A few responses on Florida selling E85

Last week, I reported on Florida's first-ever public E85 station. As luck would have it, the news aggregator Fark.com caught the link from Alt Power's homepage (thanks for the traffic, guys!) but as I read the commentary in the forum threads, I couldn't help but laugh and wonder how an article spurred such a thread on.....drinking.

First of all, Fark.com mistaken ethanol for methyl alcohol, and while I appreciate the humor, the joke would have been that much funnier if it was, in fact, correct. (Florida gets its first ethanol gas station. In related news, reports of Floridians going blind mysteriously on the rise) But thanks for trying. I do appreciate the humor! On a technicality, one poster replied by saying Well, if you want to be technical about it, most ethanol sold for industrial/chemical use is denatured alcohol. Methanol is a common ingredient used to denature ethanol. The ethanol used in E85 gasoline is probably denatured before it's mixed with the gasoline, which means there's a good chance that there is methanol in the E85.

Thanks for the clarification.

But even more interesting was the last comment from a certain poster that wrote It's funny to think that ethanol is suddenly hot news. I grew up thinking that was all there was.

And it really opened my eyes because, as a New Yorker, E85 is a new idea, as our cars on the east coast are not generally flexibile fuel vehicles. While the big motor companies have agreed to produce more FFVs, the concept is still new to those of us who rely on E10 and have no E85 pumps to go to in the event that we purchase an FFV. And it's not so much for price as it is getting rid of our dependence on foreign fuels. At least, that's what it means to me.

So while the idea of E85 is new to us, keep in mind that for those in the mid-west, it's not such an outlandish concept. E85 stations are popping up like weeds in that part of the country. If you're in the mid-west, feel free to comment here your thoughts and ideas on E85 -- give me the good, the bad, the ugly.