No vroom vroom with the Camry

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Here it's the opposite. Green holster is for diesel.

By the way, Jaguars are great cars. I certainly didn't mean to offend when I mentioned them in my post about stolen cars :-)

I think you're lucky you don't have ethanol over there.

It just doesn't make sense to waste precious top-soil by dumping it down our gas tanks. Dust Bowl of the 1930's anyone?

I mean lots of folks think soil should be used to grow food, not wasted down our gas tanks. Some have even said it's immoral to use a finite resource like land for ethanol production. I think some United Nations types have even said ethanol gas is a "crime against humanity," especially now with the soaring food prices that are pressuring poorer nations, in part because land once used for wheat production and other food crops is now being used to grow corn, thus increasing both wheat and corn prices, and the prices of other food crops, too.

And there's another consideration. I don't want my '06 Camry hurt in any way by this unnecessary use of 10 percent ethanol gas. How good ethanol is for your car is still a very open question. And now we know that ethanol's production and use creates more greenhouses gases than simple gasoline. It's just a no-win situation. My car could lose, and the Earth certainly does.

And what about the possibility of unusual, devastating plant viruses that could arise from this extreme over-use of land? Do we have another Irish potato famine in store, or something like that? It's not far-fetched. The avian virus that attacked birds around much of the world is a very bad sign.

Corn-based ethanol just doesn't make sense. I guess we can thank Bush and ADM for this hairy-brained scheme, and the new federal law they just passed to increase ethanol production dramatically by the year 2020 or so.

Saints preserve us [chuckle]

At least you can get it - Last count, there are 8 or 10 stations in the entire state of California selling E-85.

And the feds are effectively blocking CNG - the EPA and California Air Resources Board won't allow conversions without tons of red tape.

Regular Unleaded (R+M/2 = 87 Pump Octane), Premium Unleaded (91 or

Problem being there are about two dozen different regional gasoline formulations to cut the vapor pressure and volatiles for smog, so they can't ship one region's blend to another. If a regional refinery or pipeline fails, they have a convenient excuse to spike the prices. The busier stations sell #2 Diesel, but at a rather high price because of lower sales volumes - only the truck stops have it at a decent price because they turn the inventory.

And in selected areas of the midwest, E-85 Ethanol. You don't want E-100 anyway - it's really nice to be able to see the flames, and therefore you know when and which way to run...

Gasoline with multiple octane ratings is really easy now with computers, and even in the old days of all mechanical dispensers and totalizers it wasn't that hard. We had blending dispensers with 4 to

The station had two underground tanks of Regular and Ultra-Premium, and the dispenser mixed them at the proper ratio to get the desired octane level on the output.

About the only place you can still get leaded on the US is airports, because they haven't required converters on small airplanes - YET...

And even then, it's 'Low-Lead'.

Ethanol in small amounts (up to 10%) works fine in fairly modern cars, but if the car is old enough to have a carburetor and a mechanical fuel pump, expect some serious "car dies unexpectedly" problems.

The older rubber compounds used in the fuel system hoses and the fuel pump diaphragm, and the foam filled floats in some carburetors are attacked by the ethanol - they will require replacement with hoses/pumps/floats made with more modern alcohol resistant materials when they fail. After that, no problems.

Other than the fuel mileage hit, because ethanol may be higher octane but the BTU content per gallon is lower.

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Another problem with ethanol /production/ is it requires a *huge* amount of water just to produce one gallon of ethanol. I've forgotten the figure, but it's jaw-dropping.

Many think water, like land, is another finite, precious resource that shouldn't be squandered down our gas tanks.

Corn ethanol is much more wasteful than the Bush Administration likes to advertise. It's really unethical what's going on.

Quoted passages:

"Corn is a prima donna plant. It needs good soil and heavy fertilizer. On average, farmers apply more than 140 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer over an acre of corn.

Gyles Randall, soil scientist at the University of Minnesota's Southern Research and Outreach Center, says corn absorbs a lot of nutrients, but it also leaks about 30 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. That runs off into creeks through field drainage tiles. As Minnesota farmers plant more corn, they'll need to apply more fertilizer.

"We will see an upturn in the nitrate concentration in the groundwater, and then we sink our wells into that groundwater," says Randall. "That becomes the drinking water supply for many in this state."

High nitrogen levels cause health problems in children and pregnant women.

"And so if we have a corn, corn, soybean rotation that means we'll be applying fertilizer or nitrogen two out of three years," Randall says. "Or applying manure two out of three years. So there will be more nitrogen input into the system."

More nitrogen on the field means more runoff. When farmers plant corn year after year, the soil becomes clumpy and hard to manage. Randall says farmers will need to till their fields more often. More tilling means more erosion. And erosion increases runoff.

Some of that runoff ends up in Minnesota's rivers and lakes. But Randall says in the southeast, that runoff gets absorbed into the aquifers."

That's just one more problem with corn ethanol. There are a host of others. I'm veering off-topic though, so I'm done with the ethanol debate in this Toyota newsgroup.

Man, that is exactly the experience I had with my 07 Camry. I couldn't take it and like HLS, I traded it for an 04 Avalon. That and the freeway cruise control at high speed (vrrooooooommmmmmm... rrrrrrrrr.....vrrrooooooommmmm). jor

You might find

"In many areas of the country, oxygenates are required to be part of the gasoline formula. In those areas, our gasolines will contain ethanol, which is classified as an oxygenate

A couple of months back I bought a thousand gallons and it was something like $4.25 a gallon. It wasn't so long ago I could buy a thousand gallons for $0.85 a gallon.....sigh.

Damn Ed....

And that's NON road taxed diesel?

The price of oil is going to kill this country!

Jack

The diesel fuel cost was nothing compared to the cost of fertilizer.......How would you like to dump $100+ worth of fertilizer on an acre and then have it not rain for a month......I used maybe $20 per acre of diesel fuel to plant a crop....

I made a mistake on the diesel fuel. I had enough in the tank in February to plant this years crop, but not enough to make it through the fall. Traditionally diesel fuel goes down in the late spring/summer (after the heating season is over), so I kept putting off buying more fuel. I have a 1500 gallon tank, and to get the best price you need to buy in 1000 gallon lots (at least in my case). Instead of the price going down after March it kept going up. I kept delaying buying more diesel thinking surely it would go down. My tank finally ran dry in May, so I had no choice but to buy. If I had bought in April is was still under $4. Waiting till May cost be several hundreds of dollars. Live and learn.

I also worry about the effect on transportation. Most of the stuff grown in my area is trucked 60 to 100 miles to either larger transportation hubs or end users (Perdue being a big end user). Some stuff is hauled even further (400 miles) but truckers don't like to make long hauls one way and come back empty. Earlier this year I heard that truckers were refusing to go to Florida to pick-up produce because they weren't being paid enough to cover expenses.

Too bad the truckers mostly forced the railroads out of business in my area...

Ed

I agree about the cost of transportation, that's why I was asking about the cost of non-road taxed diesel. I think the government is lying to us about the rate of inflation, there is no way that inflation is running as low as they say (less than 3% per year).

The railroads here in NW Ohio are going great guns. The old Conrail tracks just south of town, now Norfork & Southern, are running about 4 trains an hour on dual tracks. They're hauling stacked intermodual freight so I assume it's TVs from S. Korea or Ipods from China. My brother-in-law manages an elevator in Toledo and he has been having problems for over a year getting grain cars from the railroad.

Jack

The "original" Norfolk and Southern used to service my area (the original N&S being taken over by the Southern Railroad and then the name was reborn when the N&W merged with the Southern). These days a short line railroad company operates the old N&S tracks, but the route is greatly reduced. It used to include a link across the Albemarle sound, but that bridge was torn down years ago, so there is one way in and the same way out. Service is limited, mostly to bulk loads of rock and fertilizer. I haven't see grain hauled out by train in years.

Ed

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Today after work, I stopped at the gas station to buy some fuel. Retired VIP, the price of the red-dyed off-road diesel is $4.52/gallon, only 15 cents cheaper than the highway #2 diesel ($4.67).

You probably know the highway diesel is ultra-low sulfur, 15 ppm max. The off-road diesel pump said it may exceed 500 ppm. This gas station has everything, even a pump for kerosene. The undyed and untaxed low-sulfur kerosene is $4.19 (500 ppm max.).

Regular grade petroleum, ie., gasoline, was $3.98, mid-grade $4.08, and premium $4.18 (all E-10).

Again, it's the gas station in the city limits with the Midwest Petroleum sign on Range Line street just south of the I-70 ramp.