Ethanol – Is It Good For Your Engine?

I fully intended on writing about Ethanol fuel and the effect it is having on food prices and shortages when I stumbled upon this article about boat owners complaining that ethanol fuel is causing their boats to break down.

I wondered if there were other complaints or concerns about this. Well, it seems that there were a few concerns from aviators as well. It seems that it absorbs water and moisture which is not good for engines.

Next comes concern over how to transport the ethanol itself over a long distance. There are pipeline concerns. Again, the absorption of water and impurities. Transporting ethanol through pipelines would require extra maintenance and costs. As well as the added costs of storage tanks.

Supposedly, it won’t have any bad effect on cars. I hope they are right.

Richard Branson (The Virgin Guy) has even said he now regrets his almost $400 million dollar investment in biofuels because of “environmental and economic grounds.”

Saskatchewan is an obvious spot for growing ethanol crops, but with food prices soaring, many farmers want a piece of the pie. Beyond Factory Farming, said that in an “extreme situation in which 85 percent of Canada’s gasoline usage would be replaced by ethanol, 94 percent of current farmland would be required, as well as three times current wheat production.”

Lorne Gunther from the Edmonton Journal says Biofuels are nothing short of a disaster and that environmentalists are to blame as emissions worsen and the worlds poor starve. I agree with the latter part, but blaming environmentalists. Come on, since when do Governments actually listen to them? Everyone saw dollar signs. That was all that was needed to push this one through.

Even the “Little Piggies” are being slaughtered because farmers can’t meet the rising costs of feed. What to do with the land now? The Federal government is set to pay Canadian pork producers $50 million to kill off 150,000 of their pigs.

Ethanol, so what’s it good for? Big pockets, my friend. And a slimmer one for us.