I was worried you missed the most serious cause until I read the last paragraph. True the oxygenate mandate is worthless and needs to go, because it is a government mandate, issued by fiat from a group of administrative law morons that make those Detroit schleps look bright. IT'S ALL THE GOVERNMENT MANDATES, not just one.
Also, ethanol was in gasoline before MTBE (by an earlier mandate), and leftist shills created MTBE to redirect subsidy money to themselves.
From an earlier post by me: " Additionally, ethanol is grossly more expensive to produce than gasoline, and the subsidy revenue pursuit causes disasters such as the MTBE pollution scandal which purpose was to shift subsidy income from Archer Daniels Midland to more leftist politically connected chemical companies (many foreign) that manufactured MTBE from their waste products."
I do not denigrate Archer Daniels Midland, or farmers by this comment, as they were the standard source of ethanol in the US at the time the government mandated ethanol. ADM simply filled a need.
CARB and Cal EPA, on the other hand tried to create a need for MTBE by using the force of law to lock ADM out of the market and seize the subsidies. That they would create from scratch the unnatural and most dangerous pollutant in history was just fine for the purpose: personal enrichment.
Yeah, I'm familiar with the horsepower an efficiency engineering, but I prefer nitromethane over toluene. I love the smell of nitro in the morning,... and Wagner.
I’ll grant you immediately that nitro will boost your effective head pressures (which, if you could VASTLY increase the extraction stroke on a four-stroke engine, would get you a huge improvement in efficiency), but nitro has this problem (well known problem, actually) of stripping the oil off the cylinder walls, leading to early ring scoring on the bore. Not something that Detroit is going to mess with.