Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Science Foundation is running a story on how corncob waste can be used to created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas. These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars. In fact, these 'briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000.' They can lead to flat and compact tanks and have already been installed in a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. And as the whole natural gas infrastructure exists already, this new technology could be soon adopted by car manufacturers."

Comments

Natural gas is great fuel

[asadodetira]

Compressed natural gas (mostly methane and low C alkanes) has been in use in Argentina for years, it's cheaper and cleaner than gasoline, the autonomy of compressed gas is lower but for city driving it doesn't matter, and cars can still use gasoline because the engine has only minor modifications. This method seems to admit lower pressure in the tank, and might enable to store more gas without need of thick heavy steel was for containing it. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Infrastrucutre in place?

[LWATCDR]

While I am not a big fan of ethanol I have to say the problems you are having are because E85 cars are flex fuel cars.
If you knew that you where only going to run ethanol you could run a much higher compression ratio in the engine and or much more spark advance. That would give you mileage and performance much closer to gasoline.
You can actually make more power running alcohol than gasoline that is why they use in at Indy and for dragsters. Top alcohol dragsters are faster than gas powered cars. Now Top fuel uses alcohol because it mixes better with nitro.