S. Surgeon General Committee issued a report in 1926 that concluded there was no real evidence that the sale of TEL was hazardous to human health but urged further study.”

The Difference between Ethyl Branded & Ethyl Alcohol:

In order to have a better understanding of what was happening at the time, we are going to look at the difference between “Ethyl” branded leaded gasoline versus “ethyl alcohol.” It had been said that the latter “ethyl alcohol” was the best anti-knock additive for gasoline.  Although both had improved fuel’s power, one was cheaper than another. Whereas, “Ethyl” brand leaded was the poison that had caused many deaths, ethyl alcohol on the other hand was the clean, renewable fuel that were known to have kept nations independent of political oil pressures.  It had been estimated that more than a dozen of countries had been using ethyl alcohol fuels.

From this outlook it is impossible for Kettering & Midgley not to have known about the alternatives ethyl alcohol & ethanol that were available at the time. Henry Ford was at the time considered to be one of the biggest supporters for “ethanol fuel” culminated with the Dearborn, Mich. In 1925 Henry Ford told a New York Time reporter that Ethyl alcohol was “the fuel of the future.”

The Influence of Henry Ford:

His exact thought was “The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, awdust, almost anything” he also said that “There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.”

As promising as ethyl alcohol had been proven to be, it appear that they may had been changes in government that had shifted the interest of alternative energies away from the agribusiness of America. The American farmers were intrigued about the idea of ethyl alcohol as an alternative energy just like current American farmers embraces the idea of wind energy as an alternative, so then what are we talking about here,  is it déjà vu all over again?

The historiography notes indicated that “American farmers embraced the vision of new markets for farm products, especially alcohol fuel, three times in the 20^th century: around 1906, again in the 1930s with Ford’s blessing, and most recently, during the oil crisis of the 1970s. By the mid-1980s over one hundred corn alcohol production plants had been built and over a billion gallons of ethyl alcohol were sold per year in the fuel market. In the late 1980s and 1990s, with an apparently permanent world oil glut and rock bottom fuel prices, most of the alcohol plants shut down. Some observers joked that ethyl alcohol was the fuel of the future – and always would be.”

Further studies have proposed that ethyl alcohol had been used in the 1920s as an automotive fuel in two ways: “First, it replaces gasoline outright and somewhat modified internal combustion engine; and secondly, it is an effective “octane booster” when mixed with gasoline in blends of 10 to 30 percent and requires no engine modification. These blends achieve the same octane boosting (or anti-knock) effects as petroleum-derived aromatics like benzene or metallic additives like tetraethyl lead.”

Comparing 1920s Public Concerns with That of Today’s Concern for Ethanol:

It could be said that just because something is effective doesn’t make it appropriate for current time. The concern that was forecasted with ethyl alcohol as an alternative fuel shared the same worries we now have with biofuel. There is absolutely no difference in respective to grains between the two ethyl alcohol & ethanol with biofuel. Back in the 1920s ethyl alcohol was viewed as being the kind of “fuel that would turn food for the poor into fuel for the rich” and 40 years from now we still think the same thing.

Now, when you have corn, beans, and sugar canes as the bi-product of biofuel, you are creating a competition between humanity’s need for food vs. bioful, the latter is not so much a necessity. Therefore, it would have had to be regulated by way of controlling production so that we make more food available for the U.S. population and part of the rest of the world as population continues to increase in size.

The potential problem we now face with biofuel existed in the 1920s.  Back then it was still a big concern since no high tech technologies like we have today had been available to increase the means of production. However, the problem that we face today compare to 40 years ago will depend on how the United State shape their domestic policies to balance the growing demand of ethanol with the total demand for food.

According to a new census the world population has expanded to 300 million inhabitants compare to the 100 million that existed 40 years ago. The current fertility rate in America is about 2.1 births per woman, immigration contributes to 1 million people to the U.S. Population every year. Now, if we consider the growing demand for food in the world with United States as a major contributor to the food export than we can begin to think of how biofuel will affect the food market if nothing is done to control land allocation for ethanol as demand continue to increase.

Nevertheless, there are new genetically engineered enzymes and yearst that are presently available in the market that can be use with almost any plant base known as “cellulosic” to enhance the production of ethanol. We believe that it is the introduction of those types of technologies that will in the future make ethanol cheaper to produce, and as a result will become competitive to oil production.

Rising Food Price Prediction & The Effecting Countries:

USA Today has written an article on the subject of “Global demand lifts grain prices, gobbles supplies” in this article the author Sue Kirchhoff indicated that “ Soaring demand, rising oil prices and government-mandated biofuel use have sent many commodity prices to their highest levels in history. The impact is hardest in the developing world: The United Nations says increasing prices will make it tougher to meet international goals of reduced hunger. Rising prices are squeezing food aid budgets that were already falling far behind growing need caused by war and increasing weather disasters. Worse, soaring costs are adding to political instability in countries such as Afghanistan, where flour prices are up more than 60% in the past year, and as much as 80% in some areas.” With that said, we encourage smaller countries like Haiti, Ghana, Guinea, Congo, Tanzania, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and more to begin cultivating like never before.

There is another important point to consider beside the growing hunger in the poorest countries that is predicted from this rise in food prices, and that is grains that are cultivated for biofuel shouldn’t really be facilitated through the use of chemicals if those grains can also become edible by people.

It is reasonable to think that if sugar canes, corns & beans that are being produced in the United State for biofuel faces a greater demand than the need to increase production through the use of chemical would have become attractive. The concern is not that the use of chemical for grain production should be eliminated, but rather be regulated so that those grains that are sold for edible purposes are not enhanced by chemicals that are not known to FDA.  Since competitive rivalry would have called for an increase in production of biofuel, than the need for government to become concern with the rising food prices would have also create worries when the U.S. population start making demands as the need for more ethanol continue to cause a rise in food prices.

Critical Thinking Analysis:

It should be understood that if we are forecasting an increase in human population, than the ideal thing to do is not to exceed the current limitation for biofuel production, but instead to promote the production of edible food for the growing population. However, when we speak of biofuel there are a a few things that should be considered. Biofuel are not made out of edible products alone, algae, wood and waste materials are three components of biofuel production. Whereas a growing in human population equals more food it doesn’t necessarily has to equal more Biofuel. There arethings that people can live without, and biofuel is one of them.

It would seems that we would have had to prioritize our needs and make decisions according to what one need as oppose to what one’s want. What one’s want is the least preferred because it shares no value that the human population cannot live without. However, when we talk in terms of biofuel there are exceptions, because what one needs doesn’t necessarily have to be the byproduct of biofuel. If biofuel can be produce out of waste materials, algae, flowers, wood than any government investments in technologies that would facilitate the manufacturing of technologies that would enhance the  production of ethanol through the use of the aforementioned products would have been a good investment to the biofuel industry since those byproducts do not affect the food industry.

From this outlook we have realized that government role in this matter would not be to reduce any investment in bioful, but instead to direct more of the investments in technologies that can be use to produce biofuel from waste materials that do not interfere with agricultural means, produce such as sugar canes, beans, corn and certain grains that will not affect the food market as population continue to increase.

In this case the best option would have been for government to regulate ethanol production in a way that complement society, it should not be left to be decided by the free market system, if the commodities use for the production of ethanol shares a direct relationship with humanity needs for food, than it becomes sensible that accommodation be made to help sustain society needs for food.

What we are talking about here is that some sort of a selling price on ethanol would have had to been set by the International Ethanol Trade Organization (IETO) to limit ethanol production out of edible products once the total demanded threaten a rising price on food consumption.

As an example, Government can step in and say: To prevent a food crises in the United States and across the world, The Federal Government find it necessary to regulate the production of ethanol when the total demand for ethanol encourages a price elasticity of demand on foods sold across the world. At which case a selling price would have been set on the stock price of ethanol.

This makes sense because it is reasonable to think that without further production of ethanol we can’t expect an increase on stock prices. Nevertheless, we should remember that the ethanol production that the policy is regulating is the kind of ethanol that is produced by grains that are edible by people.

Government Mandates:

The Energy Act of 2005 mandated a requirement of 4 billion gallons in renewable fuels consumption by 2006, and the year of 2012 it is predicted to be increase by 7.5 billion gallons. Some have predicted that the majority of the mandate will most likely be met by ethanol, an alternative fuel that Obama rarely mentioned, but apparently has been forecasted as being one of our major sources of renewable energy.

Brazil vs. United States – biofuel:

A report on the competitiveness of U.S and Brazilian Ethanol showed the prediction of U.S. ethanol production as being expanded since 2005. The report showed that “in 2005, U.S. ethanol production capacity was 4.3 billion gallons from 95 ethanol refineries. Capacity expansion totaled 0.2 billion gallons, while capacity under construction was 1.8 billion gallons. Ethanol production consumed 1.6 billion bushels of corn (about 14 percent of U.S. corn production) in 2005; 2.6 billion bushels of corn are expected to be used by 2010 (about 22 percent of an 11.9 billion bushel crop). Thus, ethanol production has already exceeded the 2006 target of the renewable fuel mandate. A federal tax credit of 51 cents per gallon on all ethanol, available to ethanol refiners, has also contributed to increased ethanol production. Despite the rapid increase in production, consumption of ethanol has been outpacing production for the past few years, which has led to increased imports in the United States.”

Assessment:

We have compared the concern of ethyl alcohol in the 1920s with our pre-existing problems with biofuel production such as ethanol, butanol & bio-diesel.  And from that observation, we have concluded that some of the concerns we experienced in the 1920s are still present today, but the situation by which there are addressed have changed dimensions.

In the 1920s we did not have the agricultural technologies that were needed to handle the level of demand that ethyl alcohol could have brought to our economy. In addition to that The Civil Right movement and The New Deal plus The Market Crash of the 1929 all contributed to government action against ethyl alcohol production.

Furthermore, we certainly did not have the technology to process waste materials & wood to retained ethanol.  Today we do have the necessary technologies, but the U.S. population has tripled, and with the world growing demand for food, ethanol can definitely be viewed as a moral hazard if not regulated by government to compensate for hunger when a rise in ethanol price causes farmers to allocate more grains towards ethanol production instead of food for the human race.

The Moral Hazard of Ethyl Corp:

Nevertheless, the moral hazard of the 1920s can be pictured as being the cause of Ethyl Corp, a company that has placed the lives of the entire humanity at stake for the sole purpose of profit.  The consequence of  Ethyl Corp’s action had been looked upon has being the government motivation for enacting further policies that would have served in the future as limitations place on energy companies to regulate the way in which companies produce energy in the United States.

The Ethyl Corp which was created by GM & Exxon in 1924 claimed that they did not know of any other alternatives. But fortunately the Ethyl Corp had been caught in a lie because there were evidences available to show to the news media that GM had patented many alternatives as a backup plan if in case leaded gasoline did not work out to their advantage.

The Engineering Technique That Helped Resolve The “Knock” Problem:

The original problem that GM was trying to solve was now left to be solved by engineer who envisioned the solution of this problem through mathematic and physic. They had outgrown the problem by developing a more efficient internal engine through the technique of increasing compression ratio.  As stated “the simple change from a low- to a high-compression motor would offer a very effective economy in fuel consumption, by increasing the compression ratio there is a more efficient utilization of the energy content of the fuel.” Thomas Midgley did try desperately to resolve the engine knock problem by increasing the compression ratio, but he fail because the automobile had become so intensified that not only did his technique cause tremendous loss of power, but  it also damage to the engine parts. Nevertheless, his effort was not in vain, where he had fail others had succeeded in later years.

The Net Value:

Looking at the history of leaded fuel, we would have had to conclude that the real net value that can be evaluated as being a righteous decision by both, government and the healthcare administration was to stop the production of ethyl alcohol branded and the regulation of ethanol fuel to minimize further threat impose of population by Utility Companies.  Although ethyl alcohol was later stop from being produce, but at least it lays an example that had indicated to the automobile industry that ethyl alcohol was a true alternative for the future.

References:

Harbrinderjit Singh Dillon,Tara Laan and Harya Setyaka Dilon,”Biofuels at what costs,” The Global Subsidies Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (Dec 2008), accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.globalsubsidies.org/files/assets/indonesia_biofuels.pdf

Bill Kovarik,”Ethyl War,” Radford University,” Leaded gasoline history and current situation (March 2000), accessed May 16, 2011, http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/ethylwar/overview.html

William Chen Wei Ning, “Perspectives on New Generations and Technologies of Biofuels,” Nanyang Technological University ( ), accessed May 19, 2011, http://www.vivasia.nl/~/media/CC704AB1230E437C9A8B63309B10E7EB.ashx

Simla Tokgoz and Amani Elobeld, ”Policy and Competitiveness of U.S. and Brazilian Ethanol,” Iowa State University (Spring 2006), accessed May 21, 2011, http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/spring_06/article3.aspx

The Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, “Eliminating the “Knock” in automobile engine,” Thomas Midgley, Jr. (May 1889), accessed May 16, 2011, http://www.todayinsci.com/m/midgley_thomas/midgleythomas-ACS.htm

Senator Richard G. Lugar and Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, “The New Petroleum,” The Lugar Energy Initiative (Jan/Feb 1999), accessed May 21, 2011, http://lugar.senate.gov/energy/press/articles/990109newpetro.cfm

Michael E. Kraft and Norman J. Vig, “Environmental Policy over Four Decades,” Achievements and New Directions (2010), accessed May 20, 2011, http://www.cqpress.com/docs/college/Ch1-kraft-vig.pdf

U.S. Census Bureau, “ Negative Population Growth,” US Historical Population Growth 1790 -2050 ( ), accessed May 20, 2011, http://www.npg.org/popfacts.htm

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