The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 197
the most corrosive of all water, salt water. It's not that the water we consume
and bathe in is not corrosive, it's that our bodies are not very susceptible to
water corrosion.
It's the same with engine fuels. You can't just put gasoline in any old container,
it must be a container that is not susceptible. The same is true for alcohol (ethanol). Everyone knows that you can leave scotch, rum, vodka, whiskey, and
brandy in a glass bottle or metal flask in your home for years and there will be
no degradation of the alcohol nor the container during that time. There will also
be no so-called "phase separation," even if you leave the top off the bottle although you will lose some or all of the liquid because of evaporation.
The same is true of rubbing alcohol, regardless of what the rubbing alcohol is
made from. Some rubbing alcohols are just regular grain alcohols with a denaturizing ingredient to render them non-drinkable. And if you have rubbing alcohol in your home chances are that it is in a plastic bottle. The question to then
ask yourself is why doesn't the alcohol eat away at the plastic bottle? The answer is because these bottles were manufactured to be resistant to ethanol's
solvent characteristics.
During prohibition (when alcohol was supposedly not available in America) and
in the decades after the end of prohibition, automobile parts makers used materials that were not highly susceptible to gasoline corrosion. The parts didn't
not corrode because the gasoline was not corrosive, but because of the materials used. If ethanol fuel or blends had been America's primary engine fuels
then auto parts manufacturers would have used parts that were resistant to
ethanol.
Incidentally, in those parts of the world (like England) where ethanol-gasoline
blends were always available, they didn't experience any greater problems using the ethanol-gasoline blends because the automobiles built for use in those
countries used parts that were resistant to gasoline and to ethanol. Moreover,
you have your rubber facts backward; ethanol is compatible with many more
types of rubber than gasoline and any of the aromatic substances (benzene,
toluene, and xylene) that the oil industry would like to use in place of ethanol.
Historically, it was gasoline that was highly corrosive to rubber until the late
1950s when DuPont invented a new rubber (called Viton) that was not susceptible to gasoline or the aromatics.
There are another couple of points I'd like to address: You wrote that the odor
of the thick nasty coat of black tar will make you vomit it's so nauseating. The