Is there any chance that Wisconsin can get rid of this scam?

Nope. But they want to raise it to 15%.

I do a lot of road-tripping. Be glad you can still get 91 octane without ethanol here.


It's especially bad in liberal states, and states with a large farming industry. Ethanol in everything.

But if you're out in the middle of nowhere, where the farmers have to fuel up, you'll magically find a lot of non-ethanol 85-87 octane choices available.

That should tell you something. The farmers have no problem pumping out the corn for the ethanol, but won't put it into their machinery.

The EPA is projected to nearly double the 4.7 billion gallon ethanol mandate for 2016

That's not how it works, and it has nothing to do with "farmers not wanting it". The reason you see it away from the city, is that the cities tend to have high ozone levels, so the EPA mandates reformulated gas for them. In WI, there are currently 6 counties in the Southeast corner of the state which consistently fail the EPA standards. Every other county is allowed to sell E-free gas, but they usually only have it in premium. BP is probably the most reliable for having it, so watch for the BP sign, or use the Pure Gas app on your cell phone.

And BTW, the vast majority of farm machinery runs on diesel, not gasoline.

I wonder if my car is polluting much as I drive a 30 mile round trip to get gas for my mower and blower? Too bad the station 1 mile from my house has only crap gas.

A list of stations in Wisconsin with ethanol-free gas (outside of the Milwaukee area which is under the EPA mandate): Pure-Gas.org

I find that Kwik-Trip, which was one of the first stations to get ethanol infused gas, is now often the best option for avoiding it.  

There may also be ways of removing ethanol from contaminated gasoline such as by adding water and then using an oil-water separator to remove the resulting water and ethanol mixture.

Correct, they are dropping the ozone standard from 75 PPM to 70 PPM. It doesn't sound like much, but it is going to put a shitload of more counties into the reformulated fuel mandates. Fuck the EPA and Fuck BHO. Sorry, I'm grumpy tonight.

Milwaukee and Chicago have met Clean Air Act ozone standards and have been reclassified.  There was a lawsuit about it settled last year IIRC.  The only other area of non-attainment is one of the particulate matter standards which has nothing to do with auto emissions.  So why didn't the reformulated gas go away?  The truth is a lot more complicated than just the CAA; lots of politics, and YES lots of handout-ready farmers.

I say fuck it and burn E85 in my race car since it is basically cheap race fuel for which I'm already paying (industry subsidies from my taxes).

You are correct that there is a lot of politics involved, but you don't understand why the reformulated gas didn't go away. They keep moving the goalposts! The 1997 8-hour standard (for ozone) was 84 PPB, so in 2008 they lowered it to 75. When they started to make that limit, the EPA decided to lower it to 70 PPB (Oct 1, 2015). It's a game you can't win, because the Feds want ethanol to stay in place.    

LOL I understand; the question was rhetorical.

The great irony is that, while oxygenated, ethanol doesn't give up its oxygen during the burning process (the hydroxyl group hydrogenates and makes water) so the initial purpose of using an "oxygenated" gasoline product are lost.  The whole point of using MTBE back in the day was the ethers give up their oxygen during combustion, making a more efficient burn (that's a very basic way to look at it).  Problem was MTBE is detectable by humans (taste) at the ppb or ppt level, and it started getting into ground water from station runoff where they were using it (CA rings a bell).  So they looked elsewhere, and low and behold, EtOH was chosen.  It doesn't make any sense from an economical or environmental (or chemical) perspective, but it bought a whole lotta farm and distillery votes.

Like analogous government scams, it isn't ever going away at this point... like Social Security, Welfare, etc.

Like some kind of Social Herpes that only gets attention from the populace at large when there is a flare up, but is otherwise getting ignored or (worse yet) spread.

LOL herpes...LOL

Rick...2 funny

V
OUT

I've played around with adding alcohol while hooked up to the 4-gas or 5-gas, and more alcohol will normally reduce HC and CO. Some people used to use it to get cars to pass, if they were right on the edge. But I've only tried it on carbed and TBI engines, which naturally had higher levels than a port injected engine with OBDII. On a port-injected vehicle (in good mechanical condition), which already burns really clean, I suspect that the difference would be so negligible that it would be hard to see. If you had an OBDII vehicle that was starting to burn some oil, and the catalyst was wearing out, adding ethanol would probably help reduce CO and HC, just like it did when we did it on TBI engines. And it's not just from leaning the mixture, because the O2 sensor is always maintaining the A/F ratio (unless it's an old carbed vehicle without O2 sensor). It does somehow help the combustion process. But newer vehicles burn so clean that it's completely unnecessary, and like you said, it's politics, and it's not going away.

When you factor it all, fertilizer, tractor fuel use and emissions, electricity and water used, and more, it uses up more energy than it gives! The only thing keeping it going is your tax dollars going to a handful of political crooks in the form of subsidies to the ethanol lobby billionaires.

Funny how a Union Loving ,Walker hater whines about Ethanol... Pot.... Kettle...

Walker is a loser, and so are you for kissing his koch bought ass.

Now this thread is getting up to speed....

lol. Just......go.....away........

Walker 2016

See.. that's why we don't want him to go away... He's an excellent reminder of what we have to watch for... I'm sure he's voting for Bernie....

Locked thread and blocked from the HTF.