What is ethanol?

When my family was driving back from dinner with a few friends I noticed that at my local gas station they were offering ethanol at $2.89 per gallon. Now, my question to you, is can Ethanol be used with any kind of car? Is it better than gas? What are its advantages? Its disadvantages?

Probably what you saw advertised was E85 a fuel high in ethanol. Only engines designed to use E85 can run it. Its main advantage is a fuel that is cleaner to produce and burn. The low price of it is due to subsidies, so I'm not sure how much non-subsidized E85 would cost. A disadvantage is the limited number of pumps that have E85. Also, you can't put regular gas into an engine designed for E85. There are also concerns about land use in regard to the biomass needed to produce ethanol.

What is ethanol? Ethanol is basically a grain alcohol used for beverages and fuel. It is also called ethyl alcohol or drinking alcohol. What most people don’t know is that ethanol is used as a solvent intended for human contact or consumption. Ethanol burns cleanly and has a long history of being used as fuel. In fact, ethanol is what Henry Ford’s Model T vehicle ran on.

People in the Midwest have been making ethanol for a long time because of easy access to the ingredients they need to make it. Sugar ethanol is also easy to make. It was not uncommon for people to have homemade distilleries used to make what was once called moonshine or white lightning.

There are two types of ethanol. What is known as denatured alcohol is actually pure ethanol. There is also absolute ethanol which is generally purified ethanol containing no more than one percent water. Absolute ethanol was first obtained in 1706 when Johann Tobias filtered distilled ethanol through charcoal.

Besides being used as fuel and in alcoholic beverages, ethanol is also used in medical wipes and most common antibacterial hand sanitizer gels. Ethanol is effective against most bacteria, fungi and many viruses, but is ineffective against bacterial spores.

Ethanol is also sometimes used as an antidote for methanol poisoning and ethylene glycol poisoning, despite ethanol’s own toxicity at high doses. Since ethanol makes a good solvent, it is what most manufacturers used to make perfumes, paints and tinctures.

Pure ethanol is tasteless and odorless. Pure or highly concentrated ethanol may bring about permanent damage to living tissue on contact. It also cools unbroken skin because of its rapid evaporation. Ethanol is also a known depressant and is considered to be a drug. Death from ethyl alcohol poisoning is possible when the blood alcohol level reaches at least 0.4%. The use of ethanol is prohibited if the person is also barbiturates, benzodiazepines, narcotics, or phenothiazines. Ethanol is not a known carcinogen, but can aggravate existing cancer conditions

Ethenol is also added to normal gas as much as 10% at some stations. It's said not not give better gas millage overall. Which I consider a filler because of that but can help clean the engine.