Move to IL. It's everywhere here. Even most of the little towns now have an E85 pump at at station or two. I've been thinking about building an E85 specific engine out of the extra LT1 I've got in the garage.

 

I dunno about superior, but its got its perks, mix it with a little nitromethane and you got yourself a superior fuel.

 

Goverment has paid some farmers to replace their corn for E85 with switchgrass. They found they get about 5 times the amount of fuel out of the switchgrass crop with the equivalent amount of inputs (water, land, farm equipment and manpower).

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=...nol-than-corn&

EDIT: rephrase...looks like corn ethanol is generally about 24% (24% of the energy you put into it)...switchgrass is 540% efficient.

 

Interesting...even little old Tucson has multiple E85 stations.

 

I would much rather run ethanol... It's a better/more powerful fuel IF the engine is built for it (Unlike the E85 compromises we have today)

 

^ Is it 10:1 compression? Or is it 9:1?

 

anybody who doesn't care for E85 needs to check out what fuel ALL of the Dynomax Challenge finalists were running. The winner put down over 1600hp!

 

My Cobalt is making the switch to E85 fuel this spring , all I really need to do is run a bigger injector and seriously re-work my fuel maps . It consumes about 30% more fuel at light loads and about 50% more at WOT ....it is pretty attainable around these parts .



Outside of using as a performance tool like the Saab and Lincoln engines or somone like me using as cheap race gas , I just dont see the draw of flex fuel vehicle . If say , u had a e-flex Impala or whatever , why would u want to fill up with E85 ? Its about as expensive as regular fuel and since it takes more energy to burn your mileage is less .

 

E85 is about 50 cents cheaper around these parts.

 

I think I remember reading somewhere that a flex-fuel car gets artificially inflated MPG when if comes to CAFE regulations... consumers were never really expected to do a mass switch to ethanol, if I'm understanding this correctly.


I hadn't thought of the turbocharging and boost controller stuff as a flex-fuel solution... that might make an interesting project for when I'm no longer a poor college student, although I'm sure something that simple would have been hit on by the auto industry by now...

 

Under the new CAFE flexfuel vehicles will not get extra credits (Unfortunately)

I think it's BS.

 

Yea , but no reason to release something like this when E85 is pretty much unattainable in several markets .

 

http://www.ethanol.org/news/index.php?newsid=25

Kind of cool article but should definately be taken with a grain of salt or grain or whatever. They (the American coalition for ethanol, the people who are releasing the info and definately a biased group) found that E20 to E30 may actually be more efficient than regular gasoline. This + more efficient ways of producing ethanol could make it a strong alternative to pure gasoline.

 

Diesel fuel 128,450 BTU(LHV) per gallon
Gasoline 116,090 BTU(LHV) per gallon
LPG 84,950 BTU(LHV) per gallon
Natural gas 983 BTU(LHV) per cubic ft.
Electricity 3,412 BTU(LHV) per kwh
Coal 9,773 BTU(LHV) per pound
Ethanol 76,330 BTU(LHV) per gallon

For comparison

 

or a crap ton of compression in N/A form.