gas prices on the lake

[Mee-n-Mac]

Originally Posted by Weekend Pundit

At the moment, reformulated gasoline is sold only in Rockingham, Hillsborough, Strafford counties, and parts of Merrimack County. Reformulated gasolines include those with 10% ethanol. Reformulated gasoline is not required in the remaining counties and, to the best of my knowledge, not sold there either. So for the time being we won't be seeing ethanol in gasoline at the street or marine pumps.

Whether that will remain true for any length of time is unknown, at least by me.

Not sure if I'm remembering this all quite correctly but ....

The Clean Air Act (1990) mandated the use of special gasolines in those areas where air quality was considered "bad". The result was the use of MTBE as an oxygenate, supposedly to trick the cars using it into buring more leanly. While possibly working for carburated engines, I think that by the time this was implemented modern engine control & feedback systems and fuel injection systems negated any noticable improvement via oxygenates. In some places ethanol was used in place of MTBE because it was cheaper to do so.

More recently the Senate passed a bill that mandated gas refiners use something like 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006 increasing to ~8 billion in 2012.

Now I'm not sure if this is good (MTBE is gone) or bad ($$,?air quality?) but it's likely we'll see more ethanol mixed gas (E-gas) in the future as a result. Ethanol can definitely dissolve different stuff than gas did and hence the problems with old fiberglass fuel tanks. I doubt any new boat will have such problems. I don't worry much about engine temps; boat engines run at lower temps then do car engines. So for me anyway, I can't forsee any issue in that regard. Conceivably any increase combustion temp might increase the efficiency to help offset the decrease in energy content. At worst the fuel injection map may have to be re-mapped. Collecting water (in the fuel dock's tanks) is a concern, not too sure how big a one. I can recall only once in the last 5 years where I tanked up and got water in the gas. The answer was "dry gas", which is alcohol. California was pushing against the RFS bill above, claiming air quality would be negatively impacted due higher evaporative emissions from E-gas in their high temp enviroment. What'll happen in NH boats in the summer-time ? Will E-gas (if it makes it's way into boats in a widespread fashion) increase smog ? I dunno.

I'll say whether we see E-gas at the boat gas docks or not all depends on whether it's cheaper to make it vs having 2 different blends around. If E-gas proponents are correct and it's cheaper than normal gas, we'll end up seeing it everywhere. I bet they're wrong but we may still see it, because if it's no more expensive, it'll be less hassle to distribute 1 type of "gas".