Tank me up with alcohol fuel, baby!
I love the idea of feeding my car alcohol to make it run, and using alcohol to run internal combustion engines is basically as old as internal combustion engines themselves. The original Ford models could run on either alcohol fuel or gasoline, and to this day I don’t really know why gasoline gained dominance as the fuel of choice to power most vehicles (it’s probably some sinister boardroom plot).
Alcohol fuel basically comes in two flavors, methanol — wood-based alcohol — and ethanol — plant-based alcohol. As a fuel, ethanol is superior in virtually every way to standard gasoline, with a much higher octane rating offering better performance. And since apparently the only negative impact on the environment from its use is some carbon-dioxide emissions, it definitely qualifies along with bio-diesel as a green, renewable fuel. Grow some corn, distill some moonshine, power your car.
E85, a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, is kind of the “official” fuel you see around (I’ve seen a number of tv ads promoting it lately).
So, why isn’t ethanol at every pump in the country? Avoiding any cynical answers to that, and to the moron at the White House, I started to hunt round to see how easy it is to get ethanol, and which vehicles can run on it safely. I just assumed that E85 was one of those “pipeline” green fuels that you hear about and never materialize, but I was surprised to discover how wrong I am.
Firstly, some of the biggest gas guzzlers on the road are, amazingly, flex-fuel vehicles, or FFVs, which can run either E85, regular gasoline, or both. These include the Ford F150 (11mpg) and the Dodge Ram (9mpg!), the Chevy Suburban, and the GMC Sierra, all big thirsty vehicles.
Minnesota has over 400 E85 pumps, but availability drops precipitously elsewhere. I was shocked to discover that the only commercial pump in California at the moment is in San Diego. Inexplicably, and inexcusably, there are no public-use ethanol pumps either in the Los Angeles or San Francisco metros, both of which are considered more forward-thinking environmentally.
With no pumps, that means that all these Ford and GMC cars on the road must use regular gasoline, which is a shame. Even if most of the owners of FFV vehicles in the Los Angeles even know that their car can run — right now — on a nearly clean-burning fuel (which I doubt) they can do nothing with the information. Unless they want to drive to San Diego.
I find it tremendously frustrating that there is a clean-burning, high-performance fuel in ready supply, from a renewable source, and we’re still living in a world at the mercy of oil prices, poisoning our planet at great personal expense. E85, of course, still contains 15% gasoline (just as most bio-diesels still contain petroleum diesel), but can you imagine the improvement in this stupid oil-dependancy situation if we suddenly knocked out 85% of our oil needs (and consumption)? I can barely imagine the degree of improvement to the air quality here in Los Angeles.
Now, every time I go out driving, and I see a big, noisy Chevy Suburban or GMC Yukon barrel down the street, I wonder how much better the world would be, at so little inconvenience to ourselves, if each one of those big heavy vehicles was powered on E85.
It’s like saying, “Yeah, man, this sucker runs on Jack Daniels!!”
Technorati Tags: E85, ethanol, FFV, flex-fuel vehicles, environment, Los Angeles
I applaud your efforts to find some alternative fuels.
What’s great about ethanol, is though it does contribute to the CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s CO2 that’s already in circulation instead of the stuff that’s dug up out of long-gone reservoirs.
However, there’s a lot of dispute right now about the efficiency of using ethanol because of how much energy it takes to grow and transport the stuff and then further refine it for use in autos.
April 19th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Cybele: it’s true, all discussions about ethanol are fraught with argument and debate, as indeed are discussions about most alternative fuels, even hydrogen.
I’ve read that switchgrass is held as a good possible candidate to make ethanol really truly viable as an economy/dependency revolutionary.
What attracts me most about the fuel is that, aside from its high-performance qualities, it could cause tangible and immediate benefits for Los Angeles, especially since so many of the flex-fuel vehicles on the road today are pretty big drinkers. Every time I see a huge Suburban I think, “what might be!”
April 19th, 2006 at 9:55 pm