Sugar cane is grown here.

Basically only grows well in the tropics.

  You can make ethanol out of what ever you want.  It will never make sense.  Your gas mileage will drop by what ever percent ethanol you use because there is less energy in ethanol than gas.

That would suggest using 100% ethanol your mileage would be zero; when actually it would drop by about 15%.  Last years race, the Indy cars ran on 100% ethanol – worked rather well.

 

The big difference is by using the entire cane stalk you can get better than 4 : 1 energy back for energy in. Brazil produces large quantities of ethanol; and does it efficiently.

 

Al

 

Bill B

 

 

So I guess we are starting this all over again?  Perhaps we could all just point out to Mr Westenhaus that it is not a question of whether ethanol works as a fuel - of course it does.  What is absurd is to produce ethanol from corn kernels where the overall energy used (in the form of petroleum fuel) to produce the corn and the ethanol is only about 4% less than the energy obtained from the ethanol produced.

 

As Lynn said at the beginning – without taxpayer subsidy it would die in a hurry.

 

Now if we could produce the ethanol from sugar cane, as they do in Brazil; it would make sense.

 

Al

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rotary motors in aircraft [mailto:flyrotary@lancaironline.net] On Behalf Of Finn Lassen
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:02 AM
To: Rotary motors in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] Ethanol

 

Now if we could just get a 6th option: 87 unleaded E-0:

 

http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Biofuels/Ethanol-Works-and-is-Here-to-Stay.html

 

Finn

 

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