The Ethanol/E85 Debate
06-22-2007, 10:00 AM
#11
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2002
Location: California
Posts: 22,465
Originally Posted by Lynn E. Hanover' post='875813' date='Jun 21 2007, 05:51 PM
That was a joke, right. You don't really think that?
Lynn E. Hanover
haha, yeah its accidental. clintons a mixed bag at best.
07-04-2007, 11:05 PM
#12
Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Minnesota
Posts: 911
Originally Posted by Lynn E. Hanover' post='875648' date='Jun 20 2007, 07:19 AM
So when I am elected........
There will be no food corn in your tank. The towel heads will be sitting on oil that a much smaller number of people want. What a pitty. There will be a wall to keep the towel heads out and everybody else as well. If another 911 is gifted to us, the towel heads will loose there beloved shrines in a single blinding white flash.
Lynn E. Hanover
There will be no food corn in your tank. The towel heads will be sitting on oil that a much smaller number of people want. What a pitty. There will be a wall to keep the towel heads out and everybody else as well. If another 911 is gifted to us, the towel heads will loose there beloved shrines in a single blinding white flash.
Lynn E. Hanover
Vote Hanover!
07-06-2007, 01:03 PM
#17
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Central Ohio (Hebron) Zephyrhills Fla.
Posts: 1,322
Originally Posted by Latin270' post='877240' date='Jul 6 2007, 10:09 AM
You got my vote Lynn!
Thank you.
Now, notice the price of soda pop (corn syrup) the next time you are in the store. Up almost a dollar. Meat, poultry, pork. Anything that uses corn. Stabbed in the *** again by the tree huggers, and
Aurther Danials Midland.
I was going to include a picture, but this new format has escaped me.
Lynn E. Hanover
07-06-2007, 02:17 PM
#18
Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 173
Originally Posted by Lynn E. Hanover' post='877241' date='Jul 6 2007, 11:03 AM
Thank you.
Now, notice the price of soda pop (corn syrup) the next time you are in the store. Up almost a dollar. Meat, poultry, pork. Anything that uses corn. Stabbed in the *** again by the tree huggers, and
Aurther Danials Midland.
I was going to include a picture, but this new format has escaped me.
Lynn E. Hanover
Now, notice the price of soda pop (corn syrup) the next time you are in the store. Up almost a dollar. Meat, poultry, pork. Anything that uses corn. Stabbed in the *** again by the tree huggers, and
Aurther Danials Midland.
I was going to include a picture, but this new format has escaped me.
Lynn E. Hanover
07-10-2008, 12:17 AM
#19
Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 2
WOW!
Where to start?
Ok, yes, we should be drilling for more oil anywhere we can. The days of burning natural gas off into the air just to get to the crude are gone. I hate hippies, too.
But...
I am not a Muslim, but you do realize calling a Muslim a towel head is tantamount to dropping an N bomb on an African American, right? Hatred like that is no better than the enemy.
Isolationism is what got the United States into the messes of the first two World Wars. Round 3 will be atomic. Do you really want that?
Blame the correct culprit. Even with the increased price of corn, that only accounts for about 4 cents per box of cereal, for example. The rest is primarily increased transportation costs because of the COST OF OIL. What's left is just the sad state of the economy because we have an oil man in the white house (and not a very smart one at that).
Do a little research. Corn ethanol is made almost entirely from livestock corn or cellulosic material, i.e. the stalks. How does that hurt the food grain supply? (OK, it might make the price of steak go up, but my grandpa owns the small meat processing plant I work at in central Ohio. Our prices haven't changed much)
If you are really worried about taxes, why do you support a president who is building a CATASTROPHIC federal deficit? We'll have to pay it off sometime. Even if deficit spending works, which is debatable, you have to stop it at some point or we will always spend more than our tax revenue. Clinton was not the one who made a one trillion dollar deficit two trillion in four years. If we want to lower taxes, we need to get out of Iraq. There is a reason why Republicans used to be known as the "doves," it's because they did not want to pay the high cost of war. Sure there is a lot of other hippie/tree hugger crap that can be trimmed from the budget, but it's hard to take that criticism from backers of the war pigs (at least that's what Ozzy would call 'em).
Now, regardless of what your opinion is on the politics, you should keep a few things in mind about the potential of ethanol as fuel for an internal combustion engine.
It is very high octane. I believe e85 is in the 104-5 range. This give it a lot of potential as a performance fuel.
Gasoline does have about 30% more btu's than ethanol, but this is offset somewhat by its octane. It also has RON and MON numbers closer together than gasoline, which means that its octane rating degrades less under load, meaning its knock resistance is functionally higher than the equivalent octane gasoline when the throttle is mashed.
All modern cars can handle gasoline ethanol mixtures. Some states are running e10 as their standard gasoline.
e85 burns a lot cleaner than straight gasoline. This means that people in states with emissions testing could use more aggressive tuning measures and still pass emissions. Whether they bust you because your exhaust smells like the air around a beer factory is another story. (God I love that smell)
It burns cooler. There is a company that build a prototype, I think it was even a rotary, that ran on ethanol mixed with water that did not need a coolant system. Even if that doesn't work for us, smaller radiators mean more air flow to intercoolers.
Much of ethanol's bad rep comes from two factors: it's poor fuel mileage in flex fuel vehicles and its economic inefficiencies. The poor fuel mileage is due to the flex fuel nature. If the engine were built to run solely or mainly on ethanol, the mileage/power output would be a lot closer. Imagine building a flex fuel with REALLY high compression and then making it run pig rich when on gasoline so it wouldn't knock. Would it then make sense to criticize gasoline for its poor performance versus ethanol? It's not that much different than people who run high test in cars that don't need it. It's a waste. As for the cost effectiveness of production, it is more of a nod to the future than a cure for now. Technology is already improving so that ethanol will one day be cost effective. It is just a matter of perfecting technology like algae or corn stalk ethanol. They have had Direct Injection tech since the 1950's; it only recently became fiscally practical except in diesels. It's not that different from drilling for new oil; it might not pay off for years, but that is not a reason to do nothing now (we REALLY need to get drilling; the tree huggers conveniently ignore the fact that hurricane Katrina let loose less than 1/10th of the oil the Valdez did. Drilling is clean anymore if for no other reason than oil is too valuable to spill). My hope is that someday we can stop paying farm subsidies because plant production for fuel purposes has made farming profitable enough for it to no longer be necessary.
Maybe some of my thoughts are wrong; unlike the gentleman above, I don't think I know all of the answers. But if I have some good points, maybe we should consider a thought process besides, "No more ethanol and Death to the towel heads!"
Where to start?
Ok, yes, we should be drilling for more oil anywhere we can. The days of burning natural gas off into the air just to get to the crude are gone. I hate hippies, too.
But...
I am not a Muslim, but you do realize calling a Muslim a towel head is tantamount to dropping an N bomb on an African American, right? Hatred like that is no better than the enemy.
Isolationism is what got the United States into the messes of the first two World Wars. Round 3 will be atomic. Do you really want that?
Blame the correct culprit. Even with the increased price of corn, that only accounts for about 4 cents per box of cereal, for example. The rest is primarily increased transportation costs because of the COST OF OIL. What's left is just the sad state of the economy because we have an oil man in the white house (and not a very smart one at that).
Do a little research. Corn ethanol is made almost entirely from livestock corn or cellulosic material, i.e. the stalks. How does that hurt the food grain supply? (OK, it might make the price of steak go up, but my grandpa owns the small meat processing plant I work at in central Ohio. Our prices haven't changed much)
If you are really worried about taxes, why do you support a president who is building a CATASTROPHIC federal deficit? We'll have to pay it off sometime. Even if deficit spending works, which is debatable, you have to stop it at some point or we will always spend more than our tax revenue. Clinton was not the one who made a one trillion dollar deficit two trillion in four years. If we want to lower taxes, we need to get out of Iraq. There is a reason why Republicans used to be known as the "doves," it's because they did not want to pay the high cost of war. Sure there is a lot of other hippie/tree hugger crap that can be trimmed from the budget, but it's hard to take that criticism from backers of the war pigs (at least that's what Ozzy would call 'em).
Now, regardless of what your opinion is on the politics, you should keep a few things in mind about the potential of ethanol as fuel for an internal combustion engine.
It is very high octane. I believe e85 is in the 104-5 range. This give it a lot of potential as a performance fuel.
Gasoline does have about 30% more btu's than ethanol, but this is offset somewhat by its octane. It also has RON and MON numbers closer together than gasoline, which means that its octane rating degrades less under load, meaning its knock resistance is functionally higher than the equivalent octane gasoline when the throttle is mashed.
All modern cars can handle gasoline ethanol mixtures. Some states are running e10 as their standard gasoline.
e85 burns a lot cleaner than straight gasoline. This means that people in states with emissions testing could use more aggressive tuning measures and still pass emissions. Whether they bust you because your exhaust smells like the air around a beer factory is another story. (God I love that smell)
It burns cooler. There is a company that build a prototype, I think it was even a rotary, that ran on ethanol mixed with water that did not need a coolant system. Even if that doesn't work for us, smaller radiators mean more air flow to intercoolers.
Much of ethanol's bad rep comes from two factors: it's poor fuel mileage in flex fuel vehicles and its economic inefficiencies. The poor fuel mileage is due to the flex fuel nature. If the engine were built to run solely or mainly on ethanol, the mileage/power output would be a lot closer. Imagine building a flex fuel with REALLY high compression and then making it run pig rich when on gasoline so it wouldn't knock. Would it then make sense to criticize gasoline for its poor performance versus ethanol? It's not that much different than people who run high test in cars that don't need it. It's a waste. As for the cost effectiveness of production, it is more of a nod to the future than a cure for now. Technology is already improving so that ethanol will one day be cost effective. It is just a matter of perfecting technology like algae or corn stalk ethanol. They have had Direct Injection tech since the 1950's; it only recently became fiscally practical except in diesels. It's not that different from drilling for new oil; it might not pay off for years, but that is not a reason to do nothing now (we REALLY need to get drilling; the tree huggers conveniently ignore the fact that hurricane Katrina let loose less than 1/10th of the oil the Valdez did. Drilling is clean anymore if for no other reason than oil is too valuable to spill). My hope is that someday we can stop paying farm subsidies because plant production for fuel purposes has made farming profitable enough for it to no longer be necessary.
Maybe some of my thoughts are wrong; unlike the gentleman above, I don't think I know all of the answers. But if I have some good points, maybe we should consider a thought process besides, "No more ethanol and Death to the towel heads!"
