Amy’s Garage

The Little Kidnappers release by Amy Mattinat

E85

My last post was to shout out the great news that Los Angeles County has approved a ground breaking facility that will revolutionize the Biofuel industry. They are going to be making their E85 out of Grass clippings, wood chips, paper products, and cardboard… and not corn.

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Then I got a bunch of questions wondering what the heck was E85 anyways?

E85 is a special alternative fuel that is a blend of 15% gasoline and 85% ethanol. This special blend is used to power Flex Fuel Vehicles. You may have trouble finding a E85 fueling station at this time, because there are only about 1500 in the USA, and none in VT, NH, ME, CT RI or NJ. Seems the North East if lagging behind in the E85 arena.

Flex Fuel Vehicles? OK, so there is not a lot of difference in a Flex Fuel vehicle and a regular gasoline engine vehicle. Mechanically, the only difference is the addition of a fuel sensor that detects the ethanol/gasoline ration and the various parts that had to be upgraded to tolerate the ethanol, which is very corrosive.

Making fuel out of ethanol is not a new idea. Henry ford’s first cars were made to run on ethanol, but gasoline was so plentiful and cheap that it became the fuel of the day.

Flex Fueled vehicles running on E85 don’t really get any better gas mileage then their gasoline counter parts, but the advantages to using E85 versus gasoline are HUGE!

• Ethanol burns cleaner and tests have shown reduction in those nasty harmful hydrocarbon and benzene emissions.
• E85 can help reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) that harmful greenhouse gas that is a major contributor to global warming – and causing Vermont rain all summer – which only lasts 3 months if we are lucky.
• Ethanol is like totally renewable! It may be the In Cold Blood film hero of the day by helping to reduce our dependency on petroleum fuels.
• Manufacturing ethanol out of scraps will help clean up the environment while providing an alternative to straight gasoline powered engines!

I’ve got my eye on this one and will keep you informed when this becomes our new reality!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.