Green River, Utah

The guy at the front desk told me that the wind chill was minus 23. Given that, I probably should have been happy that the truck started, and I probably should have just driven straight out onto the freeway. But, I didn't. I wanted to see the sunrise on the Book Cliffs. My mind's eye was full of last night's sunset: The cliffs were alive with light, glowing like a million embers along the northern skyline. So, I turned north just outside of town and drove along the east side of the river until I came to a high point where I could look down into its valley. It was a great spot, but I was not rewarded with much of a sunrise. There were a few bright shafts, but mostly there were clouds. The river, sluggish with ice, issued from the cliffs in front of me and spread into the valley, but the hills refused to glow.

Motor Fuel

Rural Ways is always looking for ways to save money on energy. Not because we are righteous, but because we are cheap. One way to do it is to spend less on motor fuel for the cars. We have tried to do that by combining trips, driving gently, and keeping our tires in shape . . . all the obvious stuff. Nevertheless our costs have been rising inexorably. One reason for this has been a decline in mileage from both of our vehicles. Granted the cars are old, but there doesn't seem to be any good reason why our efficiency would drop by 5 or 10 percent in miles per gallon in both vehicles. Recently, however, someone mentioned that the more ethanol there is in your petrol, the worse your mileage will be. So, I looked it up.

It takes one gallon of fossil fuel to produce 1.34 gallons of corn ethanol in the United States. (There are some who dispute these numbers, but the numbers come from the Argonne National Laboratory, so I'll live with them.) Great. We're getting a third more energy out for every gallon we put in. Umm, not so fast. The bad news, and the thing I guess I didn't realize is that there are only about 85,000 BTUs of energy in a gallon of ethanol, as compared with 124,000 BTUs in a gallon of gasoline. That is about a third less energy. Now, Rural Ways is not mathematically inclined, so readers can feel free to check my arithmetic, but it seems like the benefits of ethanol may be hovering somewhere in the range of slim to none.

What really gets my goat, however, is the effect of all this ethanol on my fuel consumption. Consumer Reports says that at least 70% of the fuel you buy at the pump is a 90/10 mix of gasoline and ethanol. In 2009, the US EPA allowed this ratio to go to 85/15. (You may have started to see the stickers on the gas pumps stating that your fuel may contain up to 15% ethanol.) This means that, at 90/10, every gallon of gas we pump contains 120,000 BTUs of energy, or 3% less than we'd get from straight petrol. At 85/15, every gallon contains about 118,000 BTUs, or 5% less energy than gasoline.

So, let's take the worst case scenario: Rural Ways drives an old pick-up that could (formerly) be counted on for about 15 MPG. If we are fueling it with a 15% ethanol blend, that goes down to about 14 and a quarter. At $3 per gallon spread over a year of driving (12,000 miles), our costs go up by $124.17. The car only costs an extra 74.50 due to its smaller motor, but, together, we are going to pay an extra $200 for motor fuel in 2011. Now, to many, that may seem a small price to pay for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but, according to the ANL, a 90/10 gasoline/ethanol blend only reduces our GHG emissions by 2%. So, wait? We burn 3% more to reduce our emissions by 2%? I'm still having trouble with the arithmetic. Besides, at Rural Ways, $200 is a lot of money.

From the Easel

Rural Ways periodically makes available, as a service to its readers, an exclusive sneak peak at an unfinished work of fine art. Rural Ways has secured unprecented access to the easel of the principal artist at Valerie Orlemann Fine Art. Today we have a small oil original on gallery wrapped canvas depicting the wall above Bowery Creek draped in snow. See it here first!

Spending Moratorium

Do you ever have a family spending moratorium? At Rural Ways we spent more money during December 2010 than we earned during the month. Now, I ain’t too book smart, but I know the formula for debt when I see it, and there it is. So, for the month of January 2011, we tried to reverse the trend by imposing a spending moratorium—necessities only, no luxuries. The interesting question, of course, is, which is which. Now, I would say that some of what I’ve seen in the media during the Great Recession has convinced me that most rich westerners are confused by the difference between those two terms. Is Rural Ways? Well, let’s see, what have we purchased during January? Half and half for the coffee, fuel for two cars, cheap red wine for the dinner table, dance lessons for the kid. Hmm. I think we may be a little confused ourselves. On the other hand, we did succeed in reducing our January spending to 1/3 of what it was in December. Does that entitle us to a February splurge on, say, wine that comes in a bottle instead of a plastic bag?

Across the Great Divide

We left Road Canyon a little too late and dusk was almost over by the time we got back to the truck. That kind of thing makes me nervous because, if you have a problem, you are going to have it in the full dark. In any case, we didn't have a problem, and we simply needed to drive 15 or 20 miles back to the pavement. As we went, in silence, with a little rain on the windshield, Ellen suddenly asked, "Can we have some music?" She wanted to listen to Nancy Griffith's Other Voices, Other Rooms, so we plugged in a cassette tape, and tunneled on into the deepening dark. At about that same time we came to a part of the road that was almost completely blocked by tumbleweeds. Having driven it before, I knew the road well enough not to stop, so we continued at a moderate pace around and through the tumbleweeds. Nancy Griffith was singing the Kate Wolf song, Across the Great Divide, and we all began to sing along as we surfed the tumbleweeds. It was a moment I'll remember for the rest of my life. To hear the voices of my wife and daughter—Ellen a little out of tune—singing with gusto, "Now I find myself on the mountainside/Where the rivers change direction/Across the great divide," as we bumped along in our old truck after a long day together was priceless. No joke. I would not have traded it for a million dollars. This is the stuff of which heaven is made: In a crappy old truck with a broken cassette player in the dark and the rain twenty miles from pavement, a family, fording the tumbleweeds and singing together.