Big mistake - 1% ethanol is too much!
Ethanol only makes fiscal sense for as long as it is subsidized. It makes no sense whatsoever from a net energy “savings”, as the cost of actually processing fuel-grade ethanol per BTU produced exceeds straight unleaded gasoline by a good margin. Ethanol has a LOWER total amount of BTU’s per gallon than gasoline, requiring a GREATER amount to extract the same energy.
Henry Ford, a great apostle of mechanizing the American farm industry, was very positive about the virtues of pure, or at least high-content ethanol mixes as “home-grown” fuel sources for spark-ignition internal combustion engines, much like the horses the gasoline engine replaced could be fed year-around with home-grown hay and oats. But perhaps the years of anti-alcohol agitation, which culminated in the Prohibition experiment, took all the practical aspects of ethanol production off the table. For a number of years, it was simply illegal to distill alcohol from fermented grains.