It is sad to see a supposed 'conservative' leader lend himself to fanciful stories like this. He must be getting paid pretty well.
I especially see the attempt to say that ethanol-fueled engines are so good that even NASCAR uses them. That is stretching it a lot, as those blends they use are far different than what a gas pump has.
And his verbiage to say that using ethanol is the best path to a free market is laughable, as the mandate forces consumers to use ethanol.
No wonder why this guy lost to a liberal Democrat.
Not only are NASCAR engines different, they are torn down and inspected with amazing frequency. The average car owner wants something that is bulletproof reliable for fifty to a hundred thousand miles, and not an engine which has to be dismantled, inspected, massaged, and reassembled every few thousand miles at most.
Also of concern to motorists is what is known as the “blend wall.” The gas tanks in most vehicles can only contain gasoline blended with 10 percent ethanol (E10). Another gas blend, known as E85, allows a mixture of 85 percent ethanol, but only flex-fuel vehicles can run on this fuel and the demand for these vehicles is very low. Further, drivers who own flex-fuel vehicles often fill their tanks with E10 as opposed to E85 because the energy content in E85 is lower. The combination of the increasing mandate and declining fuel consumption, from a slow economy and existing increased fuel efficiency standards, means that refiners may have to blend more ethanol than consumers want, or can even safely use in their vehicles.
(from
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/06/the-ethanol-mandate-dont-mend-it-end-it)
Saying ethanol made a significant contribution to the reduction in oil imports is funny, too. The producers in the US alone added nearly 4 million barrels of oil per day of production from 2011 to 2015,
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16591, enough to drop the price of crude oil from 2011 levels to the current prices. Oil companies, drilling companies, and completion technology advances made this happen. While biofuels may have played a lesser role, the oil industry did the heavy lifting.
Claims that vehicles run better on high octane ethanol blends omit that most E10 fuel is 87 octane, the lowest on the pump in much of America. It is the E0 fuels, when available, that tend to be the high octane premium fuels. The racing fuel NASCAR uses costs multiples of what pump gas costs, and every one of those cars has a team of mechanics on staff.