E85 Fuel - Facts and Myths

Ethanol blended fuel of E85 is the latest buzz in the energy market. Ethanol plants are popping up like mushrooms all over the midwest United States. Consumers are going crazy thinking they will save the planet by burning clean and cheaper fuel. On the other side petrolium industry is doing everything it can to put down ethanol. Both sides have millions of dollars in campaign budgets and they will only tell you only what they think is good for their product. There is so much misleading information out there that many customers are confused and can't decide what is a fact and what is myth.

Here is a simple attempt to present information from both sides at a common point and let customer make an educated decision on the topic.

Pro Ethanol or E85 Camp

Here is their pitch - Millions of Americans have driven billions of trouble-free miles using ethanol-blended gasoline over the past quarter century. The majority of this gasoline has been E-10 Unleaded, a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent ordinary unleaded gasoline. However, E85 (85 percent ethanol and 15 percent ordinary gasoline) is rapidly becoming an important part of the nation’s fuel supply.

Approved for use by every major automaker in the world, E-10 Unleaded provides a number of benefits for drivers:

• Additional octane: The ethanol in E-10 Unleaded adds two to three points of octane to ordinary gasoline, helping improve engine performance.
• Cleaner fuel injectors: Ethanol helps prevent the build-up of power-robbing deposits in fuel injection systems.
• A gas line antifreeze: Ethanol suspends moisture in the fuel systems, eliminating the need for gas tank additives in cold weather.
• Cleaner air: Ethanol reduces toxic emissions in engine exhaust, helping keep America’s air cleaner.
• Ethanol is good for the your engine because ethanol doesn’t cause vapor lock , it virtually eliminating the vapor lock problems. Additionally, all major auto manufacturers now use in-tank fuel pumps, which are not subject to vapor lock problems as were the older in-line fuel pumps.
• Ethanol cleans fuel lines and fuel injector. Switching to ethanol-blended gasoline occasionally resulted in the fuel system being scrubbed clean due to the cleansing nature of ethanol. The loosened residue would be caught in the fuel filter—requiring a filter change. Once the filter was changed, the fuel system remained clean, enhancing engine performance.
• Ethanol fuel can be used in smaller engines - E-10 Unleaded is perfectly acceptable in lawn mowers, snowmobiles, ATVs and other small engines that run on ordinary unleaded gasoline. Virtually every small engine manufacturer, including Briggs & Stratton, Honda, Toro/Lawnboy, Kohler and Snapper, approves the use of E-10 Unleaded in its equipment.
• Ethanol blended fuel can also be used in older cars. The formulation of gasoline has changed considerably over the past few years without affecting the performance of older cars. Many older cars were designed to run on leaded gasoline, with the lead providing the octane necessary for engine performance. When lead was phased out of gasoline, oil companies added toxic chemicals to raise the octane rating and other additives to replace the “lubrication” value of lead.
  

Anti Ethanol or Flexible fuel Group

There are educational and petrolium industry pro groups out there pitching their side of story. Here is their argument:

• Congress enacted a law that allowed car manufacturers to take excess mileage credits on any vehicle they built that was capable of burning an 85% blend of ethanol, better known as E85. General Motors took advantage of the credits, building relatively large volumes of the Suburban as a certified E85 vehicle. Although in real life that generation of the Suburban got less than 15 mpg, the credits it earned GM against its Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) ratings meant that on paper, the Suburban delivered more than 29 mpg.
• Other manufacturers also built E85-capable vehicles -- one such car was the Ford Taurus. Congress may have intended simply to create a market for this particular fuel by having these vehicles available for sale. But what the excess mileage credits actually did was save Detroit millions each year in penalties it would have owed for not meeting the CAFE regulations' mileage standards.
• It started with Congress, which mandated that even more ethanol be used to extend the nation's fuel supply. From General Motors, an ad campaign called "Live Green, Go Yellow" gave America the impression that by purchasing GM vehicles capable of using E85 ethanol, we could help reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
• What GM left out of its ads was that the use of this fuel would likely increase the amount of smog during the summer months (as the EPA's own attorneys had admitted in 1995) -- and that using E85 in GM products would lower their fuel efficiency by as much as 25%. (USA Today recently reported that the Energy Dept. estimated the drop in mileage at 40%.)
• But one final setup for the public has gone unnoticed. At the Web site, www.fueleconomy.gov, which confirms the 25% to 30% drop in mileage resulting from the use of this blended fuel, another feature lets users calculate and compare annual fuel costs using regular gasoline to costs using E85. But the government site's automatic calculations are based on E85 selling for 37 cents per gallon less than regular gasoline, when the USA Today article reports that at many stations in the Midwest E85 is actually selling for 13 cents per gallon more than ordinary gas. Using the corrected prices for both gasoline and E85, the annual cost of fueling GM's Suburban goes from $2,709 to $3,763. Hence the suggestion that truth in advertising should come back into play.
• The other negative aspect of this inefficient fuel is that numerous studies have found that ethanol creates less energy than is required to make it. Other studies have found that ethanol creates "slightly" more energy than is used in its production. Yet not one of these studies takes into account that when E85 is used, the vehicle's fuel efficiency drops by at least 25% -- and possibly by as much as 40%. Using any of the accredited studies as a baseline in an energy-efficiency equation, ethanol when used as a fuel is a net energy waste.
• Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.
• "There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."
• Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research.
• In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix. Although additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation, these figures were not included in the analysis.