Originally Posted by Fabrik8

Ok, I don't know what type of ethanol blend you're talking about for VA, I'm asuming it's probably not E85. We have 10% ethanol blend (as opposed to 85% for E85) at a lot of gas stations here in CO. If you're talking about E85, you won't be able to use it in your car unless it's a flex fuel vehicle, which means the ECU can automatically compensate for the very different fuel blend.
If you're talking about 5% or 10% blends, your car will have no problem. 10% is about the practical limit that most normal ECUs and O2 sensors can compensate for. As far as octane, the ethanol is about 122 octane (in pure form) but is blended with shit octane gas so that the blend comes out to normal octane levels. So 90% 85.5 octane gas and 10% 120 octane ethanol comes out to be a 89 octane blend. Ethanol does have the nice advantage of having a high latent heat of vaporization, so it really cools the intake charge nicely, just like methanol does (methanol injection, etc.) The price for ethanol blend around here is the same as standard gas, I don't use it in my car but my girlfriend uses it in hers.. It's really all about emissions though.

Honestly, if I could convert my car to run pure ethanol, which is just replacing some seals and retuning, I would get pure ethanol from the next town (biodiesel and pure ethanol station) over and have cheap 122 octane fuel. Thanks granola eating hippies! It's very similar to running pure methanol but without the horrible methanol aluminum corrosion. IRL is switching to pure ethanol for the 2008 season..

I'm not sure what you're talking about with the gel forming, you may be thinking of biodiesel? Ethanol blends don't gel as far as I know..