ngl im fairly confident that using ethanol as a fuel-additive instead of methanol is purely a subsidy for corn farmers. like methanol can be made from just about any organic waste product while ethanol requires specifically sugars making it cost about 10 times as much for the same volume. in fact (despite an ongoing price spike due to certain other fuel sources being currently somewhat unavailable) it only costs like 0.60€ per liter in bulk (obviously more when sold to consumers cause this is leaving out additives and logistics but even so its about a third of the current price of petrol)

so the stuffs been cheaper than petrol for years, burns more cleanly than it too, it biodegrades making spills effectively benign so long as you dilute it with water, it can be produced from either natural gas (an existing cheap side product of the petrochemical industry) or literal agricultural waste (less economical but entirely practical when fossil fuels become unavailable), has a higher octane rating and actively cleans your engine by dissolving most contaminants with the primary downside being that its mildly more toxic than gasoline (and even then, it has double the acceptable air concentration limit of regular ethanol which we can and do drink for fun, mind you)

literally what is the downside

@coolbean methanol attacks aluminum and magnesium, degrades more elastomers, and phase separation is harder to manage, also wasn't MTBE phased out because it poisoned the groundwater?

@coolbean the fact that it's made cheaper from natural gas makes me think we'll never make it from anything else unless outlawed and there will be shitloads of lobbying against that again

@k4t3 afaik the aluminium corrosion issue can be addressed using additives. not entirely but enough to make it acceptable (thats also why methanol is relatively common as a racing fuel). worst case scenario you have to use steel sleeves in your cylinders which is also already a not exactly unusual practice

@snacks as far as i care thats fine. it still reduces emissions and CAN be produced in a renewable way even if thats not actually done currently. not to mention that plainly, not every country has large oil deposits and biomethanol would permit them to produce fuel domestically

@k4t3 as for mtbe, the issue isnt that it was leaking into the water supply but rather that you could TASTE that it was leaking into a water supply which is... so unimaginably funny to me

@k4t3 like ah fuck this water contaminant has too noticable of a taste. we must replace it with the expensive flavourless alternative. this definitely isnt the result of agricultural lobbying and negligence in fixing leaky gas stations, no they would never

@k4t3 anyway, pure ethanol fuel (instead of using it as just an additive) actually reduces total groundwater pollution because, like i already stated, it biodegrades

@k4t3 and gasoline doesnt

@k4t3 its also less carcinogenic than gasoline. and may i repeat, a third of the price currently