Imidazole

E-85 is 85% Ethanol, and 15% gasoline.

Will it work in our vehicles? If not, any ideas what it would take to make it work?

Go48

I believe Mazda has said that the RX-8 is not compatible with E85 fuel. I suppose you could make it compatible by changing all the components in the engine and exhaust system, including gaskets, seals and anything else that might be negatively affected by alcohol. Not a reasonable thing to consider IMO.

Aseras

the car will run on it, but it's just a matter of time before things dissolve... $$$ to fix...

Raptor75

With E85 in a RX I'd be looking at around 100 miles per fill up, no thanks.

zoom44

read your manual

Rootski

iTrader: (1)

E85 also burns much dirtier than straight gasoline, so there will be more plug foul and other such problems. It also gets worse gas mileage and pollutes more, and in many cases, costs more. Even if it was compatible, why even bother?

army_rx8

ethanol's air fuel mixture (optimum) is around 9 to 1.... vs gasolines 14.7 to 1 (or somethign like that...we use a lower ratio for engine safty and durability). so strieght ethanol won't work unless you get a standalone ecm to tune....also teh fuel components aren't made for gasoline...the seals would fall apart. not sure if anything else (besides fuel system) would need upgrading.

also not sure what teh ratio should be for e85

disclaimer: befor people go crazy abotu the things i said it is just a generalization.. abotu the differences between ethanol and gasoline. b umy memory is a lill hazy on the specifics b/c i don't use ethanol

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/fuel_comp.html

hope this helps out, you can compare differnt fules....liek gasoline, ethanol, methanol, diesel etc.

valpac

iTrader: (2)

Until I am forced at gun point to buy e85, I won't. Such a scam and people are eatin it up. Green weenies have helped jack gas prices, now they want an environmentally friendly fuels. Do some research before you tacitly accept the bs.

Raptor75

Don't forget lower HP. E85 will on have about 60 to 70% the energy content that gas has.

stickman

The E85 fiasco is simply a give away to Bush's middle america base. The farmers love the idea, it will increase their bank accounts but decrease power, decrease mileage and the best part is you have to use more energy to make it than it produces. That means either we burn more oil instead of less or we resort to coal to provide the energy to make it which screws up the environment even more. Brilliant solution!

Scraper

How does he 8 do with regular gas with ethanol added? I know my currrent car doesn't like it. Also, does anybody run 87 in their 8? I'm trying to decide between an 8 and another car, and one of the big drawbacks to the 8 is the horrible fuel economy.

I'd LOVE to see the 8 run PURE ethanol, like the cars in brazil do....110 Octane baby! The rotary would SCREAM with that kind of juice! Its the only real solution to oil dependance.

kartweb

E10 fuel runs fine in the RX8 the mixture range goes a tad richer which is within the range of most cars (O2 feedback loop) of most cars anyway.

E85 would take recalibrating the ECM along with bigger injectors.

Ethanol by itself isn't a corrosion problem, it's when moisture mixes with it that corrsoin becomes a problem. E10 won't take on much water, E85 can absorb enough to be a problem.

It costs less to formulate gas with ethanol then MTBE. MTBE costs about $2.00 a gallon to refine where ethanol is running about $1.70.

Exxon & the other refiners loath ethanol. Exxon charge for refinement in 2002 was $0.48 a gallon. In 2005 is was $0.84. The refinement costs actually dropped from 2002 - 2005 at least according to Exxon's 10K's but they reported higher charges - as in profit. In fact refinment is the most profitable service for Exxon. Ethanol has no refinement charges. You can probably figure out why most of the petrol companies don't like ethanol.

Saab has a slick way of dealing with fuel flexibility; The more ethanol in the fuel tank, the more turbo pressure delivered. I have a feeling we'll see a lot more of this over the coming years. Its pretty easy to detect the level of ethanol using an on-board fuel di-electric value measurement.

I've heard that Mazda is looking at doing the same thing on the CX7 possibly in early 07.

Rootski

iTrader: (1)

Refining is profitable because there just aren't many refineries. Our oil supply can reach a point where it doesn't matter how much we have because we max out our refinery capacity. We couldn't stand to lose two of them.

kartweb

On the shut down of refineries;

In 1980 we had somewhere over 380 operating refineries. Today it's somewhere around 180. Since 1980 we've seen a 40% increase in consumption. In 1980 Reagan cancelled the $88B Fuel from Farms funding to the DOE to convert the majority of automotive fuel over to ethanol by 2000. At the time it looked like we could simply rely on Saudi Oil for another 100 years. Well at least 8 years, thats all a president ever has to worry about.

Back to the refineries. Why did over half of the refineries shut down? Mergers and acquisitions. It had nothing to do with the EPA or any other commonly tossed out misperceptions by the oil industry. The fact is as companies merged the more efficient operations ie, the ones with the shortest and fatest pipelines to the ports, opened an era of shut downs. When Exxon bought Mobil, over 50 of the 200 refineries were shut down. Instead they expanded those they kept operating.

The mega-mergers are the root cause of most of the increases in cost of refinement, and a great case can be made to show that the entire merger scene has enabled a pricing manipulation all the way back to the OPEC prices. Fewer mega-companies have more influence especially when the work together. Their job is to make a profit not to keep oil prices reasonable for Joe Family at the pump. Welcome to America.

Where government needs to step in is at the anti-trust level. We need to divest the top 10 oil companies around a maximum of 5 refineries each with a set capacity target total. That would in effect create about 45-50 individual oil refiners. We need to restore competition to the free market place. The current industry is no longer competitive. That doesn't serve our system of free enterpise.

stickman

The real answer here is fuel cell cars. If we had gotten serious about it during the first energy crunch in the late 70's we would be there now. Ethanol really won't save much if anything in terms of oil use or the environment, it simply takes too much energy to produce it so you use more oil or coal to make it. Standard internal combusiton engines will run less efficiently on it since it contains less energy than gasoline. Too many people stand to make or lose too much money for us to simply take a straight line to the best answer.

hemanrulez

HAHA that is so funny. What a dumb thing to say, of course its the "green weenies" who have increased the price of gas, dumbass.

kartweb

Fuel Cells like Permeable Exchange Membranes are only 50% efficient. Lots of heat. The Hydrogen has to come from somewhere - if it's water, the electricity has to come from somewhere. Some of the Hydocarbon based fuel cells look promising though.

The myth that it takes too much energy to produce is just that - a myth. Oil imported from the middle east takes far more energy to produce - and thats not including fueling the efforts to the military expends to do business with the middle east. The reality is it takes about 7% of the net BTU's produced to manufacture ethanol. It takes 9% of the net BTU's in gasoline for crude thats pumped out of Saudi Arabia.

Ethanol has about 3/4 the energy content per gallon as gasoline does. At current prices per mile it's about equal with ethanol. Ethanol is likely to go down as the infrastructure grows. Gasoline is likely to go up. Which fuel would you rather be paying for - one thats going up, or one thats going down?

Getting back to the original post, I think Mazda will be working towards E85 in the very near future as will most other manufacturerers.

o_town_racer

About all anyone can agree on is there is no really good solution. What we need is a cheap way to extract Hydrogen from water....whether that comes from large scale solar powered electrolysis or some new invention, getting Hydrogen from fossil fuels (like we currently do) is nothing short of a band-aid. Once we have the Hydrogen, you can burn it straight or use it with Fuel Cells, but I don't see any cold fusion or magic pills coming down the pipe, so for now, there isn't much choice other than Gas/Diesel and ICE. Electric cars are useless too as they still rely on power generated by either nuclear or fossil fuel. I remember years and years ago (during the first engery shortage) that they thought in the future there would be enormous solar collectors in geo-synchronous orbit sending energy down to collector ground stations via microwave (can you imagine what would happen if a plane flew too close or through that beam???). There were also talks of building tidal force electric generation stations. None of that has come to pass. So where do we go from here? Sorry, my crystal ball is broken and I don't see any winning plans on the horizon yet. Oh, and unless we're going to cook the corn with solar or geothermal energy, ethanol is yet another mostly useless farmer subsidy (see article in latest issue of C&D).

DMRH

Most people in-the-know will already know that a naturally aspirated rotary such as the 13B-MSP can almost run on Kerosene if required.

As already stated, E85 will work but the side effects will be felt in the fuel system.

Stick to E10 but try to avoid the larger concentrations

REgards

StewC625

There is a long, informative and interesting article in this month's Car & Driver regarding ethanol and E85.

Bottom line: It is a myth at best that Ethanol use will fix our energy issues. Ethanol is nearly a "negative" source of energy - it takes a huge amount of other energy to cook it from corn or biomass. As a motor fuel it sucks - something like less than half of the energy content of gasoline, and while it does put out less CO2 (that Carbon content has plenty to do with the lack of energy in it), it puts out higher amounts of other harmful ****. It requires a pretty specialized engine installation to be able switch between e10 and e85. And even if we switch 100% of the gasoline sold in the USA, that will only decrease our energy imports by something like only 2% due to the energy required to cook up ethanol.

I can't seem to find the article online - pickup the magazine.

Agree, it appears to be yet another myth perpetuated by our government to steer the thinking away from the real issues.

toxin440

I will not pretend to know the "whole" picture of this gasoline vs E85 business, however I do know I'm already pissed enough being forced to buy the E10 **** that all gas stations are required to sell now. My argument comes back to the fact that why am I still paying the prices I do, but getting 10% less.

Our engines were desgined for 100% gasoline and thats what I want for it, I don't have a problem paying the gas prices I do now, but don't jack me out of 10% and force me to put some BS fuel into my car that I don't want, that will lower my already sub-par MPG's. Even though our car CAN run with 10% ethanol in it, I don't want to run any risk of the seals or any other components slowly dissolving away because some hippies think this will magically cure our addiction to gasoline.

The next 10 years will be interesting, big changes with the nations energy will take time and be painful but this 10% ethanol business seems just like a little bandaid covering up a MUCH bigger problem.

HCTR154

That's about the best and simplest explaination for the current price of gas I have read.

Also, King George keeps de-stabilizing the Middle East. Initially with a 3 week war that has last 3+ years and currently planning a military intervention in another. Both of which have VAST quantities of the stuff we are addicted too.

stickman

I am not advocating continued use of gasoline, however your notion of the energy cost of producing ethanol is closer to being correct if the source is some cellulose material other than corn, sugar cane for example. Corn is a high maintenance, high use of petro-chemicals (in the form of fertilizer) product, it is not an efficient source material for ethanol. Unfortunately, corn is exactly what is being pushed because it is a bone being thrown to midwest farmers. Politics, rather than science is driving the process.

zoom44

well https://www.rx8club.com/showthread.p...=hydrogen+ball

http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/20...2003-01-30.cfm

DrDiaboloco

Yeah, I hear ya. The Middle East was always stable before GWB came along and mucked it up.

I assume in your other comment about his planning to invade Iran you've failed to notice that practically the entire civilized world is concerned about them, too... To the point of possibly going off and doing something about it. Or is that George's fault, too?