Comments by "Thump Er the Sweaty Fat Guy" (@SweatyFatGuy) on "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History" video.

  1. Hold up, wait a minute, something ain't right. Ethanol was cheap and easily obtained and produced before prohibition.... which was funded by J.D. Rockefeller, the owner of Standard Oil, which was later broken up via anti trust laws. Ford vehicles prior to prohibition were dual fuel, they would run on gasoline or ethanol. There was a knob on the dash that adjusted the air fuel ratio, and a lever on the steering column where modern turn signals are that advanced the timing. You richened the mix and advanced the timing to run ethanol, which ran smoother, cooler, and made more power than gasoline. To run gasoline you retarded the timing and leaned the AFR, and since more than 80% of the energy in gasoline goes to waste heat, they tended to overheat. Standard Oil refined kerosene and diesel fuel, along with some other things you get from crude that are valuable. What was left over he was dumping in the rivers around his refineries. Rivers on fire are something people notice, and Rockefeller being the astute businessman he was, realized that if he could sell the left over toxic waste from kerosene refining as a fuel, he would solve his waste problem and net a tidy profit. The problem was, ethanol can be produced by literally ANYONE, from any starch or sugar with simple equipment easily made by hand. So farmers, ranchers, and average people with their own still and fermentation vats could produce fuel to run their vehicles. When they can do that, its very difficult to sell them gasoline, especially when it runs worse, makes less power, and overheats often. It does start nicer in cold weather, and makes abundant waste heat so you can employ the coolant as a heater in cold climates, like here in Michigan where on April 25th 2022 it was 22F outside. So how does one fight a competitor that anyone can produce easily at home, when you're selling something they have to go to a specific location to buy from only one vendor offering it and it performs worse? J.D's answer was to push through a constitutional amendment, aka the Volstead Act, which made it illegal to produce and possess ethanol in any form, without paying a tax and having it registered. Blame it on people drinking too much, which was a simple thing for Rockefeller as he was a teetotaler, and you can force people to follow your personal rules and eliminate your competition. Gasoline requires a huge investment to produce, you need to pull it from the ground after finding it, then refine it, then ship it around to where it can be used. You can make 500 gallons of 195 proof ethanol with a few hundred dollars invested in tanks, building a still, and having some starch or sugar to feed the yeast. But wait there's more.... Tetraethyl lead was intended to increase octane so engines could run with higher compression ratios, which not only increases power output, it also increases mileage and decreases emissions. The problem is gasoline cannot handle much compression as you describe in your video. With more heat and compression, it ignites when it wants to rather than when you tell it to. Ethanol on the other hand doesn't like to run on the diesel cycle, it really wants a spark before it will light, and then it burns fast and completely. So you can run extreme compression on ethanol compared to gasoline. I know, because I do exactly that. My summer daily driver Pontiac GTOs will not run on pump gas, the static compression is far too high, and man let me tell you the 455s in them make ludicrous power... and get better mileage than the pump gas 455s I built in the 80s and 90s. My thing is cheap power, because I am a disabled veteran living on a fixed income, and $4 gasoline is onerous to me being able to survive. I started on this project in 2007 the last time gasoline was this high, and I realized I would not be able to drive my vintage GTOs with those gas prices, as they usually got between 13 and 18mpg. $80 to $110 a tank was simply unaffordable, and I simply cannot drive boring stuff. Producing ethanol myself was the answer. Making it from tree sap, like I am setting up again 8 years after my final divorce, costs me all of 10 cents a gallon to produce. Making it from cattails takes a bit more energy and some enzymes, so that costs me about 40 cents per gallon to produce 194 proof fuel. My 1970 GTO has a 13:1 static compression 455 with iron heads, and a cam with timing that produces very high cylinder pressures between idle and 4500rpm, its a mix of LSA and duration so the valve events happen to catch the most incoming air possible. It easily made 20mpg with a Qjet carb I modified, while producing nearly 600hp/tq. Its no wimpy cruiser engine, but it idles like one. I have something else in the works along the lines of Smokey Yunick's hot vapor engine, but its heating the fuel in the EFI rails not after its sprayed into the intake manifold. Very easy to do on ethanol, and I will provide the information and video later this year, currently I have snow and salt on the roads.. should be gone later this week and I can get started on it again. My 65 GTO has a 455 with 11.5:1, the heads I ran on race gas in the 1990s with a different 455 under them. It gets 17mpg with the Qjets I convert or the FiTech EFI I have on it now. The main reason it only gets 17 is aerodynamic drag, it takes a lot to push it through the air at 70mph compared to the 70 GTO, or the 71-79 Firebird Formula/Trans Ams I also own, but they are undergoing full restorations in my shop. So the 65 is my summer daily, along with the pump gas fueled 70 Plymouth Cuda. I am keeping that one pump gas like a control group, and my god is it slow. Pretty green, but slow. My thing is not the environment, not trying to sell anyone on ethanol, and I don't really hate the oil companies. Its all about being able to drive the vehicles I want to drive, and not have to spend all my income on fuel to do it. The fact that it burns clean, my engines, carbs, fuel pumps, and everything else lasts longer without gasoline or additives in it are bonuses to the fact that its cheap and makes lots of power. Without Rockefeller funding the Volstead Act, we would still be running ethanol, with smaller engines, smaller cooling systems, making a lot more power, and getting better mileage than is possible on gasoline. We would also not have had so many people harmed by tetraethyl lead and MBTE, because ethanol can run easily in an engine with 22:1 static compression, and every farmer could produce their own. Here is an interested bit. Corn from irrigated fields produces around 500 gallons an acre, sometimes more, sometimes less. They are going to produce the corn anyway, so we may as well use it to make fuel, because everything left over is a very high quality cattle feed. However, cattails, that grow profusely in damn areas, and will completely take over with nothing but sunlight and water, that actually clean the water as it flows past them which makes them grow even larger, can produce 1000 gallons per acre with clean water. Pass raw sewage through the cattail bed and they will clean the water and produce as much as 10,000 gallons per acre. 500 vs 10,000. Now imagine cities using cattails to treat waste water, and harvesting them every fall for fuel production. Cities used to produce their own ethanol for light and fuel, before the Volstead Act. Imagine the medians along the interstate system and divided highways being filled with cattail beds rather than grass, and then harvesting them every fall to produce fuel. How many millions of miles of highway medians and ditches are unused? Ever been to the southern US states? Alabama, Florida, Georgia, etc? There is an invasive species called kudzu that grows a foot per day with only sunlight. You can make ethanol from that, and it rivals corn for yield per acre as well. Currently that vine is smothering entire forests as it has no natural predators. We could stop its progress and save some forests in the process of making fuel from it. So no, we can't do it all with corn, certainly not with pump gas compression ratios. With cattails, local production rather than centralized distribution, high compression ratios (and the other things I will detail later this year) using cattails, corn, spoiled produce from stores, stale bread, waste paper, kudzu and whatever else we are currently throwing out rather than utilizing, we could all be driving around in hotrods making ludicrous power with small engines... that only produce CO2 and H2O when they are running, instead of Nox, CO, and all the particulate pollution from gasoline and diesel. Yeah we can still use gas and diesel, we can still use electric vehicles which are awesome in urban environments that do not have salted roads and snow. If its sitting at a light, its not using much energy, rather than an ICE burning fuel at idle. Where I live an EV is cost prohibitive and the corrosion is an issue, three Tesla vehicles have burned in the last two years, ending the passengers in the process. Its a corrosion issue from the heavy salt on the roads this far north. Trust me though, if you were to drive one of my vehicles where I built the engine to run specifically on ethanol, for max efficiency, you would never want to drive a gasoline powered vehicle again. All I do is raise the compression and cylinder pressure, then make the cooling system smaller, because it doesn't need it. I have to run 190F thermostats just to keep condensation out of the oil, and my oil changes are once a year, not every 3k to 5k miles. Yeah I still need oil, like 10w 40, trans fluid, and gear lube, but I am trying to become as self sufficient as possible, so if the gasoline goes stupid high in cost, I will be driving rather than walking.
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  2.  @Khunark  most vehicles ran on ethanol before the Volstead Act, funded by Rockefeller, the owner of Standard Oil. Prohibition was designed and intended to eliminate fuel ethanol as competition for Standard oil's gasoline. Most farmers had stills, because ethanol is more than just vodka and fuel, its antiseptic, sanitizer, degreaser, and when mixed with easily made turpentine provides light. He funded a constitutional amendment to eliminate his competition, and force all of us to run gasoline... and the result was tetraethyl lead with all its problems. Ethanol was the norm before prohibition. Not the alternative. In WWII ethanol production ramped up fast because torpedoes ran on it, aircraft used it to increase performance especially at high altitudes since it cools the intake and provides oxygen while allowing more ignition timing and power. In fact the Me262 and HE162, the first to operational jet fighters ran on ethanol, potato vodka to be exact. After the war we had a huge ethanol production capability, and that was a threat to oil again. A front page ad was taken out on all the prominent papers, and it was written to look like a news story. It claimed the ethanol plants were using Caribbean molasses and rum to produce ethanol rather than US grown grain. It was an outright lie, and they had to retract the advertisement, but it worked anyway. Within six weeks of its printing, all the ethanol plants had closed and gasoline was again the only fuel available. The propaganda continues today, and people simply do not know how easy it is to produce ethanol, run their vehicles on it, and how cheap it is to do it. Ethanol is vastly superior to gasoline, except in cold weather starting. Its true if you run it in a low compression engine intended for pump gasoline, you know 87 octane to 93 octane, it will get worse mileage. However if you run it in engines with 12:1 compression, suitable for only the highest octane race gasoline, you get better mileage than gasoline. As compression increases, so does mileage and power. The handicap is gasoline and its pathetic octane. There is another benefit for the auto makers, in that gasoline leaves black carbon deposits through the engine, and it causes accelerated wear. Engines wear out, so people need to buy another vehicle. It was more of a problem before 1995 when EFI was worked out to the point engines can go 300k easily now, but there are taxi cabs in Brazil that run for millions of miles without a rebuild, on hydrous ethanol.. meaning it still has between 4% and 15% water still in it, and no gasoline at all. Those are also low compression engines, they could be getting so much more from them. The racers in Brazil already know, and hardly any of them run race gas. How do I know all this? Because I have been producing ethanol to run my vintage GTOs and other muscle cars, and I drive 11.5:1 and 13:1 Pontiac 455s daily, that on any pump gas will rattle themselves to death in less than an hour. it flattens the upper rod bearings, take a wild guess how I know that. I've been doing this since 2007 when gasoline was $5 a gallon where I live, and now its close to that again. 91 octane is over $5, 87 is $4.20, tree sap vodka is 10 cents a gallon, and cattail vodka is about 40 cents a gallon. So that is more than 15 years running ethanol in old and newer vehicles, up to 2002, and I have yet to have any problems with fuel systems, engines, carbs, EFI, or anything else. Its all very clean, and if I don't run E85 my oil changes come out looking as clean as they went in, only change it because of thermal breakdown. My daily driver 65 GTO is kinda quick and it has no forced induction. Thats why I run vodka fuel.
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