The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 216
July 24, 2015
Posted by GRANDDAD1:
If I am paying for gasoline, I should be getting 100% gasoline and not a watered
down substitute. Once again Government intervening where they have no business to be. Article 1 Section 8 US Constitution outline Government responsibilities.
Reply from MARC:
Hi Granddad - You make an interesting point. It could be nice if you were able
to buy 100% gasoline and have it work in your automobile. After all, when you
hand over your dollar bills to pay for the fuel you are paying 100 cents per $1
dollar bill. It's not like you're paying with some bills that you printed that only
reflect 90 cents per $1 dollar bill. Isn't that right?
The problem is that there is no such thing as 100% gasoline, and there's a
couple of reasons for this. First, gasoline is not one single substance that is
refined from petroleum; it's actually a composite of multiple ingredients.
Second, way back, about 100 years ago as automobile technology and road
building were improving, consumers wanted vehicles that would perform better
and go faster. This required that vehicles need high compression engines. But
gasoline couldn't be used in high compression engines because gasoline
caused a hideous "knock" that would rip the engines apart. Some manufacturers, like Ford, built cars that could be manually adjusted to accept gasoline or
an alternative such as ethanol. Ethanol (alcohol) doesn't produce the knocking
problem that gasoline does.
Some fuel refiners solved the knocking problem by adding ethanol to the gasoline. But when Prohibition was enacted (largely because of Rockefeller providing money to pay off politicians to vote for Prohibition), alcohol was almost legally impossible to come by. This meant that a new fuel had to be created.
Luckily for General Motors, they had 3 very good scientists leading the charge.
They added tetra-ethyl lead to gasoline, and leaded gasoline was born. The
tetra-ethyl lead stopped the knocking and allowed vehicles to use engines that
had exclusively high compression engines. And then, because tetra-ethyl lead
is so corrosive, ethylene bromide had to be added to mitigate the corrosion.
