Ask any mechanic who works on outboard motors for reasons boaters curse ethanol and you’ll hear several hundred – as in the several hundreds of dollars it can cost to rebuild carburetors or repair other engine parts damaged by ethanol in the gasoline/ethanol blends that have become the de facto fuel for gasoline engines in this country.
Even at its lowest concentration – the ubiquitous “E10” blend of 10 percent ethanol, 90 percent gasoline – ethanol can play havoc with outboards and other “small” engines such as those powering all-terrain vehicles, chain saws and grass trimmers.
For more than a decade – since ethanol replaced methyl tertiary-butyl ether which proved an environmental and health threat, as an oxygenating agent mixed with gasoline to meet government-mandated reductions in engine emissions – boaters have struggled to deal with the damage ethanol can do to their equipment and searched for viable alternative fuel formulations that don’t have the downsides associated with ethanol.
They have a new option in the later case, albeit one currently with limited but expanding availability and a significantly higher cost, in a fuel that replaces ethanol with isobutanol. The Houston area and a handful of other spots in Texas are scheduled to see that fuel – Gulf Marine fuel – become available over the coming months.
That there is a market for such alternatives, even at a considerably higher price, speaks to the problems associated with ethanol/gas blends and the specter that fuels with even higher percentages of ethanol are coming as federal rules mandating increasing volume of “renewable fuels” – so-called biofuels such as ethanol, produced in this country almost exclusively from corn -be used in the nation’s fuel supply.
Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle at: https://www.chron.com/sports/outdoors/article/Ethanol-fueled-nightmares-could-be-over-6405626.php