The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 147
Viton, Fluoroelastomer is a rubber invented by Dupont in the 1950s and first
used in automobiles in the late 1950s. There are two important points about
this:
• The first is that Dupont was one of the three partners in the leadedgasoline patents (with General Motors and Standard Oil), and because of
gasoline's - especially leaded gasoline's - corrosive characteristics,
Dupont obviously had it in their best interest to develop a rubber that was
very resistant to leaded gasoline.
• The second point is that the use of Viton in automobile engine components beginning only in the late 1950s would explain why ethanol and
ethanol-gasoline blends in all the previous years never caused any problems, and why there is an absence of reports citing ethanol-related damage during the many decades that ethanol-gasoline blends were extensively used outside of the United States (this is the salient point behind
the editorial I published in December 2017 - The Hypocrisy of Big Oil and
API,” which you can find in Section 1 of this book).
