| You'll never get the mileage from ethanol that you get from gasoline, but a 25% reduction seems to be extreme. My vehicle manual states specifically "Do not use fuels containing ethanol." I believe they found ethanol was causing rusting of fuel tanks and lines. I remember about 15 years ago when I was still working at an oil refinery and operating the gasoline blenders, the big industrial farmers such as ADM were talking up the benefits of corn-based ethanol. It would be cheaper they said. Now a gallon of ethanol is just about the same price as a gallon of gasoline and it has to be blended in with petroleum components to be burned in engines. We've been told that one of the reasons for recent high gasoline prices
is a shortage of ethanol. Tetraethyl lead was found to be harmful to health, so we replaced it in the gasoline blend with MMT, which was some sort of formulation using manganese. Turned out it was almost as harmful as lead, so it was dropped too. Reformate was then used in greater percentages in the blends to get the octane up. Turned out that reformate was causing certain plastic parts in Chrysler carburetors to dissolve and the cars were stalling out in traffic and causing beaucoup problems. Butane is used to cause gasoline to vaporize more readily, especially in cold weather. Environmentalists complained that butane escaping into the atmosphere was causing problems, so butane percentages were reduced in blends. Pretty soon drivers were complaining of hard-starting engines. In the late 1980s and early 1990s oxygenates were the big thing. These were supposed to result in cleaner burning fuels. One of the oxygenates was MTBE, which mixes freely with water. It was soon found that MTBE was contaminating ground water and MTBE has finally been eliminated from blends. Will we ever find an environmentally acceptable fuel at a reasonable price? Stay tuned. | 
