Gasahol and Beyond

There is a lot of hype these days about E85 / Ethanol like it's something new... Actually, it's not new at all, ethanol itself has been around for nearly 10,000 years. A majority of that time it was in the form of a libation and for the last 100 years or so, as a an alternative fuel in the US. Henry Ford's Model T could easily be converted to run ethanol in the 1920's and it enjoyed some popularity over the next couple of decades. Ethanol failed to gain a major share, yet it arose once more in the 1970's during the oil embargo as an octane booster. The government even went so far as to create a tax break for Ethanol which is scheduled to stop in 2006.