Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge Ethanol

Over here we seem to follow The US's bad decisions all the time.Never the good ones!For example increasing speed limits on roads that can handle it.No that'd stop revenue raising!
Anyway here's the latest dumb thing we're talking about doing to appease a couple of country politicians.

‘Bad’ ethanol forced on motorcycles
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BY MARK HINCHLIFFEIN MOTORBIKE NEWS — 13 MAY, 2015
Dirty fuel - ethanol

Governments are continuing to push ethanol in fuel, despite it not being suitable for most motorcycles and the US Environmental Protection Agency calling for a cutback in its availability.

The latest government to consider an ethanol mandate is Queensland which has shown bipartisan support in the erroneous notion it is good for the environment and fuel prices.

While the odd dose of ethanol is ok for most bikes and fine for BMWs and American bikes on a more regular basis, it may cause long-term damage to most others.

And while ethanol is cheaper, it is also less efficient and, in the long-run, is not any more economical considering the engine damage it may cause.

Mandating that service stations stock a certain amount of ethanol-blended fuel is purely a political decision to appear environmentally friendly and aid farmers who probably should have switched to other crops years ago when the demand for sugar declined.

Ethanol is a type of alcohol produced by fermentation of crops such as sugarcane or grain. In Australia, ethanol content in unleaded fuel is limited to 10% (E10) but some countries use 85% or even higher in South America.

E10 is becoming more prevalent throughout Australian service stations and Queensland looks like following NSW where service stations have to stock a minimum requirement of the fuel.

CFMoto 650NK fuel filler - ethanol

According to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, only post-1986 bikes and ATVs made by BMW, Harley, Polaris and Victory can safely use E10. No Japanese bikes and no Piaggio products can use it. The FCAI doesn’t mention other brands, but it can be assumed ethanol blends are not suitable.

Ethanol doesn’t work with carburettors or mechanical fuel injection. It is also a solvent which attacks metallic and rubber-based fuel lines, and has an affinity to water that can cause steel fuel tanks to rust.

But one of the confusing things for riders is the octane rating. (Octane is a measure of a fuel’s ability to resist engine knocking or pinging which is an uncontrolled burn in the engine that can cause damage. Higher octane fuels resist knocking.)

Most E10 in Australia is rated at 95 RON which seems like it could be suitable for bikes that require that higher octane rating. (In America it has a lot lower RON ratings as their highest RON fuel is only 91.)

RACQ executive manager technical and safety policy, Steve Spalding, warns that ethanol-blended, higher-octane fuels may not necessarily meet the correct fuel requirements for a vehicle designated to run on PULP.

While the RON may be high enough, there is another property in fuel, called Motor Octane Number (MON), which is rarely specified on the bowser.

MON is usually about 10 numbers lower than RON, so a MON of 85 would be ok for a bike rated at 95 RON.

However, ethanol fuels have much lower MON numbers than their RON which could be too low for your bike.

Avoid filling your motorcycle tank with ethanol fuel
Ethanol fuel is fine for Harleys

Either ask the service/gas station for the MON rating or fill up non-ethanol premium unleaded fuel of 95 RON or higher.

It is always best to have a higher octane rating than a lower one even though modern engine management systems have knock sensors that can handle lower octane.

If there is no choice but to fill up with ethanol fuel, make sure your next fill is with a high-octane fuel.

Ethanol supporters say it lowers gas/fuel prices, furthers energy security by reducing reliance on foreign oil, and revitalises the rural community. However, even those debates are far from definitive and the environmental argument is far from proven.

But mainly it is not doing your hip pocket any favours, even though E10 is usually a few cents cheaper.

There is about 3% less energy content in a litre of E10 compared with unleaded fuel which means your engine performance and fuel economy will be 3% worse, or to put it another way, your range will be limited by 3%.

The price of E10 would need to be at least 3% less than ULP for riders to even break even on the fill. And then there is the long-term damage it could do to your engine.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that ethanol can damage motorcycle engines and has proposed a cutback in its availability, not a mandate as Queensland wants.

The US agency says ethanol-blended fuels increase exhaust temperatures which can cause component failure.

But you'll be saving the planet...

Good luck!

This is being pushed by a couple of farmer politicians that see a buck to be made for farmers.They've got quite a bit of power in a very tightly balanced state government.
I run premium petrol in the bike, and will continue to,but I hope they don't "mandate" that option away.I trust politicians as far as I can spit.My old crap-box car will be more expensive to run though.

Big Corn has tasted the nectar of unbridled wealth, don't think for a minute it will go back. Subsidies, kickbacks, political favors, and we as consumers have no choice, no voice, and we suffer.

One small correction, Sunoco has 94 octane at all it's stations and higher is available but not as readily. That being said, you should run the lowest octane you can without pinging. Octane is not a quality rating even though the gas stations make it seem so by grading them, regular, plus, and super or premium.

Our octane ratings are different.That's why I said premium. 91 is about your 89[I think] your 91, or maybe the 94 you talk about,is comparable to our 95 [I think.]

My owners manual says run 95 RON minimum.

Soylent green is PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!

I run 87 in my bike with no issues.

We don't have 87.
91,which I've heard is your 89,or above.

Someone posted a link a while back to a site that informs people which brand and rating has no alcohol. I used it and fill up with Shell 91 whenever I can find it. That said I would not put it past any brand slipping in ethanol if economics were to dictate more profit.

I wouldn't put it past some service stations here to add a bit more to the 10% it's supposed to be either.

www.pure-gas.org

US & Canada only though.

you can check to see if it's really pure gas you're getting with some food coloring.
mix a small quantity of any color with water, take a small bottle of the suspect gas and add some of the coloring. agitate. when it settles, there should be a definite meniscus between the gas and colored water if it's pure gas. if it's E90 it will change color entirely, as the food color solution will absorb into the ethanol component.

sometimes you can see tiny purple fishes laughing in the deep blue ethanol

Tiny Purple Fishes??? I thought they were little spermatozoa looking for a fertile place in which they could find their purchase.

Just politics revising the Law of Thermodynamics because big corn and environmentalists know science.

Get ready for the price of food to go up. That's what happened here because corn is in nearly everything!

Ethanol is one of the biggest scams ever perpetuated on us by our Govt. Add 10% E, lose 10% of your mileage, spew 10% more exhaust to go a given distance and have the rubber seals in your fuel delivery system disintegrate. And all for the benefit of BIG AGRICULTURE. Now they want us to go to 15%, E85, Feh!

And then they almost eliminate where you can purchase non-ethanol gas. Luckily we still have a few stations around here where you can buy it if you want to pay $.20-.30 more a gallon. Which is a scam in itself. I try to use it in my bike but if on a trip it is almost impossible to find along the interstates and back East.

That's right.I was riding a 600 Honda in the north of Thailand some years ago and I could only get petrol with 10% ethanol at one fuel stop.
I got 10% less mileage and the bike seemed,by the seat of the pants dyno, to have about 10% less power.It also ran rough.I filled with straight petrol at the earliest opportunity and things went back to normal.I haven't used it in anything since.
10% ethanol seems 10% worse for everything IMO,and that's not counting the damage to the engines using it.

1.5 gallons of ethanol has the same energy content as 1.0 gallon of gasoline.

The energy content of 1.0 US gallon of ethanol is 76,100 BTU, compared to 114,100 BTU for gasoline. (see chart above)

A flex-fuel vehicle will experience 72% of the fuel mileage MPG when using E85 (85% ethanol) products as compared to 100% gasoline. Simple calculations of the BTU values of the ethanol and the gasoline indicate the reduced heat values available to the internal combustion engine. Pure ethanol provides 2/3 of the heat value available in pure gasoline.

Marvel mystery oil. It works wonders to counter the effects of ethanol.

I haven't heard of that Chad.

Yeah, I think this Sta-Bil additive is supposed to help against ethanol related fuel problems also.

http://www.goldeagle.com/product/powersp...A&gclsrc=ds

http://marvelmysteryoil.com/

Have to add stuff that goes for $10 a gallon or more, to get back some of what we had with 100% gasoline seems kinda wonky to me. But we are stuck dealing with it and that is that.

Yeah it sucks. There used to be a station by where I work that sold non-ethanol gas for $.10 a gallon more that the Ethanol but even he went up to $.20 more. I guess we could get a Zero bike and add some speakers for some vrooom vrooom sounds

http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/

It's not so much the greenies as it is Big Corn and Big Money in coercion with Big Powers in Congress. Ethanol tainted gas is a greater polluter, and corn production is debatably damaging to the environment.

In a word................

A wild man walked up on our front porch and craped what looked like a pile of blue berries and wondered back off into the wilderness. Later that summer he died alone while thinking about the moon. No one knew who he was. As it turns out he was the illegitimate child of a preacher who had fed him boric acid and taken him off into the woods to die, shortly after he was born. But he survived and learned eat wild berries. He only ever learned to say one word, bible......"bah ball".

precisely why I never mix ethanol, blueberries and moon thinking

You are the one that said thank the green folks. Ethanol is a Republican deal along with the left. GHW Bush did the ethanol and clean air act and in 2005 GW Bush with a Republican House and Senate did the Energy policy act that increased ethanol in the gas.

Yes you should have thought the Bush family would be in it. Because its a fact. Link

the Act increases the amount of biofuel (usually ethanol) that must be mixed with gasoline sold in the United States to 4 billion US gallons (15,000,000 m3) by 2006, 6.1 billion US gallons (23,000,000 m3) by 2009 and 7.5 billion US gallons (28,000,000 m3) by 2012;[3] two years later, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 extended the target to 36 billion US gallons (140,000,000 m3) by 2022.[4]