Ethanol Fuel Efficiency

Ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol, pure alcohol, grain alcohol, or drinking alcohol, is used as fuel as well. The ethanol that is used as fuel is ethyl alcohol, a colourless, volatile and flammable liquid. In United States, it is used to oxygenate gasoline, while in Brazil, it is used by flex fuel light vehicles as bio fuel in place of gasoline. It was found that in the year 2008, both the countries contributed for 89 per cent of world production of ethanol.
Albeit, ethanol has innumerable uses, it is used as a major ingredient in alcoholic beverages, it used as an antiseptic, antidote, as a solvent etc. But its major single use is as a fuel for vehicles and fuel additives. Till date, Brazil, boasts of the largest national fuel ethanol industry. As mentioned above, in Brazil ethanol is used as bio fuel as an alternative to gasoline and the gasoline sold here, contains at least 25 per cent anhydrous ethanol, i.e. ethanol with even less than 1 per cent of water. The reason why brazil, holds the excellence at production of ethanol, all around the world is that, it has high carbon sequestration capabilities of sugar plantation and hence making it efficient enough  to fight the climate change.

If go back in history, we find that first of all ethanol was used as fuel by a T ford car , which was a first mass produced automobile , made by Henry Ford, and was suppose to run on pure anhydrous alcohol. But in today’s time, ethanol is not used as in its 100 per cent pure form as fuel. its combustion in the internal combustion engine produces many incomplete combustion , produced by heavy amounts of formaldehyde and gasoline which results into a photochemical reactivity that produces a lot of ground level ozone. In United States, the ethanol addition to gasoline helps in reduction of hydrocarbon emissions, volatile organic compounds, butadiene emissions in addition to carcinogenic benzene.
It has been found that, the exhaustion of ethanol generates 2.14 times more ozone than , the gasoline exhaustion.

In 2006 too, the largest production of ethanol was done by the United States, and Brazil. In Brazil, it is found that more than 20 per cent cars, use 100 per cent ethanol as fuel but that includes only flex fuel engines. Now what are flex fuel engines? Flex fuel engines are those that have the capability to work all ethanol or all gasoline or a mixture of both, ethanol and gasoline. The reason, why Brazil supports such large production is that it is been blessed with a large infrastructure that helps in generation from domestically grown sugar cane. The reason why sugarcane is preferred over corn is that, it not only has larger concentration of sucrose in it but also it is quite much easy to be extracted.  Apart from that, the bagasse ( it is the fibre that is left after the juice has been extracted from sugarcane) generated in the process does not go in waste , is rather used in the power plants as an efficient to generate electricity.

Ethanol is not only used as motor vehicle fuel, but it is also used as fuel for cooking and lighting. In our country, such stoves are developed, that can run on even 50 per cent by weight ethanol or water mixture. Apart from this it is also used as propellant in rockets and as a fuel that is used to power the direct-ethanol fuel cells.