Gasoline savings from ethanol: zero?
September 12th, 2007 by Jim JustGary Dikkers in a guest post at Robert Rapier’s blog R-Squared relates his personal experience with E10. His conclusions:
Time after time, I have arrived at consistently similar results: When I burn E10, I get about 29 mpg at steady highway speeds, and when I burn straight gasoline, I get about 32 mpg.
That three miles per gallon doesn’t sound like much of difference does it? But let’s try a little thought experiment and imagine a theoretical trip of 320 miles.
- If I use gasoline I would burn 10 gallons.
- If I use E10 I would burn 11 gallons of that fuel.
But 90% of that 11 gallons of E10 would be gasoline. And what is 90% of 11? A: 9.9 gallons.
That means whether I burn gasoline or E10, I would burn almost exactly the same amount of gasoline on that theoretical trip.
Admitting his experience wasn’t scientific, he found a dataset that validated his experience. Read the rest of this entry »