Good point - 65/58*70 = 78%. One reasonable application they’re developing is to have a separate E100 tank on a turbocharged car, by adding ethanol when on boost higher pressures can be used. If the E100 tank’s empty, lower boost is used. But seems a lot of expense to go through for peak power delivery.
E-85 helps the farmers. It does little or nothing to help you. While it is generally safe to use, under normal conditions it offers no benefit to the driver and likely higher fuel cost.
You should not use it on older cars as their fuel systems are not ready for the alcohol. Generally it
Oh Darn! And I was hoping the day would come when I could fill my car up with a can of beer! LOL…
Indy cars use E-100 and 14-16 to1 compression for a reason…Ethanol / Methanol is a renewable fuel. Gasoline is not…World-wide demand for petroleum fuels continues to grow while proven reserves of petroleum continue to decline…At some point, something has to give…We burned off the low-hanging fruit at about $2-$5 a barrel. It’s at $100/barrel today and unstable…You need to ask yourselves how badly you want it…
katidid79–it takes more than one can of beer for my fillups. Light beer might be better for your car as its advantage is “less filling”. I equate light beer with E-85 fuel. I keep light beer out of my stomach and E-85 fuel out of my engines.
They once had a documentary on Nation Geographic where Scientists theorized what the world would be like if we ran out of petroleum…Petroleum as everyone knows is used for other things besides fueling cars.
I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere here so I’ll mention it. I don’t have a link to back it up, but here in the middle of corn country I hear lots of stuff about E85, but one thing that keeps coming up is how corrosive it can be to seals, hoses, and gaskets. Given the performance drop, that on a miles per dollar basis it doesn’t seem to do any better than regular fuel, and that it might be corrosive to engine components I wouldn’t use it even if I had a flex fuel vehicle.
Caddyman; there is no way that biofuels can meet the need for motor fuel at ANY time in the future. There simply is not enough land to support the crops needed. Even the tiny amount of gasahol produced now requires half the corn cropland in the US.
With respect to petroleum resources, these are price sensitive. The cheap sources are gradually running down. But at $100 and up we have enormous resources still to be tapped. For instance there is shale oil, oilsands oil, and Venezuela’s Orinoco belt has as much oil as Saudi Arabia, if not more. And it’s all available at the $100 price or less.
If Chavez was a good manager and trustworthy, he could flood the market with Orinoco crude and under cut the $100 price.
The only long term bio source I see is oil from algea or simlar source not requiring land.
I don’t think Bio-Source is the future.
There are other promising technologies out there…Several of them the big oil companies and power companies are completely against.
Cheap solar is one. New technologies using nano technology to create cheap solar panels are being developed today. One is a Solar paint. Just paint on the any conductive material and it will instantly turn it into a solar panel.
Solar to Hydrogen converters. A solar panel panel can be used to convert water into hydrogen which then can be used to power you fuel-cell car. Or power a generator to power your house at night.
Switchgrass would be a much better alternative for making Ethanol. You only need to plant it once for one thing. Switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with only about 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol. But even with grass you would displace large areas of farm land growing food crops.
Right DfromSD. All energy specialists agree that bio fuels will only amount to a small percentage of total motor fuel needs. Only Brazil now derives 55% of its motor fuel from ethanol made of sugarcane. But that’s a very unusual case, and will not hold true in the future when Brazil becomes as motorized and the US and the population increases.
Liquid or gaseous fuels can be made from many sources such as natural gas and coal being the most prevalent. The world has enormous reserves of both.
Agree that battery technology is key to a substantial number of cars becoming electric.
Caddyman, Indy cars use 100% simply because the sanctioning body requires it. And that’s politically based rather than technically based.
I remain uncoonvinced that ethanol has any advantages whatsoever, whether 100% or blended with gasoline. I remain convinced that it’s purely politics driving its use.
Well, even I will admit it has ONE advantage - octane’s 140, so you can crank up the boost and/or compression. But this doesn’t help normal cars, they still have to be able to use regular gas.
E85 has a huge advantage for performance modifications. For example street/strip application where detonation is a big concern, especially with high compression where higher octane is needed or when boosted with a turbo or supercharger, or even nitrious. E85 is comparable to racing fuel. And A LOT less expensive than VP Racing fuel and it’s fairly available in most areas. Just need to test it for quality, mostly depends on the source. It’s also much easier on the engine. Runs cooler, less stressful on a high performance engine.
Yes, ethanol can make just as much or more power than gasoline, you just have to burn more of it, which is possible because a stoichiometric mixture of ethanol/air is “richer” than a stoichiometric mixture of gasoline/air.
The difference in stoichiometric ratios is the real reason you can’t just put ethanol in an engine designed for gasoline, if you do, the fuel air mix will be way too lean unless you rejet the carburetor or reprogram the EFI to compensate for this.
Another difference between alcohol, and methanol in particular is that methanol does not loose much power when run richer than stoichiometric. This is handy in glow ignition model airplane engines because the air fuel mixture changes the ignition point of the compression stroke, when you richen the air fuel mixture in a glow engine, you are actually retarding the ignition timing.
I figured this out long ago after noticing that a Cox glow engine with a doubled head gasket “wants” a leaner fuel mixture for maximum power. How can a change of compression ratio richen the fuel mixture? Well it doesn’t, it just changes the mixture that gives the correct ignition timing.
With spark ignition engines a rich mixture of methanol allows 15 to 1 compression ratios, which increases the power more than the overly rich mixture decreases the power.
It’s one reason why drag racing engines make lots of power while consuming huge amounts of fuel.
Methanol, while it can be “renewable” is mostly made from natural gas today. It was called wood alcohol for a reason.
The main reason they sell E85 and not E100 is so cars will start in cold weather. If you go to a drag strip, you will notice that the alcohol and fuel cars are started by having a crew member squirting a shot of gasoline into the intake.
With model airplane engines, I discovered a neat trick to get them started in cool weather without spinning them to death with an electric starter, I would put a drop or two of cigarette lighter fluid in the air intake and the engine would start with a flip or two of the prop. No electric starter needed.
Today, my power plant of choice for radio control model airplanes is lithium polymer batteries and electric motors. The power output is amazing, like a toy scale Tesla, and you just plug in a charged battery and fly, no starting, setting the mixture, flameouts while flying or taxiing to the runway, and no messy oil cleanup after flying and my car doesn’t end up smelling like castor oil smoke.
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no price controls on e85. stations can sell it at a loss. NO stations in mpls area sell it for 30% less than e10. there are a few 200 miles NW of mpls that come close.
Where does “price controls” show up in that post @Cavell?
And although that post is 5 years old I still find myself somewhat compelled to fill up with E-10 as I would need to drive far out of my way and pay 30c more per gallon for REAL gasoline. And ethanol in gasoline is certainly a politically derived formula.
gas was $2 last yr. it is 2.60 today. due to crude prices? or collusion on producers? or the hurricane? is houston back on its feet? politicians, producers and price controls? e10 is same at all stations. but 1.59 for e85?
Hurricanes.
Ethanol is a political scam. The oil companies will give away E-85 to meet EPA requirements.
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