Skip to main content

Ethanol in fuel - Up close and personal

Five years ago, I published a short letter to Science about the real biofuel cycles.  The letter was published after a long struggle with the journal's Editor of Physical Sciences, Dr. R. Brooks Hanson, who limited my letter to 150 words, and tried to prevent me from putting in a link to these supporting materials. The whole fight was for not, because the link has been broken since I left Berkeley.  In these supporting materials, I made the following two statements:
Furfural in an impure ethanol mixture will gradually dissolve almost any rubber or elastomeric seals or ducts in storage systems and car fuel systems. (Page 13)

Finally, ethanol dissolves a large number of substances insoluble in water and acids, such as many inorganic salts, phosphorus, sulfur, iodine, resins, essential oils, fats, coloring matters, etc. (Wright, 1994).  Therefore, the metal-rich sludge in fuel tanks of most older cars will dissolve in ethanol-containing gasoline and accelerate corrosion of fuel systems and engines in these cars. Older fiberglass fuel tanks will dissolve in ethanol concentrated in the omnipresent trace water, causing gradual failure of many motor boat engines. Because fuel tanks in gas stations are made of steel, there will be increased corrosion from the metal salts-ethanol-water electrolyte. This corrosion will ultimately eat through the tank walls. (Page 38)
Almost no one paid attention.

Today, I had a personal encounter with my own predictions.  My Stihl chain saw stopped working.


Click on the image to see the full size
My Stihl chain saw with the replaced carburetor membranes, fuel filter and spark plug 

The competent local dealer told me cheerfully that the carburetor membrane in the saw got stretched and lost elasticity because of ethanol in the gasoline.


Click on the image to see the full size.
Here you can see the ethanol-damaged bulging elastomer membrane in the carburetor that no longer could maintain fuel pressure, causing the primed saw to stall after 5 seconds or so.

In short, the carburetor stopped functioning because of ethanol in all gasoline I can buy in Texas.  For my three different saws, I only purchase the highest octane gasoline at a local Exxon station, hoping that they do not add ethanol crap to their best product.  Obviously, I have been proven wrong. The cost of rebuilding the carburetor was almost $100, plus two car trips to the dealer.

Given my long track record with the ethanol biofuel additive, I really do not feel disposed to subsidize this racket from my own pocket.  It is enough that my tax money is being wasted every day to keep corn ethanol on a life-support system.

What do you think?  If you have a similar story, please drop a comment.  Perhaps together we can do something about it.

Comments

  1. I too have laid my Sthil saws down to the repair man every other year. I am a conservative environmentalist that can't stand any subsidies that test out to be pure scams. It is bad enough to burn food, but to argue this is good for us is just silly. I like to keep my tools and vehicles until I get tired of them not when when government decides I can't buy fuel that doesn't hurt them. My 1990 Camry and my 1995 Lexus get 33%-24% less MPG in Dallas then last year in Tulsa where I had a choice. They both have over 200K miles and will last another 10 years or so. Unless the state of Texas finds out about my monthly trips to refill a 300 gallon tank in southern Oklahoma.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I would like to learn what you are thinking about my posts and encourage you to share

Popular posts from this blog

Ascent of the Angry and Stupid

Scientifically speaking,  stupid  people harm themselves while also harming others. In addition, stupid people are irrational and erratic, and are very dangerous to others. After discussing the destructive role of the stupid in any society whatsoever, I will focus on the delicate interplay of actions of intelligent and helpless people, who in balance make or break a functioning democracy.  Unless things change fast in the US, we can kiss our democracy goodbye for decades. If you want to see how a virulent ascent of the stupid looks up close, and what implications it has for our fight against social injustice and climate change, please watch the brilliant " Don't Look Up " movie. Unvaccinated people demonstrating in Los Angeles. There are tens of millions of the raving mad and/or angry, stupid people in the US and other developed countries. Source: New York Times , 12/25/2021. I overlapped at UC Berkeley with Professor Carlo M. Cipolla for a decade, until his death in t

Confessions of a Petroleum Engineer and Ecologist

I just attended an SPE workshop, "Oil and Gas Technology for a Net-Zero World – Defining Our Grand Challenges for the Next Decade."  Of the 60 people in the audience, I knew 1/3, some very well.  It makes sense, because I have been an SPE member for 40 years, and a Distinguished Member for 20 years.  Last year, I received an SPE EOR/IOR Pioneer Award for my work at Shell and UC Berkeley on the thermal enhanced oil recovery processes that involved foams, and their upscaling to field operations. This was nice, because Shell recognized me as one of their best reservoir engineers, and in 1985 I received an internal Shell Recognition Award for the same work. But I am not a mere oil & gas reservoir engineer.  First and foremost, I am a chemical engineer and physicist, who has thought rigorously about the sustainability of human civilization , ecology and thermodynamics of industrial agriculture and large biofuel systems, as well as about the overall gross and net primary produc

Net Ecosystem Productivity is Zero on Planet Earth

In the last bog , I told you how the law of mass conservation governs the large-scale behavior of Earth's households - ecosystems - that must recycle all mass on average and export only low quality heat into the cold universe.  Now, I will give you a few useful definitions of cyclic processes, sustainability, and ecosystem productivity. Let me start from stating the obvious:  We live in a spaceship we cannot leave, a gorgeous blue, white and green planet Earth that takes us for a spin around her star, the Sun, each year. But this statement is imprecise. We really live on a vanishingly thin skin of the Earth, her ecosphere .   Think of this skin as of a thin delicate membrane, teaming with life and beauty, but incredibly fragile. We trample on this membrane and poison it.  Then we act surprised when it brakes and shrivels. Practically all life on the Earth exists between two concentric spheres defined by the mean Earth surface at the radial distance from the Earth's