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Ethanol May Be The Future But It’s Not Perfect
By Mr Ethanol | April 20, 2007
Ruidoso News:
Flexible-fuel vehicles are designed to run on more than one type of fuel - usually either gasoline or E85 ethanol or both. The advantage of flex-fuel vehicles is that they come in about the same sizes and have about the same performance as their pure gasoline-powered counterparts. If you can’t find E85 ethanol while you’re traveling, you can also burn regular gasoline in a flex-fuel vehicle.
Ethanol is a type of alcohol, usually made from corn or other grains in the United States and from sugar cane in many South American countries, most notably Brazil. The designation ‘E85′ refers to the amount of ethanol content in the fuel. The higher the E-number, the higher the percentage of ethanol content. For example, E85 ethanol contains 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. You can learn more about ethanol from the American Coalition for Ethanol at www.ethanol.org.
Ethanol as a fuel is a mixed blessing. While it is sustainable in that it comes from plants that can be grown again every year, the process of converting it to fuel takes more energy than you get out of it. Of course, this is ultimately true of any fuel, including gasoline. The difference in fossil fuels is that the energy used to make crude oil was expended over millions of years. Other methods of producing ethanol and other types of fuel alcohol are currently under development. Many of these new methods have the potential of reducing the energy input required to produce fuel, so ethanol may become more economical in the future. There are also other types of alcohol (methanol) that may be more economical in the long run.
In South America… read on.
Topics: Cars, Negatives, News |
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