There's nothing wrong with ethanol as a fuel per se. It has the potential to be a great sustainable fuel made from farm waste and other sources. Unfortunately, the bulk of it now is being made from subsidized corn. This pits all of us who would champion ethanol as a sustainable fuel against it since the current state of the industry is based on very bad policy.
There's nothing wrong with ethanol as a fuel per se.
== This is a completely uneducated comment.
Ethanol has poor energy to mass ratio and is unstable and/or reactive chemically with things that aren't stainless-steel, which make up certain "mission-critical" sub-systems of petrol-designed-combustion engines. Its notorious clogging/eating EFI systems/sub-systems that are not "hardened" or and/or specially maintained. The only really "good use" of ethonal is in applications that have terrible environmental side-effects. For example, e85 is very useful if you want to make a cheap substiture for high-octane fuel in performance applications. But notice in California, "octane" ratings are limited to prevent "high-performance" applications for fuel because as a general rule they are "environmentally unsound". But e85 has terrible gas mileage (1/3 less than e10), which even in everday use means more haulage or more mass==more road wrear, more stops to refuel, etc==more environmental damage.
I could go on, but will spare you the rant =D
TLDR: Petrol is a better store of energy/mass a nd depreciates a motor at a slower rate.
[edit: To answer the GP question, the easiest way to get reliable fuel without ethanol is to buy "race gas" with octane ratings > 100+ at something like 2x the price of normal octane fuel ~87.]
This comment is just 400% wrong. And to make the claim that the OP was uneducated just misleads everyone here on HN. I'm someone who has run E85 blends in my 2006 turbo Subaru for the last 4 years. I can personally attest to E85's increased stability and cooling power from my time personally playing and tuning on a chassis dynamometer and gathering real world data. I would prefer E100 if they could sell that at the pumps too: it simply reduces the chance of pre-ignition or dual flame-front events from the petroleum blend.
I think as scientists and engineers it's extremely important we separate the empirical facts from the political propaganda.
Flagged? Seems to me it's pretty tough to get around the mpg arguments. Likewise, the wear on engines is well known in the marine environment -- which is not all that different from driving on PNW roads in the winter. Most of our cars ran fine on E0, and I'm not at all sure what you're concerned about in terms of pre-ignition or dual flame-front events (my car, like most, was designed to run on 87 octane).
How do you know it's wrong? The argument is that ethanol degrades an engine more quickly than gasoline; presumably testing this would require studying a whole fleet of engines for a long span of time--probably longer than 4 years.
> I think as scientists and engineers it's extremely important we separate the empirical facts from the political propaganda.
Right but a single anecdote about your own car doesn't move the conversation forward. It sounds like you may know more on this subject than most, give us some details and sources.
Where I live, a few of the "76" stations advertise very loudly that they don't add ethanol to their fuel. They don't seem to be much more expensive than the E10 stations either.
You're probably burning tax dollars as well if you're burning pure gasoline. And corn used to ethanol is usually feed corn - it was never going to directly be eaten by a human anyways. The degree of indirectness from actual food is at the level where you should also be aware of any activity that promotes farmers doing anything but grow and sell human food.
Using E0 hasn't been cheap for America. The low pump prices paid have made for a car market where small and efficient is less popular than elsewhere on earth, and the prices paid for middle eastern stability (which hasn't been very successful) has been footed by huge (mainly US) military expenditure.
One of the things worse than burning petroleum in cars is burning corn ethanol in cars. It has essentially all of the downside, only amplified through energy inefficiency and politics.
If I had any political power, I'd end the ethanol subsidies. That would be the simplest change to save ~$20b or so ($6b in direct costs, higher corn prices, corn subsidies, use of fossil water and other limited resources, less fuel efficiency)
Small and efficient are popular elsewhere because US gas taxes are hugely lower than the rest of the world (other than producer countries that have huge subsidies, like Saudi and Venezuela). US taxes average 49c a gallon vs UK $4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax and thats what makes the difference.
Yes. And much of the rest of the world perceives (rightly or wrongly) that the Middle East is that mess that it is in part because of the US need to maintain their low prices by guaranteeing supply through military aid and maintenance of some terrible governments.
Unfortunately, making ethanol out of corn still uses a lot of oil: farm equipment for harvesting corn is powered by diesel fuel and fertilizer is made of petroleum-based chemicals.
I don't understand this argument. Burning E10, my car gets at least 10% worse gas mileage than on E0. So how exactly is any fossil fuel being conserved?
