How does octane affect the environment?

Answer 1

• Octane number is a value used to indicate the resistance of a motor fuel to knock. Octane numbers are based on a scale on which iso-octane is 100 (minimal knock) and heptane is 0 (bad knock).
• Higher octane ratings correlate to higher activation energies: This being the amount of applied energy required to initiate combustion. Since higher octane fuels have higher activation energy requirements, it is less likely that a given compression will cause uncontrolled ignition, otherwise known as autoignition or detonation. The compression ratio is directly related to power and to thermodynamic efficiency of an internal combustion engine (see Otto-cycle).
• Engines with higher compression ratios develop more area under the Otto-Cycle curve, thus they extract more energy from a given quantity of fuel.
• This means high Octane number leads to less fuel use for the same energy production and hence less environmental pollution.
• Refer to link below.