By DEAN BILLING.
Reading Ben Visser’s blog, More questions about ethanol, reminded me that December is the month the EPA is supposed to set the ethanol quotas for the next year.
For the first time in several years, the EPA has published the quotas in accordance with the schedule set in the law EISA 2007. The EPA Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2017 can be found here at the EPA website.
Suffice it to say, the upbeat tone of the announcement masks the serious problems with mandating ethanol blending into the nation’s auto gasoline supply.
There are a number of ironies in this announcement, but to give you a little insight into the absurdity that abounds, I’ll present just one fact.
EISA 2007 mandated that the amount of renewable fuels that must be blended into our fuel supply shall be 24 billion gallons in 2017 (See page H.R. 6-31), yet this announcement specifies that only 19.28 billion gallons shall be blended.
If you want more information about this divergence, you might peruse this article in the Ethanol Producer Magazine. Be warned, there is a lot of gobbledygook in the article, but ethanol production isn’t working out as planned.
I hear you. You’re asking: What the heck does all this have to do with the disappearance of mogas from the aviation fuel supply?
Well, the answer is the availability of ethanol free unleaded auto gas (E0) may be coming to an end in the U.S., and unleaded auto gas without ethanol is an approved aviation fuel, what we in aviation call mogas.
There are currently 113 airports in the U.S. that make mogas available, to say nothing about the thousands of pilots that purchase E0 at a corner gas station and self-fuel their aircraft. I’m one of them.
According to this article in Hemmings Daily, the days of ethanol free auto fuel are numbered. The EPA wanted to do away with it in 2017, but that doesn’t appear likely.
If you don’t want to take the time to read the article, here is the pertinent quote: “Despite worries that the Environmental Protection Agency would put an end to ethanol-free gasoline sales with its Renewable Fuels Standard ruling for 2017, the agency permitted E0 a reprieve at the same time it declared its intention to transition the entire nation’s fuel supply to E10 and above.”
So we’ve been warned. (Actually, there are some scarier pronouncements in the article. You should read it if you use mogas in your airplane.)
I want to thank Todd Petersen, of Petersen Aviation, for alerting me to the Hemmings article, which reminded me that this was the time of the year for the EPA to set ethanol quotas for the coming year and I needed to do my annual research on ethanol quotas required by EISA 2007.
This will be my last GAfuels blog. I want to thank the Sclair family for the opportunity to contribute to their fine publication and Editor Janice Wood for her support and editorial assistance. Todd Petersen has agreed to contribute GAfuels blogs in the future.
If you are flying a plane with a Rotax engine and your fuel tanks do not corrode with Ethanol as is the case with most SLSA Mogas 91E10 is totally useable. No need for non Ethanol gas.
My understanding is that it’s possible to remove the ethanol from mogas by adding some water, stirring the mixture a bit and then draining off the water/ethanol mix from the bottom of a tank. What is left in the tank is gasoline, but what octane it is after this, I can’t guess. Maybe some chemists here can contribute.
If you are flying a Rotax with tanks that do not corrode with Ethanol as is the case with most SLSA Mogas 91E10 is totally useable. No need for non Ethanol gas.
Leigh,
I’m not a chemist, but did ethanol separations for many years using water. I did not experience any problems using the separated gasoline in my 80 octane Bonanza motor. The ethanol removal accounted to an octane loss of about 2 points. I used the least expensive gas I could purchase. I tested every batch for ethanol content and used enough water to produce a 50/50 ethanol /water mixture.
The oil companies have placed additives in gasoline blends to keep the ethanol from phase separating. The additives made the process a little longer. Time for the separation to be complete went from 1/2 day to a day and a half. I processed 50 gallons at a time.
Probably not a good idea as we pointed out in a previous blog: http://generalaviationnews.com/2011/10/30/washing-ethanol-out-of-mogas-part-ii/#more-52720
Ethanol is a great octane fuel component of gasoline but has its limitation as well. With 25 years as an A&P mechanic for both air medical operation and general aviation, there are two sides to this story. Over the past 6 years, I have transitioned to fuel research and co-authored several Society of Automotive Engineering papers.
First we should separate off road versus on road vehicle which Mogas and marine fall under off road. For on road, the autos want more octane and I can reference dozens of studies looking at blends up to E30. For on road vehicles with close fuel vent systems and O2 sensors supporting computer calibration, simply adding ethanol provides better efficiency with lower emissions.
What Dean and others need to recognize is that the RFS being talked about in the cited article is not going to push E0 out of the market place. What will make E0 more difficult to find is when oil refineries start to make a lower octane fuel for ethanol blends over E10 which is already being reported today.
If you are purchasing E0 today, you may not know this but you are buying a 50/50 blend of regular 84 AKI and premium 91 AKI BOB (Blendstock for Oxygenated Blending) originally produced and shipped with the intention of adding 10% ethanol just to meet minimum octane. If a new BOB for E15 is ever economically beneficial, you can bet the oil companies will make an 81 AKI BOB.
There are plenty of studies out there to say ethanol is a good fuel as well as not so good pertaining to ethanol. The best advice I can offer is to review the fuel data to see if ethanol was simply added to gasoline or was the gasoline changed as ethanol was added to the fuel matrix. Most API and EPA studies manipulate the fuel blending by using the term match blending. If there is one thing I have learned in the past 6 years is that whoever controls the blending of the test fuels controls the outcome of the study.
The best approach that benefits both consumers and the autos is to require all blends over E10 to be splash blended. Meaning that ethanol is simply added to gasoline. For fuels like E15 or E20, the consumers for on road use gets higher octane which means no mpg loss. The auto’s get what they want in that higher octane enters the market and starts octane competition. For those who think E10 is going away, E10 stays around for many years to come. For those who want E0, there will still be current BOB’s at terminals if E0 87 or 91 AKI is in demand.
Octane is money to oil refineries and the price of octane at the refinery is increasing since we now have all this sour crude in the Bakkens and West Texas that produces lower octane gasoline.
Want to protect what E0 is available, ask that higher blends are only splash blended to keep oil companies from making a cheaper and lower quality gasoline.
Steve Vander Griend
[email protected]
Mixing ethanol in gasoline is a bad idea in every way except for octane increase. Ethanol raises vapor pressure, reduces shelf life, leads to corrosion damage, and can phase separate. What need to be done is a return to free markets and this ethanol gasoline availability will be reduced.
agreed. ethanol sucks.
Fell free to set me straight but the mpg is a function of how many BTUS are in a gallon of fuel not its octane rating.
The higher the octane rating the less volatile and slower it burns.
For instance a gallon a diesel fuel has more BTUs than gas.
And ethanol has fewer BTUs per gallon than gas.
“What Dean and others need to recognize is that the RFS being talked about in the cited article is not going to push E0 out of the market place.”
Not according to the Hemmings Daily article cited in my blog: “Despite worries that the Environmental Protection Agency would put an end to ethanol-free gasoline sales with its Renewable Fuels Standard ruling for 2017, the agency permitted E0 a reprieve at the same time it declared its intention to transition the entire nation’s fuel supply to E10 and above.”
Autoweek seems rather pessimistic too: http://autoweek.com/article/classic-cars/ethanol-free-gasoline-appears-be-safe-next-year-least
Time to lobby the Trump administration to reign-in the EPA. No ethanol in gasoline is very important to a lot
of different users. We don’t need and shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of political malpractice.
We’ll miss you, Dean. Thanks for everything!
Thank you Mr. Billings for you informative articles.
Hopefully someone will fill your shoes and the information
flow continues and keeps us informed.
I don’t have an airplane (thinking about it everyday though) but I do operate farm trucks, farm equipment and cars none of which I will knowingly put a drop of ethanol fuel in lest I have no other choice. That stuff should have never have been forced upon us by the govment. Case of big agra lobbyists “twisting” arms in Congress. Ours is the best govment money can buy.
Your writing will be missed, thanks for making the time to write for us.
I wonder what our friends in the Boating industry will say about this? They use much more Ethanol free gasoline than GA burns via MoGas or 100LL.
It was the recreational marine industry that had the most to say during the comment period this year and swayed the EPA to leave them a few crumbs. But from here on the EPA is in a bind because the production of E85, which is Renewable Fuel under the act has gone nowhere so they dumped all the ethanol into E10, which ironically is never mentioned in the act. Go figure.
Might this plan to remove E0 as an option be related to the 2018 plan for unleaded AVGAS? I use MOGAS for my airplane and lawn equipment, as well as some older cars that are not operated often enough to keep fresh E10 in the tank. I would hate to have to pay even higher prices for unleaded AVGAS just to avoid the headaches that E10 causes in my equipment.
Has absolutely nothing to do with the 100 octane unleaded. I doubt the EPA even knows that E0 is aviation fuel. We don’t use enough of it to show up in any statistics. Certainly the FAA and the aviation alphabets didn’t comment when the EPA set the E0 quotas for 2017. None of them know that E0 is an aviation fuel either.
Mr. Billings, Thank you for your contributions to the GA News. You have done much to keep the available alternatives to 100LL in front of there readers. Hopefully the recreational users of E0 gasoline will help keep some production available.
I read somewhere that the EPA continues to push turning food into gas at a cost of production of close to $15 per gallon. These are the same people who probably had food fights when they were in their highchairs as babies. This is crazy. Eat corn and keep ethanol out of the internal combustion engines. Tune back the EPA.
It’s not really the EPA, it’s Congress. 🙁 The EPA experts think this is crazy, but Congress (the Republican Congress, in fact) mandated it… because Iowa corn farmers bribed them to…
Iowa corn producers and their lobyists push congress into this….try to get the sequence right. And the EPA is behind it as much as them…the EPA would have you eating air if they could get away with it.
Dean,
Thanks for contributions to the Ethanol free movement! I have enjoyed reading your articles. Although it would be terrible for E10 to become mandated across the board, I have hope that companies like Swift Fuel can gain traction with their Ethanol free offerings