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Ok, there's a great article at Popular Mechanics that makes me wonder what we can really use as an alternative to gas.

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.

You have to keep in mind that using biological fuel sources can be problematic. Take ethanol for example. All it takes is for one season of drought and we’re in trouble. No corn = no ethanol. Or, say a bird flu type virus takes off in the US and starts wiping out chickens… what then?

Also, you have to consider the demand on food versus fuel. Corn is a major staple of the American diet. How do you decide how much goes to food and how much is used to produce ethanol? It can lead too much higher costs in the long, I believe.

It’s a great idea, but with the potential for droughts, diseases that affect crops and poultry it’s a bit of a risk.

Differnt kind of corn is used for ethanol. The animal feed grade of corn is for ethanol.

But still, what if we have a drought and find ourselves limited on that particular type of corn. Do we eat or drive? By eat I mean do we use that corn to feed our live stock, or use it for fuel? I guess we could use different plant based feeds for the live stock if that we to happen.

I'm not against the idea, but I'm curious what the "back up" plan would be.

Feed corn is so low grade, it will even grow in drought conditions. That is why they started making ethanol, because it was such a waste because so much of it grows. I doubt we will run into an issue with it.

ahh I see - well hell in that case...

What really kills me is that there are so many options and there have not been many solid attempts at moving in any direction. I mean this has just recently started to be a topic that was taken seriously, and that is because we are getting ass raped for fuel right now.

And one excellent crop for Biodiesel is Hemp, actually. Hemp is, literally, a weed. It grows in just about any climate, with very little water and no pesticides, and it doesn't use up much (if any) of the nutrients in the soil. It also has the added advantage of only needing the seeds for their oil, the rest of the plant can then be used a number of products, including paper (higher grade than wood pulp, means less logging is necessary saving our forests, and hemp grows rather faster than a tree), clothing, animal feed, etc. etc. etc.

Given that this is NT, I must state again: Industrial hemp has no THC content at all, and if you try and plant marijuana in among the hemp, it cross-pollinates, destroying the THC content of the marijuana. So, no sane person would try and use hemp to hide marijuana plants.

I've posted a number of times here pushing Biodiesel as an important and necessary line of development for this country. I'm honestly curious as to how much it would cut our oil import needs if we could produce 100% of our diesel fuel from plant crops. Plus, I am sure that as the practice grows, we'll start seeing real economy of scale results, pushing prices down as the costs to produce drop. Even if we don't, the cost of biodiesel wouldn't go up, and as the cost of petro-diesel keeps rising, eventually biodiesel will be cheaper by default.

-Arlos

I love you arlos...every fuel thread..hemp is brought up by you...just admit it man.. you wanna suck on the exhaust pipe.

in all actuality Hemp is viable, but we need some way of lessening the burden at present while we kick these options up.

diekan, the option of switching back to fossil fuels when there are problems with drought or disease or insects is always there. It could be used as a fall back plan but not the main source

Vegetable Oil FTW!

we need to develop cars that run on shit. Sure the planet would smell like ass...but fuel would be somewhat free.

BAd plan dude bad plan

This thread sucks. Give me the information I desire...


How many miles can I go on one ground up muslim/terrorist ?


That should be the fuel of the future...that or fuel made out of illegal aliens.