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.
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.
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.
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.I was waiting for someone to post something about what this stuff does to cars. Thanks.
As for laws requiring us to buy something: no thanks.