E85 Conversion anyone?

[jeffhre]

Investment in technology is one thing, but ramping a particular technology that has "negative gross margins" for the environment, the economy and world will never make any sense. The world is worse off because of corn ethanol mandates/subsidies. There is no counter argument to this other than: "the future good will more than compensate for the prior bad." But the future good does NOT depend on high-scale bad current activity....

My counter argument.

Every marginal increase in gasoline use is...

from imported oil,
from difficult expensive and dirty oil,
often sent in massive ships burning incredibly dirty bunker fuel, expanding the wealth and economies of countries that hate our way of life.

Since E85 has already "ramped" to 13 billion gallons, to conclude that there is no counter argument, I would have to assume that more foreign oil exploration, extraction and importation is better for the environment.

[rmay635703]

Brazil is successful at running an alcohol fleet because of sugar cane. Perhaps if we end this idiotic embargo against Cuba, sugar cane will be cheap and plentiful enough to support widespread use of alcohol fuel in the U.S. (not to mention the economic benefits to Cuba).

Brazil actually has one other thing going for it more important than sugar, CLIMATE.

Our ethanol production attempts all involve doing it
1. fast
2. inefficiently.

To do it fast you need to heat crap while it stews and since we love our ethanol plants to be run in -40 weather in the winter even more losses.

Ethanol can be made with nearly no inputs but nobody wants to malt and do it the old fashioned way and keep the plants either down south or running part of the year, the plant would be much larger and more expensive but the ethanol would also be cheaper to produce and use little dino juice to operate.

Another requirement should be "pure" ethanol fuel with no gasoline added, keep separate fuel tanks for e85 and gas on flex fuel vehicles, it takes under half the energy to distille e100 (which is e95ish) than e85 because ethanol burns just fine with up to 10% water. It also takes a much lower tech setup to do as well.

Also ethanol can be made much more efficiently from potatoes, many thousands of tons go to waste each year for one reason or another, if we want to make ethanol it should be made from whatever crop failure we currently have so it has less impact on the environment.

Another good way to reduce ethanols carbon input would be to ban petro chemical pesticide and fertalizer. We really don't need monsanto anyway.

Banning petrochemical BS that gets into our drinking water would also force more efficient farming and reduce the amount of topsoil and erosion issues we have since the old way most every farmer until the 50s farmed rotating crops would be required to survive. We could also get our pastures back so the excuse that there is no land available for the cows so we need to put them in 4x8 cells in darkness could be put to rest, our meat supply would also become a bit safer since grass fed blows out the ecoli formed during grain feeding.

Ah well.

[Ladogaboy]

I know this thread is old, but I thought I'd chime in because I actually have done a partial E85 conversion (not on the Volt). I'm not really interested in getting into an argument over ethics, the environment, or any other global issues.

In my experience, an E85 conversion is not worth it economically speaking. Unless you are in a vehicle specifically equipped for E85, you will not be able to run it well without three things: larger fuel injectors (capable of flowing 30% more fuel), a larger fuel pump (capable of keeping up with the fuel demands), and ECU tuning. I haven't done any investigations on the cost for fuel injectors or a fuel pump for the Volt, but I have to imagine it would run a minimum of $500 just for the hardware. Now, in regards to retuning the engine to run it properly (including scaling the replacement injectors), it seems that no one has yet hacked into the Volt's programming. Until that can be done, I'm not sure there will be much use.

The car I converted was stock, but I was able to do the conversion because the the stock fuel injectors and fuel pump were capable of flowing enough fuel to support > 350 hp in a 2.0L engine, AND I had access to tuning software that would let me reprogram the ECU. The reason I stopped is, even to continue an economy tune using E85, I needed to have a wideband AFR gauge (and I wasn't going to invest another $300).

When gas prices were ~ $5 a gallon, I was able to save ~ $1 a gallon by switching to E85, but to my dismay, this wasn't actually any sort of cost savings. While I was paying 20% less for fuel, I was getting 20% lower fuel economy (due to the lack of energy density in E85). Now, from an efficiency standpoint, I still did find it fascinating because, even though E85 has 30% less energy per volume, the engine ran more efficiently than it did on gasoline (resulting in a 10% improvement). That's how I ended with a ~ 20% difference. I believe that had I been able to continue tweaking, I might have been able to achieve only a 15% overall difference in mileage between gasoline and E85, and who knows, maybe GM could have done better building an E85 motor from scratch.

Anyway, at this point, I'd advice against any attempted E85 conversions if it is being done for economic purposes. As this thread has shown, if it is being done for ideological purposes, many sides need to be considered. Right now, the only people I would recommend a conversion to are people who are tuning sports cars and what a significant increase in power without a huge investment in parts. That's my two cents.