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Bad News About Ethanol You Haven’t Heard Yet

By Mr Ethanol | June 2, 2008

PR CannaZine:
1. There are two types of ethanol – anhydrous and hydrous. Brazil has used hydrous ethanol made from sugar cane to become largely energy independent without encroaching on its food crops.

We use anhydrous ethanol. Anhydrous ethanol was not designed as a fuel. It was legislated as an oxygenate in the Clean Air Act of 1990. It doesn’t burn well in most engines and wasn’t designed too, as wasn’t MTBE, the other oxygenate that it replaced in 2006.

Oxygenates add emissions into the atmosphere that mix with smog to form low level ozone. In 1990, smog was a threat to Americans health as well as unsightly as it hung in grayish brown clouds over cityscapes nationwide. There wasn’t as much known about low level ozone back then. MTBE was used to get rid of the smog where the EPA took great credit for it’s oxygenate requirement programs for regions of non-attainment of federal air quality standards, crowded cities with smog.

As more was learned about low level ozone, Washington grew increasingly silent on the truth about it because both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly supported mandating the use of oxygenates in the Clean Air Act of 1990.

When MTBE was banned, their collective fear was how to explain why the visible smog had come back.

So ethanol replaced MTBE even though it worsens air quality. Then California took the EPA to court proving that oxygenates worsen air quality. But the EPA came back saying that the requirement for ethanol to be added to gasoline was no longer regarding air quality but a national imperative to wean the US off foreign oil while siting Brazil’s successful ethanol program as a precedent.

2. Anhydrous ethanol lessens mileage.
The EPA and Energy Department both claim it has a lesser energy value of about a third of that compared to gasoline. So when it is added to gasoline as it is now at 10%, there is supposed to be a 3.3 percent unnoticeable loss of mileage.

But what they are saying about energy values is irrelevant to mileage. Brazil does not lose mileage per gallon of hydrous ethanol over gasoline because they understand that hydrous ethanol burns at a different compression ratio than gasoline so they have either installed ethanol converter kits on their vehicles or drive vehicles with higher compression ratio engines.

But our vehicles are designed to burn gasoline and no one is telling us about the converter kits. They just say that our engines can still run with ethanol in the gasoline as long as it isn’t added at a rate above ten percent.

So the ethanol mixed with the gasoline largely doesn’t burn at all. But even with reports coming out nationwide since ethanol began to added to gasoline that consumers are loosing ten percent mileage from gasoline when ten percent ethanol is added to it, but not loosing mileage when using regular gasoline, still it is reported that E10 ethanol only causes a minor not noticeable loss of mileage.

And no one is questioning where the ethanol that is not burning is going, as they didn’t with MTBE which is made from ether and methanol, both carcinogens and neurotoxins, as is ethanol and its emission byproducts. Continue reading…