Originally Posted by Pokie

I wonder if Rich knows about the use of corn and sugar cane

Originally Posted by geraldo

I have an E85 vehicle and E85 is probable the worst direction this country could go right now. I get about 28 on regular and about 16 on E85. At that gas milage, I need E85 to be at least fifty cents cheaper a gallon. Sugar cane is much more efficient to burn in vehicles than ethanol. Sugar cane is hard to grow in some of our climates in the states and corn is abundant right now. I have lived on a farm and I wish the government would stop subsidizing corn. Ethanol is not the answer although it may be politically popular.

Originally Posted by CaptainObvious

The problem with burning E85 in a Flex-Fuel vehicle is that the vehicles aren’t optimized to take advantage of the higher octane rating of E85.

E85 has about 3/4 the energy content (100,000 BTU’s vs 130,000 BTU’s) of gasoline, but the octane rating is about 10 to 15 points higher. The higher octane allows for a much higher compression ratio. Unfortunately, while running on gas only, the compression ratio that works well for E85 would have your engine apart due to detonation in short order.

The information that I’d like to see is this: what is the true cost to produce gasoline vs. ethanol. Oil must be located, the drilling rights procured, pumps set-up, drilled, transported via barges, refined, reformulated and finally transported to the service station.

Ethanol must be grown, harvested, distilled, refined, blended (for E85) and distributed. Common sense dictates that E85 must be less expansive to produce…but common sense isn’t all that common these days. Lets face it, we spend more for bottled water than we do for gas.

I’ve seen figures that suggest that ethanol runs somewhere around 70% while gasoline is neutral, meaning that a gallon of gas cost as much to produce as it does to purchase, while ethanol is 70% of that figure. Now, if you have to blend it with 15% gas to obtain E85, it still seems to be a good alternative.

Moreover, E85 reduces our dependence on foreign oil. I’d pay double the current cost of gas for that advantage.

Originally Posted by Rhein

pretty much the same energy content of dino fuels and is super cheap

Originally Posted by Rich Rohrich

Ethanol bandwagons are more about politcs than science in many cases, so it's best to consider the source when you read about it.

Originally Posted by robwbright

Amen to that.

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb051206.shtml

In 2004 U.S. farmers harvested 11.8 billion bushels of corn. In other words it would take the country's entire corn crop to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol, an amount equal to about one-fifth of the gasoline Americans currently burn each year. . .

Assuming that it would be undesirable to turn our entire corn crop into fuel and feed residues, growing another 12 billion bushels of corn for ethanol production would require plowing up an additional area double the size of the entire state of Illinois. . .

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush suggested that switch grass might be a good source of cellulosic biomass to produce ethanol. . .

Last year, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture estimated that it would take one billion tons of dry biomass to produce enough ethanol to replace one-third of current U.S. demand for transport fuels. Assuming a high yield of 10 tons per acre of switch grass would mean harvesting 100 million acres of land for fuel each year—an area about the size of California.