Is the use of ethanol as an alternative fuel a corrosive pipe dream? It could be thanks to ethanol’s widely unknown dirty little secret. The infrastructure for transporting oil or fuel is through the use of metal pipelines, tanker truck or railway tanker. But there’s just one slight problem. High concentrations of ethanol are corrosive to the metal pipelines. When you stop to think about it, that’s actually a major problem.
A smooth transition to ethanol seems highly unlikely since ethanol has a water affinity problem. That is, it absorbs water. Ethanol corrosion in metal pipes can lead to internal stress cracking and can accelerate damage to weld joints. 
The damage can be extremely difficult to detect and very costly to repair. Due to ethanol’s corrosive characteristics, production may not be able to meet ethanol demand soon enough.
The U.S. may have large supplies of corn or biomass to convert to ethanol, but without using pipelines, how will the massive quantities of ethanol be transported to gas stations and the end consumer? In the short term, the transportation of ethanol will be handled by railway or tanker truck. But in the long term, a whole new infrastructure of pipelines may need to be built to transport ethanol. That’s not going to happen over night and it will certainly add to the costs of using ethanol as an alternative fuel.
So is ethanol corrosive to PVC pipe? If not, maybe we could line up the Plumbers Guild, give them a ton of PVC pipe and doping compound. They could construct another pipeline along top or side the existing pipelines in a matter of days. Is this ridiculous and far fetched? Of course. But it’s strange ideas like this that may lead to a solution. We could construct the world’s first “Moonshine Pipeline” to transport the ethanol right along side the oil.
Filed in: Pipelines, Alternative Energy, Renewable Fuel, Ethanol