I hesitate to make a comment on this subject but what the hell............... The addition of ethanol to gasoline is a scam and always has been. It sells more "corn", sells more "gas" and you get to pay more taxes on the "more" gallons you have used. Ethanol itself is a great, renewable fuel and runs great if the engine is set up for it. To mix it with gas is just to get the octane up high enuff so it won't detonate. It allows the enriching of a very low grade of gas to run without detonating. You loose the about the same amount of mileage as the percent of ethanol you put in the gas. You gained nothing but increased the amount of liquid fuel you have used......... sales and taxes. I wouldn't be so opinionated but I worked with the Mother Earth Magazine in the mid to late 70s so I'm quite familiar with ethanol. We did a lot of testing on mixed fuels (called gasohol back then) and straight alcohol down to 160 proof or 20% water. Problem with the lower "proofs" was engines didn't idle well but ran great, ran clean. Just about never had to change the oil. To get the power out of the ethanol engines needed to have almost diesel like compressions and higher timing. Even tho there are less BTUs in ethanol, with the proper set up engine you could actually get better (slightly) mileage than with gas. It was a real soft firing, hi octane fuel, about 105 octane rating. I was a part of building a couple of dual fueled vehicles for MEN mag, a Ford pickup and a Chevy van. The guy I worked with did most of the engineering.............. flip a switch and switched fuels and timing curve............ worked pretty slick, way before computers or fuel injection. We even did some dyno testing at some lab in Ohio. Ultralights were getting popular about that time and someone made the comment that a 2 cycle engine couldn't run on ethanol since all alcohol has some water in it and couldn't mix the oil. So I proceeded to experiment and came up with a modified 2 stroke with an external oil injector from a 250 Yamaha and flew the first "airplane" to ever fly on ethanol as far as I know. It was a POS ultralight but it worked, just wasn't dependable or practical. I used dish soap as an emulsifier to get it to "mix". Static thrust was actually slightly higher on the alcohol than on regular gas. We were at Oshkosh with MEN sometime in the late 70s cooking corn liquor right there and running the truck and van on it promoting alternate fuels. Corn is not a good source for ethanol but I guess we have a lot of it. Its still costs more to produce the ethanol than gas but it is "renewable" but not practical as we couldn't produce enuff for our current way of life. I was in Brazil years ago and many of the cars there, like our rental car, were pure alcohol but problem was they didn't like starting when cold and heaters made very little heat........... good for the warmer climates.
FWIW