Ethanol and Rail Bottlenecks

I read a news article about the rising price of gasoline being caused by distribution problems of ethanol being shipped to eastern markets where it is to replace MBTE. According to the article railroads might not be able to ship enough to meet demand. What I would like to know is why this might be. Do the frieight railroads east of the Mississippi not have enough transport capability ? tank cars? track capacity? oil transfer/ storage facilities? locomotives? manpower? Whatever could the problem be with the railroads not being able to transport this material ?

East coast refineries are older and smaller, alot of refined products are transported from the gulf coast petrochemical facilities by parcel tanker; a coastal tanker designed to cary a variety of solvents, chemicals and petroleum hydrocarbon products. They bring MBTE in a million gal. at a time. It takes alot of 20,000 gal railcars to do the same w/ ethanol.

Meantime alot of Synthetic Ethanol is comming off the refinery stills taken from the ethylene fractions. Alot of this ethanol is sold. I worked for a chem hauler and we were bringing ethanol, from those same parcel tankers, brought up from the gulf by the millions of gal. to a place that was filling totes and shipping it to Russia where it was being used to suplement their Vodka production.

Rember this the next time you ask for that pricy imported Vodka, Some of it came off a Petrochemical cracker down in the bayou, rode thousands of miles in a tanker ship and then rode across the ocean in a tote bin.

Have another!

What we need is a way to connect the mid west corn farmers to the Vodka makers and let the Petrochemical guys produce their own oxygenate to make the gasoline burn cleaner...