[bennelson]

I did look up some information on the ethanol plant closest to me.

I am in the Midwest, and we are pretty much the hub of ethanol production in the United States.

My understanding is that ethanol is supposed to replace MTBE. I have heard that areas where ethanol was introduced DO have cleaner air.

I just started reading ALCOHOL CAN BE A GAS by David Blume. There's lots of interesting information in there about alcohol, E10, and E85.

As it is right now. I think E10 really is just a way of shifting money around to ethanol producers. E85 or straight ethanol both look like like promising alternative fuels.

My local ethanol plant uses an auction method of obtaining whatever bio-materials are available to them. Whatever is cheapest and most abundant is what they use. They also produce co2 for the beverage industry, and the leftover bio-material becomes animal food.

E85 was sort of a compromise between government and the automobile industry. It makes it possible to have an engine that can run on gasoline or a mix of gasoline and alcohol. By still having 15% gasoline in there, the alcohol doesn't suffer from winter cold start problems. In fact, the winter blend of E-85 is actually 30% gasoline! So, really, we should call it E-70 right now.

The problem with running Ethanol in a gasoline engine isn't the ethanol, it's just that you are using the wrong fuel. Potentially, an engine DESIGNED to run on alcohol could have much HIGHER fuel economy.


PS: My very first car got 47 mpg without trying. When E-10 came out, the economy dropped to 30 mpg, and it eventually went back up to 35 mpg in the long run. Not sure how that was supposed to help the enviroment when I had to use that much more gas!