I’ve had a flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) for a couple of years, a 2003 Ford Taurus. The FFV is one that can run on a mixture of ethanol (sometimes methanol, but not in my case) and gasoline, at any mixture ratio from 0% ethanol to 85% ethanol, which is what E85 is - 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. Ford has offered a flexible fuel vehicle for a while now, and I recently saw a Chevy SUV that had a “FlexFuel” tag. There are probably others, and it seems like the numbers are growing. The difference in these cars is that there’s some kind of gizmo under the hood that detects the ethanol/gasoline mixture, and adjusts fuel/air ratio and ignition timing accordingly. The car also must have special fuel supply lines to carry the ethanol, so don’t go putting E85 in your AMC Pacer just because you want to cut down on our dependence on foreign oil. You’ll just hurt the Pacer.

Just this week, I put my first tank of E85 in the Taurus. You’re probably wondering why it took me a couple of years to try out the E85. This isn’t the car I drive every day, but more importantly, there’s only one station in town (Albuquerque, NM) pumping E85. And it’s only open 8-5, M-F. Bummer, because here I have a car that, straight from the factory, can run mostly on renewable bio-fuel. You’d think with quite a few FlexFuel cars out there, you could buy E85 easier. Well, you can if you live closer to the corn it’s made from. I looked at the Alternative Fuels Data Center website’s map (www.eere.energy.gov/afdc), and there are many E85 stations in the midwest, but only a handful in the Southwest.

Before I had a chance to try E85, I watched the price a little, and it seems to be always 30 or 40 cents more than gasoline. Now, I can understand that it might be more expensive than gas. After all, gas must be collected, refined, and distibuted. But with ethanol, you have the extra step of growing the corn. But the part that bugs me is that E85’s price seems to follow the price of gasoline. I hope that the cost breakdown isn’t like this: $0.40 to make a gallon of ethanol, and 1 gallon of diesel to bring that gallon of ethanol to Albuquerque.

Anyway, I tried it. In combustion, ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline, so running on ethanol has to have less power or worse mileage, or both. The Taurus didn’t seem to run any different, and it didn’t seem to have less power. So the lower energy content must show itself mostly in the mileage. It did. For that tank, I got 13.4 mpg. Hmmmm. Now, I don’t keep track of mileage too carefully, but I think this car usually gets something like 21 mpg.

In order to do a real cost comparison between the fuels, you have to account for both the price difference and the mileage difference. I made a little table in Excel to show the cost per mile in order to compare the two fuels. CPG is cost per gallon, MPG is miles per gallon, and CPM is cost per mile. Here it is:
CPG MPG CPM
gas $2.20 21.0 $0.10
E85 $2.68 13.4 $0.20

Remember, this is a snapshot of prices and an estimate of MPG on gasoline, but it would cost about twice as much to always run my car on E85. I would be willing to pay a little extra to run E85, but not twice as much. I’m sure the economics work out better for someone buying E85 in the midwest. But I’ll be doing some research into ethanol production and economics. With many cars out there that are ready to run on E85, it seems like the government could be subsidizing this industry (or more generously, if they already are) until it can be profitable on its own. Wasn’t it just a month ago that Bush was imploring the people to help reduce our dependency on foreign oil? FFV owners aren’t going to buy E85 unless they can afford it.