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Just wondering if anyone has seen the new study that say Ethanol is worse for the environment than regular gasoline. What stinks is that nothing will change. There's too much money being made by too many people.

In the study, they say that Ethanol is 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline. Oops!

Article here.

Ethanol = C 2 H 5 OH
Petrol ( octane ) = C8H10
Now that is a big simplification but the basic premise is the longer a hydrocarbon chain is the higher the ratio of C to H becomes so more CO2 produced per gallon burned .
The shorter the chain, the more completely it can be burned in the engine so the less unburned fuel passes out the exhaust .
So in a simplified analysis you get less CO2 produced per mile traveled burning ethanol than petrol .
Note the use of the word simplified .
Now for gasahol ( e 85) this has been proven to be correct as it is used in Brazil & was pioneered for large scale use by South Africa during the BS embargos of the 70's & 80's
How they stack up when compared on an oil well to exhaust against seeds on a field to exhaust is a totally different story and has so many variables that it is impossible to come to a definitive answer .
It can swing both ways from being a big reduction is total pollution to being a big increase in total pollution.

The story is very much the same for electric vehicles .
They are nowhere near as green as they are made out to be .
All they do is shift the pollution from the roads they are used on to the place the power is generated & their production & distribution.
Making Lithium batteries is a very high pollution industry .
Australia is about to launch the worlds only "green" lithium mine, totally solar & hydrogen powered.
But right now most hydrogen is dirty so again it depends just how deep you want to dive .

OTOH even e5 does reduce photochemical smog .
My personal opinion is anything lower than e50 is a waste of time on a total pollution basis but I fully support the use of e 85 or even strait ethanol which we used to run race bikes on.
E10 - E 20 is more about reducing the volume of imported oil & making countries self sufficient for petrol than realistic pollution reductions .

And remember that because ethanol is derived from plants then during their growth, they are removing CO2 from the air so that has to be factored in .
Most of the anti-ethanol bumph ignores that and some even count the forest that was cut down as a negative while ignoring the ethanol crop as a positive .

So you have to be really careful when you access the information.
Right now a couple of local labs are developing bacteria that can produce ethanol from sugars in forest waste and the long term aim was to produce ethanol from wood pulp prior to it being converted to paper using a bacteria that produces less methane and even collecting that methane for power generation .

I would bet London to a Brick & on that the same research is being done world wide .

What I do know, from the minning & metallurgy journals I subscribe to is it is totally impossible to convert every IC engine to electric as there is not enough metals & rare earth minerals to make that many vehicles with .
And this assumes no Li batteries being used for other places where they should not be used like back up power for the electricity grid or household solar .

Basically it is a Catch 22 problem. Basically everything is going to create another problem.

It is like the idea of vaporizing gasoline before it enters the cylinders. Well there was the explosion risk when heat source burn through the container walls. Even if very good metal were used the risk is still there if not sealed completely. But it did achieve 100+ mpg until the vehicles went up in flames.

Before the vehicle manufactures started control the vehicles via computers there were ways of making vehicles to get better fuel ecomoncy. I took a 265 ci engine in 79 Chevy Malibu that was getting only 16 mpg highway to 32 mpg highway with an average mpg of 22.6. It required only installing variable duration lifter along with a mild racing camshaft, Changing to 700R4 transmission and free flowing the exhaust using a turbo muffler. I probably would gotten better mpg if I had used a 200R4 transmission. If I could do it the manufactures can too but then they would piss off the oil companies.

A school friend worked in a government garage
We changes governments to a conservative one so every government department that could be sold off or have what they do done ( usually very badly ) by private enterprise was sent to contract.
He was a 2nd year apprentence so could not be sacked but was bored to death because all of the servicing of the massive govenment fleet ( apart from ministers cars ) was fosted out to external mechanics .
So he water injected his old grey series Holden motor ( derivative of the strait 6 138 chev ) .
Thing got near 80 mpg on long trips. MY A10 got 75 mph & he always went further than me between fills .
He fitted a small diesel manifold that injected diesel into the individual intakes and a second carb jetted some thing like 70% leaner to use when water was being injected & it used 2 stroke marine oil in the sump.
Now it did take him a bit over a year to get it right, but he was just an apprentice not a research engineer .
He ran that car for about 20 years , converting it from 3 on the column to 5 on the floor and a diesel truck diff because it kept stripping teeth off the gears & diff crown wheel .
HE only sold it because they were moving to a city appartment that only had 1 car space .

So yes there were a lot of things that could have been done to reduce fuel use & pollution.
One of the big dissadvantage with the capitalist economic model is it encourages waste of any resource that is abundant or cheap which of course is squandering the resource that is in fact finite.
Aust coal fired power stations are the perfect example.
We built radiant wall furnaces to boil the water & make steam when the rest of the world was building direct injection boilers or even more economic direct injection turbines because we had endless supply of very cheap coal and that was before we went to open cut . Thus we were burning about 3 times the coal per Kw as most of the rest of the world .
Petrol is another example .
Places that had cheap & plentiful oil made massive engines ( USA ) while places where oil was scarce made small engines ( UK ) .

The biggest worry is the fact that we all have to change our way of life is totally ignored.
Change the power stations to solar & buy a battery car then it will be life exactly as it was before will not work.
The nuclear family ( which was invented as part of the post WWII Marshal plan ) has to be replaced with the extended family which vastly reduces the resources we consume per head of population.
Not good if you have shares in GE , Sunbeam , Walmart etc but much better if you want to have grandkids that live as long as you have .

AdamE said:

Just wondering if anyone has seen the new study that say Ethanol is worse for the environment than regular gasoline.

Click to expand...

That's old news. This was reported many years ago. These reports never touch on how "gasahol" eats may parts in older cars.
What they don't tell you in gas-ahol is the intensive multiple stages that it takes to grow the corn they get gas from using a diesel tractor to boot.
Actually, I would like to see a report when they switched to corn gas, did oil consumption drop any or did any car oil gas used just go to farm diesel\delivery truck\refinery fuel usage instead.

Just pour a cup of gasoline on the concrete and a cup of ethanol on the concrete. See which one leaves a stain. There is one that pollutes more.

What most don't get is that corn is fuel intensive crop. Ground must prep, pre-emergents applied, seed must planted, fertilizers applied, in some areas irrigation used, it must be harvested, trucked to storage containers, trucked to processing plants, from there trucked to the fuel mixing plants, shipped to distribution centers, and finally deliver to your local gas stations. All this requires lots of fuel which a lot consumers don't even think about.

Just like solar power. On the surface it looks like a non polluter until you add in all the manufacturing pollution that it takes to the non pollution level. The only difference is that solar is a long term use item where ethanol is just a short term use item so their is a benefit in the long run from solar.

True, similar to the manufacturing and life of a lithium battery. Very costly and short life.

upupandaway said:

That's old news. This was reported many years ago. These reports never touch on how "gasahol" eats may parts in older cars.
What they don't tell you in gas-ahol is the intensive multiple stages that it takes to grow the corn they get gas from using a diesel tractor to boot.
Actually, I would like to see a report when they switched to corn gas, did oil consumption drop any or did any car oil gas used just go to farm diesel\delivery truck\refinery fuel usage instead.

Click to expand...

That is because they are not intended for use in older cars.
They are for use in new cars
Replacing perfectly good old cars with new cars for no good reason is exactly why we have pollution problems that we have now, along with kitchen renno because the old one "looks tired or dated" and knock down rebuilds because it was not our dream house .
As for making ethanol we make it from sugar cane and will shortly be making it from forest waste & the trash left over from brewing & sugar cane trash .
You can make ethanol from anything , ask your looking moonshine still owner .

But yes you have hit the nail on the head of most of the so called pollution reducers, very few of them actually reduce the total pollution, all they do is shift it from one place to another or one type to another .

The answer is to CONSUME LESS
But quality items that have long service lifes
Make products that are economically reapairable .
However this makes them more expensive to purchase and the easiest way to sell is to be 1¢ cheaper than your competition.
I have some left over Rolls Royce hire cars from a business that was legislated out of business .
Thus I am a member of a couple of RR clubs.
There was a compreshesive study done on the long term cost of owning a RR comparied to the family 6 cylinder car ( GM & Ford ) over the service life of the rollers, they were cheaper than replacing the family 6 .
The break even point was around 45 years.
But ask the man on the street could he afford a roller & the answer is always no based purely on the new car price tag not the actual running & replacement price over time .
And the same goes for just about everything else
My fridge is 48 years old & in that time it has needed 2 door seal replacements & one regas
Most fridges are replaced on a 10 year turn around
The house I was born in still has the original gravity fed copper tanked hot water system and that is now pushing 100 years old .
the average service life of a glass linned steel hot water system is 8 years.
If you replace the anodes then that can be tripled but most anodes are made so they can not be repaired once the tank has been installed as they run near the full length of the tank & are replaced from the top .
But some how h message that uit is consumption that creates pollution seems to have been lost & people seem to think we can consume our way out of the problem that was caused by consumption in the first place .
Wanna guess why ?

Bert, The problem now is the products that we buy are not no where near quality we once purchased even when we pay for them to be of the quality we expect. Yes I was using a 50 yrs refrigerator myself until a lightning strike took it out. Of course no replacement parts available. The next high quality refrigerator only lasted 10 yrs before its compressor failed.

The mentally of the factories is we got to making tons of money at the expense of the consumers. We don't care if we are hurting the planet.

But everything just went out the door with Russia attracting its neighboring country. Prices being already at record highs are just going to go through the roof. I hope we not starting WWIII as it will be the end to all of us.