Bunk.
Photosynthesis is inherently weak and wasteful.
Ethanol is a technically inferior fuel.
The justification is more or less, "we may lose money on every gallon, but we'll make it up on volume".
Hi, I don't know about small engines but in Brazil they sell dual fuel vehicles which can run on either fuel blend. Brazil is self-suffcient on fuel producing lots of ethanol. U.S. could do it too. and why not?.
Rich256 wrote in news:_9x8g.47283$Fs1.20823@bgtnsc05- news.ops.worldnet.att.net:
I suspect they will "denature" the ethanol to make it undrinkable. I wonder what that will do for emissions?
The last one In retrospect dumping the salt OUT OF the bags into wheel barrow ( clean) spreading around the pool with shovel might of been a better idea, to bad I didn't think of that.
Exactly right, whether battery or hydrogen. If you work out how much electricity is equired to replace gas, you see that the amount of power to be produced is enormous. We're not talking about one or two more nukes - we're talking about more than doubling existing electrical capacity!
Mike
Richard J Kinch wrote in news:Xns97C02EB67AF5someconundrum@216.196.97.131:
And if we'd drill in ANWR and the Gulf for oil,and process oil-shale,it would not be $50 a bbl. OPEC would have to lower their price because of supply and demand changes,and we would not be paying adversaries(hostiles) large sums of money.
Richard J Kinch wrote in news:Xns97C02EB67AF5someconundrum@216.196.97.131:
And if we'd drill in ANWR and the Gulf for oil,and process oil-shale,it would not be $50 a bbl. OPEC would have to lower their price because of supply and demand changes,and we would not be paying adversaries(hostiles) large sums of money.
The last one In retrospect dumping the salt OUT OF the bags into wheel barrow ( clean) spreading around the pool with shovel might of been a better idea, to bad I didn't think of that.
And yet it produced a heck of a lot of oil.
Mike
A lot of people are mentioning Brazil as if it was some kind of ideal example. That is certainly not the case. They did not convert to ethanol for environmental reasons - they did it to control their balance of payments and trade deficits. It wasn't necessarily cheaper and a lot of Brazilian drivers hated the ethanol fueled cars. It took a while before the were able to get cars that ran well on ethanol. Now that the technology has settled down, Brazilian drivers still resent the ethanol fuels (sort of like North American drivers that are still cranky about pollution control equipment on their cars - there's no problem with it, just a perception based on the relatively poor performance of the first pollution controlled cars in the '70s.)
Brazil's ethanol industry is based on sugar cane, which is not a good source. It was relatively plentiful and they couldn't get as much money exporting sugar as converting it to fuel. The US, for examples, blocked sugar imports with trade restrictions and a propped-up US price to support US sugar businesses - like sugar beet.
Ethanol has to be based on a marginal crop that can grow without intense farming techniques. Otherwise, it will cost more energy to make than to use.
Mike
And that's more dangerous than BBQ tank refilling stations?
In some ways propane is more dangerous, because it's heavier than air, and flows along the ground almost like water seeking low points.
There have been a number of propane rail car accidents where the propane flowed downhill for quite a distance before it encountered something that ignited it. That wouldn't happen with hydrogen.
Even better. Think of as a battery, being charged by a .
There are more energy efficient ways of producing hydrogen than electrolysis, but most have their own problems.
Back in the old days, it was done by reacting iron with sulphuric acid. Which'd be economically and environmentally unpleasant in the volumes we'd need. [I have a book from the 1900s that outlines exactly how to make your own man-rated airship including how to make the hydrogen too. By today's standards, really scary stuff.]
In the beginning of this century, naval ships carried tons of calcium hydride that they could convert to hydrogen (for observation blimps/balloons) simply by adding water.
But you have to produce the calcium hydride. It wouldn't be cheap.
According to mm :
Not having seen the report, I'd remark/ask questions on the following:
1) Comparing what are probably two-stroke with oil mixed in is not a fair comparison with a 4 stroke car engine. 2) Where did he get his ethanol from? How much water did it have? This is more likely to be the cause of blistering/corrosion than anything else. 3) Did he retune the engines properly for the different mixes? Increased heating is more suggestive of bad tuning - ethanol should be cooler. 4) Comparing engines that have virtually _no_ consideration of ethanol fuels in their design to engines that do isn't a reasonable test. 5) "Swelling of the carburettor?" A metal carb swelled? I don't think so. Suggestive of plastic (especially nylon) carb parts. Nylon swells when wet with water or alcohol. Engines designed for ethanol should not have nylon in its fuel system.Ethanol works just fine in engines provided that the engine designer has taken a few things into account. For example, one of the things that used to happen is clogged carbs after a car switched from gas to a ethanol blend. You see, if there's water present, the ethanol will pick it up. If the car had a paper fuel filter, the water would cause it to disintegrate, and the paper sludge could plug things up.
If you had picked up gas from a tank that just switched to an ethanol blend, there can be an enormous amount of water in it (I'm told that these tanks can sometimes have several inches or more of water in the bottom. Which is only a problem with straight-gas if the gas level is very low and/or recently disturbed. Ethanol will simply suck it all up.
They don't make fuel filters that way anymore.
No... That is the problem that overshadows and dwarfs all the other problems. There is no energy problem. It's a pimple on the ass of the population problem.
Terry & Skipper, Clearlake Texas
Then why aren't we using it? The Federal Government promised to take care of the remains of the Yankee Nuke Plant when it was decommissioned. When the time came, they simply came in and said, "Okay, we're responsible now", and left everything sitting exactly where it was onsite. They did not move one drum 5 feet from where it was sitting, much less transport anything to Yucca Mountain.
Terry & Skipper, Clearlake Texas
All good points Mike. This is another example of how only a part of the story gets told and how people go off half cocked. Another key point to the Brazil story is they didn't just use Ethanol to become energy independent. Last week there was a picture of the President of Brazil on an offshore oil well, turning the valve on, bringing it online.
Yet, if you talk about drilling off shore in most areas of the US, the environmental extremists all come running around telling you it shouldn't be done. Then they point to the wonders of Brazil as an example of how to achieve energy independence, hoping nobody will notice the truth.
The reality is we should be pursuing multiple solutions. Opening up more areas to drilling *(ANWAR, offshore, etc), building nukes, ethanol provided it's cost effective, wind, more research on solar, more conservation, etc. But anytime you try to do almost any one of these, some nuts show up to piss and moan and stop it.
We aren't using Yucca because anti-nuclear obstructionists have done everything they can to stop it or slow it down. It would have been done 10 years ago, if not for that. Some anti-nuke person wrote a letter to the local paper along the lines of the above, blaming the federal govt for not having a safe disposal, why they are the ones responsible for all the delays.
I'm 59, substantially over 50.
mm
For all the risks and costs of nuclear, it might be necessary if we're going to keep using electricity at the rate we do. According to Jeopardy, 20% of US electricity is made with nuclear now. (even though no new plants have opened in decades. There are 3 within 90 or 120 minutes of Baltimore.)
My objection was to your tying hydrogen closely to nuclear. It has no special relationship to nuclear.
(not counting hydrogen bombs and the possible possibilty of cold fusion (that is, a hydrogen bomb that's not a bomb and generates heat more slowly and at a lower temperature than a bomb.)
If you mean that you want to use nuclear and hydrogen is one way to store the energy, I have no objection, but it didn't sound that way in hte post that I answered
More below.
There are problems with every fuel. I'm not pushing coal (even though it is plentiful and not radioactive), only saying it is as related to hydrogen as is nuclear.
There is also coal slurry, which iirc solves some of the problems of coal, but has difficulties of its own. I don't remember the details.
There is also low sulfur versus high sulfer coal. I thought low-sulfur was pretty good, but I don't recall details.
Nor am I pushing hydrogen. It too has problems, mostly iiuc that you can only put so much of it in a pressure tank on a car.
The fact remains, there is no safe storage of the remains being done, regardless of the reason, or reasons, or excuses. It's not happening. There is plenty of blame to go around, and fingers pointing in a cross fire, but its not happening. Get it?
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