There is no reason in today’s computer controlled fuel injected engines for ethanol to be mixed in with gas. The computers know and adjust their fuel/air mixtures as they need to to burn very efficiently. Ethanol isn’t needed to have a more complete burn.
You waste more gas having to truck corn to ethanol plants.
You waste more gas having to truck ethanol from the ethanol plants to the gas companies for mixing.
You waste a LOT of fresh water converting corn to ethanol.
You pollute groundwater MORE with gas+ethanol than just straight gas.
You take away more farmland for human food when farmers plant feed-style corn for ethanol. You raise food prices and create more shortages as well.
You damage engines, gaskets and rubber components in your vehicle because of ethanol. Dissolves/weakens rubber/plastic, causing them to outgas (break down, become brittle/crack) far more rapidly than normal.
You force subsidies (taxes) on everyone to make it.
A gallon of gas+ehtanol has less energy than a gallon of straight gas. Ethanol has less energy in it than gas, meaning you can’t get as much work out of it than pure gas. Which means your miles per gallon decreases.
- First of all, realize that corn is processed to not only produce direct food products, like corn meal, corn chips, and animal feeds, but also to produce indirect products like corn starch (much of which is used in paper production) and corn oil.
- You waste more gas having to truck corn to ethanol plants. It normally has to be shipped somewhere for processing by either truck or rail Unless the individual farmer uses it for his own livestock), so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production.
- You waste more gas having to truck ethanol from the ethanol plants to the gas companies for mixing. The end product has to be shipped to some market, so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production.
The reason that ethanol made it’s way into gasoline at all was that the EPA considered an oxygenate to be a requirement in gasoline for reduction of CO emissions.
Now, you’re right that a closed-loop EFI engine does NOT need any oxygenate at all - regardless of whether we’re talking about MTBE or ethanol.
But when MTBE became a huge problem for groundwater sources, the EPA cast around and found only two other alternatives: methanol and ethanol.
The farm lobby jumped up with ethanol as a solution and here we are.
Do we need either methanol or ethanol? No, not as long as we’re talking closed-loop EFI.
BTW - as far as MPG issues go: Ferrari (you know, the Italian sports car maker?) has produced a version of their 430 Spider engine that gets better mileage and produces higher HP on E-85 than on straight gasoline. It is only a concept to prove it could be done, since they don’t envision selling many Ferrari’s into the midwest, where E-85 is widely available.
I’ll let people here ponder that for awhile as to how they did it. Other engineers (and I know who you are ;-) ), keep quiet for a bit.