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Christianson said cars running on E85, rather than gas with 10 percent ethanol, see a drop off in the number of miles they can travel per gallon of fuel.

Well, if you're driving less miles per gallon, you're filling up more often, which means you may be paying the same anyway! Depends on what the drop off is, of course.

Alcohol has fewer BTUs than gasoline.

Well, if you're driving less miles per gallon, you're filling up more often, which means you may be paying the same anyway! Depends on what the drop off is, of course.

Reminds me of when I ran Twilight: 2000 role playing games.

Twilight: 2000 is an RPG, now alternate history where World War III broke out, both the NATO and Warsaw Pact used nukes in 1997 and around the 2000/2004 era, the US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact are still fighting, although mostly still using vehicles that are barely running on a wing and a prayer and using methanol/ethanol as fuel usually.

I remember in the game itself, vehicles use 3 liters of ethanol for every liter of diesel fuel/gasoline it used and 3.5 liters of methanol (usually the fuel of choice, ethanol takes away from food which starving, war-torn Europe and the world needed) for ever liter of diesel/gas. It was bad enough running a group of soldiers in a Hummer living off the land but it took a lot to keep an M1 tank going. B-)

I think some other poster might have pointed it out but the energy contained in each liter of enthanol/methanol is less than in diesel/gasoline so you use more.

I remember back in the 1970's, I understood that it was rather simple to convert cars to run on alcohol (methanol/ethanol) if you adjusted the carburettors, but most cars don't have them anymore.

Overall, I think it is a good idea but again the free market should be the determining factor which I'm sure at some point in the future, we might be using a blend of fossil fuel/alcohol or alcohol entirely. I know my 1977 Mercury Cougar would be easy to convert if the logic holds true but I wonder about my 1994 Ford Explorer.

A side note, when my father was in the Army, he was stationed at Camp Casey in South Korea in 1955/56 and he remembers in cold weather, they started the Army trucks on gasoline and then flipped a lever to feed the engine the diesel it ran on.