NOTE: This thread concerns the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; not internal combustion engines.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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We call table salt “salt” even though that’s a generic name for any metal bonded with a non metallic mineral (for instance potassium chloride). Sugar is the same, table sugar is just one kind of sugar. “Sugar” is the generic name for a type of carbohydrate. Ethanols found in gasoline can degrade into a sugar over time (like in a mower left out over the winter) and this will leave a fine white powder in the engine that will cause scaring when the engine is started. Thus sugar can ruin your engine, but is more likely to increase wear. This has perpetuated an urban legend that you can force this by putting table sugar in a gas tank.
See the longer response from another user, they're correct. Just wanted to say table sugar is sucrose (a combination of fructose and glucose if I remember correctly). But you will not create sugars in the process you're talking about.
I realize (and you mentioned) that sugar is not a well defined term, but calling degradation products of ethanol in gas "sugars" is still a bit of a stretch. Ethanol by itself usually forms some combination of acetaldehyde, acetic acid, 2-carbon peroxides, and CO2 (i.e. not sugars) upon autoxidation, though those species can react with other components of gasoline to form the precipitated "gum". The structure of gum in the literature is pretty hand-wavy (high MW materials kinda just be like that sometimes) but tends to be much more more oxygen-deficient than conventional "sugars" (polysaccharides) even for ethanol blends and contains a wider variety of substructures. Though, I have seen some papers talking about certain microbes that can ferment the ethanol in gasoline, possibly via sugars, but I don't think that's the common degradarion pathway for a mower.