EPA Proposes Raising Ethanol and Biofuel Requirements in 2017

In reply to foxtrapper:

Are you talking about budget or workers? Because that is a fairly flat line with respect to budget with no adjustment for inflation and the workers have fell accordingly before the sequester numbers.

See Rule 1 posted above on how to get government organizations to fail.

Personally I like breathing air and drinking water. There seem to be people against that.

alfadriver wrote: In terms of octane rating, Ethanol by itself has a RON of 107 (MON of 89, so a PON of 98) So it's not totally out of question that the PON of E85 could be 95. The real question- how much does it really change- AND the physical properties of the ethanol changes knock sensitivity without any octane change. So in the end- for boosted engines, the effective change is probably more related to the RON of 107.

I'm pretty sure that the US spec is that RON and MON may not be more than 7 points apart, I wonder where E85 stacks up with respect to this.

In WWII, fuel octane was rated for mild and severe engines, so you'd see ratings like 115/120 or 130/145. IIRC watercooled engines were mild and aircooled were severe. I also wonder where E85 stacks up in this regard.

Flight Service wrote: Personally I like breathing air and drinking water. There seem to be people against that.

I've met these people online. To them, pollution means jobs.

rslifkin wrote:

kb58 wrote: There's actually a fair bit of debate about the actual octane value. The latest I saw was more like 95-ish, which was pretty disappointing if true since I'm running a turbo as well.

Even at the same octane, E85 will still let you run a little more boost, as you're feeding a lot more fuel, which gives some cooling effect to the intake charge.

A little more boost? On turbo direct injection engines a 50% ethanol mix is usually sufficient to reach mbt. In most cars on stock turbos this means all the boost.

Knurled wrote:

Flight Service wrote: Personally I like breathing air and drinking water. There seem to be people against that.

I've met these people online. To them, pollution means jobs.

Yeah, I get that. Just the whole, have money while dead thing never made much sense.