Slashdot Mirror
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.
One can save a lot of money and trouble by just biking from coast to coast. Takes about 9 weeks, from what I hear.
This would require a redesign of the vehicles as they are not capable of acting as such now, but it seemed very logical to me, and worth the relatively minimal additional cost of a better out-plug and some software to charge the utility money for using your electiricity and to prevent them from draining your battery do nothing.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons.
Yeah, Daryl Hannah is on the interview circuit telling the world that the only byproducts are harmless steam and a wonderful flowery smell. She's a fucking moron.
Not relying on fossil fuels is a noble goal, but the problems of CO and CO2 emissions (and others) are still there. Burning biodiesel even creates a whole new range of compounds that burning petrolium diesel doesnt.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sooo.. I don't really see the point of V2G. The article makes it sound like the energy comes for free from the car. You're just going to be draining the battery, having to use more of the gasoline engine's power the next time you drive to replentish it. So wheres the advantage? It's probably much easier to make one big, efficient, clean generating station than rely on millions of little generators.
Selling energy back to the grid is a good idea but only if that energy was generated in a fundementally better way.. Like farmers selling energy generated from burning methane from their manure pit, or some guy with a windmill in his backyard.
But what's the point of getting energy from cars? That energy was generated by burning fossil fuels (usually) so why bother?
Note that if your car generates electricity, you could conceivably make a few bucks selling juice to the grid at peak hours.
This is a terrible idea. Just think about where your energy is coming from and how much you are losing by converting it to electricity. This second law stuff leads to pollution and a waste of energy (unless you have some rare source of energy which doesn't pollute, like the sun).
This is sounds clean and groovy, but just like hydrogen-powered cars, is dirty and wasteful.
I've lived in the burbs for most of my life so far; once after taking a bus home from college I was dropped off at a mall about 2 miles from my home, and my ride didn't show so I walked. There was no way to do this that didn't involve walking down the shoulder of a highway and running across onramps (not even a decent median to walk on). Going anywhere at all requires a car.
On the other hand, a lot of my friends in cities with reasonable transit systems haven't learned to drive at 21 years of age.
um, Columbus never thought he found something new, he thought he found east Asia.
Also, isn't a "dilusion" what happens when you pour water into another liquid? (Maybe you meant "delusion"?)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
" Biodiesel doesn't have anything to do with cutting down emissions. You're still burning hydrocarbons."
Actually, regardless of whether or not Darryl Hannah is a moron, you are wrong.
Because the carbon in the vegetable oil used to make biodiesel is already part of the carbon cycle (opposed to having been sequestered underground for millions of years), biodiesel does not, for the most part, contribute to a NET INCREASE in carbon dioxide.
In fact, research by the US DOE suggests that biodiesel use cuts net CO2 emissions by 78%.
http://www.ott.doe.gov/pdfs/biodieselfuel.pdf
The reason it isn't 100% is because the methanol reacted with the veggie oil to make the methyl ester comes from petroleum in the US. You can make ethyl ester biodiesel using non-petrochemical based ethanol, but the process control is less forgiving.
the military's humvee replacement is going to have 4 electric motors, one on each wheel, a generator, and a diesel engine to power the generator, and enough batteries to drive the vehicle without the generator (for stealth)
because the vehicle has 4 motors, it doesn't have to do a 3 point turn, it just puts one side forward, the other side in reverse, and it turns in place.
this vehicle is also supposed to be more fuel effiecient.
the solution to gasoline, is probably going to be hydrogen, we'll never run out. I've heard of people with hydrogen cars producing their own hydrogen from solar panels at their houses. (cheaper than paying through the grid)
I think he bought a processor for over $1000, and gets the grease for free.
Well, if I could get raw crude oil for free I would be happy to sell you gasoline at $1 a gallon...
The input is free in this example only because biodiesel is in its infancy, so the community refiner you reference has no competition for the used grease. Within five years you can expect that the restaurants that pay this person to take the grease away or give it to him for free will have several competing offers to pay the restaurant for the priviledge of hauling away the grease for later refining.
This McNuggest Nation may use a lot of vegetable oil every day, but it is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of diesel fuel that is used daily (which is only a small fraction of the amount of gasoline used) so there is no way this scales up beyond proof-of-concept stages.
Of course, this sort of leads one to wonder why the companies which are actually in the business of hauling away and disposing of the contents of the grease traps in american restaurants are not starting to produce biodiesel to increase their profit margins. I am sure it will be fairly common soon, but does anyone know of anyone doing this already?
Shaun and his team visited us last year in Portland, and I wish them the best of luck getting their program picked up.
We have a fairly decent FAQ on our site about biodiesel, I've noticed a lot of questions and some misinformation, especially in the AutoWeek article.
Biodiesel is a lot like normal diesel and is no longer vegetable oil after being processed. If made right, it should not have much left over of the other materials from processing.
Pure vegetable oil is a different thing, but can also run on an engine somewhat cleanly (I ran some short term experiments at a previous job). The problem is that it is so thick, you have to heat up the engine first. So you use some normal diesel, then switch to vegetable oil after a bit. Then before you stop the engine, you have to switch back to normal fuel to get rid of build ups and stuff. Other than that fancy arrangement, it didn't take much to get a diesel engine to run off vegetable oil without additives (like straight from the supermarket).
It would have been nice if I had been paid to run long term experiments too, but I didn't, so I don't know how much build up happens when running more than a couple months. Biodiesel runs cleaner and is a lot closer to normal diesel, so many of the issues with vegetable oil don't show up.
When I find out that it's cheaper to use my wife's car to power my house all day than it is to use electricity off the grid, I'm going to do it.
Don't worry, it won't be cheaper. There's a reason people aren't generating their own power from gasoline right now. The cost in fuel and maintainence is a lot higher to operate your own gasoline/diesel generator than to buy electricity from the local utility. That price gap is only going to get bigger as the price of oil goes up relative to other energy sources.
Now, when natural gas fuel cells come to the mass market, it will be different. You'll be using the same fuel as the big electric companies, and generating near the point of use. The economics would probably go in favor of generating your own power then, as you would avoid the distribution losses inherent in a massive power grid.
0 1 - just my two bits
This is the process that Discover magazine published two articles about (one intoduction in May of 2003, and a one-page update in July of 2004)
Anything Into Oil.
Anything Into Oil (update.)
The first application that this process is being put to is the disposal of slaughterhouse waste (blood, guts, and bones) by turning them into fertilizer and fuel oil (at 85% energy efficiency!) I find this highly exciting, as it promises a future where an individual human's bio-load on the planet may be reduced by the reprocessing of the waste that he produces into resources that then don't need to be drawn from non-renewable sources.
I anxiously await reports of sucessful full-time operation of their 200-ton-a-day plant in Carthage, Missouri this Fall.
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?