Study: Ethanol not a major factor in reducing gas prices
If you have stopped at a gas station recently, there is a good chance your auto has consumed fuel with ethanol blended into it. Yet the price of gasoline is not substantially affected by the volume of its ethanol content, according to a paper co-authored by an MIT economist. The study seeks to rebut the claim, broadly aired over the past couple of years, that widespread use of ethanol has reduced the wholesale cost of gasoline by $0.89 to $1.09 per gallon.Whatever the benefits or drawbacks of ethanol, MIT’s Christopher Knittel says, price issues are not among them right now.“The point of our paper is not to say that ethanol doesn’t have a place in the marketplace, but it’s more that the facts should drive this discussion,” says Knittel, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy and a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.The 10...