The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 381
and bathe in is not corrosive, it's that our bodies are not very susceptible to
water corrosion.
You can't just put gasoline in any old container, it must be a container that is
not susceptible to gasoline corrosion. And when tetra-ethyl lead was added to
gasoline to stop engine knock, the General Motors and Standard Oil people had
to come up with another ingredient to mitigate the highly corrosive nature of
tetra-ethyl lead (they used ethylene bromide, another highly poisonous substance). Conversely, alcohol (ethanol) such as scotch, rum, vodka, whiskey,
and brandy can be left in a glass or plastic bottle, or metal flask in your home
for years, and there will be no degradation of the alcohol nor the containers
during that time. There will also be no so-called "phase separation," which is
caused by gasoline’s inability to safely “hold” water the way that ethanol does.
Rubbing alcohol presents another good example of how compatible alcohol is
with different materials, regardless of what the rubbing alcohol is made from.
Some rubbing alcohols are just regular grain alcohols with a denaturizing ingredient to render it non-drinkable. And if you have rubbing alcohol in your home
chances are that it's in a plastic bottle. The question to then ask is why doesn't
the alcohol eat away at the plastic bottle? The answer is because plastic is
resistant to ethanol's solvent characteristics.
During prohibition (when alcohol was supposedly not available in America) and
in the decades subsequent to the end of prohibition, automobile parts makers
had to contend with gasoline corrosion, not ethanol corrosion.
In those regions of the world (like England) where ethanol-gasoline blends were
available for decades, they didn't experience any greater problems using the
ethanol-gasoline blends because it wasn’t the ethanol that the parts were susceptible to, it was the gasoline. It wasn’t until the late 1950s, when DuPont invented a new rubber material called Viton that gasoline’s corrosiveness was
contained.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, when vehicles were being built to meet E10 standards, very little had to actually be done differently.
Why doesn't the person described as an "automotive expert" and called "America's Top Woman in Car Care, Education and Auto Industry News" know this
information? Why doesn't she know it as a result of my 2013 editorial, in addition
to numerous other critical editorials that were published as a result of her FOXNews appearance. Clearly, she has no contradictory information, because if
