perhaps the long run offers some benefits of ethanol, but from my current perspective its a PITA. hawaii just passed a mandatory 10% ethanol mix in pretty much all our gas, which in exchange allows gas stations to pocket the state tax they must charge on each gallon of gas. I've seen no personal benefit from this stuff unless you consider lower mileage and thus less energy for my dollar a good thing.

 

Watch it..... RR is one of my favorites.

 

I believe its only working in brazil b/c of politics... they had a large suppy of sugar and decided to start using ethanol to make a market for their own products...

You can't work the same senario backwards and expect it to work as well... especially with a country thats so huge and already has oil pipelines in place...

Now that oil is over $70 a barrel its starting to become cost effective to get oil from shale... and there is a ton of oil in shale. So we won't be running out of oil anytime soon.

 

I think it would do more good than bad though. Yea, it might be pricey, and yea, it might drive up the cost of corn (big deal, im not even a fan of corn), but it would do a lot of good. Im not sure, correct me if I am wrong but I believe that it burns a lot cleaner which would probably cut down on smog (wont mention global warming because some people still believe its not happening), but more importantly for the present, it would bring our nations economy back. Am I wrong or arent we one of the biggest producers of corn? Not for anything Im sick of seeing these rich @ss shieks over in the emirates that only have money becuase they were sitting on liquid gold.

 

Ethanol is able to compete with gasoline only because of subsidies to farmers and producers. The real cost of producing ethanol is much higher than gasoline. Many states have very limited numbers of suppliers, it is more common in the midwest due to the greater numbers of corn producers. As a fuel it is clean, high octane stuff, but it holds fewer BTUs per gallon so it will give you less range per gallon. You have to buy more of the more expensive product to get the same distance down the road.
Ford and GM and others produce cars that sense the blend of ethanol/gasoline in the tank and alter fuel delivery to compensate. There are currently millions of these vehicles on US roads. Multifuel has really only caught on with fleet users, again because of the subsidy structure.

 

Ethanol can be made with just about any organic substance. In Brazil I believe they mainly use sugar. We use corn here because it's probably the least expensive. The problem is how expensive it is to make right now and there is a lot of waste, they still need to figure out how to refine more ethanol out of corn etc so it becomes more cost effective.