Ethanol-FFV?

Question

Anyone know of any gas station chains that sell Ethanol-FFV fuel, and if so is it worth the purchase of a vehicle that takes this fuel.

Answer 1

Yes, there are several chains that sell ethanol.  To look up one near you click this link:

http://www.e85refueling.com/

Then just click the state you are in and it will list the addresses and phone numbers of all the ethanol stations near you.  They only put 9 stations on a page so be sure to scroll thru all the pages at the bottom.

Last year I bought a 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis flex fuel vehicle.  After using ethanol, I will NOT go back to using gasoline.  A flex fuel car can run on either gasoline or ethanol.  But ethanol is better for your engine anyways.  It burns cleaner in the engine and also combusts at a cooler temperature, which is also better for your engine.  Heat is an enemy of your engine.  Ethanol is priced 25% cheaper than gasoline and I only lose about 15% fuel economy in my Grand Marquis.  So overall I save about 10% on fuel by using E85(ethanol).  To answer your question, yes, a flex fuel vehicle can use either ethanol or gasoline or any mixture of the two.  You can fill up on gasoline one time and ethanol the next time, etc.  It makes no difference.

Lastly, let me tell you why I use ethanol.  Simply put, it is clean, renewable, and made in America.  Gasoline is none of those things.  Gasoline is not renewable, pollutes, and comes from the Mideast.  We can cut our trade deficit by 47% simply by switching from imported oil to homegrown ethanol.    I've seen arguments that ethanol will make the price of food, milk, etc go up.  But rising gasoline prices will make the price of EVERYTHING go up.  Everything you buy at the store whether it's a TV, furniture, clothing, etc. has to be shipped to that store via truck.  Trucks run on diesel or gasoline.  Both come from oil.  Sky high gas prices are causing the price of everything to go up.  I'd rather pay a little more for food and pay less for everything else I buy.  Using ethanol reduces demand for oil which forces the price of oil to drop and in turn lowers the price of EVERYTHING.  Plus, I'd rather my money go to an American farmer than a Mideast oil sheik, or even a filthy rich coorupt oil executive for that matter.  The U.S. Dept. of Energy concluded in 2006 that making a gallon of ethanol results in a positive 77% energy return.  You can read about this on their website.  Big oil has created lots of myths regarding ethanol and unfortunatelly alot of people(especially people who answered this question) believe them.   Think about it rationally---which uses less energy?  With ethanol, the corn grows from the ground and corn starch is created inside the plants.  The sun does most of the work.  The corn is harvested, taken to a nearby ethanol plant and electricity is used to ferment the corn starch into usable ethanol.  Electricity can be generated from wind, solar, and other renewable sources.  With gasoline, oil is drilled from the ground thousands of miles away with huge oil drills.  It is then put in barrels and put on huge tankers which sail 7000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico.  The entire time these huge oil tankers don't use any energy or any fuel.  Magic elves do everything.  Then once the crude oil is taken off the ship it still must be refined into usable gasoline, diesel, etc.  refining crude oil into usable fuel takes energy!  Lots of it in fact.  The heat needed to distill oil into gasoline and diesel is far greater than the heat needed to ferment corn starch into ethanol.  Producing 1 gallon of gasoline uses about 3 gallons of fossil fuels.

I could go on and on.  Obviously, you are a smart girl and understand the importance of having clean, American-grown, renewable energy.  I say buy a FFV.  And use ethanol.  You will not regret it!

Answer 2

A previous answer addressed your question of where to buy E-85 and the vehicles that use it very well.  The question of whether it is worth buying a FFV (flexible fuel vehicle) really hinges on economics and personal beliefs.  The economics relates to what you think the cost of E-85 will be as compared to gasoline.  Pricing for ethanol relates more to its supply / demand than to gasoline.  So at any given time E-85 may be more or less than gasoline.  The personal beliefs plays a part in whether you think ethanol is good as an alternate fuel to gasoline or bad because of the fuel for food and recent corn price issue.    That is one you will have to research and make up your own mind.  I personally believe ethanol is a good alternative to gasoline and it is better to pay our farmers more money for corn than to pay a foreign company for their oil.  But, it isn't an easy issue.

What a FFV does for you is it provides an option for using E-85 if the pricing is less while also allowing you to use gasoline if it isn't.  Unfortunately most FFV's are trucks, SUV's and large sedans.  So, if you are in the market for that anyway it is a good option.  But, environmentally it would be better to buy a smaller vehicle with better gas mileage than to purchase a larger vehicle that has FFV capability.  Also, ethanol has less energy (Btu's) per gallon than gasoline so your vehicle will get less miles per gallon than it would with gasoline.  So, E-85 has to be less expensive to even out the mileage difference economically.

Answer 3

Not yet ...but we saw why and how this gov'ts energy policy is a joke.

Now we are robbing the water supply to grow corn and starve people.

How stupid is that?

Fire all our represenatives in gov't. don't you agree?

Answer 4

Why do you want to support whole sale destruction of Nature ????

The insane plan for the production of ethanol means to replace all the indigenous Forrest's in the world ,with mono cultures .

Non sustainable, chemically grown ,heavily irrigated (with water needed for communities)one specie Forrest's,that have only plagues of insects as fauna which are combated with pesticides.

Killing all bio diversity,in both flora and fauna ,adding to the destruction and extinction of species ,like nothing we have ever seen before.

All in the quest for alternative energy and to save the Environment ,

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay. "We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms. Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of bananas.

Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum, including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil palm. Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very difficult.

The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 released last week reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day -- equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.

National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest producer of pulp and paper. "Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what kind of changes have taken place there," he said.

Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.

Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs. "Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local people," Lovera said. Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.

Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into soy, she says. Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which are just the latest threat to existing forests. "Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.

The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders, she says. Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective natural forests. Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.

One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water. The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation. Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.

Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police to enforce the law where it was being violated. "Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted. The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for management, she said.

However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little natural forest left. "Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on deforestation is the only way to stop this."

This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/...

Answer 5

I think you will be disappointed in E-85 as it will give you only slightly better emissions and much worse economy. The cost will only go up if demand increases. Already we see that milk is at $3.50 a gallon because of the demand for corn to make Ethanol has raised the price of corn to feed the dairy cows.

Get an electric car for your daily commute and errands and rent a car for the long trips. I do.

Answer 6

Ethanol is only a little bit cleaner burning with regards to cancerous emmissions than gasoline, so why bother.

Answer 7

Ethanol is government pork, it takes 2/3 of a gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon's worth of ethanol.

http://www.mda.state.mn.us/renewable/ren...

Biodiesel is 3x more efficient, so I think that's the real winner and its price will be more stable.  

New high-performance diesel cars and trucks are coming out in the next year (EPA just changed the smog laws on diesel so the automakers are designing all new engines).  And all diesels, new or old, can run biodiesel.  So you'll have a lot more choices than Beetle, Jetta, truck or Mercedes.

Yes you should definitely check out alternative fuel vehicles, either E85 flex-fuel or diesel, so that you have a hedge against insane gas prices of the future.   Like I say I don't think ethanol will work, but biodiesel will.

Gas will go down in a few months but don't be fooled, that's only temporary, it's gonna go back up, and up, and up.

Answer 8

I did the calculation in another thread about how much ethanol we could produce if we bought the entire supply of corn in the world and produced it--it came to 28% of the gasoline consumption of the United States.  Brazil can't even produce enough ethanol to run all their cars at 25% ethanol anymore because of the increase in demand for E85.

Secondly, ethanol is going to continue to be much more expensive than gasoline for many, many years.

All the lip service and government handouts (oil companies receive 51cents/gallon from the US government for every gallon of ethanol they mix with gasoline which reduces the money available to fix the roads--see invisible costs) will not make ethanol into the "cure."  Bio-diesel is much better in all respects but we'd have to make the country want to start buying diesel vehicles.

So either go diesel or stick with gasoline engines.  Because E85 is not only unrealistic, but even if it is the same cost per gallon, you will be using 30% more of it per mile.

Answer 9

If you want to know are there any gas stations nearby your locality that carries E-85 ethanol goto:

http://gasprices.mapquest.com/

select e-85 and enter your address - a map with the gas stations near by the address you specified will be marked.

Since e-85 ethanol is not available full fledged in the US, its better to buy a car that can run in both gasoline and e-85 ethanol. The following link lists the vehicles that can run on e-85 ethanol:

http://www.cleanairchoice.org/outdoor/Fl...

Answer 10

I don't know wether you are looking to buy a new FFV or a pre-owned one. There are PLENTY of both on the market.

FFV's can use regular gasoline or E85, which is 85% ethanol / 15% gasoline.

For a list of gas stations in your area that carry E85, here is a website:

http://www.e85refueling.com/

To find out which vehicles are FFV's (new & used):

http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/FFVlist200...

http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/flexfuelve...

The purchase of a "New" FFV may also qualify you for Federal & State tax incentives as well.

{ I applaud the EXCELLENT answer above (M S) & would like to add that we don't  send our troops to the Midwest (U.S.) to protect our interests in Illinois & Iowa corn farms. Just another factor (+) to consider when calculating the use ($) of alternative fuels}