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SwiftFuel Alternative To Alternative Fuels
TheDawgLives writes "PBS has an article by Bob Cringely about the best route to end our dependence on oil and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of replacing all our expensive cars with even more expensive hybrids or electric cars, his suggestion is to use a cheap drop-in replacement for gasoline called Swift Fuel. It is derived from Ethanol, but doesn't require any modification to older cars to prevent corrosion. It can be mixed with gasoline in any amount and can even be distributed using the same network as gasoline, including being pumped in the same pipes and shipped in the same trucks. It is truly a drop-in replacement for gas, and it is real. It is being tested by the FAA for certification in propeller aircraft. It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline."
Switchgrass
Even if they use ethanol from algae, hemp, switchgrass, or sugar cane, this might reduce our need for oil, but it can't replace oil used for other things like plastic.
If this is made using ethanol from corn, then diesel is used in the production of this, and it causes food prices to increase.
What is wrong with using a vegetable oil in a diesel engine? That is a bio-fuel with low processing requirements.
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According to TFA, while they can make it from almost any plant, they're starting with sorghum:
"...sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production."Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
It's not the same land or farming resources, though. Switchgrass grows on a wider variety of soil and climate, meaning it can be grown in places where you couldn't grow food crops, and doesn't require much seeding or fertilizer.
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Hmmm, does Brazil have these same problems?
Don't know, but 144,000 people are about to lose their jobs in Brazil thanks to biofuel:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4083137.ece
Brazil grows sugar cane and started back in the 70's. It is only in the past 5 or 10 years that they became energy independent so it took them decades. I am sure they had all sorts of growing pains but they should be commended for doing it. We should be doing it for the same reasons. Better to use a renewable fuel where we can and save the oil for what we really need it for. Moms SUV is not really a need to me. She can have ethanol or swift fuel.
All points of time and space are connected.
Factor of six sounds high. I admit these figures are old, but...
Yield of 99.5% ethanol per acre from:
Sorghum cane: 500 gallons
Corn: 214 gallons
Grain sorghum: 125 gallons
Only David Pimental believes that, and he's in the pay of the oil companies.
Per the article (Cringely, so not exactly trustworthy, but I don't feel like verifying the numbers) wholesale ethanol costs $1.42 a gallon and SwitftFuel production costs are ~40 cents/gallon. 1 Barrel of oil (42 gallons) currently goes for $130. That's converted to 20 gallons of gasoline (plus 20 gallons of other useful stuff), so the raw cost of gasoline is ~3.09/gallon. That's reasonably consistent with these numbers from the California gov't. Refinery costs for gasoline are slightly less, but not too far out of line.
Therefore, IF the ethanol price and ethanol conversion costs are accurate, the end user cost could easily be $1.50-1.60/gallon less than gasoline.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Lead is currently added to avgas to retard premature detonation in the cylinders, and to increase the octane rating. One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas. Today's unleaded gas would increase compression to the point where it would literally blow the seals out of the engines. They also have different chemical effects on materials that may cause deterioration in such parts as fuel lines and gaskets. Another difference is that the lead additives help protect the engine valve seats from eroding.
Airplane engines were designed to run on a very specific fuel, that had very specific properties. Avgas produces a precise amount of compression when it's burnt. The old engines were designed to be run at 100% of their potential power, so there is no tolerance for out-of-spec components, such as unleaded fuel.
In order for SwiftFuel to be an acceptable replacement, it will have to have very similar characteristics to today's avgas. Either that or it will have to be "close enough" so that older engines can at least be modified to burn it, and that would promise to be an unpopular, expensive decision (airplane repairs are never cheap.)
John
Don't they have to continually clear rainforest to grow that sugar cane though?
And FYI, switchgrass and other cellulose feedstocks are being developed in order to address the land use and runoff problems.
I'll stop 'preaching' to you now and let you get back to your "facts".
Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that compression was caused by the reduction in volume within the cylinders between the bottom and top ends of the piston stroke, and had nothing to do with the particular gas that was being compressed. Am I wrong, or did you mean to say that unleaded gas detonates at lower compression ratios than leaded gas does?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Unleaded fuels without other octane boosters are prone to predetonation. That might be what the guy was talking about - that "pinging" noise of a so-called knock condition is the sound of the piston vibrating in the cylinder as it tries to compress an expanding mixture. Hard to say.
As for eroding lines and such, this is true, especially of Ethanol. A lot of that aeronautic stuff is pretty damned antiquated. I wouldn't be surprised to find that replacement parts are still sold with leather seals and whatnot. It wasn't an airplane, but my 1960 Dodge Dart (2dr, "Phoenix", 318ci big block hemi) had a 650 CFM Carter carburetor which had a leather acceleration pump flap. When the switch from leaded occurred, a lot of these cars sort of fell apart. Not mine though. Must have gotten lucky. Also I used the expensive lead substitute, maybe it was good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Peak Oil is _not_ "that stuff running out". It is the production of oil reaching a plateau and then going into decline. The peak of a mountain doesn't happen when you reach the valley, it happens when you've got to the top and can't go higher.
Consider this - since 2005 oil production has been on a bumpy plateau with a slight downward trend. There's tons of publicly available data you can research to confirm this. In the meantime worldwide demand continues to go up - where's your magical creation of new oil via supply and demand? Oh yes, Bakken. I'll believe that one when its up & running and producing a few million barrels a day.
You should also realise that the USA's oil production peaked in 1973 - its been all downhill ever since. Even opening up Alaska didn't reverse the decline for long. North Sea peaked in 2000 and its plummeting now. Mexico's Cantarell field is doing the same. Perhaps you should clear your head of the economic "demand will create supply" nonsense and wake up to the geological realities of living on a finite planet with finite resources. Have you checked out the EIA's reports on US inventory levels lately?
Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
Nuclear is pretty much infinite resource if reprocessing takes place. The price of fuel is so small percentage in nuclear powerplant costs that you can increase the uranium extraction costs by 10x and still be profitable. Really, we do have enough uranium for producing entire worlds CURRENT electricity consumption for tens of thousands of years. Yes there is 10^5 times the current "estimate of economical mining" reserves, if we use
a) fuel reprocessing.
b) breeder reactors
And the fuel cycle improvements give another 10^3 increase over current model. So its 10^8 increase over what figure people talk about the current economic reserves just by one cent electricity price increase since last study. Or that much reductions in operating costs by making all parts of nuclear economy higher volume production.
©God
These guys are promising a biofuel that is exactly like fossil crude oil. It could be mixed in with the petro crude and refined into any currently available fuel.
Maybe
"Global warming cultists are *not* environmentalist. They're easily led rubes that have bought into a self flagellating religion born out of politics."
Thakyou for opening my eyes. I now see how the science I have been following for at least 25yrs is really a massive political conspiracy that has managed to infiltrate and control every national science body on the planet.
Thanks also for sharing your thoughts on 'self-flagellation', it was enough to convince this 'easily led rube' that a massive muti-decadal plot has been hiding right before his very eyes, matter of fact it's now so fucking obvious that I have been led by poitics that I will promptly find and burn my BSc.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?
Not what parent said; if we don't burn a barrel of oil because we have Magic Fairy Dust (tm), that barrel will just get burned by someone else. At least for the foreseeable future.
And "global cap-and-trade"? Are you kidding? Good luck getting every nation in the world to agree to that system. Good luck getting just China to agree to that system. Good luck getting everyone bound by that system to stop bickering over what their caps should be. And good luck having such a system function as it's actually intended to.
Getting the entire world to agree on a complicated system simultaneously is not a good way to solve world problems. Even if that problem would actually be solved by them doing so. The US has made greater progress on its would-be Kyoto goals than any Kyoto nation - and we didn't even sign the thing.
Now, biofuel is great and whatnot - biofuel and politics have killed a large chunk of the world economy. We subsidize corn ethanol to make the corn belt farmers happy. In the meantime, we have a huge tariff on imported ethanol - we can't buy alternative fuels from Brazil, for example, but we can buy crude oil from the Middle East. The result is a lot of corn diverted for ethanol production.
All this legislated corn-ethanol nonsense raises the price of corn - that's a side effect of doubling demand for it overnight. So, of course, some food prices go up too, but that's just for starters. The prices of other grains rise as well - they're "substitute goods", things people will use instead of the now-prices corn if they can. With the costs of every grain rising, livestock feed becomes more expensive, meaning practically everything you buy in a grocery store is more expensive. Meats, soda (corn syrup, remember) - all of it rising in price.
But it doesn't stop at just food, either. Soap is made in part from waste fats from slaughtered animals. As it becomes more expensive to feed livestock, even something as simple as soap becomes more expensive. We in America can generally deal with the rising food costs, but our Big Ag special-interest political games in the name of the "environment" come at the expense of the rest of the world.
Biofuel is great... If it happens on its own, and not when huge tracts of our economy are forcibly shifted so politicians can win the farm vote.
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>Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.
My coworker did some research on this over the last week, using data from the Department of Energy website. The stuff he printed out says, pretty clearly, that if we continue using oil at the same rate we are currently using it -- that is, not increasing usage -- the United States would use up its entire domestic supply in three years, and the world would use up its entire available supply in 38 years. Note this is not the amount of proven crude oil: this is the amount of oil extractable from crude oil, oil shale, and currently-existing technology for oil extraction from coal. That's *everything*, all the oil there is, and it'll be gone in under 40 years.
I'm trying to find a mistake in the Department of Energy's numbers, but haven't yet.
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