It CAN actually improve fuel economy. That is, if you have an older car with a carburetor, instead of EFI. First, it improves the fuel’s ability to evaporate, which brings an improvement in efficiency. It also boosts the effective octane rating of your fuel, which means that you can bump timing ahead on a lot of engines and get more power for a given bit of fuel.
HOWEVER, if you have an EFI vehicle... emission control and EFI systems effectively just pump in a wee bit more fuel, and unless your fuel injectors are badly goobered up, you won’t get any more miles per gallon. Well, not unless the slim improvement in knock resistance results in the engine being more efficient.
As far as a fuel goes, it’s a mixed bag. It will lower emissions slightly, presuming you properly tune your motor.
It will keep the combustion chambers somewhat cleaner.
On the flip side: It is somewhat corrosive to lots of fuel system parts. It tends to reduce the service life of many fuel system parts, from pumps to injectors to hoses and pipes.
If we have a huge surplus of agricultural production to convert to production of ethanol, then we can stretch our oil a little.
Other than that, it serves little use. It is not “carbon neutral”, not significantly. Besides, that’s not necessarily any great benefit. Any fuel or emissions savings are generally a wash. Emissions improvements are offset by vehicles’s fuel systems malfunctioning more often. One short malfunction takes a LONG time to offset th any slight reduction attributable to E-fuels. It can’t be used in diesel at all.
But lets remind the freepers here that the attacks on agriculture lately are hobbling the US production of such things rapidly. Restrictions on pesticides, fertilizers, taking water from farmers, wholesale land conversion from private to public ownership, restrictions on farming, from dust emissions to “viewshed” protection... The assault continues.
It’s best to just let the market play out. Let people figure out what to do in ways that work...and make sense in all forms, financial, moral, etc.
+1 to that!
I’m now converting my main vehicle to E85 just to perform an experiment in competing technologies and micro-market forces. I predict that I’ll make significantly more power (because I can program the fuel and spark maps with a laptop to optimize efficiency for E85) but with the increased cost of fuel (per miles traveled) it should be a wash. Time will tell, but the real objective is to have more first hand knowledge about using alternative fuels than the talking heads preaching at us on TV.
I agree, remove the subsidy targeting ethanol at the blender and the market will quickly provide us with the most economic fuel.
Always the best economic sense. What is the CARB edict? Sounds like another stupid government thing to prevent the free market from doing just that. Oh, BTW, if the stupid government would just get out of the way, there would be plenty of incentives to tap into our rich oil and energy resources as well as finding economically sound alternatives. As Reagan used to say (countering Carter's stupid self-imposed "Energy Crisis"), "America is not energy poor, it is energy rich".