There's a big political push pending in Washington towards increasing the national supply of so-called "E85", which is a mix of 15% gasoline and 85% ethanol. If you're not familiar with this fuel/issue, ethanol is derived from agricultural crops--right now, predominantly corn.

While this home-grown fuel promises to lessen our current (outrageous) national dependence on imported oil, which is a good thing, it carries with it some potentially important problems for owners of carbureted cars. There's some interesting information about this in the current issue of "Chevy High Performance" magazine, and I'll summarize it here.

Specifically: E85 can cause corrosion problems. Being alcohol-based, it mixes easily with water--such as the water moisture present in air; and E85 evaporates readily when exposed to air--as it would be in carbureted cars without 'closed' fuel injection systems. When it evaporates, it can leave that water moisture behind, in places like carburetors, fuel tanks and fuel lines, which in turn can lead to rust formation.

E85 also causes cars to run richer. In a carbureted engine, it can take as much as twice the amount of E85 as it would gasoline to achieve complete combustion. (Even though that's the ideal level of performance, the point is that E85 is a less "efficient" fuel in that sense). That can lead to problems like overfueling the engine and washing out the rings.

Since alcohol is a solvent, E85 can deteriorate rubber fuel hoses. Modern hoses made with neoprene are more resistant, but are still vulnerable. (Plastic fuel hoses and stainless steel fuel lines are a solution).

So if you own a carbureted Corvette, E85--while a good thing for our country--does present some potential problems.

Pretty good info- theres got to be a way to upgrade our older cars to handle this fuel. would this totally replace the 100% gasoline we now have? 

No, it won't.  If you do the math, we don't have enough airable land to grow enough corn/veggies to put this into a viable national utilization. 

Once again, rather than the auto manufacturers rolling out the patents they own for ceramics and other mechanicals/processes for higher mileage, more efficient engines, E-85 makes for good sound bites and press statements from our elected representatives and allows business to move on as per normal. 

This is much like the fiasco in the 70's that brought catalytic convertors and other patchwork crap (A.I.R) on our cars and others rather than utilizing the technology available for the production of efficient, clean burning vehicles. (Read All Corvettes are Red for a brief look at GM's problems in this area)

Another highly improbable source, Biodiesel, will be making lots of noise this year.  Biodiesel will be utilized in fleet applications (i.e. railroad, trucking, mail carriers, etc) that will benefit from the savings of large purchases, but won't do squat for the individual buyer.

With prices going down  you all of a sudden see Hugo Chavez back in the news making threats against the U.S.  This will be used to drive the price back up due to the "uncertainty" of getting Venzuelan oil (of which we use a whopping 5% or so).  We will also see a scare coming from all the new terror tactics in the middle east (Iran wanting to test missiles, etc) that will cause OPEC to either tighten supply (which will work the best to drive up the price) or raise prices.

The intent--and the current government/industry position on this 'alternative' fuel--is generally that it can serve as a partial substitute for petroleum-based gasoline.

That being said, the ultimate/long term goal clearly appears to be to replace substantial amounts of traditional gasoline with E85--and possibly other alternative sources of fuel as well (for example, investment in new technologies to withdraw oil from oil shale deposits in the U.S. and Canada are ramping up these days. If they bear out, and don't create impossible environmental obstacles, we will benefit hugely. The U.S. alone has more oil in its shale deposits than Saudi Arabia has crude oil under its sand, by a wide margin. We could operate our economy at current levels of oil consumption for hundreds of years to come if we're successful at this. Imagine if we actually became more efficient at consumption, and also employed other alternative energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal!)

The reason for the E85 push right now? Iraq/a beleaguered Bush administration/Congress finally waking up to the overwhelming national security nightmare posed by our increasing dependence on foreign oil...and last but definitely not least, the politically powerful agricultural lobbies in Washington.

Ethanol can be made from several different sources. Right now, it's almost all corn-based. But things like switchgrass and other organic sources can be processed to produce it as well. So obviously, big bucks are at stake here. (And the oil companies have a thing or two to say about all this as well, as you might expect/suspect).

So, as in everything else in the wild n' wacky world of government policy/industry self-interest, money is the ultimate driving force (you should forgive the pun).

Re your question about potential solutions to our particular (carbureted) problems--the EPA has decreed that any vehicles converted to run on alternative fuels must have exhaust emissions as clean as that which the original equipment produced. Translation: cars that are converted to run on E85 can't be any dirtier than they were when they were first manufactured. Because of the 'runs richer than gasoline' nature of E85 (and other reasons), we'll have to tune our cars to run either on E85 or gasoline.

Of course, the EPA also hasn't approved any conversion parts yet. For fuel injected cars, insignificant things like fuel injector sizes, A/F ratios, ECM calibrations, fuel tank/lines materials and other assorted items are all affected.

All that being the case, the changeover will be gradual. It has to be, given these enormous issues. But I think it's pretty clear (and will be made more so) that E85 is going to get a big push. And like it or not, at some point we'll probably have to adapt our cars to run on it.

I might be dumbing this topic up, but I don't think you'll have to worry about a world totally without gasoline in your lifetimes.  Think of all the vehicles that rely on gasoline in our country right now.  It would be economically unfeasible if they all had to be "retrofitted" to accept "flexfuels" like E85.  The detriments of using E85 in a classic car are very simple -- run one tankful of E85 in an engine designed to use unleaded gasoline only and you probably won't have to worry about what's in your next tankful   

"in our lifetime" may be only 20 years for some of us seniors, but it is conceivable to think that unleaded gasoline may be as scarce as leaded gas in 20 years.

I agree, there's gotta be a way for us to upgrade or adjust our systems without presenting too much trouble for us owners.

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(link removed by Adam Wartell)

Adam Wartell2007-02-16 07:44:45

I now live within 10 miles of 3 new ethanol plants. So the push is on in the midwest.  

I wouldn't worry too much.  In addition to us, there are lawn mowers, snow blowers, marine interests, etc, who all need gasoline.