Posted on 12/01/2011 10:55:05 PM PST by neverdem
This is not a fair comparison however. Gasoline is taxed at the state and federal level while Ethanol is subsidized.
Recalculate the chart on a level playing field eliminating taxes and subsidies and then we can discuss the superiority of Ethanol as a fuel.
Good article.
Thanks for making me aware of this odious bill!
I WILL contact my congressman, in opposition.
The true cost of alky fuel are clearly manipulated in this article, they do not reflect the true expense.
Not only are the tax’s and subsidies not mentioned, neither are the inefficiencies of alcohol production.
The real agenda here is clearly to force all older cars off the road, screwing around with our fuel could do that pretty quickly.
I will NEVER own a “Flex-Fuel”, “Hybrid” or Electric” car, I’m keeping my pre-computer fossil fuel cars for life, the subsidy hungry alky lobby can kiss my @$$!
I don’t think methanol is subsidized.
"The spot price shown in the table is the New York Harbor spot price of gasoline and the non-discounted Methanex spot price, both averaged over the past year."
oops... sorry for the double-post.
Methanol not ethanol. One is like is like booze, the other like snooze or go blind.
I got an 07 Cobalt with the same 2.2 engine, gets 28-29mpg. runing on methanol could cause a fuel efficiency drop of aroung 18-20%, according to this article. Right now regular gas is just under 3.30/gal in NJ. So, in theory if they sell the stuff for less than 2.60 it may be a good tradeoff. When I first bought it I had the dealer replace the stock exhaust with a Goodwrench low-res exhaust system. It wasn’t cheap but it actually added about 2 extra miles/gal. I got 125k on it already, still runs and looks good as new, so I recovered that cost long ago. It’s well worth it if you don’t mind a little bit of that good old-fashioned glass-pack rumble ;)
Methanol is very corrosive - I don’t know how it would do in a car with 10-20 year life, as opposed to a race car that may be torn down every 10 hours of use. It’s also a very nasty poision. The good news is, that it’s amazingly biodegradeable.
It burns almost invisibly, which is fairly dangerous. I’m surprised that the article mentions that methanol attacks Viton, I thought that almost nothing short of hydrofloric acid could.
If you were to design a vehicle engine to run exclusively on methanol or ethanol, the compression ratio could probably be increased to 14:1 or so and/or the timing increased, and this would definitely take a great deal of the sting out of the lower energy density of the fuels.
I think that these fuels have a place in the (possibly near to mid) future, but destroying food (and using quite a bit of petrolueum in fertilizer chemicals) to make it is crazy.
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Methanol can be made from coal, I think. The efficiency of the process I don’t know. But it too comes with its own set of drawbacks.
One further comment.
The only thing keeping the price of gasoline high is the restrictions on oil exploration by the government of the Unite States.
The US has more oil reserves on its territory than Saudi Arabia.
I think methanol is the future, but the environazis hate it because it is made from coal or natural gas. Ironically it is the easiest (cheapest) liquid fuel to produce and there are so many ways to make it, some are very long term like coal. I’m not a AGW sucker. But it is simple economics, Gasoline is going to continue to increase in price faster then inflation, and so will oil. China and India are increasing demand, and there is just not an infinite supply.
But coal will probably stay steady with inflation for a long time.
Coal can be converted to methane (natural gas), which can be converted to methanol. The price on this process will not go up ether.
Yes it isn’t quite as dense of energy as gasoline, but luckily weight isn’t a huge deal and its possible to stop and refuel. Not like airplanes, which needs to use kerosene and there is no substitute. So it makes sense to save some oil for jets and start powering our ground transport with coal products.
And if you are an enviro, or we still havent come up with anything better and use up almost all our coal 500 years from now, you can make methane from any plant matter. Just let it rot!
Hope this author goes back through and checks the rest of his fuel system soon. A few tanks of methanol might not do much, but as you say, it’s quite corrosive. It’ll chew through not only the pump diaphragm, but his injector seals (and maybe bodies), any seals or gaskets along the fuel lines, and it might do a number on his tank too, if its a plastic one. It’s not as simple to switch over as he says, and it’s not as big of a stretch to run on methanol as it is on ethanol, hence the reluctance to take his bet.
It’s very damaging to aluminum also.
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