Great response there GP4L,
Seems like there could be "some" benefits, but requires some additional attributes. I think in my case, and my uneducated experience with ethanol blended fuels, I'm not seeing any benefits from using such fuels.
So then, are there differences between ethanol blended fuels and oxygenated fuels? Or are they one-in-same?
Well I wrote a thorough response, but I forgot to finish it, ended up doing other things, and my session expired and I lost everything I wrote. I'll try to make the same points..
Cliff notes: E10 has zero benefit. Legitimate sources and research can easily be found on the internet that provide all the data you'd need to understand it.
MTBE which was the first major fuel additive to replace lead back in the 70's was later found to be extremely toxic to humans, and was removed immediately. I'm a little fuzzy on when exactly E10 starting getting pushed into gasoline, but it happened too quickly, before the govt understood what would happen.
What happened, across the board, is: yes, adding 10% ethanol cleans up the tailpipe emissions of a vehicle. The oxygenation adding ethanol provides lowers CO, benzene, toluene, xylene, ethyl benzene, lowers hydrocarbon output, and lowers the "soot" or tinge of black smoke coming out of the tailpipe. But, the same engine has to burn more fuel, than it would with straight gasoline. How much more fuel, can be anything from as low as 2-3% up to 25-30%. Does this offset the lower emissions per gallon? The answer is open for debate. But that aspect is small in comparison to everything else that's goes along with it.
It was also supposed to lower our dependency on foreign oil - yet keep purchasing oil at the same rate, and create a surplus driving gas prices down. This didn't happen for a myriad of reasons. Granted today we don't buy anywhere near as much middle east oil as we used to, their prices still manipulate all oil futures. And I'll avoid the controversial politics the best I can, but the "added instability" in the middle east post 9/11 did not help oil futures at all.
E10 (really the farming subsidies for E corn), depending on if you believe the earth is a flat circle or not, does produce toxic-to-human and agriculture emissions, during ethanol production. It also brought big politics into the mix - which, just like the middle east instability, is never a good thing. This also further increased the price of gas indirectly, because who pays for the subsidies to boost the E corn farming industry? I'll give anybody two chances to correctly answer that question, but I'm pretty confident that most will answer it right on the first try.
So, you, me, all of us, do the math... Yes, there's lower greenhouse emissions per gallon of E10 gas, but we need to burn more gallons to do the same work (making power, driving miles, ect). Plus the emissions associated with producing ethanol for gas. Did it really lower emissions overall enough to quantify the higher expenses of, not just gas, but the higher cost of cars today (because the manufacturers needed to R&D better engines to increase total efficiency, to compensate for the gas, and to stay competitive in the market), and the taxes we all paid to beef the industry up? In my opinion, based on years of being in the automotive industry, plus being (non-financially) related to a 8500 acre
ethanol corn farm in central IL... No. My cousin, who owns the farm, will argue this with me to death, but E10 doesn't quantify it for me, or anybody else that doesn't have financial ties to ethanol and is educated on the matter. We also didn't get the benefits, the govt said we'd get, of lower gas prices at the pump... Looks like a fail to me.
However, a cool thing that came from the manufacturer side, was the engine tech that came from all this (even though we pay for it when we buy a new car). Example - 2002 Camaro SS, 325hp, 16/23MPG. 2015 Camaro SS, 426hp, 16/24MPG, and it's roughly 500 pounds heavier. Granted the bigger engine can be noted for helping the huge increase in power, but that extra air volume from the 6.2L (vs the 5.7) should = more fuel needed too. And it does. But the newer 6.2 *wastes* so much less energy than the older 5.7, it can achieve the same fuel economy for the heavier car, because it needs to work that much less to do the same work. The transmission plays a big part in this too. Newer transmission designs are SO much better than they used to be. Same thing applies to our trucks, and pretty much every vehicle sold today vs 5-10+ years ago.
Also - I'm a huge fan of E85-E100. Why? Because E85 costs about the same as regular gas, it could still be less, like it used to be in 06ish-2010/2011. And it's like running 110 octane all the time. You'll get about 20-35% more fuel consumption, but you can run around with a hot tune all the time. This is great for forced induction cars that are modified. I'm not going to get really crazy into that, besides saying I used to pay $15 bucks to "produce" (in my cousins backyard) 50-60 gallons of E100, and use that in the Evo 8 I used to take racing. Good times.
Modern ECU's will negate most of the difference between E10 and E0 gasoline in many-most stock cars, but jump over to the aftermarket tuning side of the house, where you can extract more power (efficiency - because factory tunes ALWAYS leave room on the table for safety, tolerance differences and reliability reasons) out of the gas you run. E0 will outperform E10.
