Which fuel is the first viable alternative as gasoline prices edge up?

[Jimmypoo]

Swing fuel engines have been part of South America for a LONG time.

I suggest that anyone who really wants information to look it up.

As for Brasil, it is a massive city with a massive population that lacks the mass transit
like NYC, which is a finely tuned machine by comparison.

btw... for those that are interested - - those engines that will burn just about anything
short of coal and wood - are made by the same people who've kept these out
of the mainstream in the US for 20+ years.

ethanol burns very clean. So clean, it is almost magical. too bad it has too low a BTU for proper use in what WE demand --- engines with greater output.

If the population could be persuaded to withstand the horror of a 5hp lawnmower with the same sound pressure level as the current 160hp car.... then perhaps one day, the rate at which we get from zero to 60mph could be tempered to permit 15 seconds, rather than a goal of 6.5 seconds, and engines that topped out at 90mph would actually serve a conservation purpose.

[Jimmypoo]

Blus....


You want to consume animal feces for energy?

yuk!


You are, I assume, making reference to biomass. There are basically two ways to approach this. One is to use the biomass to create methane, and burn the remaining mass afterwards, and then there is biomass gasification, which in a closed loop system is something related, but totally different on its scale and process.

I've done some reading on the former, and extensive on the latter. We are not far out from our first megawatt facilities for closed loop, along the gulf coast. It is a pie I've had my finger into since ~~2002, though not deep enough for my own satisfaction (knowledge satisfaction---get your filthy mind out of the gutter, and save it for my other posts!)

[blusubaru]

"get your filthy mind out of the gutter, and save it for my other posts!"

LOL, ahhh, that can go so many ways. Wait, so can that, and that...

Yah, I vaguely remember someone mentioning a method of recycling pet feces in a form of energy here on the forum, but I can't find it anywhere. Oh well. Your explanation sounds about right 'Poo.

[PeterB]

I wondered how long it would take for the 'Poo' to enter this discussion!

... I know I'll probably get hammered here, but what do people think of this?: http://www.savefuel.ca/

[JEBB]

20% ethanol has to close to the solubility of ethanol in gasoline. After that you'll have two layers of liquids.

I recall reading some numbers that indicated that the decrease in miles per gallon with the mixture is the same as the percentage of ethanol. So that you'll go as far on 10 gallons of 80/20 gas/ethanol as you will on 8 gallons of gasoline.

[Racer X]

BigGuynRusty Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ethanol is a nightmare, look what it did to
> Brazil.
> Puts out tons of formaldehyde, which isn't tested
> for on the current smog tests. Makes a car tuned
> for gasoline, run like crap.
>
> BioDiesel is beautiful, sulfur free fuel, problem
> is that GM personally killed the automobile diesel
> market in the 1980's. Euro diesels are just
> wonderful cars that can't be sold here because of
> our crappy high-sulfur content diesel.
>
> Diesel is the near future, would love to see a
> Diesel/Electric/Hydraulic Accumulator Hybrid,
> 75/100 MPG easily obtainable.
>
> BGnR

ah, people still remember those Olds 350 gas engines redisigned into diesels?

As a racing gasser block they are hell for stout. Bore it .110 over and use some 425 and 403 parts, and it is indestructible. But as a diesel, it was crap.

And as for ethanol, you need either 20 or 40% more by volume to get the same amount of energy out of a gallon of gas.

So your miles driven on a tank of fuel is far less, and cost per gallon as a straight comparison isn't valid.

Do you remember if it is 20 or 40% Rusty?


This was plainly obvious when I read a Hot Rod article years ago about a Blown hemi '70 Barracuda in SoCal owned by a guy named Sal Gonzales. He got 1.4 gallons per mile. The horsepower was unreal, but he could only go 10 miles on a tank of ethanol. Granted this is extreme, but it does illustrate the lower energy content of ethanol vs gasoline. I think diesel has 4% higher energy content than gas.

[SteveJobs]

I think ours was a 4.3 L (not 5.7/350)

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_UScars.html

[GeneL]

I think you might be interested in this column by Patrick Bedard in the May 2006 "Car and Driver. I know that I was.

Please forgive any mistakes as I scanned it and then did my best to correct any errors.

PATRICK BEDARD
Run your car on cornstalks and grass clippings...

Fill 'er up with switch grass? When our "big oil" President tossed this Native American prairie grass into his January State of the Union speech, in the same breath with "wood chips" and "stalks," as a way to make "ethanol practical and competitive within six years," the guy at this keyboard groaned. Couldn't we just run our cars on presidential hot air?

Bush went on to say that this and other technologies would let us replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the MIddle East by 2025.

Funny how this date for liberating ourselves from foreign oil keeps getting kicked down the road. During the first Arab oil embargo-that was in 1973-President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, saying that by 1980 "the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need."

When Jimmuh Carter took over in 1977, he famously declared energy independence to be "the moral equivalent of war." Cellulosic ethanol from switch grass and other biomass was part of his plan to be free of foreign energy sources by 1990.

In defense of the much-maligned peanut farmer, he was not responsible for the entire 10-year slip from Nixon's original 1980 deadline. Gerald Ford, the White House resident from 1974 to 1977, had previously pushed the date off to 1985. Still, in the years I've been holding down this page, the dawn of American energy self-sufficiency has been punted into the future by 45 years. I'd call that a rare display of good judgment by our government.

We could be self-sufficient now. All it would take would be a willingness to pay nearly a buck extra per gallon for ethanol made from corn. But paying more for each mile we drive-without some other benefit-would just make us poorer.

And let's be clear. There is no benefit. The most optimistic assessment I've seen on ethanol was a study by the University of California, Berkeley, published in January of this year. "Putting ethanol instead of gasoline in your tank...is probably no worse for the environment than burning gasoline," said the authors.

Some folks would get pleasure from denying our dollars to the Arabs, until they get the bill. We do business with the Arabs for one reason-they have the cheapest oil. We don't have to like them. What we like instead is more miles from our dollars.

Ethanol from corn is a "mature industry," according to the U.S. Department of Energy, so price improvements will be few. That means the subsidies necessary to produce it-51 cents for each gallon now from the feds, and many states add 10 to 40 cents per gallon on top of that-will continue as long as politicians choose to subsidize farmers and others.

This is not to say that running cars on ethanol, the alcohol from fermented vegetable matter, is an entirely bad idea. We already have about five million "flex fuel" cars on the road that can run on gasoline-ethanol mixtures up to 85-percem ethanol (E85). Ethanol packs a large amount of energy into a gallon compared with alternatives such as natural gas, LPG, and hydrogen. It's not as good as gasoline, however; you need about 1.5 gallons of ethanol to drive the same distance as on one gallon of gasoline, according to the DOE. This means poorer mileage, so you'll need a bigger tank for the same range.

Ethanol has other problems, too. To ensure good engine starting, it needs to be mixed with gasoline. And that mixture has higher smog-producing evaporative emissions. Moreover, ethanol can't be shipped in pipelines because it picks up water. Working around these problems raises the cost of an already costly fuel.

Which brings us to Mr. Bush's ethanol from "wood chips, stalks, or switch grass." These are "biomass" sources, a category that includes everything from forest thinnings to municipal garbage. Unlike corn, which is a food, these cellulosic materials have little use and are therefore cheap. Here's the gotcha: Turning them into ethanol costs more than making it from corn.

Still, the siren of technology sings so sweetly. If we could put a man on the moon, we can surely turn grass clipping into fuel. That's the dream, anyway.
Here's the reality. To make ethanol, You need sugars. They can be fermented into alcohol. Fruits have sugars, so the alcohol comes easily. Wine dates back to biblical times.

Grains don't have sugars, but they have starches. Starches can be converted to sugars. Beer and whiskey start with grains. "But you don't hear of switch-grass Vodka. It's possible to turn the cellulosic structure of woody plants into a form of sugar, but the proven methods all use sulfuric acid and make expensive messes. Chemists think they see another way. Instead of sulfuric acid, an enzyme not so different from that used to stonewash jeans could be used to convert the cellulose to a form of sugar. Unfortunately, this particular sugar is a reluctant participant in fermentation, but just the right yeast-it has to be genetically engineered-could do the job.

Research is needed here to drive down the costs of the enzymes and yeasts and raise the ethanol yield. The President says six more years.

Absent from the President's declaration of energy independence was this season's favorite biofuel-used french-fry oil. Wait till the dark of night, then back your diesel up to the barrel behind McDonald's. All the smartest pirates fill up this way, according to the media. I heard it again a few weeks ago, this time on an NPR cooking show.

Actually, this is a surefire recipe for clogged injectors. However, used restaurant "grease," known in the recycling trade as yellow grease, or any vegetable oil, can be transformed into a substitute for diesel fuel by a chemical process known as trans-esterification. It's a good substitute, too, much closer to diesel than ethanol is to gasoline. Of course, the feds have subsidies going for biodiesel, as much as 90 cents gallon to producers. And some states have sweetened the pot with tax cuts up to 20 cents a gallon.

The good news: We have lots of fuel possibilities beyond oil. Looking only the cost of feedstocks, 85 cents will buy enough corn for a gallon of ethanol, $1.08 worth of yellow grease will make a gallon of biodiesel, or you can use $1.63 worth of soybean oil. What you won't see, as you scan down the list of farm commodities is a price for switch grass, It's not a commercial crop.

So when will we be filling up with switch-grass ethanol? That's easy. Not before farmers plant huge fields of a rangy grass that grows over your head. When you start hearing of switch-grass subsidies we'll be close.

[Harbourmaster]

How about Wave Energy for fixed infrastructure. http://discover.com/issues/dec-05/featur...an-energy/

And then it seems that oil can be made from just about ANYTHING! Talk about recycling, whoa!

"Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end"

http://discover.com/issues/apr-06/featur...thing-oil/

You will need to fill out the FREE registration to read the full articles.

[sscutchen]

Badard's article has a lot of good stuff in it.

Ethanol is FAR from a "green" fuel. The evaporative emissions from ethanol-laced gasoline are a huge detriment in places like LA. And the combustion byproducts are nasty. Formaldehyde was already mentioned.

Also, ethanol is hydroscopic. It wants to go into any free water phase. And gasoline distribution systems are wet. So ethanol cannot be mixed at the refinery or even in the tanks at the terminals. It has to be mixed into the tank truck just before delivery So the logistics are a real pain.

Finally, ethanol provides basically no relief from oil. The energy required to produce ethanol from corn is basically break-even.

What ethanol has going for it is the agriculture lobby. That's it.

The real sad thing that's happened is the removal of MTBE. It is a very high octane fuel with a low vapor pressure. This give refiners the ability to add higher RVP stocks to their gasoline pools, whtih increases the gasoline from oil yield. And 36% of MTBE comes from Methanol, which in turn comes from natural gas. So it makes a great way to add natural gas to the gaoline pool. And it has been shown in the real world to improve air quality compared to gasoline or especially ethanol/gasoline.

Unfortunately, many underground gasoline storage tanks, especially in older gas stations, were leaking, and this caused MTBE to leak into the environment. There were already federal and state programs in place to require and pay for fixing the storage tanks. And gasoline is leaking regardless of whether MTBE is a component or not. But the agriculture lobby wanted to get ethanol into gasoline in place of MTBE, and they got the wedge issue they needed politically.

Even the oil industry helped. They wanted to end all oxygenates in gasoline... MTBE, Ethanol, all of it. They want all of gasoline to come from oil. Tighter supplies. Higher oil to gasoline content. Higher prices and oil yields. Much higher profits. They saw the risk that high prices would drop demand. But it hasn't so far. So they are pushing hard.

MTBE, OTOH, is huge overseas. Europe loves it. They have very tight standards for underground storage tanks, and no leak issues. Germany subsidizes ETBE... where ethanol substitutes for methanol. Low vapor pressure. It gets away from all of the bad issues with Ethanol, but still gets Ethanol into the gasoline pool. But it is not allowed in the MTBE-prohibited states in the US.

The US is actually cross-shipping MTBE to Europe for gasoline blending stock. That's just stupid.