Gas Grade

How many tortillas are made in a day/a year?
Tortillas per day: 10,226,261
Tortillas per year: 29,247,106,909
If all the tortillas made in a year were stacked to the sky, how many stories high would it be?

Total stories in a day: 60,341
Total stories in a year: 17,257,598

 

NEITHER of those references says what YOU said:
"Use only gasoline containing a maximum of 10% ethanol."

It does NOT state "not to use Ethanol infused gas".

 

Go back and read post #7, that was not my quote, I was replying to tach18k.
That is why I posted links from Toyota so as to clear up what was said.

 

Easy Rider,
Sorry for the confusion!
I meant to reply to tack18k with those links, My bad!

 

No, I believe EPA agrees with me! But the manual wording may be out-dated now.
Note that EPA never states that ethanol is the reason why the reformulated gasoline burns cleaner. Background: the Clean Air Act Ammendments of 1990 required the oil industry to come up with a complex new clean-burning recipe for gasoline called Reformulated Gasoline. In a highly debated fight, Congress mandated the new gasoline recipe must include ethanol and/or MTBE, even though the R&D program (conducted for the purpose of the law) was showing new cars did not burn cleaner with ethanol. So therefore cleaner burning Reformulated Gasoline does indeed contain ethanol. More recent years, congress has mandated ethanol be added to all gasoline (reformulated or not) and MTBE was dropped.

 

etc......all good points

+1 reduce dependency on foreign oil...great
-1 us currently exports oil about 3million bbl a day, while we import 10 million.....we could cut our dependency on foreign oil by 30% if we stop exporting.
-1 depending on which study you look at. 0.7 units of ethanol produced per unit of fossil fuel used. on up to 1.5 units of ethanol per unit of fossil fuel used while gasoline on the other hand. 15 units produced for 1 unit used..... So even on ethanol BEST day.... its just barely breaking even...
-1 our taxes are still paying subsidies to farmers... for ethanol corn to the tune of $7 billion...or 54 bucks per tax payer.
-1 133000 BTU's of energy are needed to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, which has a BTU rating of 77,000
-1 lets not even get into the environmental aspect of farming corn...water waste, fertilizer, soil erosion....
-1 fuel economy up to a 10% loss in fuel economy..... quick math. on e10 you can get 500 miles on 10 gallons of gas or 50MPG @ 3.30 per gallon 33.00. on e0 you get 5o0 miles on 9 gallons or 55mpg $3.50 per gallon 31.50. 2.50 savings per tank... thats not even talking about e85 which is only about 70% as efficient as e0 E85 vs. Gasoline Comparison Test

-1 ethanol LOVES water....which means it will blend better with water than gasoline and can absorb much more water. and its not as simple as draining the bottom of the tank, as the ethanol will also drain out. While this isn't a problem if you drive your car a lot or you get fuel from a busy station that gets frequent fills...

from a landscape point of view- its what I do for a living, 30 years now...so this I know... and I don't have any maintenance problems, all of our equipment both at home and at work are garage kept. but we have noticed an increase in the need to service equipment, hardening rubber on hoses, carb gaskets, cracking of soft parts ect... we are talking about putting nearly a thousand hours a year on associated landscape and grounds type equipment. Ask any boater about fuel/phase separation with ethanol blends. Yes we have some older equipment some 10 years ( i have a tractor at home that from the mid 80's (7000 hours on a gasoline engine)... and as we have problems we are rebuilding carbs with ethanol in mind. The key for homeowner use equipment is to only keep enough fuel on hand for 2-3 weeks of use. which means a lot of of wasteful trips to the gas station...We are having some fuel separation issues and filter clogging, and cold weather problems from b15 biodiesel, but that's another topic altogether.

List: E10 Engine Damage & Performance Issues.

I'd love to end our dependency on middle east oil...but bribing farmers with our tax dollars to produce ethanol isn't really a solution, we are just robbing peter to pay paul, granted I'd rather pay paul at home than peter in the UAE....IMO...Unfortunately more ethanol is coming...

 

Thanks.
Yours are as well.

It's not a simple issue, and there is room for improvement, but I think that Ethanol can be a springboard for further development in ultra-low displacement ICE's, and we don't HAVE to use corn. Switchgrass or even hemp is being tinkered with.

Time will tell.

 

^^^let's face it Bio-fuels is mostly political government support of ag community getting piece of the energy pie. It's pretty much all governments do this around the world, so you gotta accept it. However, I think 10% ethanol may be too high in USA if corn is our only source.

 

thankfully, I see that Americans are slowing looking towards diesel engines. I blame the US automakers as our european, and south american brethren have been using diesel for quite some time with success......now if they can just design a vehicle that matches the longevity of the diesel engine... I could see a b10 or greater diesel engine coupled with a hybrid powertrain.... or a propane hybrid?

FWIW I love american bourbon whiskey from Tennessee and the corn in it....not so fond of the corn mash whitelightning/moonshine....

 

You've all missed a key reason for E10. But before I get to that it's important to know that pipelines do NOT carry anything but pure gasoline due to corrosion issues that accompany any ethanol content. The ethanol is blended in at the distribution terminals. The key reason for blending ethanol is a federal tax credit that the blender gets! I'm fortunate to have a local station that sells only E0 and at the same prices as all the other stations sell the crummy E10. My experiences suggest that the computers in my PIP are much more accurate on E0, ie I actually get the mileage the computer reports when I'm running on E0 while with E10 I get 3-5% lower mileage than the computer reports. FWIW Ethanol-free gas stations in the U.S. and Canada

 

Funny that they continue to print those manuals with the same "out-dated" wording in them......year after year after year. (Not funny at all really.)

How about a reference to that "R&D program" ......which is quite different than a "study" by the way.
Nobody ever said that adding ethanol reduced emissions overall. It only targeted ONE component that isn't handled well by the cat. converter.

 

Are we in agreement?
Yes the catalytic converter and low sulfur gasoline (which allows the converter to work better) pretty much nails all the pollutants and in particular CO is very low (40-yrs ago ethanol helped reduce CO back when CO was a whopping 6 to 9% in your exhaust, but not in today's cars).

 

Corn whiskey's not that bad.

 

Not at all. It is really hard to convey sarcasm in a text message.

You said that Toyota recommends against using ANY ethanol.......and I said that is
wrong......because it is NOT true.

It is not a mistake in updating the manual. They continue to say that E10 is perfectly OK.......because it IS.

 

I actually agree with you it is OK to use E10.