I was doing my research and came across the fact that, "Ethanol is increasingly used as an oxygenate additive for standard gasoline, as a replacement for methyl t-butyl ether (MTBE), the latter chemical being responsible for considerable groundwater and soil contamination".
The disadvantage of ethanol is the number of acres of cropland that are needed to produce ethanol, and this makes it more expensive than gasoline. Using cropland for the production of ethanol will drive up the cost of other foods that could be harvested from the same acreage, such as corn. Ethanol also gets less miles per gallon than the same amount of gasoline.
MTBE(methyl tertiary-butyl ether) is a chemical compound that is manufactured by the chemical reaction of methanol and isobutylene. MTBE is produced in very large quantities (over 200,000 barrels per day in the U.S. in 1999) and is almost exclusively used as a fuel additive in motor gasoline. It is one of a group of chemicals commonly known as "oxygenates" because they raise the oxygen content of gasoline. At room temperature, MTBE is a volatile, flammable and colorless liquid that dissolves rather easily in water.
“Ozone and nitric oxide are both contributors to urban smog, so depending on how well a city is able to mitigate air pollution, ethanol may not be the ‘green fuel’ that it is often called,” said Franz Geiger, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University who worked on the study.
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