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.
Really? He's got a pooper scooter?
Better yet, ride a bike around the country. Bio-powered. Some emissions, but nothing the environment can't handle. :)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I guess a world without gasoline would be nice, but the BP commercials on CNN have me feeling better about fueling up. ;)
Anyone going to watch 13 episodes of this guy? Please say no.
People have been travelling great distances without gasoline since prehistoric times.
Hell, Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean without it.
Unknown host pong.
excrement-powered scooter
I'm sure it's gets shitty mileage.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I found most interesting that the only vaguely technical discussion of biodiesel in the puff-piece was a bit of bashing:
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.How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I've driven and worked on passenger car diesels exclusively for the past ten years. They're robust and reliable, but you can't just fuel them on anything. They run terribly on gasoline!
The most critical part of the diesel is the fuel pump and injectors. They run at 3000-5000 psi with very low volume per stroke, so leakage cannot be tolerated. The fuel has to be filtered extremely well (sub micron). My worry with biodiesel is that it might plug filters due to microbial growth [always a problem in diesel], or the vegatable oil hydrolyze into organic acid plus glycerol. The organic acids will cause corrosion of the injector pump plungers and injector tips. Not good at all. The fuel will also have different rubber swell characteristics, so you may get fuel leaks. I'd try this first on a imetal-to-metal Mercedes with simple to replace rubber rather than a Peugeot or VW with a fuel-lubricated pump and that main O ring soaking in fuel.
I expect vegatable oil could be made to work with additives: a biostat, acid neutralizer plus seal swell control. But it would have to remain a separate product becauase petroleum oil and vegatable oils aren't miscible. If you wanted a blend, you'd need an emulsifier, and the results might be too viscous.
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!!!!
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.
" 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.
I have to stop at the Taco Bell and "gas up".
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
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)
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.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Here, in Brazil, it's common to see dual-fuel cars around. (There are commercial names like "flexpower" or "total flex").
:-)
Gasoline AND Organic Alcohol. In the same car. Mixed together in any proportion.
We have been using Alcohol in cars since the 70's. Nowadays, we can choose the best ($$) fuel in the gas stations.
And it's alcohol, because of Iraq and Saudi Arabia troubles.
Yep. Here's a nice map showing where the US gets its oil imports. The top four sources are Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, each at about 15%. Which one is the top source varies from month to month. Other Middle East sources -- Iraq, Kuwait, UAE -- add up to about 15% as well. Summing up, about 50% comes from the Western Hemisphere, about 30% from the Middle East, and the other 20% from places like Africa, the North Sea producers, and Indonesia.
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