E15 Holly Crap Batman

[serialk11r]

I like adding a little bit of E85 to boost the octane a little. 91 makes the ECU retard ignition timing. Something like 5% so the total is something like 13.7% ethanol at most.

Ethanol as an octane booster is somewhat useful on a macro level because while it only barely reduces net oil usage, you can use less processed hydrocarbons with lower octane rating more efficiently in engines.

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by serialk11r

I like adding a little bit of E85 to boost the octane a little. 91 makes the ECU retard ignition timing. Something like 5% so the total is something like 13.7% ethanol at most.

Ethanol as an octane booster is somewhat useful on a macro level because while it only barely reduces net oil usage, you can use less processed hydrocarbons with lower octane rating more efficiently in engines.

Our country long ago chose ethanol as the octane booster and oxygenate so we could both reduce the use of deadly light ends like mtbe and use cheap waste oil from other countries to make 83-85 octane fuel. We simply don’t have the feedstocks to make significant amounts of higher octane pure gas.

Next…
The trouble with the “barely” aspect is that we ignore all the cofactors from ethanol production that get sold or used by other industries

These cofactors that are a side effect of ethanol production would also require energy and associated pollution to produce but are usually normalized into the calculation as if we are only making ethanol.

https://www.pinalcentral.com/maricop...a8a8d6677.html

Some examples…
Historically corn oil was produced in a relatively energy intensive fashion , the process of making ethanol does most of the work and corn oil is now a biproduct instead of a separate industry
Likewise 25%+ of the “corn” used to make ethanol is leftover after processing as a healthy high protein byproduct that is used to improve and supliment many animal feeds.
While feed corn is only usable as a finishing food, the leftovers from ethanol are not dangerous to feed continuously improving the nutritional content (vitamins, minerals, etc) of typical feeds, reducing the reliance on synthetic supplements.
Lastly industrial components are generated by the ethanol production process like dry ice, some advanced ethanol plants clean and sterilize affluent and sewage reducing their water footprint and export heat to other nearby businesses.

So the real answer is it’s complex and embedded in the production of meat amongst other things like soft drink bottling and animal medicine.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by rmay635703

The trouble with the “barely” aspect is that we ignore all the cofactors from ethanol production that get sold or used by other industries

These cofactors that are a side effect of ethanol production would also require energy and associated pollution to produce but are usually normalized into the calculation as if we are only making ethanol.

Same problem in Brazil when people believe that sugarcane is always better as a feedstock, even though corn-based ethanol is far from being the evil depicted by the mainstream media and sugarcane lobby. Folks here look only at ethanol volume per hectare, which is more favorable to sugarcane, but it doesn't serve as a feedstock for other supplies so effectively as corn does. Maybe if leftovers from grains-based ethanol brewing served as a feedstock for bio-CNG as it has been implemented by a whisky distillery in Scotland, Brazilians would become more favorable to grain-based ethanol considering the total amount of fuel produced, yet it wouldn't make as much sense as using distillery leftovers to feed livestock.