Summer Driving

Well, now the dream has become a reality. Now you can choose to help clean-up the environment and your car's engine without doing anything differently. Simply choose an ethanol-enriched fuel the next time you fill-up.

Every week Americans fill their tanks with approximately 2.73 billion gallons of gasoline. The EPA estimates that for every gallon of gasoline that is used as motor fuel 19.4 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted (Source: EPA-Emission Facts: Greenhouse gas emission for a typical passenger vehicle). Therefore, gasoline powered cars in the U.S. release nearly 53 billion pounds of greenhouse gases per week*.

However, there is something you can do to reduce your carbon foot print—use clean burning ethanol. Ethanol has been shown to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions when compared to energy equilivant amounts of gasoline (Source: Michael Wang "Updated Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emission Results of Fuel Ethanol" (2005) Presented at 15th International Symposium on Alcohol Fuels, September 26-28, San Diego, CA).

If you consider a car with a 20 gallon gasoline tank then filling up with E10 can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9.5 pounds per week. If you fill a FlexFuel vehicle with 20 gallons of E85 it will reduces greenhouse gasses by 90.7 pounds. And the story gets even better...when you consider that ethanol derived from cellulose should reduce greenhouse gasses by 33.2 pounds or 282 pounds in E10 or E85 respectively for our 20 gallon tank it all starts to make sense.

Now if you apply these numbers nationwide to every car on the road you'll see that if you used E10, you would help reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced in the U.S. by nearly 1.3 billion pounds each week. If everyone filled their tanks with E85 it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 12.4 billion pounds each week. So, if we all filled up with E85 made from cellulose, we would reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by more than 38.5 billion pounds every week.

So you see by simply filling your gasoline tank with an ethanol-enriched fuel the next time you're running on empty you are helping clean-up the environment and helping keep your car running at its optimum. The dream is a reality!

*The total impact is likely higher, due to other components in the emissions, for example volatile organic compounds, NOx and SOx

Use this easy calculator to see how filling up with a tank of ethanol-enriched fuel can be beneficial by decreasing greenhouse gases.

Find out more about ethanol and our environment >

Assumptions:

• 2007 DOE EIA gasoline consumption data is accurate for 2008 consumption
• The average driver fills up approximately 1 time per week
• Each gallon of ethanol displaces one gallon of gasoline- This is probably accurate due to the fact that the GREET model takes the energy content of ethanol vs. gasoline into account, it may throw off the number of times per year that a consumer fills up their car.
• A weighted average of Dry Mills and Wet Mills (Source: RFA industry statistics) for LCA GHG production was taken for ethanol for corn; E10=-24.5% GHG, E85= -27.5%, Cellulosic ethanol=-85.5%