What happened to gasoline in the mid 1970s?

yellow rose said

Yeah, that’s just one reason why I’m not for using corn for fuel. Just roughly (because I’m lazy and I don’t want to look it up) how many BTU’s less is methanol?

I know in the small test sample I’ve tried I can go 25% methanol and not change a jet or anything.

Seems it would be more cost effective (if we are set on using an alcohol additive in gasoline) to use a bit more methanol and send it rather than use less ethanol and waste all that farm land to grow it.

What do you think about that??

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Well, in my 35 years of experience I did not use BTU as a value for energy since the long accepted scale is called Joules (J). But just to give you an idea of the relative energy content between methanol, ethanol, and gasoline: (MJ=Mega Joules)
One liter of ethanol contains 21.1 MJ, a liter of methanol 15.8 MJ and a liter of gasoline approximately 32.6 MJ. In other words, for the same energy content as one liter or one gallon of gasoline, one needs 1.6 liters or gallons of ethanol and 2.1 liters or gallons of methanol.
So using methanol instead of ethanol may seem to be more inexpensive but you would actually spend more money on the methanol blended gas to cover the same distance as done with the ethanol blended gas.
Switching to methanol would require larger gas tanks or more frequent stops at the gas station due to the decreased engine performance when using ethanol.