Why you should change your vehicle to flex fuel

Dear Everyone, as you know the price of the Oil is more and more increasing, while the oil supply is decreasing. Moreover Oil is causing wars, terror, oil spills and a lot of greenhouse gases. By upgrading your car to flex fuel, you will continue to be able to use oil. However you will also have the opportunity to use E85, that means more freedom of choice. The conversion cost is about 200-250 USD. By choosing ethanol, you choose local fuel production, which means labour for farmers, labour for enginneers and workers in the ethanol plant, labour for transportation. Moreover you also help for indirect labour. Since the money stays in your country, this money will turn and produce indirect labour. Since the farmer will gain your additional fuel money, he will buy other things (labour is again needed for their production), which in case of oil the oil-Sheikhs or their people would do. That ethanol production increases the food prices is also not totally right, first there is a by-product called "distillers dried grains with solubles", which is used as feed for livestock, that is also nothing else than food. Moreover, by using ethanol, you put pressure on oil prices, which has also an important effect on food prices. You also give your money for more research (again labour), which will yield in higher efficiency of production and alternative production methods like cellulosic ethanol, which will change the whole equation. Again in case of oil this money would be spent for oil rigs, oil- infrastructure, but also for weapons to defend the oil. By using ethanol, you produce less CO2, since it is produced by corn, which actually consumed the CO2 in the air for its growing. The more people use ethanol, the higher the efficiencies will come for production (similar to solar cells). The prices will go further down, and much less CO2 will be produced during production in the plant. Do you know that the production efficiencies already improved 30% ?* Another reason for using ethanol is that oil prices will come up again, when the barrel price of 150 USD is back you will be very happy to have your vehicle converted. The conversion also increases the value of your vehicle.

Yours sincerely.

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So, now 2.3 BTU of ethanol energy is produced when 1 BTU of non-ethanol energy is consumed.

And, it still has to be subsidized. And flex-fuel vehicles have less fuel economy with ethanol blends than with pure gasoline, since ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline. The Wiki article

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says that fuel ecomomy is 7.7% worse with E20 than with pure gasoline. At this rate, ethanol has 61.5% as much useful energy per gallon as gasoline.

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is a bit kinder to ethanol - saying 65.5% as much energy per gallon as gasoline, and 2/3 as much fuel economy. But is a gallon of E10 or E15 any less expensive at the pump than a gallon of pure gasoline? How about the tax dollars spent subsidizing it?

Any why does the subsidy have to be limited to ethanol produced from corn? Looks like there is not as much of a switchgrass lobby as there is a corn lobby! Switchgrass has about 85% as much conversion already achieved from harvested usable biomass (cellulose in the case of switchgrass) to ethanol, with more harvested usable biomass per acre and half as much cost due to lower need of water, fertilizer and pesticides in comparison to corn.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
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Don Klipstein

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