Slashdot Mirror
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."
It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline for the next five minutes."
There. Fixed it for ya.
My blog
Switchgrass
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.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Your right that it can be grown on land that is not used for food and grow very well there. I think the problem is that the people who do grow food might stand to make more money growing switchgrass so then the land for food will be used anyways. I know if I was a farmer and had a chance to make more money growing a weed I would be all over it. I might be wrong in that. It might not make them more money it is just the first thing that popped in my mind.
All points of time and space are connected.
Corn based plastics are just the tip of the iceberg, we will be seeing dozens of new plant based plastics in the decade. Just because oil has been used for a 100 years doesn't mean that they will even need it in another 100.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It's not a religion. Religions are based on faith. This is based on hysteria.
That is wrong. In a new diesel, it will run pure biodiesel with no modifications. In a used diesel, the biodiesel will clean out the fuel system, so the fuel filter will get plugged. That is the only change needed.
Ferment into what? It is running in a diesel engine, not a ethanol engine.
For vegetable oils, it needs to be warmed up before running in the diesel engine, but that is also the only thing needed to do when the vegetable oil is heated up before being sent to the engine.
One reference for running only straight vegetable engine in a car. There it did need modifications like different injectors and glow plugs, mostly to compensate for the increased viscosity.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I don't know if switchgrass is a legume or not. Legumes make their own nitrogen fertilizer; and cellulosic ethanol could be made from some kind of leguminous grass. You wouldn't need much of the other nutrients (phosphorous, potassium, etc.)
fertilizer is a safe, renewable source that is completely independent of petroleum...
No more dependent on oil than other products. Ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas; not oil. That stupid oil company TV ad that lumps the two together ("Two-thirds of the oil and natural gas consumed in the U.S. is produced in North America") is very misleading.
The best alternative is to develope communities in a fashion that is conducive to both mass-transit as well as manual-transit (such as walking, biking, &c.)
AC's Law of Real Estate: The housing you can afford is 50 miles from where the jobs are.
Oh, and try walking or biking to work in Wisconsin in February.
Your brain is not a computer.
This is based on an economic consequence. The infrastructure of America is built around the car, and not just any car, but a car that had 60 years of dirt cheap fuel. Our cities and towns are modeled around this. More importantly salaries are also adjusted for a much cheaper transportation cost. You have several options and none of them are particularly appetizing, and none of them have anything to do with global warming. You can produce your own fuel through biofuels, switch to electric cars, or produce more oil from costly hard to access oil reseviors which represent the last of your domestic supply. Nothing else is feasible despite all the fairy farts, adament denials, and heartfelt praying that might be offered. If you don't want to live where public transportation can be possible, then do not expect people to cry for you when something clearly predictable damages your ONLY source of personal transportation.
He talks EXACTLY WHY the solar power->electric->battery WON'T WORK! Because it will take over a decade for electric cars make it to most households even if we outlawed all non-electric car sales today! Cars have a life expectancy of 10 years or more, which means you will see that same 2007 car that was bought last year on the road until 2017 or later. The government could even outright outlaw all gas powered cars today and still you would not see a full uptake of electric or hybrid cars for several years because people can't afford to make the purchase. Again, it is usually every 3-4 years for someone to get a different car, but not necessarily a brand new car (usually a used one), and most cars will see at least 10 years and 3 owners. This means people expect to have 10 years to save up to purchase a brand new vehicle, or 3 years to save up for a several year old used one. Any change that would be significant would need to be able to affect ALL cars at the same time, not after 10 years. This is why a fuel change that can be used in existing cars is the method of choice to change our energy usage. Yes, keep the hybrids and electrics coming, but do the thing right now which can affect ALL cars right now! And let the 10+ year solution continue to work as well.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Oh yeah? What about sherpas, then? ; )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm sorry, hauling 3500 pounds of steel to carry one person and groceries using controlled explosions is monumentally stupid.
We need to conserve energy dense fuels for situations where they are are truly needed (emergency vehicles, long-haul transportation through sparse landscapes, aviation).
What people are upset about is that life is much less convenient when we're all not driving powerful vehicles than can carry 10 folks and tow a boat on a whim. Well, tough shit. You may have to carpool or take the bus. You may not be able to keep your own jetski in a garage a hundred miles from your lake house. These are privileges, not rights.
Algae based biodiesel is interesting, but again, we need to get away from ICEs except where they are absolutely necessary. An electric car can receive power from any source - nuclear, coal, and even biodiesel through small on-board generators. ICEs will always be addicted to one type of depletable resource - that derived from dead organic material.
Are you actually advocating that brazil not mechanize the nearly 500 yearold process of sugar cane harvest? Are you nuts? Was industrialization something you found "quaint"?
prior to the biofuels initiative or that you are against agriculture in the midwest that produces huge amounts of untreated runoff every year and has been since probably the mid 50s if not before. Remember at one point in time, before gasoline was discovered to be perfect for the combustion engine, ford considered ethenol. As it happens he chose gasoline because it was dirt cheap and they were dumping it straight into the Mississippi (I honestly cannot fathom how that must have smelled) since it was a by product. Mind you I'm not trying to justify this as a perfect circle or some other kind of historical asshatery but I find your most compelling arguement not only contrary to your final statement about global warming but also tangential to the issue.ãã Additionally, while oil will always be sold and burned off by someone else, decreasing the demand will decrease the price and also reduce the incentive for people to tap costlier reseviors.
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
- Everyone who didn't plan is screwed
- You are not
If we don't plan ahead by investing heavily in alternatives, we'll have to figure it out at a time when resources are more scarce, energy is vastly more expensive, foreign firms have already patented things out the wazoo, and our society is struggling to reinvent itself on short notice.Surely it isn't controversial to say that you should generally plan ahead for a big, ugly change that you already know is coming. I'm not the smartest cookie, but even I know that.