Why automakers not making cars for us to put 100% ethanol fuel in the tank?

Question

Instead of gas and oil...

why not use Corn and sugar cane to make Ethanol fuel?

And Automakers need to make cars that can run on Ethanol Fuel 100%.

Answer 1

Corn will make 30gals of Ethanol per acre in one year.

100% Ethanol will drop you mpg by 30 to 40%

You will burn about 600 gals a year of Ethanol so you would need 20 acres per car just to make the fuel.

This is not good.

United States consists of about 2.26 billion acres of land

There are 143,000,000 cars in the USA.

So you would need 2.86 billion acres to make the Ethanol of them.

As you can see it will never work.

Answer 2

Because no one wants to go to Taco Bell and pay $17.50 for a chalupa.

Answer 3

Please do not pursue the ethanol route.  It takes more energy to make it than it produces, it drives up world food prices (i.e. the current Global Food Crisis), and it's not even environmentally friendly!  Here is a really good article by Scientific American you should read talking about ethanol: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=redu...

The question you should ask is why automakers refuse to increase cars's fuel economies (MPG), and why isn't electric more heavily researched?

Answer 4

using 100% ethanol is somewhat dangerous as well as it can catch fire and if our budding scientists can come over it ,the problem still remains unsolved as production of ethanol also requires energy and is not available naturally hence it would be foolish to use ethanol.

Another thing is the average given is lower incase of ethanol and hence it could act as an additional supply but fully depending on it wud not be the right option.

Answer 5

I can not answer this question for certain..

But if they had have.. the flooded mid west would have been a bigger disaster this year than it already is..

If we could only use 40% eethanol..it would help. We need to stop saying.. "well it wouldn't help much" and start thinking "every little bit helps"..

Answer 6

Because ethanol based fuels would require that most all of the tanks and pipelines that handle fuel be completely redesigned.  Ethanol has a much higher water content that would cause the current hardware to rust out much quicker.  

Also ethanol is not a very efficient source of fuel.  I would rather see more being done with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Answer 7

IIRC we would have to plant 75% of the farmland in the US with corn to provide enough ethanol to meet our needs to replace gasoline.

So what are you planning on eating after we do that? Better plant a garden and start raising your own animals for meat.

Answer 8

Considering that ethanol actually results in more CO2 emissions than oil out the ground, competes with food production and damages engines that aren't designed to run on it there are some d**n good reasons not to use it.

Answer 9

Because ethanol is not the answer to global warming neither to solve economic problems.

With a tank fuel of ethanol you would drive only 70% of the distance that you would get with gasoline. So you need more ethanol to drive the same distance. So we are not comparing apples to apples here.

Using corn will increase the price of corn up to a point in which it will not be affordable (just like is happening with oil). So we are not solving the problem, just filling one hole by creating another one.

Unfortunately the solution is public transport, car pooling, limited driving.

Worst of all is that the US infraestructure is based on the idea that everyone will have it's own car, commuting on long distances to go to work, while most of the world (even big and developed countries) keep things closer to reduce time and/or distance.

In the US the average commute is over 20 miles, meanwhile in some other countries this average could be 4 o 5 miles.

Answer 10

We'd need to redesign engines first, since even flex-fuel cars won't run on 100% ethanol and you have cold-start problems even at moderate temperatures. Both problems can be overcome and ethanol can be made from far better sources than corn. Corn yields 331 gallons of fuel per acre, a strain of algae now being tested will yield 6,000 gallons of fuel and the algae emits gaseous ethanol. Which means little to no processing, just condense it and put it in a fuel tank.

It's important to use close to 100% ethanol since otherwise it produces pollution that may be even more harmful than a gasoline engine produces. http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/04/...   ethanol emissions

Electric cars are probably the future but the GE EV1 in the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" never used current battery technologies, was horrendously expensive and just not practical. But it was a good test bed for future designs and some of those are already on the market, with many more to be available in the next few years.

Answer 11

Flexi-fuel cars can run on gasoline 100% , ethanol 100% or any mixture of the two.

They are intelligent cars...

Answer 12

cause you need the crop to produce ethanol fuel. and then food prices would go up. but they recently considered a plant in India that grows and spreads like a weed. and it also makes fruit which can be used to make ethanol fuel. and it require's no watering so it can grow anywhere. but still, its not going to make enough for the whole world...atleast not in the near future.

i think electric cars would be the solution to global warming and high fuel prices. electric car technology has been around since the 70's. and in the 90's, automakers started making practical electric vehicles. but then they were all taken away and demolished because the oil companies didn't want them cause they'd interfere with their profits. this is just what happened in a nut shell. go on youtube or google video's and you can watch the movie "who killed the electric car" for free. the facts in it will surprise you...

Answer 13

With 100% ethanol it would be seen as really cheap vodka... except then sometimes there would be some gasoline mixed in and people would be poisoned.

But the reason for going to ethanol appears to have pr oven itself a bad reason. We were thinking it would significantly extend our fuel supply. Well, iot does a bit, but not enough to justify taking that much land out of food production. No matter how we try we can not make  enough ethanol to run our whole fleet on ethanol.

Answer 14

Read this...

http://www.coskata.com/

If it works as promised, it will be the future of ethanol.

Ethanol needs to be mixed with something to keep people from drinking it as cheap booze.

My flex fuel truck runs better on ethanol than it does on gas & starts just fine on those sub-zero midwest winter mornings with 15% less fuel mileage than gas.

Answer 15

Lots of reasons.

- Ethanol takes more energy to make than you get out of it.  

- It takes huge amounts of water to make.

- It costs more than gas to make (before the govt subsidies).

- Your mileage will be about 1/3 lower than with gas.

- Corn doesn't make good ethanol.  Sugar does but the US climate isn't right to grow much of it.  We would just be importing fuel from somewhere other than the middle east like Brazil where they will cut down rain forest to make more farms.

- Corn should be used for food.  Animals and people need to eat.