Originally Posted by
Western Flyer
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
I hate to break this to you, but most of the alcohol fuels you are likely to use, outside of something like Everclear, are produced from petroleum. Drinking ethanol is made by biological processes and has been for millennia. But commercially produced ethanol that is use in denatured ethanol is made through refining and cracking and treating oil.
I don’t know the availability of renewable ethanol around the world. I would suspect it would be readily available in South America with Brazil being the largest ethanol producer in the world. Another benefit of using bio-ethanol is the smug knowledge that in the US it is subsidized by automobile and RV owners, and in some very, very small way you are not adding to global warming.
cycocommute is completely wrong on this one. Most of the 13 billion gallons of ethanol produced in the U.S. is produced by fermentation of starch-based crops, primarily corn:
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/eth...roduction.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethano...her_feedstocks
Methanol is primarily produced from fossil fuels (natural gas, not oil):
http://www.methanol.org/Methanol-Bas...nol-Made-.aspx