This all sounds good, but E85 in my area is much more expensive per unit of energy than oil. That is, it is 2/3 as efficient as oil at 87.5% of the price. When oil was at $4 a gallon, E85 was at $3.50. For it to cost the same to move the vehicle the same distance, it would have to cost $3 a gallon when gas was at $4.
I don’t see E85 as the right fuel for our future if it’s more expensive than $4 a gallon gas, even with enormous subsidies given to ADM. It also increases the prices of agricultural commodities to the extent that third world food supplies were disrupted. None of these things are good.
Recent news stories have shown that biological fuels can be reformulated to be the same as gas, with microbes customized to excrete fuel, and that sounds more like our future. In that case we would not need cars capable of running E85 and all present cars could use the new fuels — much more promising in my view.
D
