Ethanol: Benefits For American Farmers

Ethanol is the high-tech fuel used in race cars and dragsters and it comes from corn. I will be doing a deep dive into one of my favorite biofuels or fuel additives where I cover the constraints and benefits in order to get to the truth.

Ethanol is basically ethyl alcohol, the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages but it is used as fuel. During production starch from the plants is fermented and distilled in the sugars which microbes turn into ethanol (Corn Ethanol Production, 2014). It is the same way you make beer, vodka, or moonshine. There are a couple of ways to make fuel-grade ethanol but the most common is the dry mill method.

The grain is passed through a grinding mill and comes out as a powder. The mixture made of this grain powder, water, and an enzyme enters a high heat cooker (How is Ethanol Made?). This enzyme converts the starch into sugars that can be fermented to create alcohol. An enzyme is a protein that can take another chemical and change it. Yeast is then introduced to the mixture and that is where the sugar changes to ethanol and the natural carbon dioxide is separated. Heat is used to vaporize the ethanol in the mixture and then cooled to condense the gas into a liquid form. (Bergmann, 2018). Often, a small amount of gasoline is added so that it is non-potable meaning you cannot drink it. There are many laws out there that say all the ethanol that is going to be used as fuel has to be made so you cannot drink it. It is then mixed with petroleum, and the ethanol becomes fuel for your car (How is Ethanol Made?).

Making ethanol a major player in the fuel industry could have serious drawbacks. It takes a lot of land to make not a lot of corn ethanol and creating significant amounts of energy from food crops would deplete the amount of land available for growing actual food for people to eat. Each acre of corn can yield about 328 gallons of corn ethanol (Corn Ethanol Production, 2014). That’s a lot of corn for not too much fuel, so it is fine as a bridge or a supplemental fuel but it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a primary fuel.

Ethanol blended gas is labeled as E10, E15, and sometimes E85. The number after the “E” indicates the percentage of ethanol by volume, so E10 has up to 10% ethanol. All automakers approve blends up to E10 in their gasoline vehicles.

“In 2011, the EPA began allowing the use of E15 in model year 2001 in newer gasoline vehicles” (DeMace, 2017). E85, also called flex fuel, is an ethanol gasoline blend containing 51 to approximately 85% ethanol. E85 can be used in flex-fuel vehicles, which are specifically designed to run on gasoline, E85, or any mixture of the two. By volume, ethanol contains about a third less energy than gasoline (The Advantages of Ethanol for High-Performance Cars, 2019). Drivers should not really notice a performance loss when they are using E85. In fact, some flex-fuel vehicles perform better with more torque and horsepower when they are running on E85 compared to when they are using regular gasoline.

So we touched on a few things here and there, but what about the big question? Is ethanol bad for your engine? The answer is, sometimes. In newer engines, E10 oxygenated gasoline can be safely used with only minimal interferences. For example a slight decrease in miles per gallon and fuel efficiency (The Advantages of Ethanol for High-Performance Cars, 2019). But many other types of engines are not designed to resist the possible damaging effects of ethanol fuel. Ethanol is hydroscopic meaning it actually attracts and drags the water right out of the air. When enough of it is attracted into the fuel it will actually combine with the ethanol and it sink to the bottom of your fuel tank. This is what we call phase separation and with phase separation, water is introduced to your engine, which makes for some seriously costly damage (Garrett, 2013).

A big issue with ethanol is that it is highly corrosive. Any of the fuel system components that it comes in contact with will corrode. It is capable of dissolving fiberglass fuel tanks as well as aluminum parts and will actually destroy rubber components. A lot of older vehicles have issues with ethanol fuel because of this but if you are driving your car enough and your gas tank isn’t crummy, you probably don’t need to worry about that (Automaker tests show damage to older car engines from running on E15 ethanol, 2012). There is also the concern that ethanol reduces the lubricating properties of gasoline, which is true to a point. There is many people up in arms alleging that ethanol in fuel is ruining their engine for that reason. But good oil companies take great pains to make sure their gasoline minimizes engine wear. So modern gas in a modern car shouldn’t be causing damage. But up north where people are running two-stroke snowmobiles, they’re blaming ethanol for munching up their engines, which makes sense. Two-strokes need oil mixed with the gas to run properly, and ethanol cuts the efficacy of lubricating elements (Threewitt).

So why do we use ethanol then? Well, first, ethanol is extremely resistant to pre-ignition. E85 is like a 105 octane gasoline (DeMace, 2017). So if you are in the racecar business where you’re not worried about fuel economy, you have extremely high compression ratios, and you need super precise ignition timing, you might want to use a more ethanol-rich fuel. If you walk around the pits at a race, it smells like ethanol and not gas. These cars are tuned to run on ethanol-rich fuels, so they don’t have the same concerns about engine wear that I would in my 25 year old Oldsmobile. Ethanol is a much cleaner fuel source and when combined with gasoline it creates an oxygenate which satisfies the Clean Air Act of 1963 (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012). So our ethanol makes our current tech a little cleaner before the next thing takes off, whatever that might be. Fully electric, hydrogen, something else, and then the internal combustion engine becomes a thing of the past.

In conclusion, ethanol is great. It has been helping Americans in several ways. First, it is a cleaner fuel to burn with nearly 60% fewer pollutants than petroleum (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012). Economically, ethanol allows us to rely less on imported oil, giving us lower prices at the pump therefore saving Americans billions of dollars while the industry simultaneously creates thousands of job.

Farmers across America benefit for more demand for corn and don’t think ethanol production hinders food production because over 30% of the corn used in ethanol returns to the food chain to feed animals, produce carbon dioxide, and create other products (Atyeo, 2018).