Hello, and welcome to Simplified on PowerDrift, where we take complicated ideas and break
them down into something simple so you can digest it easily and use it with your daily
life with your automobile and today we're talking about the new source of fuel that's
in the mix and that's called ethanol.
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Unfortunately, I wish things were that simple with ethanol as well.
So what is ethanol?
Ethanol is one type of alcohol and you have other ones right, methanol, etc.
and what you should know about alcohol is that various kinds of alcohol have been used
to fuel engines throughout the course of human history.
So using ethanol in ICE engines and petrol engines especially is not going to be something
dramatically different, it's not something brand new or revolutionary.
But the reason why everybody's interested in ethanol suddenly is because ethanol can
be created from biomass, which means crops like corn or sugarcane, etc, can be used to
generate what effectively is something you can burn in your car and power it and go distances.
This is important because crops are considered a renewable source of energy, which means
when I run out of a corn crop, I can grow more corn.
When the sugarcane crop is done, I can grow more sugarcane
and therefore I can keep generating a bigger source of ethanol.
Now, this does lead to a problem
and there are some case studies where the use and increasing use of ethanol as a fuel
for automotive applications has caused a lot of land that was used for food crops,
to now be used for fuel crops causing an artificial shortage in the availability of that food source.
But, I think India is very far away from that situation,
so while that is a genuine issue, it's something that we can deal with later.
And in time, technology has also moved on where ethanol can be made from waste biomass
rather than active biomass, which means the parts of the plant that we use for food are
not the parts of the plant that can be used to generate the ethanol anymore
and which means you can actually double leverage the same land create ethanol from one part
of the plant and find another part of the plant to eat, so it's not that much of a crisis.
Now, in India, what we've got so far are ethanol mixes that range between 5% and 8%
and they're officially listed as E10, and the E designation means ethanol mix petrol
and you've got various kinds of things from E5, which is 5% ethanol, E10, 10%, E25,
that should be self explanatory,
E85 and in some countries E100 as well. The country that is at the forefront of the ethanol revolution,
as it were is Brazil, which ran into fuel issues many, many years ago
and for decades together, they've run all kinds of mixes of ethanol
and today, there are some very, very high levels and Brazil is probably the world's
greatest market for flex fuel vehicles, which can run not just pure ethanol, but all kinds
of mixes with petrol quite happily, because the systems are designed to adapt to whatever the fuel is.
And the reason why we need this adaptation to happen is because ethanol as a fuel is
a little bit different from petrol.
First of all, the amount of energy in ethanol is a little bit lower than in petrol, litre to litre
and that means you have to burn more ethanol to achieve the same result.
The other thing about ethanol is, ethanol actually contains oxygen molecules inside the compound,
which means that when it enters the combustion chamber, it's bringing oxygen with it,
so you don't need so much oxygen.
So if a car were to run 14.6:1 air fuel mix, ethanol engine might only run 12.6:1
but the flipside of this is because it brings its own oxygen, ethanol is actually quite happy
to run in higher compression engines and produce greater results.
So there are pros and cons to using ethanol.
But the big reason to use ethanol is, especially for India, we import a lot of our petrol and diesel
and if we can replace even 10% or 20% of that with ethanol, we save a huge amount on the
import bill and that's why the government is so excited about it.
And what they've done most recently is that while they've always had policy to increase
the amount of ethanol in petrol that you buy, they have actually moved the datelines forward
just like they did with BS6 and that means that the manufacturers are
going to struggle again to meet a completely new requirement
and there is obviously some resistance to this because the industry already says that
the five-year insurance law caused a hiccup, the ABS law caused a hiccup,
the airbags laws caused a hiccup, the BS6 arrival so early and so fast caused a hiccup
and they've already done all of the work to put these things in stability,
and now the government is saying please adapt to ethanol as well and on an accelerated schedule,
and that's where the resistance is coming from.
But the biggest issue with ethanol perhaps is people worrying about what happens to their
engines, which should have been running pure petrol or E10
and now suddenly, they're being required to run E25, in as little as five or seven years from now.
And the answer to that is most modern vehicles already make accommodations for ethanol.
One accommodation that needs to be made is ethanol is more corrosive than petrol
and there are chances that it will eat things like the inner plastic liners of your fuel tank,
various rubber seals and gaskets that it encounters along the way
and there is a chance that ethanol will corrode these things.
But this is true more or less completely about older vehicles rather than more recent ones.
And the thumb rule seems to say, anything manufactured after 2001
should be able to run ethanol without too much trouble at all.
The other adaptation that needs to be made, as I said, is that ethanol evaporates slower
it contains less energy than petrol
and when you mix it, the properties of the engine change and the fuel injection system
etc. have to be able to adapt to this.
The evaporation idea means that the fuel injector might have to have bigger holes because you
need more ethanol in the combustion chamber,
whereas, the fuel injection system might have to put less air because there's ethanol in
the combustion chamber but most systems today are flexible enough to be able to adapt to
these changes, especially up to the level that the Indian government is looking at,
which is E25.
It's when you cross E25 and put more ethanol into combustion engines that you need genuinely
flex fuel vehicles, which are actually able to prefer ethanol to petrol as it were, and
be able to run well in that condition.
There were some concerns initially, that if you ran ethanol at very cold temperatures,
and we're talking zero and below or something like that, at those kind of low temperatures,
ethanol engines were harder to start
and those engines used to have traditionally a small petrol tank,
which would be used to start the car.
No longer is the case today, technology has moved on
and most cars that run E5, E10, up to E25, don't actually have any cold
starting problems either, technology have solved that issue as well.
So as a user, this is going to be an interruption for the manufacturer more than from you.
If you bought a car in the very recent past or a motorcycle in the most recent past, I don't
think you'll really face a challenge when you go to E25 in seven or eight years time,
and of course manufacturers will adapt their vehicles to run E25.
So if you're buying a vehicle five or six years from now, chances are it will be E25
ready when you buy it. And that's all you need to know about ethanol.
If you've got more questions, leave us a comment.
If there are other topics that you think should be on Simplified, that's all you have to do,
fill up a comment box and we'll get right on it.
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