Winter gas sucks!

[lawsoncl]

Exactly. You pay a tiny bit less for a lot less gas mileage.
Although the good thing is, it helps the farmers, instead of the dirty diaper heads.

I hear you on the need to break oil foreign oil dependence and get the hell out of middle east politics. It just that I see corn->ethanol as another subsidy for farmers trying to hang onto the family business. The funny thing is that sugar beets are much better for producing ethanol than corn. It's just the midwest state farmers have a much better lobby group than the californian sugar beet growers. We should be spending that subsidy money towards boidiesel which has much better potential.

 

[mattbred]

Exactly. You pay a tiny bit less for a lot less gas mileage.

Although the good thing is, it helps the farmers, instead of the dirty diaper heads.

May help the farmers but its doing nothing but hurting the ranchers. The prices of grain have skyrocketed and rancher's are really feeling it. Same with everyone that buys grain. Ethonal is the world's biggest most stupidest fraud right now.

 

[RichP]

May help the farmers but its doing nothing but hurting the ranchers. The prices of grain have skyrocketed and rancher's are really feeling it. Same with everyone that buys grain. Ethonal is the world's biggest most stupidest fraud right now.

Nah, it's #2, global warming is #1

 

[w_howey]

May help the farmers but its doing nothing but hurting the ranchers. The prices of grain have skyrocketed and rancher's are really feeling it. Same with everyone that buys grain. Ethonal is the world's biggest most stupidest fraud right now.

If they really believe that's completely ignorant.

Ethanol production also results in the production of distiller’s grains and gluten feed — both of which are fed to livestock, helping produce high-quality meat products for distribution domestically and abroad. There is no shortage of corn. In 2004, U.S. farmers produced a record 11.8 billion bushel corn harvest — and some 1.3 billion bushels (about 11 percent) were used in ethanol production

Define 'tiny' amount saved......

One station I passed. E10 $3.37 a gallon, E85 $2.12 a gallon......
The station I normally get gas at....
E10 $3.15, E85 $ 2.59 a gallon

But then again I shouldn't be a surprised that a resident of part of the problem(Canada is the third largest Oil exporter to the US), to want the truth about ethanol to get out......

 

[lawsoncl]

The corn growing states are the only ones that have E85 reasonably priced. The few stations having it here are the same or maybe 20 cents lower than normal gasoline. Your $2.59 gallon is still about 26-cents too high based on the typical 26% mileage loss.

I'm about 90 miles from Canada, does that make me biased too?

 

[RichP]

The E85 is another misdirection by the powers that be. You can get the mileage up but you have to up the compression to take advantage of it.

 

[McQue]

My mileage is down to 15 mpg...I gotta do something about this...maybe buy a second car for daily driving that gets 25mpg... Just thinking out loud here...
If I drive the Jeep another 175,000 miles to get to 250,000 miles, at 15 mpg that will be another 11,666 gallons of gas, at $3.20 a gallon that comes to $37,331.20 in gas expense.
If I buy a used DD that gets me 25 mpg and drive it for 175,000 miles that will be 7000 gallons of gas at $3.20 a gallon that comes to $22,400.00 in gas expense.
I can use the $14,931.20 that I save on gas to pay for the daily driver...and my Jeep will last a whole lot longer..probably take me 40 more years to get its odometer up to 250,000 miles if I have a daily driver..I will be dead and long gone by that time..Hmmmm...the hunt is on for a used daily driver that gets me at least 25 mpg...

 

[bjoehandley]

I've been debating the same thing McQue, I went surfing for low priced 4-cylinder domestics the other night. Found a '97 Neon with body damage and 320k miles for $977 (seriously, $977 for that!) and an '89 Aries sedan with only 200k for $917 (if it were about 1/4-1/2 that price, I'd consider that one, could probably get another 100-200k out of it if I take care of it and it still has a floor!)

 

[ehall]

Define 'tiny' amount saved......

One station I passed. E10 $3.37 a gallon, E85 $2.12 a gallon......
The station I normally get gas at....
E10 $3.15, E85 $ 2.59 a gallon

I was in Omaha for a wedding recently. It was kind of interesting, the regular and premium were gasoline, while the silver-grade was E85. The silver-grade was more expensive than the premium.

 

[w_howey]

I was in Omaha for a wedding recently. It was kind of interesting, the regular and premium were gasoline, while the silver-grade was E85. The silver-grade was more expensive than the premium.

SeanR describes where I live at, as go to the end of the road, and then 5 miles beyond that....
I have 2 million plus gallon Ethanol plants within 30 miles of my house, and several million acres of corn and several more million acres of soybeans around me.

I do believe that Bio-diesel offers many more permanent possibilities than E85... But we need to take advantage of anything that allows us to get rid of outside influences.... Being able to tell the Arabs, Chavez, and Canucks of the world to take their oil and piss off needs to be a priority to our nation.....

Anytime another nation's idiotic leadership and behavior negaatively effects our economy and our people in general, we need to be able to remain idependant. To be the leader of the world, we need to be in front of things not behind them.

 

[McQue]

check out this gas receipt....

 

[lawsoncl]

Some interesting statistics from http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html and http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.htm (June 2007 data).

The US consumes about 25% of the oil produced in the world at 20.7 millions barrels of crude every day. 45% of it is used for used for gasoline and about 20% is used for diesel. The other 35% is for plastics, solvents, etc. The US imports about 60% of its oil. The number 1 source of US imported oil is Canada. Oddly enough we do export oil. About 25% of the US consumed oil comes from OPEC aligned countries.

So what's my point? Passenger cars are less than half of our oil consumption. We should be looking at the other uses such as plastics. The cheap throwaway plastic crap economy is also a large part of the problem.

 

[w_howey]

So what's my point? Passenger cars are less than half of our oil consumption. We should be looking at the other uses such as plastics. The cheap throwaway plastic crap economy is also a large part of the problem.

That's the kind of foolish, self-serving political speak we hear all the time from people wedded to the fuel industry. Gasoline for all uses is the single largest use of imported oil. We slow the flow there, we slow the flow everywhere......

But, there are already corn starch based containers and packing supplies. There are also vegtable stock based carry-out containers, IIRC one of the hippie grocery chains on the Leftist Coast is using them now for their 'carry-out' salad containers.

 

[lawsoncl]

I didn't say that gasoline use shouldn't be addressed. It does makes sense to go for the biggest use first. I was simply pointing out that it isn't the only thing we need to look at. There are other consumptions areas that can be addressed with potentially good returns on oil savings per dollar invested in research.

The corn starch based packaging has the nice side effect of being biodegradeable.

 

[RªMB°]

What about E85 can that be more fuel efficient?

 

[lawsoncl]

What about E85 can that be more fuel efficient?

Yes and no. You can alter the engine compression to take better advantage of the E85, but you give up compatibility with normal gasoline blends. Ethanol is different enough from gas that you really need to run different timing and compression to get any better efficiency. Still, even in the normal flex-fuel engine it is burning more efficient than gasoline. Even though it has 35% less energy per gallon, EPA reports an average loss of 26% mpg when running E85. So it's getting better mileage/btu.

 

[bjoehandley]

If you guys get a chance, check out the current issue HotRod, they have a good article about E85.