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Is E85 Dead Now?
twdorris writes "With a stoichiometric ratio far lower than that of gasoline (much lower than the price difference), buying the E85 ethanol fuel blend instead of gasoline was already hard to justify. Unless you raced your car on a track where E85 provided a great alternative to race fuel, it really didn't make financial sense. And there are other reasons not to buy E85, too. Like the impact corn-based ethanol is having on food prices or the questionable emissions results (PDF). So, now that the ethanol subsidies provided by the U.S. federal government are scheduled to end this summer, it's going to be even harder to justify E85 (at least in the U.S.). This change will basically make a gallon of E85 cost the same or slightly more than gasoline. With so many things working against it, are the days numbered for readily available E85 at your local gas station? And should it have ever even been made available to begin with? How much did all that government-backed R&D and tax credits cost us for something that was pretty clearly questionable to begin with?"
For the record, I know of only one location that sells E85 in this area. Doesn't mean there aren't others, but if there are, I haven't seen them.
One of the talk shows on our station is a good ol' boy who talks auto repair. He insists -- vehemently -- that ethanol lowers mileage so much that whatever you saved on emissions, you lose because you're burning more fuel as a result. The callers to that show seem to echo that sentiment.
I know in my own car (Nissan Altima, and I LOVE it), I seem to get a bit more mileage when I'm burning pure gasoline -- about 5% more.
YMMV (literally, in this case) and that's hardly scientific, but there you go. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I know diesel engines have a lousy reputation in North America, but I firmly believe hemp based bio-diesel is a FAR better alternative than E85. Most importantly, hemp seed based bio-diesel is a net-positive energy solution, requiring less fuel to farm the hemp and process it into bio-diesel than you end up producing (kind of a critical point for any product to succeed in the energy markets.)
Some go so far as to claim that hemp bio-diesel is carbon negative. I'm skeptical about that, but it would be interesting to test the theory.
Unlike ethanol corn, hemp produces a great deal of fiber suitable for textiles and paper as a side-product, even if the main purpose of the crop is bio-diesel. Levi's jeans used to be made exclusively from hemp-fiber denim, not cotton. I've read claims that hemp based paper out produces poplar tree paper production by a factor of nearly 4:1, though again, I've not seen a study to prove that claim.
Most important of all, hemp is literally a weed and will grow almost anywhere, allowing the use of low-grade farmland instead of taking away from food-crop acreage.
But it's nothing new. The pro-hemp community has been screaming this "nonsense" at the top of their lungs for decades while the cannabis drug war drowned out their good points about hemp farming.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It doesn't raise octane content, but octane rating, which is a measure of susceptibility to autoignition, indicated as the iso-octane content of a mixture of heptane and iso-octane with the same properties -- but as soon as there's anything other than heptane, the octane rating is nothing to do with octane. Ethanol raises octane rating by being difficult to ignite -- basically because it's an alcohol instead of a hydrocarbon, and they act different.
And E85 will let you get more power, and comparable MPG, from the same block vs. gasoline precisely because of ethanol's awesome octane rating -- the only catch is, you need to increase the compression ratio to make it happen (which will boost your efficiency enough to compensate the decreased energy content of the fuel) -- but turbocharged engines (which can do that on the fly) are sadly unpopular in America, land of the big-block V8.
That's just semantics.
It takes less energy to drill a gallon of gasoline out of the ground and deliver it to your fuel tank than you gain by burning that fuel in your engine. It takes more energy to grow corn, turn it into ethanol and deliver it to your fuel tank than you gain from burning that ethanol.
If you were using solar powered tractors to grow the corn, and solar powered trucks to move it around it might make sense (just might, it wouldn't necessarily.) Given that most of the energy to produce the ethanol comes from gasoline or diesel, it makes no sense to use ethanol.
I believe that in most cases, it's more than just semantics. Most (not all) corn is grown using conventional (petroleum-based) fertilizer. According to Michael Pollan, producing one calorie of corn uses two calories of petro-fertilizer. This is only counting fertilizer use, not the additional energy used for farm equipment, moving product/raw materials, the distillation process or loss of energy during distillation.
I'm shocked that this is not cited elsewhere when discussing Ethanol as an energy source, especially when used to reduce our dependency on petroleum (foreign or otherwise). Given that we're using more petroleum to make it than it would save, it appears to be a bit of a boondoggle.
...either that or I'm horribly misinformed. (Note: Pollan's book cites a peer reviewed study for this claim - I'm just citing what I read from memory)
-Turkey
This is the case for ANY motor not specifically designed to run on high-ethanol-content fuels. Ethanol is a strong solvent and strips oil films, breaks down hoses and seals, oxidizes ferrous metals, and generally tears apart gasoline motors. E85 "flex-fuel" motors are designed with ethanol's nastiness in mind, using different materials and lubricants, but even then, running E85 is harder on the engine and usually calls for more frequent service intervals.
Running E85 in ANY engine that does not explicitly state that it is designed to run on E85 will cause permanent and rapid damage. It'll probably completely destroy the engine before your next oil change.
Ethanol is complete crap as an engine fuel, with the lone exception being purpose built race engines that can utilize the higher detonation resistance for more horsepower per unit displacement. And those race motors tend to get rebuilt at least once a year, mitigating the wear factors.