BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)

Subject: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 10:50 AM

On the current gas price thread, I posted... We have three grades and I will have to buy the top grade for my lawn mower, snow blower and generator. I have read that ethanol may void some warranties, that it does some harm to larger engines as well, that it has a short shelf life even if a stailizer is used, etcetera, but I dunno if any of it is true.

Figured this deserved it's own thread.

Found this... http://www.starbrite.com/whatsnew/STAR%20BRITE%20ethanol%20p3072D2.pdf

Anyone in the know. Spaw?

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 10:51 AM

My new Ford F-150 has a HUGE gas tank and I can go 6 weeks without refuelling so that link makes me nervous.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: Sandy Mc Lean
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 12:08 PM

gnu, I have seen this before and suspect that it is a bit of crap. That F-150 can burn up to 85% ethanol. They have been mixing gas with ethanol in the States for years. Yes, alcohol will mix with water and that is exactly what gas line anti-freeze does. As for your mower it will suck in more H2O into the carb. while you're out cutting your backyard haypatch in the Fundy fog.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 12:31 PM

Fair enough Sandy.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: EBarnacle
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 01:54 PM

The isue is not ehtanol, it is the amount of ethanol. When they first started adding ethanol [and even recently] to marine fuels, a large number of machines with plastic fuel tanks and system parts found themselves with a plastic gunk in the induction system. This was primarily as a result of the fuel interacting with the plastic an then breaking down when it reached the warm precincts of the engine. There have been quite a few articles written about this phenomenon in the marine industry journals.

My niece's car, a SAAB, had a sudden gas tank leak in her boyfriend's garage. When they called the police, the car was removed from the road and towed to a garage where the tank had to be replaced.

The SAAB was an 80's model built in Sweden before the GM takeover.

Another one of my vehicles had an explicit warning not to use E-fuel, as it would attack the fuel system.

Does Sweden use E fuel? If so, when did the change go into effect?

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: GUEST,999
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 02:27 PM

In Alberta, Mohawk gas stations have been using ethanol in their gas for over a decade that I can recall. I'd guess it's at 10%. I used another gas station, so I have no idea how it would have affected my car. Ethanol burns hotter than straight gas so far's I know.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 02:41 PM

Alberta has a few outlets (Mohawk) with partial ethanol. It was slightly cheaper than regular, but not enough to be interesting.

My objection to most ethanol is that it uses land that should be left in forest or grassland, or in food production. Brazil is a big user, and forest land is suffering.

I can't see the objection to current gasoline prices, insofar as individual use is concerned. Pretty much in line with general cost of living increases. Some localities have high local tax percentages which don't help- remember that they get a higher take when the price is high.
It does cause commercial carriers problems, since shippers by truck change to rail (good!) or receive fewer contracts.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 02:48 PM

I've always understood that in an emergency you can run a car on whiskey or vodka etc just as well as with ordinary motor fuel. Even more pricey, of course.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:03 PM

Can you drink it first?

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:04 PM

I wonder if my truck has a metal tank. Hmmmm...

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: ranger1
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:19 PM

Gnu, small engines are at serious risk from ethanol if run without marine grade stabilizer (the blue stuff, not the pink stuff), but cars not so much. We had two chainsaw engines go kaput due to ethanol, and there was a big problem with snowmobiles engines three winters ago. I suspect that may be the problem with one of our big leafblowers, too. The issue isn't so much with the ethanol as with the phase separation that it causes over time. It was deemed important enough for the regional supervisor of our region to deliver marine grade stabilizer to all of our parks himself. We got the heads up from the warden service.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:26 PM

You get into all kinds of crap when you try to compare and there are problems but in the main they relate to the solvent tendencies of ethanol and the less power and mileage. If you own a car built in the past ten years that stuff has pretty much been solved by the manufacturers (seal material in fuel pumps for example). So the 10% blends aren't going to matter. Power and economy have obviously been addressed and unless you'd like a dissertation on compression ratios, cam timing, ignition timing, and stoichiometric ratios, don't worry about that either.

IF your car or truck is set up for E85 that's fine. If not and its been built since 2000, the pump gas is fine. Now as far as marine or long term storage goes, that's another story. There might be some problems there but most of this stuff you read is based on old data and scary rumors and anecdotes.........


Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:30 PM

Yeah ranger.......quite true. Marine, small engine, etc., are another story. That industry has less monitoring and so more problems continue. The auto industry would have been aniled to the wall a long time ago. In fact they were....LOL......and they need to be or they'd be going the same way today.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: pdq
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 04:53 PM

Reformulated Gasoline Fuel and MTB

Prior to the Clean Air Act of 1990, environmental issues regulations were aimed at reducing emissions as they left the exhaust system. The catalytic converter has been the primary means of attacking air pollution in this way. After 1990, regulations for the first time undertook to alter the composition of the fuel itself. Reformulated gasoline applies to gasoline that is sold in the nine metropolitan areas designated by the EPA with the highest level of ozone in air pollution problems. About 48 million people reside in areas where ozone concentrations exceed federal standards.

Reformulation refers to the transformation of gasoline to make it cleaner with respect to emissions environmental. Beginning in 1995, specifications for reformulated gasoline included a 2 percent minimum oxygen content and a maximum content of various organic and inorganic pollutants. In addition, heavy metal additives in reducing gasoline are prohibited. A disadvantage of reformulated gasoline is that it contains 1 to 3 percent less energy per gallon than traditional gasoline.

Many reformulated gasolines use oxygenated compounds as additives. Clean Air regulations specify the need for oxygenated fuel in 39 metropolitan areas with high carbon monoxide concentrations. The regulations for oxygenated fuel are seasonal: during the winter season, gasoline must contain a minimum of 27 percent oxygen. The oxygen helps engines to burn the fuel more completely which, in turn, reduces monoxide emissions. The major additive to supply the additional oxygen to reformulate gasoline to satisfy these requirements is the methanol derivative, methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). Currently, this additive is used in over 30 percent of U.S. gasoline.

MTBE was first used as a fuel additive in the 1940s and was a popular additive in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s, MTBE began replacing lead in this country to enhance octane number. In the late 1980s, California led the way in the United States for its use as an oxygenate for clean energy burning fuel. The consumption of MTBE in the United States increased rapidly between 1990 and 1995 with the passage of the Clean Air Act and, a few years later the implementation of the federal reformulated gasoline program. Currently, MTBE is produced at 50 U.S. plants located in 14 states. About 3.3 billion gallons of MTBE, requiring 1.3 billion gallons of methanol feedstock, are blended annually into reformulated gasoline.

In the late 1990s, MTBE came under serious attack on grounds of both efficacy and safety. A report by the National Research Council (1999) stated that the addition of oxygen additives in gasoline, including MTBE and ethanol, are far less important in controlling pollution than emission control equipment and technical improvement to vehicle engines and exhaust systems.

Moreover, MTBE has been found in groundwater, lakes and reservoirs used for drinking water, and it has been linked to possible serious disease. The probable occurrence of cancerous tumors in laboratory rats injected with MTBE alerted federal agencies as to its possible health hazards. In 1999, the EPA reversed itself, recommending the phasing out of MTBE as an additive to gasoline.

During the first half of 2000, MBTE production in the Unites States averaged 215,000 barrels per day. In the same six-month period, the average production offuel ethanol was 106,000 barrels per day. In light of the EPA's 1999 recommendation, ethanol will most likely replace MTBE as an effective oxygenate additive. In addition to its use as an oxygenate, ethanol enhances octane ratings and dilutes contaminants found in regular gasoline.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: pdq
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 05:31 PM

The Cleanup of the People's Pocketbooks

(Excerpts of this article were published in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 17, 1998, page A23, with the title, "MTBE Cleans Up Our Pocketbooks".)

by Dr. Bill Wattenburg

June 16, 1998

Know what a billion dollars a year represents? It's $10,000 a year for each and every one of 100,000 students from low-income families who otherwise might not get the college education they deserve in California. Or, a billion dollars a year is five times more than the state's total yearly financial support for the qualified medical scientists in all of California's research laboratories. These are the highly trained scientists who are closing in on cures for cancer and other major diseases that eventually kill ninety percent of us. With more money, surely they could find these cures much sooner and extend all of our lives by many years. So, what would you call politicians and bureaucrats who are deliberately wasting three times that amount every year—enough to give every college student in California a free education? I call them official criminals.

Sadly, there is an army of self-serving bureaucrats pretending to be environmental saviors who are wasting over three billion dollars a year in California alone on fraudulent environmental cleanup programs that do nothing more than give billions to their friends in private industry. The worst two of these monumental scams are the MTBE additive in California reformulated gasoline and the Smog II program that will soon be forced on most car owners. These programs are not cleaning up our environment. They are cleaning out the pocketbooks of the small businesses and working families of California. The California Legislature has acknowledged its mistakes by temporarily cutting the budget for Smog II and ordering investigations of MTBE. But they need a real kick in the pants to stop these frauds once and for all.

These frauds have been orchestrated by what I call the eco-fraud lobby. This powerful lobby consists is not only of self-serving bureaucrats, but lawyers hungry for lawsuits and thousands of so-called environmental cleanup contractors and smog equipment suppliers as well. Every day they invent environmental scare stories and promote new laws to force the expenditure of billions of dollars destined to end up in their own pockets (and, of course, the pockets of elected officials who receive gorgeous contributions from the lobby).

There are good scientists and environmentalists who will tell the truth and promote sensible programs. Generally, they are not the ones working for government bureaucracies. Unfortunately, most are in our universities are not able to dictate national policy. Our political leaders seldom seek their counsel—that is, until it's too late and the eco-frauds have robbed the country blind.

None other than the Sierra Club recently came out of the eco-fraud closet when the Tosco Oil Company decided to remove MTBE from its gasoline. A Sierra Club spokesman quickly announced support for continued use of MTBE! Why? He said that "MTBE was like the canary in the mineshaft because it was an indicator for other bad chemicals." I believe that all the Sierra Club lawyers really care about is that eliminating MTBE will kill all the Sierra Club plans to sue the oil companies and the hapless service stations which are required to put MTBE in their leaking underground fuel tanks. Interestingly, the Sierra Club expressed no concern for the health of the people.

The eco-fraud lobby smothers any scientific evidence that money is better spent on more productive environmental cleanup programs that do not require the services of the eco-fraud lobby. I'll tell you below about the most cost-effective energy conservation and pollution reduction program for California. The eco-fraud lobby has long struggled to ignore this one—the way Dracula reels from a silver cross—because this program doesn't need the eco-fraud lobby. It doesn't generate lawsuits for their lawyers or lucrative dig-another-hole-in-the-ground jobs for their contractors or sell fifty-thousand-dollar dynamometers (or generate big campaign contributions for the politicians in Sacramento and Washington).

The voters in California who want the MTBE and Smog II frauds stopped must demand that the legislators now in office kill these programs before the November election. I'll tell you how these massive frauds in the name of the environment came about and what they are costing you. You use your own judgement at the ballot box.
MTBE in Our Gasoline

For the past three years, Californians have been paying at least twenty cents a gallon more for their MTBE-laced California reformulated gasoline than motorists in other states pay for their gasoline. Multiply twenty cents a gallon by forty million gallons per day for three years and you'll find that Californians have been robbed of about nine billion dollars over the last three years. This is enough money stolen from working families to have given every college student in California free tuition, books, and room and board. How in the hell could this happen? Easy. The California Legislature long ago turned over all of its authority to a bureaucracy of bungling scientific illiterates called the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the same defiant idiots who forced a poison diesel fuel on California a few years ago against the advice of many scientists (as widely reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and many other newspapers). The evidence now clearly shows that CARB bureaucrats, with the full support of their federal EPA idiot cousins, were desperate to force some new program on Californians just to justify their continued existence on the public payroll.

Many other states refused to allow their citizens to be exposed to this man-made chemical, MTBE, that was known to be toxic to laboratory animals. The State Department of Health has recently confirmed that "research has shown that MTBE is toxic to animals and probably to humans." Some oil companies are now backing away from using MTBE because they can see the lawsuits coming their way. But for three years now, Californians have been forced to breathe and drink this stuff in quantities ten thousand times greater than all the pesticides on their food. Ironically, many of the self-styled environmental saviors such as the Sierra Club who want us to breathe and drink MTBE are the same ones who file lawsuits to force the elimination of pesticides.

So why did the political leaders of California look the other way and disregard the health of our citizens and the economy of our state? I was at the 1995 legislative hearings when CARB bureaucrats and the oil companies told the legislature that MTBE was safe and that increased gas prices would only last a few months in 1995 until the oil companies had recovered their costs for converting to the new gasoline. I told our legislators then that they were being lied to and that high gas prices would continue forever because CARB was giving the oil companies a monopoly. I told them that CARB was forcing Californians to buy only CARB's special concoction called California reformulated gasoline while the rest of the country could use the standard federal reformulated gasoline available at competitive prices from refineries around the world.

Good scientists long ago told the EPA and CARB how to reformulate gasoline to reduce emissions in the most cost-effective ways, and they advised against using oxygenate additives such as MTBE and ethanol in the gasoline (see the journal Science, 3 July 1993, summary, page 37). These oxygenate additives are self-defeating. They reduce the amount of energy in each gallon of gasoline and thereby force motorists to burn more gallons of fuel to go the same distance-which produces more emissions. Just as predicted, MTBE has not been an essential factor in reducing emissions. Other chemical reformulations of the gasoline suggested by the scientists are what account for reduced emissions. The only purpose of the MTBE has been to generate billions in extra profits for the oil companies.

Indeed, an oil company proposed the use of MTBE in California reformulated gasoline as a sure-fire way to reduce automobile emissions and please the federal EPA. CARB bureaucrats didn't even question the obvious profit motives on the part of the oil company, nor did CARB make any reasonable investigation of the health consequences of dumping a million pounds of MTBE into our environment every day (unburned fuel evaporating and coming out of exhaust pipes). CARB promised the legislature that everything would be ok. I believe it was all too easy for the legislative leaders and the governor to look the other way. These politicians were well aware that the oil companies would make billions of dollars of new profits selling MTBE. The oil companies just happen to be some of the biggest contributors to the political campaigns of incumbent politicians.
The Smog II Fraud

Budget committees in the California Legislature voted last month to cut all money from the budget for the Smog II program—for good reason. Legislators were facing the primary election and the wrath of the public. But now that the primary election is over, eco-fraud lobby with the full support of big business will surely bring Smog II back by one means or another. A billion dollars a year of business for the eco-fraud lobby and millions in political campaign contributions depend on Smog II. The word in Sacramento is that legislators getting the political payoffs will have the Smog II budget restored behind the scenes by an assembly-senate budget compromise committee. This way, each legislator can say that he or she voted against the Smog II budget but that it was restored by others whom they could not control. Voters who want this program stopped must demand that Smog II be killed, permanently, before the coming November election.

The Smog II is a bureaucratic nightmare that will force millions of California motorists to miss millions of days of work and pay dearly to have their cars tested on expensive dynamometers (treadmills for cars). This will accomplish nothing more than to put money into the pockets of the dynamometer manufacturers and the smog check stations who are forced to buy this horribly expensive equipment. The emission control equipment on newer cars and the smog testing program used in California for the past twenty years have been highly successful in eliminating ninety percent of the emissions that came from older cars. But EPA bureaucrats and their buddies in the smog equipment industry were running out of a job so they had to invent a more complex and expensive dynamometer test program.

High bureaucrats in the federal EPA tried to push this dynamometer program on other states. Those states refused, for good reason: this idiotic program was clearly designed primarily to punish the owners of older cars as if they are the major source of air pollution. But our most knowledgeable scientists reported long ago that older cars are not the biggest polluters because they are driven relatively fewer miles (see the journal Science, 3 July 1993, page 40). And newer cars are virtually emission free. So, newer cars owned by the well-to-do are now excused from Smog II testing by the latest revisions to the original Smog II plan. What are left are the cars five to twenty-five years old that are driven by low income families who can not afford new cars. These are the families who will be socked a billion dollars a year for a meaningless Smog II program.

The political leaders of other states rightfully suspected that the EPA officials pushing dynamometer smog testing on the states would go to work for the dynamometer manufacturers after these EPA bureaucrats had forced the states to sign hundred-million dollar purchase contracts for the dynamometers. Indeed, this has already happened in California—right under the noses of our legislature and Governor. The top California bureaucrat-engineer, who helped write the Smog II regulations that require smog testing stations to buy thousands of expensive dynamometers has already jumped ship and gone to work for a manufacturer of smog testing equipment.
A Compelling Alternative

The biggest reductions in air pollution still obtainable will come from major reductions in overall energy usage by homes and industry in the state, not by small reductions in the minor amount of pollution still coming from older cars or the use of unnecessarily expensive reformulated gasoline. The energy savings that can be easily achieved have been thoroughly documented by the University of California Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

The vulgar nature of the MTBE and Smog II frauds is best demonstrated by describing a thoroughly tested alternative program that can achieve greater air pollution reduction at much less cost. CARB has refused to consider this program that actually rewards low income families instead of punishing them. What is this miraculous program? Simple. It is nothing more than installing energy-saving insulation in at least two hundred thousand older homes per year in California. This is the most cost effective program ever demonstrated for energy conservation and air pollution reduction. It can be done for less than the annual cost of Smog II. The California electric utility companies have been financing such programs on a smaller scale for years.

Utility sponsored home insulation programs have shown that a few thousand dollars of new insulation per older home can produce up to fifteen percent permanent energy savings per home. So we take the billion dollars that will be wasted each year by Smog II and we use that billion dollars instead to insulate two to three hundred thousand homes each year. The reduction in statewide energy usage to heat and air condition these homes will result in three times greater permanent statewide air pollution reduction than will be achieved by the motorist-humiliating Smog II fraud for which working families will have to continue paying every year.

For more than five years I have been telling the California Legislature and the Governor's office that they should greatly expand the home insulation program and show the federal EPA that this is the way to real air pollution reduction. It actually helps low-income families rather than punishing them Smog II style. It stimulates rather than depresses the California economy by creating thousands of entry-level construction jobs. And it puts billions of dollars of utility bill savings back into the pockets of the working families of California. However, this program contains a politically fatal flaw: carrying out this program does not require tens of thousands of incompetent, scientifically ignorant bureaucrats on the public payroll. This program does not feed a billion dollars a year to the eco-fraud lobby.

Privately, politicians in Sacramento told me that it would be bad for them to increase the gasoline tax to fund a home insulation program to reduce air pollution. The people would consider that to be a new tax. They said it was politically safe, however, to allow millions of California motorists to be robbed of a few hundred dollars each for meaningless Smog II tests and another two hundred dollars a year for outrageously expensive gas. They said that "the legislature could put the blame on the federal EPA idiots for forcing these programs on California." Such robbery of our citizens is not a tax? Where in the hell are some political leaders with enough guts to protect the working families, students, and the economy of California?

The voters who don't relish having their money wasted should put this home insulation alternative in the face of every candidate for public office who wants their votes. Demand that the candidates put their promises in writing for the press to publish so that they cannot deny their campaign promises later.
San Francisco Can Rescue California

There is a much quicker way to stop these billion dollar frauds with a bit of poetic justice. All it takes is the initiative of the guy who used to run the state legislature, the mayor of San Francisco. The EPA and CARB lied to San Francisco when they promised in 1995 that San Francisco motorists would be exempt from Smog II because the air in the City is so clean. Then the EPA changed the standards and doublecrossed the San Francisco legislators who voted for Smog II. Its time to give the eco-frauds a dose of their own medicine under the environmental laws they created.

The mayor (or the Board of Supervisors) can justifiably ban MTBE and Smog II in the City for health and safety reasons. MTBE is clearly toxic under Proposition 65. No adequate study of the inherently dangerous Smog II dynamometers in the workplace has been done by the city or state occupational safety agencies. A car can fly through the next building if it slips off of one of these things with its wheels spinning at fifty miles an hour. This would surely ruin somebody's day.

If San Francisco lights the spark of protest, the Sacramento politicians facing elections in November will quickly throw both of these frauds to the bonfire where they belong. Most of our legislators openly state that they were deceived by CARB bureaucrats. They don't need much of a push to kill these cancers on California's health and economy.

And what would the eco-frauds and the feds do? Nothing. They don't dare go to the courts and face the facts that I've given you above or the scientists who would testify to the truth. Both CARB and the EPA lied to the California Legislature and even concealed the scientific report I've mentioned several times above, a report by this country's most knowledgeable scientists at MIT, Cal Tech, U.C. Berkeley, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (the major review article on air pollution reduction in the journal Science, 3 July 93, page 37).

How about it Mr. Mayor?

Dr. Bill Wattenburg is a Research Scientist with The University Foundation, California State University Chico (Chico, CA 95929).

Copyright © 1998 Dr. Bill Wattenburg

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 06:45 PM

Your point from those two 10+ year old articles is what?

Ethanol allowed the phase out of MTBE which, if you recall, replaced the dreaded LEAD in gasoline as the oxygenate(anti-knock additive). The real need is to replace the hydrocarbon based fuel source.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: pdq
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 06:59 PM

From what I can tell, about 30% of all gasoline sold in the US right now contains MTBE. It has not gone away.

MTBE is (probably) what degraded older rubber and plastic seals, leadeing to numerous carburator fires, even deadly crashes. Ethanol is much more benign.

MTBE did not replace lead. It was supposed to be an "oxygenate" to lower carbon monoxide emissions. Lead was removed for health reasons. The newer low compression engines and computer controls allowed the use of lower octane rated gas.

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 07:44 PM

Yeah it did fuck up rubber/neopreme/etc for the same reasons ethanol does. MTBE IS an oxygenate AND most certainly used as an anti-knock compound. It exists in higher octane gasolines for that reason. Other anti-knocks have come along which didn't have the health hazards and ethanol was something which offered up a number of plusses. Like everything else it had lots of drawbacks which we were happy to overlook for awhile. Right now its pretty fair with some exceptions.

I still fail to see your point on MTBE.


Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: E-10 Fuel (10% ethanol in gasoline)
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 10 Apr 11 - 07:54 PM

Ethanol-def.

Food to burn in engines where it is inefficient, thereby raising the price of food to burn in bodies where it is quite efficient (and necessary).