Katrina and Alternative fuels
 

With everyone talking about the price of gas after the Katrina disaster, it brings up the future of alternative fuels. Everyone knows about Ethanol, but has anyone heard of Butanol?

www.butanol.com

This isn't to take anything away from the incredible suffering that's going on, it's just something that I thought I'd bring up.

Click here to donate to the Red Cross for the Katrina relief effort.

This is an interesting thing, this topic can be political.

I'll start that :D

Everyone knows that we have to eventually stop using fosile fuels, mainly because of the greenhouse effect and that fosile fules are not ever lasting.

Everyone also knows that the farming industry in the western world is under hard and difficult economical situations. In the EU we pump in billions to the farmers and I think you do as well in the US.

So one simple solution. If the world could come together and say: From 2012 all new cars has to run on Ethanol (for example). Then all our farmers could grow plants for Ethanolextraction. Everything could be pretty localy produced, we do not need dependancy on the Arabs and we could keep our farmers happy.

We have the technology, it is just a matter of creating the infrastructure for the producing chain. In Brazil they have run cars on Ethanol for ages.

I am not sure about numbers but I think we should have the capacity to do it.

Jan

I agree, except I have found out that with ethanol, it costs more, and uses more fuel to produce the ethanol than what it makes ! The only good thing about it is that it burns cleaner than petroleum. I think the future is in hydrogen fueled vehicles, but a butyl-fuel would be great if we could run it in our cars that we have now.

I'm in denial.
/Steevo

Right now the only cost effective way to make hydrogen is to take it form hydrocarbons.........oil, texas tea, black gold. You know the song.
W.

It does cost more to produce, but in most states where corn is grown, they drop some of the taxes off it as an incentive to spend your money on the local economy (farmers). Usually a small percentage of ethanol is added to create the mid-grade fuel, and it costs the same as the "regular".

I also have heard that it takes more energy to produce than you can get from it, but just hearsay, no proof that I have seen. This will change though, as farming gets more efficient (bigger newer equipment, fewer small farmers) and yeilds continually get better. Also, right now, all cars that run on E-85 also run on 87 octane, so they can't take advantage of the 13:1 compression that you can run with E-85. If they built the cars to ONLY run E-85 they could use smaller engines with bigger compression to get the same power, and better mileage. Before this can work, E-85 will need to be much more readily available than it currently is.

Being from a farming community, I use ethanol blends whenever possible :thumbsup:

IMHO, the future is Bio-Diesel

who woulda thought we could use the grease from cooking fries to fuel our vehicles. that is recycling at its bestest :thumbsup:

Yeah, well have you ever ridden behind a vehicle that runs on that same grease for cooking fries? You think you're driving behind a mobile french fry machine! No thanks. A guy I work with here has a buddy with an old Mercedes station wagon that was converted to run on "the grease". P-U!

John