Ethanol mandates are nothing but a corn subsidy for farmers. 15% ethanol means you burn 15% more fuel to go the same distance, how can that be saving anything?
Time to end all subsidies, and let the market work.
“Ethanol mandates are nothing but a corn subsidy for farmers”
Yes indeedie; it’s made whores out of Midwest farmers and cowards out of congress.
Ethanol has some energy content (about 2/3 as much as gasoline) so it should be more like 5% more fuel to go the same distance as 100% gasoline.
But I did some more research on this and apparently the situation is complicated:
1. Gasoline is not a pure substance. Is is blended differently in summer and winter and the energy content varies.
2. E10 (10% ethanol) fuels are reported to have more energy than you would expect based on the energy content of ethanol and unleaded gasoline (less than 2% loss in energy vs. computed 3.4%). If accurate, this may also have something to do with blending.
3. Experiments show that gasoline+ethanol mixtures can give better gas mileage than would be expected from their energy content.
4. All anti-knock compounds have lower energy content than gasoline. So premium gas actually has less energy than regular.