The Answer to our energy problems is not etanol it's LNG.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiogNLxu0cw

 

I don't understand, where are all the "pro ethanol'' people? A couple of years ago, a discussion on ethanol was started and there were lot's of pro ethanol people singing the praises of how it never hurt their engines, gas lines, etc

 

I don't know if anyone has postedb this yet, but mister ford designed his first car to run on ethanol until he found a cheap by-product of the heating oil manufacturing process (gasoline) to power his new vehicle. Had he not decided to used gasoline, it's quite possible that we would have much better ethanol technology and no dependance on foriegn oil.

 

Yeah last time i looked the closest one was too far away to even bother thinking about

Anyway I was only trying to be funny lol

 

I'll be more than glad to do my part if you can show me just one station anywhere near the St. Louis area that has ethanol free gas. You seem to imply that it is available everywhere when the opposite is true.

 

I think it's because most of us are pretty much experienced, and therefore fed up, with the fuel. It was easy to hop on the bandwagon blindly a few years ago, promises of lower fuel costs and better for the environment had everybody hopping, but the truth has come out- and we all see how crappy it is, the affects of the fuel on a modern day engine, how bad for the environment it is, and we all see that the prices are only going to those who produce and sell, not the consumer.

 

I think you are totally correct, to paraphrase, your reply if you don't mind, we were sold a bill of goods. I had heard a lot of negative comments about it before it was put in the gas here in oregon. I'm lucky, i can get non ethanol gas [92 octane] here in quite a few stations.

 

Hey Nubz,

I knew you were trying to be funny.

So was I...lol

Kevin

 

Jim- just looked at the map http://www.pure-gas.org/extensions/map.html

Amazing, there are ethanol free stations all over MO, but none in St. Louis. Looks like the closest one is way out near Mt. Vernon.

Bummer.

Kevin

 

The problem on all these ethanol threads is that most have opinions, and few have facts. Minnesota has been an "ethanol" state for a long time, and our modern vehicles run fine on 10% ethanol, and a big benefit is that we no longer have gas line freeze up in the winter. We have one gas station within 30 miles that sells non-oxygenated fuel. By state law, this fuel can only be used in "collector cars, tractors, small engines, motorcycles and boats," and I fill my cycle tank any time I go by, even though this fuel is slightly more expensive, due to its limited use. It does give better mpg with our current engines.

Now, for some of the facts. I am a licensed USDA grain inspector, working for a private contractor, that grades and tests corn at a wet mill plant owned by one of the largest ethanol producers in the nation. The plant processes 1.4 million bushels of corn....PER WEEK ! That's 1400 semi loads a week. If our farmers average 140 bushels per acre, it would take 10,000 acres of corn, per week, to run just this one plant. Is this corn taken out of the food chain? Absolutely not !

A corn kernal consists of four dinstinct parts: starch, protein, germ, and fiber. Ethanol is only produced from the starch of the corn. The world does not need more starch (think sugar), but needs instead more protein. Because the corn is cooked during the milling process, the protein and fiber (from the hull of the kernal) becomes a very highly digestable product, used in pet foods and large animal feed. This wet feed, now with the starch and germ removed, as it leaves the plant in semi loads, is now so high in protein that it cannot be fed directly to livestock, but is instead carefully blended into siliage and hayliage at the feedlots, raising the protein level of the feed to its optimum for maximum livestock gains. The germ of the corn is converted to corn oil (think Mazola), also a food product. The starch is also used in the manufacture of corn syrup and fructose, i.e., sugar, which is then used in the food industry, candy industry, ice cream, beverage industry, and breweries, allowing our country to import less cane sugar from other countries.

So the corn has not been removed from the food chain during the maufacture of ethanol. Ethanol is rather a value added product of the corn processing. Ethanol is also being produced from non-food crop sources, such as switch grass, which can be grown easily on poorer, higher erodible soils, without tilling the soil.

Now, where is the savings on "dependence on foreign oil? Well, it's not going to happen at 10% ethanol gas, when the gas mileage is 10% less. The savings is coming, however, as more and more E85 vehicles are produced and driven with E85 fuel. The current E85 engines are also designed to run on gas, so their E85 efficiency is not yet very good. A flex-fuel car that gets 30 mpg on gas may only get 20 mpg on E85. But running E85, the savings on foreign oil are already big. Here's how it figures out:

In 300 miles, a car at 30 mpg would use 10 gallons of oil based gasoline. At 20 mpg it would use 15 gallons of E85, but only 15% of that fuel, or 2.25 gallons, is oil based. Once cars are produced that run only on alcohol based fuel, you will see the mileage increase as well, as the engines will be able to run much higher compression, benefiting from the high octane level of alcohol vs gasoline. This is already happening in some European countries that are years ahead of us in reducing their dependence on oil.

Edmunds did a test back in 2007, giving a pretty good mileage comparison of gas vs. E85 Flex Fuel vehicles.

http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/...ison-test.html

Subsidies? Just do some of your own research and see how much the oil industry is subsidized. Be sure and add in the cost of the military and American lives lost in the middle east.

Cost of corn flakes? A bushel of corn is 56 lbs. At $3.50 a bushel, a one lb box of corn flakes in 2007 had 6.2 cents worth of corn in it. At today's price of $7.50 a bushel, that same box of corn flakes (costing around $4.00!) has only 13.4 cents worth of corn. You can bitch all you want about today's price of corn flakes, but the value of the corn in that $4.00 one pound box is still less than 14 cents.

For those of you who are just now getting 10% ethanol in your state:

1)Don't run it in older engines that weren't designed for it
2)Don't use stale gas--ethanol has a much shorter shelf life
3)Don't store your seasonal engines without adding a gas stabilizer, such as StaBil or SeaFoam.
4)Expect to eventually have to change out your fuel filters, as ethanol will clean the gunk out of your gas tanks.

For those of you old enough to remember the debates of leaded vs unleaded gas, when it was forced on us in 1972, these ethanol debates are similar. Now, decades later, everyone has accepted non-leaded gas. I predict down the road a few years these ethanol debates will no longer exist. As dtmues stated earlier in this thread, Ford designed his first cars to run on alcohol, not gasoline. We're coming full circle.