Here's some highlights and issues
Legislation established a renewable-fuels standard that will require the use of 7.5 billion gal. of ethanol and biodiesel annually by 2012--a nearly 90 percent increase over today's usage--and extended tax benefits that favor both fuels.
I'm not sure telling people what they should use is as good as offering alternatives that are cost effective and mainstream. tax benefits are negligible.
Here's the current costs and components needed for alternative fuel use, in a hypothetical trip from New York to California.
http://media.popularmechanics.com/docum ... e-e852.pdf
It seems the best bet right now is Biodiesel. However, the future seems to be Hydrogen Fuel cells. There seem to be a lot of options but most things are still based on the same internal combustion engine. I can see a comparison to MMOs, where they all try and do the same thing, versus looking at a completely different paradigm.
Here's a quick quote from each of the alternatives
E85
Ethanol is an excellent, clean-burning fuel, potentially providing more horsepower than gasoline. In fact, ethanol has a higher octane rating (over 100) and burns cooler than gasoline. However, pure alcohol isn't volatile enough to get an engine started on cold days, hence E85. Much smaller quantities of ethanol are also added to around 30 percent of the gasoline sold in the States to meet EPA requirements
One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation's 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won't kick our fossil fuel dependence--unless we want to replace our oil imports with food imports.
This looks like a shortsighted solution to me.
Solutions include Electricity and Hydrogen Cells, but I'm not adding notes on them because neither offer real solutions now.
M85
commonly called wood alcohol; M85 is a blend of 85 percent methanol and 15 percent gasoline. Methanol is produced through a steam and catalyst process that reconstitutes methane gas as methanol. Currently, virtually all methanol produced in the States uses methane derived from natural gas. However, methane also can be obtained from coal and from biogas
Methanol is a potent fuel with an octane rating of 100 that allows for higher compression and greater efficiency than gasoline.
Producing methanol from natural gas results in a net increase of CO2, hastening global warming. Unlike ethanol, the process liberates buried carbon that otherwise wouldn't reach the atmosphere.
This isn't even something we should be considering, IMO.
Biodiesel
Made from sources other than petroleum are known as biodiesel. Among the common sources are vegetable oils, rendered chicken fat and used fry oil.
Diesels rely solely on high compression in the cylinder to raise the temperature of the air enough to ignite the fuel. Consequently, diesels are tolerant of varying-quality fuels and the high compression results in high efficiency. Diesels extract more energy from each gallon than gasoline engines, and less energy is lost as heat leaving the exhaust pipe than with a gasoline engine.
Biodiesel has a viable future as a major fuel for transportation. According to the National Biodiesel Board, production of biodiesel in 2004 was about 25 million gal., tripling to more than 75 million gal. in 2005. The trend is solidly upward, thanks to government incentives, the growing number of new diesel vehicles for sale and a grass-roots groundswell of support.
Obstacles to mainstream acceptance include a higher price than petrodiesel (seasonally and regionally, 10 to 25 cents a gallon) and the need to heat storage tanks in colder climates to prevent the fuel from gelling.
Biodiesel to me is the answer we are looking for. It's not based on a pie in the sky development cycle like Hydrogen Cells, and offers flexibility and actually moves us away from the static pure internal combustion engine. What I think would be best is if we looked to advance the Biodiesel engine technology and to press to have this almost completely replace Gas completely in Texas and California, and slowly migrate elsewhere.
If all the cars in Texas and California were to move to Biodiesel in the next 5 years, our fuel depdendence problems would vanish and it would break OPECS stranglehold on us.
