If alcohol is such a great fuel (and fuel additive), then why isnt everyone using it?

The truth is, most petroleum companies have used it, at some point in their history, and many continue to use ethanol as an octane booster / oxygenator. Pure grain alcohol is rated at 106 octane, and it is so good that it doesnt take all that much to raise the octane of 85 or 87 octane up to 90 octane, so that it can be sold as premium and obtain a much higher price. Alcohol fuel has been the main fuel of the Indianapolis 500 for almost its entire history, and fuel dragsters racing the ¼ mile drag strip use alcohol fuel. Ethanol (grain alcohol) was popularized during the OPEC oil embargo, around 1979-1981, because US-produced ethanol could displace from 5% to 10% of the fuel needed in the US, while imports were being shorted. So, the big five oil companies (at that time they were Shell, Arco, Standard Oil, Texaco, and Mobil) all started building big commercial distillation plants in the deep South, including Texas, but mostly around Mississippi and Louisiana (this was because it was easy to bring in the large quantities of grain (as well as imported molasses from Caribbean sugar cane, and sugar beet pulp from all the Southern sugar beet farms. This wasnt the first time ethanol was used, either. During World War Two, ethanol was produced in very large quantities, and many new plants in the Midwest were built to supply the US Navy & Airforce planes with aviation fuel, which was anywhere from 20 % ethanol to pure 100% alcohol. People in the US used ethanol- spiked fuel to conserve petroleum for the war effort, and gas rationing was so stringent at this time that people were issued gas stamps which they had to show at the gas station, to show that they were allowed to buy gas say, twice a month (or whatever their allotment).

So the petroleum companies already knew a lot about ethanol as a fuel and as an additive, and have had this in their bag of tricks for a long time. All through the 40s and early 50s, premium gas wasnt called premium, it was called ethyl, short for ethyl alcohol. In the 50s, though, someone came up with the idea of adding this incredibly cheap waste product, lead dust from the mining and metals industry, to gasoline. Leaded gas displaced ethanol because it was a lot cheaper and because it did slow down the combustion of the gasoline (which tends to burn to fast to be able to get all the power out of it). They could still offer a premium brand, and it cost a lot less to make it, the oil companies profited enormously. They just ignored the fact that lead did not enter into the combustion cycle at all: it just inhibited it, and ended up as lead dust all over the cities, which started getting heavily polluted and grayish colored from all the lead dust landing on the streets, of the walls of buildings, and on the hands of little children playing outside. Well, with the oil embargo of the 70s, they went back to ethanol, as an octane booster. They made a marketing mistake, though: they decided to call it Gasohol, and they promoted it hard and heavy. The term, gasohol confused people though, and a very high percentage of people werent sure if they could put it in their car.

At this time, ethanol started so getting popular as an alternative fuel, that many people, from farmers organizing alcohol production co-ops (like the one we started in California: the Calif. Alcohol Fuel Producers Association, or CAPFA). Even big companies like Archer-Daniels/Midlands (as in Midlands Oil) started turning corn into fuel grade ethanol. Ethanol production came into its own during the late 70s early 80s, so much so that a new trade journal, Gasohol, USA, flourished almost immediately after going to press, and became a major industry trade journal, with big advertising dollars from the growing ethanol industry. Suddenly farmers knew they could produce their own fuel, as well as the fact that this was a clean- burning fuel, much better for your engine in many, many ways. Now these people had a voice, with this widely circulated magazine.

What happened then was that the petroleum industry started running a counter-advertising campaign against the growing grass-roots effort intent on converting cars to switch to alcohol. To give you an idea of how big this movement was, many groups, such as CAPFA, and Chuck Stones company, Future Fuels of America, started lobbying their congressmen, and talking to their state governors, and we even got an alcohol fuel tax exemption passed in Congress (an exemption which continues to this day). So every week you started seeing articles in the newspaper about how corrosive, or how inefficient pure alcohol was, while at the gas pumps, people saw gasohol with signs saying, contains ethyl alcohol, and they didnt know what to do. So gasohol sales dropped, and the shortage of unleaded regular persisted, keeping the unleaded gas market overextended. So, regular gas prices continued to soar, and oil companies continued to make a killing with the high prices they were getting. A lot of this was totally twisted propaganda, with adulterated and manipulated statistics. They would say things like it takes more energy to produce it than you get out of it. Well sure, you could make a case for inefficiency if you purposely built a plant that was designed to be inefficient. This would be like only testing one particular car, say, a big 1960 model Cadillac V-8 engine for fuel efficiency, and never bothering to ever test another car on the road to see if there was ever anything better than that. In fact, the propaganda was even worse than that: they didnt bother to actually test alcohol production facilities, rather, they just built a case from a theoretical, completely made-up assumptions, in short, a flawed mathematical model. This same mathematical model would keep re-appearing in so many reports, that people accepted it as true, just because the oil pundits had told them so many times that it was true. A couple agricultural universities, such as UC Davis, subsequently did studies of these new commercial distillation plants to disprove this myth, and they determined that with an efficiently run distillation plant you have a net energy gain of over 65%, which is not a bad equation at all.

The fuel energy is just not there per gallon. Engines can be built and are built that run higher compression to make more power from the E85 but the energy per gallon is still not there