Politicians love to fall all over themselves to promote the ethanol use. In 1990, this resulted in Clean Air Act provisions that compromised the effectivenes of fuel content requirements and led to widespread MTBE water pollution. (While MTBE was the pollutant, the provision that led to widespread MTBE use was pushed by the ethanol lobby.)
The New York Times reports on another potential problem with E85 ethanol fuels: their corrosivity.
E85, a blend of 85 percent corn-based ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, could be eating away at metal and plastic parts in pumps being used to dispense the fuel at gasoline stations, Underwriters Laboratories, the private product-safety testing group, said this month. . . .Underwriters Laboratories, which certifies the safety of everything from toasters to televisions, has temporarily withdrawn authorization for the U.L.-approved label on parts used in E85 dispensers. Those dispensers, it turns out, were modified from regular gasoline dispensers and were certified only for a maximum of 15 percent ethanol concentration; U.L. said it had never certified any E85-specific pumps.
The reversal has heightened concerns among some oil companies about the safety of E85 pumps on the market and threatens to slow the proliferation of the fuel, which automakers, President Bush and Midwest lawmakers are pushing as a homegrown alternative to gasoline.
If we ban E-85, the terrorists have already won.
Maybe we should just go with Homer Simpson's philosophy. "Trying is the first step towards failure." and just forget about it.
Also, if those pumps are only rated to E15 then Minnesota has a problem. Their gas is all E20.
There are actually two very separate corrosion problems. The first is worrying about the alcohol dissolving plastic parts. The other one is that over the years gasoline storage tanks collect a layer of crud that settles out of the gas. A lot of that crud is ethonol soluble, and so even E10 or E15 will pick up the stuff and then deposit it in your engine.
Alternatively, you hate the big ag corporations who get all the tax breaks.
Hate. That's all there is here. Hate.
The better question is how much money are we wasting to support the non-cane-sugar derived ethanol lobby? Clearly you have burn more gallons of total fuel when ethanol is mixed with gasoline due to the lower energy density, but if ethanol were cheaper enough than gasoline, this should be a net gain both in dollars and sustainability. Another good question then is why are we wasting money on more expensive corn-derived ethanol from the US midwest when the Brazilians could produce and ship sugar-cane derived ethanol here for $0.90 less per gallon without our ~$0.58/gal import tariff? Their ethanol is already cheaper than ours, leading to significant increases in its importation in the last few years, but it's not clearly cheap enough yet (though it would be sans protectionism) to make up for the loss in enerygy density.
Where is the Bush administration on this? The Democrats? Is Lula the only leader who sees the value of energy independence?
(Good article on butanol at Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol_fuel)
When I calculate the gas saved using E85 that gets 15 mpg versus 100% gasoline that gets 17 mpg, I show a 3.8% reduction in gasoline used, not 25%:
(15 / .85) / 17 - 1 = .038
Avgas is generally dyed blue and is known as 100LL, for 100 octane "low lead," although it actually has quite a bit of very nasty tetraethyl lead in it. Hot rodders know it as "blue racing gas."
Anyway, it turns out that ethanol is bad for airplanes. Apparently in addition to deleterious effects on seals and fuel lines, its presence in gasoline increases the risk of vapor lock, which is a really big problem when you are sucking gas into a hot engine at high altitude.
And now it's become impossible, in some areas, to find mogas without ethanol in it. Major bummer.
Faced with a requirement of handling 15% ethanol, it's very likely that handling that by using parts that can take 15% ethanol for the expected life of the product is cheaper and easier than making ones that can handle 85% for that timespan.
Unless they expected a change to 85%, there'd be no reason to spend extra time and money supporting that case.
A product need not be "just barely" able to handle 15% ethanol for years of running life to be likely to fail early if used at 85%.
An over 5-times increase in chemical concentration is a significant change, not a minor one, in my experience.
Sorry, my previous comments should have been addressed to billb, not you. I just wanted to point out that the 25% gas savings was inaccurate.
I agree with you that my analysis only focused on gasoline used after the fuel is pumped into the car.
Don't know. Did we find out if there was a study on how much extra gas we are burning to support the oil and car manufacturer lobbies to continue producing gasoline powered cars that get 17mpg? Don't know if you're in a truck/SUV or sports car, but if truck/SUV, should've been designed with a diesel engine. Gas inherently sucks at heavy loads.
The point is that it is not cheaper and easier to do so, therefore the switch to materials fully capable of handling E85 when the 15% ethanol requirement came about.
The entire US would have to be plowed from LA to NYT to grow the amoung needed just for fuel.
And the statements about Brazil being self sufficient is not phrased properly. They may be self sufficient in Total energy but not in ethanol. The get 20% from Ethanol...the other 80% comes from their OWN oil mostly from offshore in Brazil.
We dont even want to think about Hydrogen since it is not a primary fuel...is a storage method. There are no Hydrogen deposits to mine or drill. You have MAKE it. From water electrolysis or steaming of methane or other hydrocarbon. If we can get pebble bed nukes to do it or more efficient solar...then maybe work. But transporting it is a booger.
And it is even more detrimental to the pipeline system due to "hydrogen embrittlement" Hydrogen molecules are so small they pass into the crystalline structure of steel. This causes the metal to become porous, brittle and break like glass. Not good with a gas that is flammable from about a 4% to 70% concentration.
It does? This study from the DOE seems to suggest otherwise. I clearly states that all calculations and estimates were done without any tax credits or subsidies. The process also has two by-products, 1) excess electricity produced by steam turbine and sold back to the grid and 2) animal feedstock (DDG credit in tables).
The price of corn that they are buying at already has the tires and tractors built in. So, if there's subsidies at the farm level keeping the price of corn artificially low then there may be some hidden margin here.
Also as stated by most promoters of ethanol or other alternative fuels, few are relying on corn as a long term solution. There's no doubt with its current yields that it is viable as a major source of fuel. But that in itself doesn't support the argument that ethanol taking more than it gives.
Agree as well that ETOH has fewer BTU's, but do you have a reliable report that supports the claim that real cost of producing ETOH > true market rate?
BTW, DRWN, you're method isn't quite right, I believe the appropriate formula should be:
fraction change in gas used = (1/17 gal gas/mile - (1/15 gal blend/mile *.85 gal gas/gal blend))/(1/17 gal gas/mile))
To everyone bringing up the petro used to make ethanol: I'd like to point out that neither do any of these numbers take into account the petro use to get petro out of the ground and refine it. In any case, my above point was about price and consumer consumption of gasoline not the net effect on carbon emissions. No matter what, there's one thing that's guaranteed, taking petro out of the ground and burining it takes carbon out the the ground and puts it into the atmosphere. With ethanol, at least some of the carbon comes out of the atmosphere before being converted to ethanol and burned. As the ratio of ethanol to petro products used in fuel blends (used in tractors and ethanol refineries) goes up, the net effect should eventually work out. The remaining hurdle to this is finding plant products that can be used to make ethanol more efficiently than we can make it from corn or killing the import tariff between us and Brazil.
Information here.
Introducing ethanol into gasoline has two major problems: it is a much less pure substance, thanks to the way that it is produced as compared to the methods used to produce petrochemicals (biological processes producing very similar chemicals versus fairly straight forward catalysed reactions that produce much more easily discernable products) and it is hydrophillic unlike industrial petrochemical hydrocarbons.
So you have to deal with a more variable product with interesting corrosive and polluting characteristics (gasohol products can produce some truly horrible crud and sludge, especially in marine environments, as very many boat owners have learned... which is especially horrible if you can't get the engine and fuel pump out of the boat without a chainsaw).
Then there is the introduction of water into all parts of the engine and fuel system. With straight gasoline, water isn't introduced from the gas tank as it stays physically separate from the fuel and the engine instantly shuts down when any is introduced. The alcohol water mix goes all the way through the system, with diminished combustibility and drastic corrosion. For fuel pumps at a station, they will always have a water air bath attacking its workings, as well as the gas and alcohol trying to corrode it.
Designing tanks and pump systems for these four types of chemicals is very challening and expensive, especially when you have dramatically increased the very corrosive elements (alcohol and water) while reducing the relatively inert ones (petrochemicals). That is going to throw your safety factor right out the window and light it on fire, which is also something that is likely to happen to the unfortunate gas stations and customers when these tanks and pumps start to fail spectacularly.
All of these problems are yet more examples of why you don't let liberal arts grads, especially hippy liberal arts grads, write technical legislative mandates. People that can't even explain what happens in a gas tank using words, never mind do the math or understand the chemical differences between similar organic compounds (and no that term does not refer to related communes in Vermont!) should not have any say in the operation or composition of our transportation system. For when they do, you get these idiotic things, where not only are insanely expensive mandates imposed on the public and gas stations (which said innumerate hippies then use to attack the oil companies for conspiring to raise prices) but they end up being physically impossible and many times more expensive thanks to the damage to infrastructure and the crash development projects required to save it. Reminds me of Ralph Nader's murderous impact on car design, and it isn't exactly shocking to see him and his organisations leading the charge to wound America all over again.
Do you have an engineering or other type of rational reply to hey's comment?
Or are you just going to use snark to cover up your apparent lack of
1. Design knowledge
2. Ability to reply to hey's comments on the problems ethanol causes in the fuel stream
3. Ability to reply to hey's comments on the difficulty in engineerging components to deal with ethanol.
In comment above engineerging should have been engineering.
What I have seen is attacks on what is a commenter's perceived background.
The E85 rollout has been hasty, and looks very political in light of recent events. Nothing signficant has been done in 20 years or more to come up with a better solution. Now some hacks are rushing in to try and fill the gap and save face. Example of trying to plug holes, an Escalade running E85 is still a crap design for a large car engine. Sparking engine technology does not scale well under heavy loads.
That said, dimissing alternative fuels without proposing a solution other than stay the course or suggesting that it's hippy liberal arts grads writing the legislation is hardly productive. Is the non hippy side of the political fence full of engineers in its ranks? Doubt it.
I think you've hit on the problem, perhaps unintentionally Jack S., it boils down to the inefficiency of having the government dictate (and, unfortunately, subsidize) what fuel we're going to power our current/future transportation methods with.
Market forces will (would have) take(n) care of things just fine thank you, but they cannot take hold with the current manipulation by the government. Their efforts merely delay progress while transferring the current status quo, partially, from oil to corn.
When I was a kid I was admonished to clean my plate because people were starving in China, now we're growing corn to burn up in our cars, while people still starve around the world -- there's something wrong with this picture, isn't there?
My comments before hey's decent into the ad hominem were rational and entirely based upon the engineering. Whatever else is "apparent" to you doesn't change that.
When comparing us to Brazil and their sugarcane derived fuel, you must take into account the species of cane grown there is a perennial. They get as many as 10 harvests from a single planting. American cane is an annual, it must be replanted every year. That's expensive.
"Small NEVC conversion grants: On a limited basis, the NEVC may have small grants available to retailers that install or convert equipment to dispense E85. Typically, retailers must agree to sell E85 for a minimum of 24 months to qualify for this assistance. The grants generally cover the cost of professional cleaning and testing of fueling system as well as minor upgrades to alcohol-compatible hoses, steel or plated nozzles and 1-micron dispenser filters. In addition to the financial assistance, the NEVC provides a basic station kit of dispenser decals, pump toppers, nozzle covers and in-store materials for its retailer partners. Please note these grants are conducted on a case-by-case basis and are limited by the availability of NEVC funding. The NEVC reserve the right to decline stations that may not meet technical or operational requirements."
The NEVC adds that the program has now been suspended due to lack of funds. I wonder how many gas station operators would be willing to convert to E85 without having their costs defrayed.
Hawaiian sugar cane is grown for around 24 months, which is optimal for sugar production. Sugar varieties are not necessarily the best for making fuel.
However, if molasses is used to make fuel, most of the objections about net energy yield disappear. So eat more granulated sugar.
Brazilian ethanol is cheap (though not in Brazil, where ethanol fuel sells for $5 or $6/gal, depending on location) because it is manufactured without any noticeable environmental controls. The vinesse (the leftover liquor from the distillation) is just dumped on the fields. This is not bad for the soil but it smells awful.