Cleaner air for Iowa with Ethanol

I ran across this article. Cleaner air for Iowa with Ethanol.
EPA increases The Federal Ethanol Mandate.

https://dailycaller.com/2016/11/23/epa-increases-the-federal-ethanol-mandate/

Then I ran across another article saying ethanol may be bad for the environment.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/04/epa-ethanol-mandate-environment/

Conclusion, Ethanol is a Federal Mandate.
I never heard anything about the second article, have you?

Please feel free to post any article that may have opposing opinions.

That first article was from November of 2016.

I do not burn the ethanol blend if I can help it. My F-250 with the 6.8L V10 drops 3 mpg with the ethanol.
I'll burn gasoline..........

I've used ethanol blend almost exclusively since it first came out. Scientific research has always held that ethanol is a cleaner burning product. I've experienced none of the ill effects that people attribute to ethanol. And i've noticed no noticeable difference in mileage. And it is cheaper so more economical to use. Plus it is a big boon to corn prices and that's how I make a living. I call it a win - win.

I been using since 1977 when I started blending it for the farmers. I now use E15 in everything, including my chain saws, lawn mowers, skid loader. Everything starts/runs so good on it, I wouldn't even consider running reg gas anymore.

Sure it would work. When the ethanol burns up motors on older cars there will be fewer vehicles on the road.

93 Olds and 04 Dodge pkup and 08 Caravan all use E-30 with no problems. Been using ethanol since about 77 also without any problems.

The second article is more current August 2018 and it from the
EPA.

Ethanol does not cause any great problems. Mileage might drop and there in starts the first irony. Lower emissions with ethanol. Now we have more emissions with Ethanol due to less economy. The BIGGEST problem comes when you put Methanol in your tank. That will melt anything rubber in your fuel system. Especially that short 1 inch hose inside the tank between the pick up tube and the fuel pump.
I got a car one time real cheap because of Methanol.

(quoted from post at 20:36:28 09/17/18) I been using since 1977 when I started blending it for the farmers. I now use E15 in everything, including my chain saws, lawn mowers, skid loader. Everything starts/runs so good on it, I wouldn't even consider running reg gas anymore.

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Same here. I will add one more vehicle to the list. 2 stroke motorcycles. I have experimented with E85 in a Farmall H and a Farmall M. It worked fairly good, but the engines needed to warm up good before actually working them. Our local gas station offers E10 and E85 only, so I've not yet had a chance to try the E15.

What most of you don't realize you can't compare gasoline to ethanol by miles per gallon buy by cost per mile. Mileage drops typically 20% so cost of e85 must be 20% lower than gasoline to make sense to use. All of my vehicles are flex fuel vehicles and I use e85 when it's at least 20% below the cost of gasoline.

The problem is that one can find articles going either way. No one wants to do the hard work of life-cycle calorimitry on the blending of Ethanol to fuel. It's a lot of inputs, and to include the secondary, and maybe the tertiary components of the blending of Ethanol in fuel makes for very hard or absolute conclusions.

Do we add the diesel fuel burned by the tractors and trucks associated with the planting, and harvesting of corn for Ethanol production? This would be an avoided fuel use if Ethanol were NOT blended in the fuel.

Do we substitute the increased hydrocracking required to increase the octane level, plus the other octane additives that take the place of Ethanol in raising octane to required levels?

Ethanol has a lower specific energy content by mass, and volume. That much is certain. So the fuel mileage in a vehicle goes down(consumption goes up) due to needing a minimum amount of calories to produce the same motion.

I can easily make an argument that the total environmental damage caused by blending Ethanol to fuel is greater than the modest cleaner burning of Ethanol in cars. Since the addition of catalytic process to the modern cars makes them pretty clean, the delta between emissions between E-10 and non-Eth fuels is vanishingly small. On the order of micro-grams or tenths of Parts Per Million of CO and NOx. In some case, the difference in emissions is so small it can't be measured.

It's also safe to say that blending Ethanol avoids using the other blend constituents and increased oil cracking needed to produce better octane fuel.

So, the answer is, it depends. If I were a ag company like ADM, and was getting hundreds of millions of $$$ per year from the fed govt, I would surely buy the best science I could get to prove that Ethanol blending was favorable. So - follow the money, and buy the science one wants to use.

Bruce, my thinking is along the lines that if mileage drops by mixing in alcohol, about all we've accomplished is turning some of earth's dwindling food resources into a product that's sole purpose is to artificially prop up crop prices. gm

(quoted from post at 08:22:26 09/18/18) Bruce, my thinking is along the lines that if mileage drops by mixing in alcohol, about all we've accomplished is turning some of earth's dwindling food resources into a product that's sole purpose is to artificially prop up crop prices. gm

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Brewer's grain. That is what is leftover after the alcohol is extracted from corn. Brewer's grain is a very viable livestock feed.

You can extract alcohol from corn to fuel your truck, and then fatten out your steers and sell the beef. It is a win/win.

The best thing for the Environment, the US Taxpayers and gasoline consumers would be that the amount of corn used to make Ethanol every year would never have been planted in the first place.

Brewers grain is still good feed for livestock.

OK guys, look at the numbers games. IF you buy a small gas car it will get better mileage and pollute less than an older mid sized car. Say something new compared to a mid 90's mid size. Now here is the kicker. If you take into account collecting the raw material needed to make a car, the various ores, oil (for plastics) and other materials, plus the refining processes and so on. You will create more pollution than the midsize care will emit in 200,000 miles of driving if it's well maintained.

Kinda the same thing with ethanol. You create more pollution growing the corn, harvesting it, spraying chemicals on it, transporting it distilling it and blending it than it reduces. You can find multiple studies on line if you bother to research.

So getting one here, with no new members and trying to convince one side or the other to change their minds is pointless. And it has nothing to do with the environment for most of the corn growers. They could care less about that. What they are about is profit. Gotta figure out some way to get prices back up. Gotta justify GMO's and roundup. OK corn growers get mad. But that's how most of the whole world see you. And trust me, no one cares about how you see yourself. The see you as a greedy person who is trying to use government mandates that cost them money. You are paying for it to. Last time I checked the bio blend diesel is about 1.30 more a gallon because of the cost of the bio stuff. They figure just in paying that just because of the added fuel cost it's costing the general consumers 5.8 BILLION more a year in the stores. Now go online and justify that to the general public.

Rick