Here we go again, MPG will be affected more by how you ride than by ethanol.
If you are stuck in traffic, going from red light to red light, or if your riding the super slab.
The only way to get an accurate MPG is to ride the same route with ethanol fuel then non-ethanol fuel (if you can find it).
3 to 4 MPG or engine performance doesn't matter that much.
Just get on and ride, have fun and don't sweat the small stuff.
That's just MHO as I set in my snow covered house and wont ride cause of the salt on the roads.
I get your point SkyWarrior, but I commute the same route 100 miles/day, cruise control on the highway, 5-6 days a week for work. If I am just out for a joy ride, I don't really care about MPG as much as having a nice ride. It is not just "gasoline" (or more correctly "fuel", since it is not pure gasoline), it is pretty much a necessity that we all use and pay for in some way. My issue comes with the incremental increase in may other items, just to add ethanol in fuel. I don't have a problem paying for energy. But added costs to everthing delivered, manufactured and grown (food stuff) is very real and significant.
When I fueled up this morning, it cost me $15.40 for 4.4 gallons @3.499/gallon for 156 miles= 35.45 mpg (I cruise at 73 mph, so I could save a litte if I slowed down a bit). If I use 500 miles/week @$3.499/gallon= $49.22 x 52 weeks= $2559/year in fuel.
Pure gasoline (no ethanol, when I could get it locally 2 years ago, not anymore): 41.9 mpg = $2171/year (assuming 3.499 a gallon and 500 miles/week). That is a ~15% difference for 10% Ethanol. So if it is linear I expect (holding price stable) about a 22% difference for E85.
Now, what happens when fuel is north of $5/gallon (Exxon officer mentioned this is likely in 18 months). So, right now, with all the incremental changes we are approaching a 25% difference, just in fuel. What will HD charge do deliver a bike to their stores when fuel is $5/gallon @ E85 energy density?
I expect many more dealers to close as the disposable income is reduced as people choose necessity over luxury. Although, I am a strong proponent of the fuel efficiency/excitement trade off of Harley Davidson motorcycles and do my daily best to convince others to make their commutes on a HD. To me, what could be better than an entire highway with nothing but HD's!
I think sometimes the percentages get confusing when thinking of the volumes of fuel needed. You really tend to care about what is in your immediate world: what it takes to fill up your HD tank sitting in front of you. But you have to remember that it will not only cost more to fill your tank, you will get less miles traveled out of that tank AND your corndog at the local fair will cost you much more as well. (I like corndogs!
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This may give a little insight into the percentages/mpg and amount of fuel used by military. The miltary is used because it is easier to measure specifically, compared to the "public". And, the military is always looking for better, faster, cheaper...so fuel sources would be on the table. I say we bring back HD's for miltary use..
Again, it is physics and energy density. Ethanol has less energy per volume than straight gasoline, so it is impossible (all else equal) to get more mpg out of the same volume.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, producing enough corn ethanol to match the energy contained in a single gallon of conventional gasoline costs taxpayers $1.78. Even with those subsidies, which total about $7 billion per year, corn ethanol still only provides about
3 percent of America’s oil needs. And by mandating the consumption of ethanol, Congress has created an industry that now gobbles up about one-third of America’s corn crop.
Those numbers are germane to Friedman’s claim that biofuels will be an essential part of the DOD’s new “green” future. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist lauded the Navy for its experiments with jet fuel derived from camellina, a plant in the mustard family. In April, the Navy flew an F-18 using a mixture of conventional jet fuel and camellina-based fuel. The cost of that biofuel: about $67.50 per gallon.
The fundamental problem with using plants to make liquid motor fuel isn’t want-to, it’s physics. We pump oil out of the earth because of its high energy density. That is it contains lots of stored chemical energy by both weight and volume. Camellina, like switchgrass, and nearly every other plant-based feedstock now being considered for “advanced” biofuel production, has low energy density. Thus, in order to produce a significant quantity of liquid fuels that have high energy density – such as jet fuel, diesel, or gasoline -- from those plants, you need Bunyanesque quantities of the stuff.
The US produces about 3.2 billion bushels of soybeans per year and each bushel can be processed into about 1.5 gallons of biodiesel. Thus, if it made sense to do so, we could convert all US soybean production into diesel with total output of about 4.8 billion gallons.
How much fuel is that? By Pentagon standards, it’s not much. In 2008, the DOD consumed 132.5 million barrels of oil products, or about 5.5 billion gallons. Put another way, even the US decided to convert all of its soybean production into motor fuel, doing so would only provide about 87 percent of the Pentagon’s total oil needs.
Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School who has written extensively about the problems with biofuels, says that biofuels don’t make much sense because it “takes a huge amount of land to produce a modest amount of energy.” The key issue, says Searchinger, is scale.
He points out that even if we used “every piece of wood on the planet, every piece of grass eaten by livestock, and all food crops, that much biomass could only provide about 30 percent of the world’s total energy needs.” Some crops can provide a relatively good feedstock for biofuels. For instance, Brazil utilizes sugar cane to produce ethanol. (Brazil is the world’s second-largest ethanol producer, behind the US.) But even if the US military commandeered all of Brazil’s ethanol production -- which totaled 6.5 billion gallons in 2008 – that volume of energy still wouldn’t be enough to keep the Pentagon’s planes, trucks, and tanks moving. Recall that ethanol contains just two-thirds of the heat energy of gasoline. Therefore Brazil’s 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol is equal to 4.3 billion gallons of refined oil product, far less than the US military’s consumption of 5.5 billion gallons per year.
Going beyond Brazil, biomass-based fuels may be worthwhile on tropical islands, like Hawaii, that have lots of rainfall and plenty of arable land. Furthermore, fuels derived from photosynthetic algae might – repeat, might – someday become commercial.
