35 comments on The Transition to Winter Gasoline--Revisited
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
35 comments on The Transition to Winter Gasoline--Revisited
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction - Part IV: Energy from Breeder Reactors and from Fusion?
- The US stimulus and "green jobs"
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
—Albert Einstein
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Good stuff, thanks.
BAck to my mpg question. Assuming my '99 Tacoma is not re-tuned when I put gasoline with ethanol in it, what happens to my mileage? I assume the car is smart enough to adjust the air mix and the timing, but then what? 10% ethanol drops the energy content by 3% relative to the straight hydrocarbon fuel. In practice does anyone know (via careful tests) what that does to mileage? This seems an important part of the arguments for or against using ethanol as motor fuel. I recognize that adding ehtanol likely means removing other high octane components from the original fuel so exact comparisons are of limited value, but...?
Is there some rough equation that relates energy content to mileage?
(mileage) = EC * a where EC is energy content and "a" is a proportionality constant
or
(mileage) = (EC - b)*a where b is energy lost to friction/heat
-d
In practice does anyone know (via careful tests) what that does to mileage?
There have been a number of independent tests done, and they show the expected decline in mpg. Most of these are on E85 though:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/news/2006/ethanol-10-06...
I have around here somewhere a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study from the 90's that looked at 5% ethanol blends, and concluded that they dropped fuel efficiency by around 2%. The American Coalition of Ethanol commissioned a study recently and came out with the conclusion that fuel efficiency generally drops, but by less than the BTUs would warrant. The ethanol guys like that study, but I don't suppose they would like a study funded by the American Petroleum institute that concluded just the opposite.