Around The Country Without Gasoline

IronChefMorimoto writes "Autoweek has an interesting write up on an Australian man's 16K mile trek around the United States using anything but gasoline to power his variety of alternative fuel vehicles. Featured are bio-diesel Hummers and RVs, a solar-powered canoe, and an excrement-powered scooter." Note that if your car generates electricity, you could conceivably make a few bucks selling juice to the grid at peak hours.

Comments

Re:Better Yet

[bs_testability]

I would seriously try to ride a bike almost everywhere I went if I wasn't in constant fear for my life.

Spurious biodiesel bashing by Autoweek

[YankeeInExile]

I found most interesting that the only vaguely technical discussion of biodiesel in the puff-piece was a bit of bashing:

Biodiesel is more expensive than gas and eats natural rubber hoses and gaskets on older diesel engines.

What the article neglects to mention is that the dino-diesel sold in California also wreaked havoc with older diesel engines, and all left-coasters have already done the trivial job of modernizing their fuel systems.

Re:Big Deal

[strike2867]

Actually he reminds me of Columbus. It sounds like he thinks he found something new. Columbus had the same dilusion. Seriously how do you discover a continent when there are people that meet you on the shore when you get there?

Cars as Generators

[deacon]

From the writeup:

Note that if your car generates electricity, you could conceivably make a few bucks selling juice to the grid at peak hours

Like many good ideas, though, this one is illegal without an EPA Permit

What?

You thought that environmental laws only regulated things that you believe to be "bad"?

Welcome to the Law of unintended consequences!!!

Re:Cars as Generators

[gurps_npc]

Another person that comments without reading the article or understanding anything about it.

The idea actually expressed in the article is to use the power in the battery (without activating the vehicle), making sure to not drop it below a charge sufficient for 50 miles.

As the generator would not be in use while the car was not in motion, no EPA permit would be neccesary. The EPA has already issued regulations allowing the vehicle to generate power from the gasoline/etc. while in use.

Re:Poop powered scooter?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct: burning *any* hydrocarbon releases CO2 and H20. The difference here is that you're releasing CO2 that was, until a few months ago when the corn plant grabbed it, already CO2 in the atmosphere.

Hydrocarbons that are pumped out of the ground and burned haven't been in the atmosphere for millenia. So the total amount of CO2 overall in the atmosphere has increased. When you burn vegetable oil, you're not adding extra CO2. That CO2 would have ended up in the atmosphere anyway. Or did you think the CO2 in the corn plant was going to *stay* in the corn plant? Not likely.

Using Biofuels isn't going to *remove* CO2 from the atmosphere, but it's not going to add it, either. CO2 levels would remain the same.

Solar powered canoe?

[Saganaga]

As someone who's done a lot of canoeing (human-powered, not motorized), I wonder how stable the pictured solar powered canoe is. Those panels sticking up like they are look likely to cause the canoe to flip over if they were to catch a strong gust of wind.

Re:Secondary article more interesting.

[DarkOx]

Batteries have a pretty limited dubty cycle. They are good enough now for electric cars as traditionally envisioned but, I would not want to go near this idea without lots of hard numbers showing the kinda impact it would have on my batery life. I supect it would cost consumers much more in maintainance then the value of the electricity they could produce. Now haveing the car more able to function as a personal generator for your own home in the even of blackout sounds like a great idea.

Re: Killing Muslims

[DigiShaman]

The fact of the matter is the rest of the world (US, Europe, China, Russia...etc) doesn't really know if OPEC is telling the truth or not as to how much oil *really* is left in the ground. For all we know, there may only be 5 years left at current rate of consumption. And when looking at this from a national security standpoint, this is very very BAD.

We can't risk letting the middle east hold the US hostage to our ever-growing demand on oil. Sure, oil is clean burning when done properly with a maintained turbine or tuned engine, but it IS running out. And it is of my optionion that the Pentagon knows this. Why else would the be so frantically filling up our emergency reserves?

I'm willing to wager that we will be forced into spending more research and development on alternative fuels. And Shell and Exxon know this. I'm sure well start seeing them work on bio-fuel projects and refining them into usable plastics. Time will tell....

Re: Killing Muslims

[strictnein]

Give me a fucking break.

Prince Bandar and his Saudi friends are currently in control of America via a proxy named George Bush. If you've seen Farenheit 9/11 you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, I know what you're talking about. And if you actually believe that Farenheit 9/11 was in anyway truthful, or based on any facts at all... come on now. F9/11 is a clever propaganda piece. And like most propagana, there is no room for truth.

If F9/11 is a documentary, then Jackass is a documentary too. Actually, Jackass was much more of a documentary than F9/11.

V2G idea is a non-starter

[Clod9]

That secondary article ignores the most important point: efficiency. Attaching a million vehicles to the grid is far less efficient (and less clean) than using large, stationary plants. Our problem isn't that we don't have enough generators. Our problem is that we don't have enough fuel and we have to import it.

The article describes a non-solution to a non-problem.

Re:Better Yet

[mog007]

Going anywhere at all requires a car.

Welcome to the United States of America... sorry that's the way it works here.

Re: Killing Muslims

[Hiro Antagonist]

Do I get an invite if I don't think murder is wrong? :D

I got into an interesting argument with a fellow anthropology major[1] about this -- She says that "'Murder is Wrong' is the only 'cultural absolute'", and I say that it's a useless definition, as the definition for 'murder' changes between cultures. You could abstract the statement out to say, 'Killing is wrong in some context in any given culture.', but the definition is still useless -- every single culture has prohibitions on something, and knowing that all cultures have some sort of prohibition against killing in certain contexts is worth Fsck-All, because the definition is so vague.

It's like saying that the corner grocery store is a walk lasting between ten minutes and two years away, maybe. Utterly useless to anyone wanting to get to the grocer.

[1] Note that I'm considering a switch to biochem, mainly because I really hate all the fscking hippies in the Anthro department who can't understand that we aren't going back to teepees and granola.

Re:pedestrian czar needed

[Ricdude]

Sure, exploit our own resources for what, 30 days of oil at best? Remember the real reason for the 55 mph speed limit? To increase gas mileage (much lower wind resistance, as it goes up with the *cube* of velocity), so as to decrease our oil dependency. I know my car gets 42-45 mpg if I commute at 80 mph, and 45-48 if I keep it down to 70. If I could keep it to 55 or 60, I would probably crack 50 mpg. So if we could all just lay off the go pedal a bit, we could all reduce our need for oil, period. Foreign and domestic.

BTW, I think if you check the Sierra Club manifesto, you'll find they would rather we not be dependent on petroleum for energy at all. It's only a little slanderous to claim they "prefer" we remain dependent on the mideast for energy.

We had a wake up call in the '70's with regards to petroleum dependency. We hit the snooze button. Eventually, we will have to wake up and deal with it for real. You can start dealing with it now (drive fuel efficient vehicles, run on biodiesel, E85, live where you can walk or bike to most of your weekly needs), or you can deal with it later. It isn't going to get any cheaper to fix this as time goes on.

Re:pedestrian czar needed

[SethJohnson]

People don't want to be crammed into high density developments.

And people don't want to eat healthy foods, either. The choice, however, is to feast on Pizza for 50 years and die a bloated mess from heart disease, or live many more years eating un-fun foods with a sexy body that enables you to bang more broads. Sometimes we have to take the more difficult route as a society for the greater good.

Forcing people to live like caged animals to save the environment doesn't work.

There are hundreds of yuppies living in $300k downtown Austin lofts that would hardly call themselves caged animals. Force would never work, anyway. A community must make population density attractive. It does this with toll roads to the suburbs and cheap rail systems within the core. People get sick of paying out the ass to commute and eventually stop moving far away from the center of the city where everything is convenient.

as long as oil energy is cheaper than alternate sources, people will burn oil.

I think we both agree that there will be a time in the future that oil will not be so cheap. And it currently isn't very cheap when you consider the cost of going to war to unleash the world's second largest oil supply from UN sanctions (Iraq). So what happens when we get to that moment where oil isn't so cheap, yet our entire country is based on development that relied on cheap oil for transportation? Whoops! Our economy goes down the crapper and some other country becomes the top dog. And I bet that country will have a well-developed rail system. In fact, I'll bet you my house in downtown Austin on that prediction.

Re:Humvee replacement

[Politicus]

the solution to gasoline, is probably going to be hydrogen, we'll never run out.

Hydrogen is not a fuel source like gasoline. As a matter of fact the source of most hydrogen today is fossil fuels.

The real solution lies in switching to existing renewable energy sources. Given that, you can even go back to running a transportation infrastructure on gasoline using thermal depolymerization.. Although ethanol would be preferred since it requires the same delivery infrastructure as gasoline but can be used by both internal combustion engines and fuel cells. It's also a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen not to mention that it can also be directly consumed by humans.

Biodiesel... future... wits to grasp it

[bourne]

Or, as I'd say without the lame /. subject line limits, Biodiesel is the future if we have the wits to grasp it.

I'm drunk tonight, so I'll speak bare truth and you can make of it what you will. I'm an American and this is my point of view, so if you're euro then I could care less, except to point out that the fucking French have more progressive nuclear and biodiesel policies than we could hope to have here.

Biodiesel is almost as efficient an energy storage medium as dinodiesel (10% lower energy density). Unlike Hydrogen (also an energy STORAGE format, not an energy SOURCE) it can be stored and distributed using EXISTING infrastructure, doesn't require high-pressure or highly expensive storage containment. When some teenage fuckhead wraps his coupe around a tractor-trailer, it's less likely to burn than gas, where a high-pressure hydroden container would be... interesting.

The pollution issues with biodiesel are lower than with standard dinodiesel, and in 2 years when the U.S. legal limits on diesel sulfur content drop to low levels (see bullets below), car manufacturers can filter out biodiesels small issues without the filters being compromised by sulfur.

Biodiesel doesn't release any carbon that didn't recently come out of the atmosphere. It's a net zero fuel in carbon terms, garbage out, but only from garbage recently in. When you burn petrofuels, you release carbon that's been buried for millions of years.

Biodiesel can be manufactured in a number of ways. The original Diesel engine ran on peanut oil; almost any oil seed can be used to generate biodiesel, as can turkey guts and algae. People complain that solution X won't create enough biodiesel to meet the need, but we could make 10% come from source X, 40% from source Y, 50% from source Z and be done with it.

In 50 years, it will become vital to have an alternative to dinofuels. The question of oil reserves pales next to the socioeconomic pressures that millions of welfare-state arabs will pose. Consider Saudi Arabia. Work is considered "beneath" everyone, so foreigners are imported to do most of the work, and unemployment among the citizens (and I use that term loosely) is rife. Converting to a productive society is almost impossible; the world bank won't fund projects because the state welfare level is too high, and any change to a dynamic (capitalist) society would threaten the current ruling caste. Young men are channeled into madrasses because there is no other path for them. If you think religion is the opiate of the masses, consider a society consisting completely of addicts.. An economist once said that revolution is inevitable once the merchant class exceeds 10% of the population. A fool could tell you that revolution, bloody revolution, is inevitable when the crop of dissatisfied young turks currently being grown ripens, and the natural reserves of oil that support a welfare state begin to wane.

The oil economy will cause bloody flux within our lifetimes. Will it catch us by suprise or will we shift to independence before then? Biodiesel, solar power, nuclear, we've got to turn to it before it becomes a crisis if we want to survive. Of course petrofuels are cheap - they're accepting the investment of dead dinosaurs millions of years ago. You see any dinos volunteering to become fuel today? I didn't think so. It's always cheaper to take advantage of dead shit that's turned into fuel, but you can't always bank on dead shit working for you. Maybe it's more expensive to push for biodiesel today, but in 50 years when the conflagration of the Middle East makes today's wars look like sandbox games, we'll either be glad we pushed for independence or sorry we didn't.

Okay, you

biodiesel bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it not occurred to anyone that biodiesel is not such a good thing?

Or is inhaling high concentrations of aerosolized heavy oils and grease prefereable to relatively lower concentrations of soot?