What are the pros and cons of ethanol?

Question

It is going to be mandatory to add it to petrol soon in parts of Australia. How does it affect your car / the environment?

Answer 1

Ethanol fuel is made from grain or sugar and is an alternative to gasoline and can be combined with it. The positive from this is a reduction in air pollution so that's a major pro.

Pro - It is a renewable resource

Pro - Limited amounts of ethanol will not damage your car engine. Some Indy car races in the states will use 100 percent ethanol next year.

Pro - It is good for the struggling sugar and wheat industries as they will be called on to produce ethanol.

Neutral - While limited amounts of ethanol in petrol haven't been found to destroy engines, in older car makes fuel tanks can be loosened by its prescence and rubber components may deteriorate faster.

Con - Some argue it will end up being more expensive than petrol and that the energy required to create the stuff actually results in more pollution than comes from petrol.

Con - Contains 34% less energy per gallon than petrol, thus fuel economy is reduced.

Con- Pure ethanol can only be used in specially made engines

Con - Some vehicle manufacturers void their warranties if fuel with more than 10 percent ethanol in it is used.

does that help?

Answer 2

Ethanol Pros And Cons

Answer 3

Pros And Cons Of Ethanol

Answer 4

Agree with starlights pro. above. Cons: 1.This seems to be rarely considered even by the uber:greens. A ton of corn would have to be planted to meet the energy requirments of this country. I read a paper from the early 2000's that said that 98% of the land in the US would have to be planted with corn to meet the need. The technology has come a long way since then but it's still an important point. The more corn we plant to devote to energy the more naturalized land has to be destroyed. This is robbing Peter to pay Paul. All land, especially in the mid-west plays a valuable role in ecosystem function. Even the oft-neglected grasslands are home to myriad birds, insects and animals. Why would we disrupt these ecosystems to grow corn? 2. People have a certain animosity towards big oil, big ethanol is the next up and comer. 3. As mentioned above subsidies to grown corn for energy have jacked food cost up dramatically. Hybrid poplar shows great promise once the kinks are worked out of the cellulosic ethanol protocol.

Answer 5

It tends to give make you foolish and leaves you with a headache. Oh, how it affects the car? Well, it oxygenates the fuel so it helps with the emissions. I forget exactly how. It will also scavenge water from the fuel system, which is more important in colder climates. Any downside would probably be from cultivating and using a food grain for fuel, and whatever energy is used in producing the ethanol. But turning corn into ethanol has historically been good for farmers, because it increases the demand for corn and is easier to ship. This was as true in the mid 1700s as it is today. It was a good taxable commodity then in the U.S., the tax being passed in order to pay off revolutionary war debt which must have been tremendous because the tax is still there. Although it's waived for fuel alcohol.

There is an issue about how much ethanol should be used in a car engine, because as it gets more concentrated it tends to wash lubricant off the cylinder walls. So if an engine starts to misfire when you're running straight alcohol, it damages the cylinder bores very rapidly. Mixing with gasoline makes it more forgiving.

Answer 6

Pro - it does take the place of some petroleum fuel, reducing the need for that fuel.

Con - costs more to make
Con - takes a lot more energy to make, often energy provided by using more petroleum fuel
Con - fuel efficiency lowers up to 30%... so again it takes more to run the same as standard fuel
Con - for proper use, the vehicle must be set up to run on Ethanol

As far as the enviroment goes, ethanol has some pros and cons, which I dont remember the details strongly enough to say here. As I remember it, its again a tradeoff... certain gases reduced, while a couple of others are increased.

My personal opinion, ethanol will wind up costing more than simply working over to hybrid vehicles. Even including the cost of manufacturing the batteries AND recycling those same batteries, the cost effectiveness for hybrids outshines ethanol or hydrogen cell vehicles. Add the factors of changing pumps and infrastructure to accomodate the ethanol ( even worse if hydrogen is pushed ) and the costs rocket up even further.
Good luck.

Answer 7

Like stated above, ethanol is cleaner for the environment and renewable, however it less energy rich than gasoline and is(currently) expensive to produce.
Hopefully ethanol/electric hybrid vehicles will be the wave of the future, reducing pollution and invigorating the US economy.

Answer 8

The problem with ethanol is that the government has been lobbying it as a green fuel without actually checking the effects of widescale production and distribution of this fuel.

Ethanol is still a hydrocarbon fuel. It still needs to be combusted within your car to make the engine work. Therefore, there will still be emissions and pollutants coming from your exhaust as you go down the road. Every hydrocarbon combustion process produces CO2, H2O, and N2 - but cars will burn with extra fuel, therefore producing carbon monoxide and other pollutants (SOx, NOx) that cause acid rain, respiratory problems, smog, and other undesirables.

Not only that, but the ethanol, as stated in other posts, is not as efficient a fuel. It takes more energy, time and effort to produce the ethanol than it would to just pump natural gas or oil out of the ground.

Finally, mass production of ethanol will not help the country's farming community. Sure, they will be subsidized by the government to produce only corn, and as much of it as possible. But producing a maximum yield of corn, without allowing the fields to go fallow, will ruin the soil for other crops. Corn is naturally hard on soil as it is, so constant production of corn in one place will drain all of the naturally occuring nutrients in the soil.

Instead of wasting all of this time, money, and effort researching the values of diluting our gas with the less efficient ethanol, why doesn't the government put some time into other research options? For a start, the building industry consumes 1/3 to 1/4 of the world's energy every year. How about investing in research to make building equipment more efficient, or solar housing designs? But this is off topic.

In short, ethanol is a good quick fix. A patch on our economy and on our short term energy crisis. However, it is by no means the best fix, and there are many other alternatives out there that deserve more thought.

Answer 9

from what I have been reading there aren't many pros...I guess that a small percentage of our "gasoline" will be made from a renewable resource. The down side is ethanol is not as effecient as petroleum based fuel, thus you use more of it to go the same miles, plus the big thing is if all the corn we produced in the country went to ethanol it would only be a few % of our total usage. Not to mention it will drive up the cost of corn itself and also beef as farmers will pay more for their corn feed. It seems like a lose, lose to me, I don't know why it is suddenly seen in such a good light...just goes to show how screwed up our energy program is...

Answer 10

well it's a biofuel made from corn so its much better for the environment. The only downsides are it costs a little bit more to produce and therefore the prices will go up slightly.