Nissan plans to quietly market its FlexFuel version of the Armada that’ll be sold in areas where E85 is available. We won’t tell anybody! Ooops...
E85 is getting a pretty woman. Earth Biofuels announced that Julia Roberts will become a spokeswoman for the company and chair its new advisory board.
Viagra is facing some, umm, stiff competition from ethanol.The Xethanol Corporation, which uses wood chips and solid waste to make ethanol, announced that it will close on the sale of a phased-out Pfizer manufacturing plant.
Global interest in ethanol as an alternative fuel has sweetened the price of sugar in the commodities market. Analysts attribute the rapid price inflation to escalating demand for ethanol - sugar is one of the raw materials of the fuel - and recent supply constraints. Is Splenda next?
Some people are driving FlexFuel cars and don’t even know it. Now OnStar updates will tell users in monthly diagnostic e-mails if their vehicle is capable of using flexible fuels like E85.
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This is a part of the problem
Note that the touted flex-fuel vehicle isn't going to be a hybrid Altima. It's an Armada, which gets an abysmal 15 MPG economy rating from the EPA. On E85, you can probably reduce that to 10 MPG.
Guzzlers like this are unsustainable regardless of the fuel supply; we can never make enough ethanol to slake their thirst. On top of this, nobody is going to buy E85 to run them unless its price is cut to about 2/3 that of gasoline (which is only going to happen with massive subsidies from taxpayers). The only reasons to call them "flex fuel" are:
Everyone talks about cellulosic ethanol. ORNL calculated that we might be able to get 1.3 billion tons of biomass per year from various sources. Iogen's enzyme process can only get about 87 gallons per ton, or 113 billion gallons of ethanol per year; Syntec's process has an actual yield of 114 gallons per ton (presumably of biomass; coal and waste oil have more energy per ton and would yield more). Ethanol has only 62% of the energy of gasoline, so the yield is equivalent to 70 to 92 billion gallons of gasoline per year.
The USA burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Ethanol from biomass can replace 65% of that at most. That leaves nothing for diesel, heating oil, jet fuel, chemicals, or other fuels like coal and gas.
Flex-fuel Armada
Guzzler all decked in green paint
Ecocidal fraud.
Engineer-Poet