A new gas station just opened up in town, and they are selling Non-ethanol marine fuel at one of there pumps. I understand why, as older boats fuel systems react very poorly to ethanol… So I get that, but I also know that ethanol blends costs power and MPG on a car. At the stations around me its a 10% ethanol blend on the normal fuels.
This is my question will filling up my car with the non ethanol fuel justify the 60 cent a gallon difference (actually more because I usually run regular and this stuff is 89 octane) with an increase in MPG?? Not sure how the math would work out… What do you guys think?
You’d probably only increase your MPG by about 5% (rough guess.) Therefore you should only be willing to pay 5% more for non-ethanol gas. 60 cents is way more than a 5% difference, so you’ll end up spending a lot more.
I buy non-ethanol if a car, motorcycle, lawn mower etc. is going to go unused for a long period of time as the shelf life of ethanol is pretty short.
Let’s say you pay $3.60 for E10 gasoline and the marine gasoline costs $4.20. For each 100 miles you travel using E10, you need to travel 85.7 miles on marine gas to equal the cost. 100/85.7 = 1.16667; you need to get about 17% better gas mileage to break even.
In MN, premium gas for boats without ethanol was recommended by my boat guy. As far as cars go depending on the year, your’s I do not know, it is probably a waste of 60 cents per gallon.
I have never noticed any mileage difference between E-10 and E-0…But $.60/gallon, you will certainly notice THAT difference…I wonder if the station sells enough of it to justify all the paperwork involved…I’m guessing this station is the “unbranded” variety…Joe’s Quik-Stop Gas, something like that…
The 60 cent a gallon premium is way too high to recoupe any of your money by better fuel economy. It’s a shame that ethanol was rammed down our throats because someone a long time ago thought it was a good idea.
I can buy gasoline without ethanol for about $ .05 more per gallon and tried it for a few tanks. I went back to the 10% ethanol blend, because I didn’t see any fuel mileage improvement using straight gas, but different cars may react differently. Even if there was a slight increase in mileage I don’t think you’d ever recoup $ .60 per gallon.
I remember an independent in Denver who sold “100 octane racing gasoline, ethanol free” He got double the money for it. On Friday Night, the “tuners” were lined up, happily anteing up…
The product turned out to be 100 octane LL Av Gas, and could only be sold to “Off road Use Only” vehicles…He had to stop selling it to "drive in " customers…
E10 was done to replace MTBE. MTBE is clearly worse environmentally than ethanol. As a pure fuel source, ethanol is pretty questionable. As an oxygenation ingredient, ethanol makes sense.
"Oxygenated Fuels made sense when cars were carburated…It did lower the CO content of the exhaust…But after fuel injection and computers controlled by oxygen sensors, CO was reduced to zero and “oxygenated Fuels” made no sense except to corn farmers…
Today, its an economic issue, not an air quality issue…
I can remember the Oil Companies position…“The corn farmers have suddenly been awarded 10% of our market and they didn’t have to build a single gas station.”
MTBE had to be replaced with something to raise the octane rating of gasoline, and ethanol is the best combination of cost and limiting toxicity. As gasoline reservoirs at gas stations age, they can leak. MTBE will kill the water supply if it is from wells.
Yeah, there’s gas available. Just saw a huge refinery in the carribean went bankrupt, could easily be restarted to fill an uptick in demand. Between the economic downturn, the 10% ethanol mandate, and the increased mpgs petro-based gas consumption is dropping.
Has anyone seen a good current study of the total impact of ethanol as a automotive fuel, in the US today, including pollution, total cost etc, in the US today. Likewise world wide?
The U.S. consumes 19 million barrels of petroleum A DAY…Of that, we import 60% of it or 11.5 million barrels a day. At $100/barrel, that’s one billion one hundred million dollars ($1,100,000,000) leaving the United States every day just to pay our oil bill…That’s the REAL problem, not pollution…We can’t afford to keep importing all this oil…
There is no way we can produce the oil we need by expanding domestic production, that’s just not going to happen…So the alternative is reducing consumption down to a level we CAN produce…This reduction in consumption can be achieved in several ways, some of them VERY painful, some not so painful.
North America could produce all the oil we need if Obama and democrats would stop blocking production and transportation of it at every chance they get.
“At $100/barrel, that’s one billion one hundred million dollars ($1,100,000,000) leaving the United States every day just to pay our oil bill…That’s the REAL problem, not pollution…We can’t afford to keep importing all this oil…”
Clearly we can afford it. That’s three dollars and fifty cents a day per person. The fact that we buy things made with petroleum, delivered using petroleum, and buy petroleum itself, shows that we can in fact afford to import all this oil. Unlike the gummint, most people don’t borrow the money to pay for these products. If you can earn enough money to pay for something, you can afford it.