I'm with you. I just view E85 as a legal substitute for meth injection for autox.

 

You miss one big point is that the earth can keep a carbon cycle going if we do not dig up more carbon from under the earth and burn it.

The water is not a big deal it gets reused look at how much water is used at any power plant.

Ethanol is not a perfect answer but they are working on butanol which does not hold water like ethanol and can be shipped in normal pipelines and other close related fuels that are in the 180 day carbon cycle.

Look at any other oil based octane booster and tell me how much energy it takes to refine that how much electricity that is mostly made from coal it takes. That is a even father step in the wrong direction.

 

They just added E85 to a bunch of local pumps here in Houston. I will be converting my car over to E85 within the next year. Just have a lot of supporting mods to do first.

 

Wow, I was just trying to do some research for my IC engines class about the increased use of ethanol in transportation fuel supply and I found this thread. It was REALLY informative. There are a lot of good points. I used to be ANTI ethanol because i though it was just corn additives that stuck in fuel lines and combustion chamber, but know I would seriously consider converting. It's kind of funny because i now know about 4 people running E85 in their Evo's and their all from WI. Gotta love it.

BTW, Trinababe, do you know Trevor from Onalaska? He was running E85 on his evo 8 too. It was pretty badass until he sold it to buy the Bushur Magnum. lucky...

 

Fact, you need to retune to run E85. Fact, E85 is 105 octane. Fact, it is cheaper then gasoline. Fact, your **** will be faster if tuned for E85. Its like running racing fuel in your car every day! Sweet deal for those who have pumps near their homes...I hate you peeople lol!

 

Don't think that it's any better for oil...it takes about 1 barrel worth of energy to produce 2 barrels now....the easy oil is gone.

 

I'm looking forward to my move to Dallas because of the availability (albeit limited) of E85

 

When it comes to producing E85, we're still dependent on fossil fuels for much of the production, so at this point its not yet "better" for the environment. But when all of the equipment used to produce E85 or B100, are running on E85 and B100, then you'll finally hit the point where it doesn't take more oil to produce it.

Realistically that will take time.. But at this time, its about adopting change, and allowing for a shift in public awareness and "biting the bullet" to depend more heavily on domestically produced products. Eventually this will benefit us in more ways than just being Green..

The carbon cycle argument was a pretty good one, but I think its hard for alot of people to follow. It does require a bit of explanation on why renewable resources are renewable, and why oil isn't.. I mean, EVENTUALLY organic matter will be turned into crude, but I doubt anyone wants to wait a few million years to get more. There has been success in producing crude from animal/vegetable matter in the lab.. But its a long way away, and if you think producing E85 uses alot of raw material, it takes way more to produce oil (especially in the quantity we would need)

 

get a custom tune and fue system for it. its cheap and better than any unleaded race gas. god stuff if its easily available to you

 

just to add to this it's not just the machines and tractors that run on oil but the powerplants that generate electricity and once those are healthily subsidized with alternative power sources like wind, solarvoltaic, solarthermal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion then you will have very little problem with expending oil to produce ethanol.

 

Once we figure out nuclear fusion we won't have an energy problem at all.

 

it doesn't mean we don't have to be careful and conserve... there will always be problems. fusion plants require manpower to run, safety measures to be in place, maintenance. the fight never ends. energy will never be "too cheap to meter"

 

Fusion is 1000 times more productive than fission with no waste (it's what the sun uses). It would be a true win-win from an energy stand point. We are still very far from being able to utilize energy from fusion that's why I was joking.

 

i'd love to know how fission is 1000 times more productive than fission when princeton was JUST able to achieve a positive eroi on their tokamak. and that doesn't even have any engineered extraction capabilities. they just measured the amount of energy.

i'd love to know how there's no waste also, you ever tried living on the sun? if you did you'd be killed by gamma and xrays within moments. you think that's any different here on earth????? the fusion reactors would generate a LARGE LARGE LARGE amount of activated materials. these while "usable" can't be used around people.

 

Fusion is the joining of two lighter particles into a heavy/stable one. Although a lot of gamma rays are produced which are very dangerous, these are short lived and contained within the core. Risk of meltdown is unlikely since it would take optimal conditions to create fusion. The amount of radioisotopes created with fusion have much shorter half lives. It's the difference of 50yrs and 1000yrs.
We currently have two ways of creating fusion, Hydrogen bombs which use atomic bombs as a trigger to achieve the extreme temperatures and pressure needed for fusion to take place and particle accelerators which use huge rings to accelerate sub atomic particles at each other so fast they fuse. Particle accelerators must use such tiny particles. E=mc^2 is the amount of energy produced per mass consumed. The sun loses about 500 tons of matter a day if I remember right.
As far as 1000 times more productive, that might be an exageration but the bottom line is it's more productive, less waste, and far from being ready for primetime.
This gives you an idea of the energy potential of fusion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaEsC80oRQk