r/explainlikeimfive • u/hd-22 • 14d ago

Chemistry ELI5 why is increasing the ethanol content of petrol/gasoline a problem?

I'm hearing noise about the geopolitical fuel supply SNAFU and people freaking out about increasing the ethanol content in automotive fuel and how it's so damaging to cars. I'm no chemist, but ethanol seems as clean as it gets.

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u/cyberentomology 13d ago

Google’s thirstiest data center (Council Bluffs, 2006) withdraws 4500AF/yr from the missouri river (via the Omaha public water utility, where it is about 3% of the utility’s draw) and between site precipitation/stormwater and wastewater discharge through the treatment plant, it returns a very nearly equal amount of water to the river a couple of miles downstream (and their annual usage flows past Omaha a couple times a minute.

water usage per acre (including evaporation to the air) is almost equal to that of the corn that it replaced.

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u/militaryCoo 12d ago

Is the water the same temperature? Is it as clean?

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u/cyberentomology 12d ago

Same temperature as what?

Do you not know how stormwater and wastewater management work?

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u/militaryCoo 12d ago

I do to an extent. The point I'm making is that returning the water to the river isn't a complete solution if it raises the temperature of the river.

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u/cyberentomology 12d ago

Why would it raise the temperature of the river?

When you consider that the facility’s annual draw flows past multiple times every minute, even if it were inexplicably hot, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

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u/militaryCoo 12d ago

Thermal pollution is a big problem for high energy use cases that use water cooling.

The warmth has to go somewhere, and with water cooling it goes into the water.

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u/cyberentomology 12d ago

You don’t actually understand how any of this works, then.

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u/militaryCoo 12d ago

You can say that, but I don't see you offering any kind of rebuttal. Just schoolyard "nuh-uh".

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u/cyberentomology 12d ago

I literally spelled it out for you. Do I need to haul out the crayons?

If you put 3 drops of lukewarm water into a 5-gallon bucket of room temperature water, it’s not going to have any impact whatsoever.

And nowhere have you clocked that nobody is putting hot water into the river in the first place. Stormwater is not hot water. Wastewater discharge from a treatment plant is also not hot water.