What can you make E85 from?

Question

what can you make E85 from?

corn?

Wheat?

Rice?

grapes?

Answer 1

Corn is currently the most popular choice, yet the most down right stupid. It requires too much energy to grow and refine, plus it steals from our food supply.

While Ethanol or E85 can also be made from sugar cane (50% of Brazil's cars run on this), the smartest choice for Americans would be switchgrass.

Switchgrass is a prairie, so it grows in almost any soil, is hardy, requires little energy input to harvest, and thus returns the most energy without taking from our food supply.  

Other more progressive methods are ethanol from cellulose or even algae.  

Not rice or wheat or grapes.

Answer 2

pretty much anything you can make alcohol from, you can use to make E85.

Answer 3

Pretty much all of those will work. If you can make moonshine out of it in a small still you are making ethanol, then blend it with 15 % gasoline and 85 % ethanol and you have E85.

Answer 4

All of the above, and you left out sugar cane.  You will also need some gasoline, probably made from oil.

Answer 5

Usually Corn. Any ethanol can be used.

A better idea than corn is Algae.

Algae Biofuel

-With our current biodiesel feedstocks, like soy and palm, there’s no way we could grow enough to supply all of our transportation needs.  In fact, it would actually require twice the land area of the US devoted to soybean production to meet current heating and transportation needs.

-Algae, on the other hand, could supply all U.S. diesel power using a mere 0.2% of the nation’s land.

-Enough algae can be grown to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S. on only 15,000 square miles or 4.5 million acres of land.

- Algae is the highest yielding feedstock for biodiesel, producing 24 times more oil per acre, on average, than the next leading feedstock--palm oil at 635 gallons/acre/year.

-One company can produce 180,000 gallons of biodiesel every year from just one acre of algae. That comes to about 4,000 barrels, at a cost of $25 per barrel or $.59 per gallon.

-To put that in perspective, it takes 3,750 acres of soy to make the same amount of biodiesel at a cost of about $2.50 per barrel for 4,000 barrels.

-It is possible to use human sewage and wastewater from agricultural endeavors to enhance the growth of algae.  In fact, when done right, algae can double and even triple overnight with the addition of these fertilizers.

-Plus, as algae grows it absorbs C02 from the air.

-In addition, fertilizer for other food crops can be produced by using the leftover nutrients that aren’t used to make the biofuel.

-It can be turned into ethanol or biofuel.  

-It can be used to absorb the pollution in factorites.

Answer 6

actually E85 is barely better for the enviroment than gasoline is.