Ok, I've had ALOT of experience with Ethanol so I figured I'd share.

First of all, everyone knows or should know that ethanol burns cooler. Stoich for ethanol is 9.0:1. So yes you are effectivley stuffing MORE energy potential into your chamber every revolution. Ethanol is also oxygenated, which means as it burns it creates its own oxygen which in turn allows more of itself to be burned. So if you run ethanol in your engine and don't make more power, your doing somthing wrong, Period... On top of that, ethanol has another property that helps make power. It has a high latent heat of evaporation. So as its injected into your port it is rapidly cooling the air charge, thus creating a lower pressure area, THUS pulling more air into the port/cylinder. You can actually see this happen on a MASS AIR car where you're measuring actual airflow and not manifold pressure. Thats why that turbo EVO in the preivously posted youtube vid made more power on the same boost. Even though it was at the same boost pressure, there was actually a greater amount of AIRMASS entering the cylinder = more power. And of course everyone knows with ethanol you can run optimal timing (MBT) without having issues with knock (too a point).

The other advantage is since your burning a larger quantity of fuel, you will expell a larger volume of exhaust gas therefore giving you much better spool characteristics on a turbo charged application. The flip side of this is you'll need to account for the extra exhaust volume when planning out your manifold, wastegate and turbo selection, cause you will have an increase in backpressure.

The difference between winter blend and sumer blend is marginal where fueling is concerned. As far as octane, theres almost no difference between E70 and E85. And actually E70 has better knock resistance than C16 and can do this while running leaner and making more power at a fraction of the cost, PLUS!! its not gonna kill your O2 sensor in a short time like the leaded race fuels will.

I've personally made 850HP on winter E85 (about 72% according to the flexfuel sensor on the ProEFI EMS), and will be doing a twin turbo mustang next month that we're shooting for 1500HP on E70-85 (Also on a ProEFI EMS with flexfuel).

If you wanna get really crazy with HP potential E98 has been said to produce better results than VP-Import which is like $25/gallon, and can be run in boosted setups with no intercooler.

The whole lack of fuel economy could easilly be countered to a great extent if the engines were originally designed to take advantage of ethanol. In stead they are designed to run on gasonline and are just fed ethanol so the manufactuers can get their evironmental merit badges.

If you built an engine specifically to take advantage of ethanol, you could use a smaller engine, and produce more power with less emmisions. PERIOD.

Yeah ethanol has its inherent issues with cold weather and with certain legacy materials, but realistically, its worth it if you consider all the benifits of the fuel. Most current fuel systems can tolerate ethanol, its really only the older ones that have issues. And cold starts are not really that big of a deal if the EMS is tuned to deal with it.

The thing with E15, the REAL issue is that the ECUs in those cars wern't designed to handle the amount of fuel trim required to keep E15 running at stoich, so they end up running lean and burning up CATs. So the facts are the facts but they kind of used them out of context. But again some of the legacy materials arn't compatible and will deteriorate over time.

I'm not an expert in marine application, but I could see where an alcohol based fuel would have issues in an environment where there is ALOT of moisture. In this case I think all that would need to happen is a better design of the fuel system to help prevent moisture absorbsion. I don't think it would be that hard to do if they really wanted to make it happen.

And those of you worried about using up all the corn.. Well first of all we shouldn't be feeding corn to the cows, do some research, thats why we keep having ecoli outbreaks cause cows arn't built to eat corn, the are built to eat grass and eating corn prevents them from producing the nessisary enzymes to combat ecoli er ebola whatever its called.

Anyways, heres another, perfectly viable way to make Ethanol. Its pricey now, but in time it'll be the prefered method I believe.

http://www.microfueler.com/

I hope this clears up some stuff. I'll check back so if there are any specific questions I'll try to anser them as best as possible.

Just a few notes I forgot to mention. The original engines built back in the day were designed to run on ethanol, the idea was for every person to be able to make their own fuel. Well guess what happened, around the time big oil started to grow somthing called prohabition happened, forbidding anyone to make their own fuel.. Kinda a convenient coinsidense huh? you think they were really concerned about ppl getting drunk? I don't.. I think it was the first step in govmnt and big oil taking control of everything.. If they prevented ppl from making their own fuel then they could sell more gasoline.


Also bossman was right about the oil.. The russians discovered a while back that oil empty oil wells were replenishing themselves with new oil. You think that the earth produced oil unground for X amount of years and all of a sudden it just stopped?? I used to do work for alot of oil/energy companies and there is TONS of oil out there and they know it, thats why they arn't trying very hard to get off of it.

How about this.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0A...x=6&playnext=2