Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car
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WhiningKhan
Regular
nintenho said:
My chemistry skills are in a thick rust, but home wine processing experiences tell me that you've got something mixed up here. Ethanol is produced with fermentation from sugars, not from oils. Then again, as others have pointed out, biodiesel is extracted from organic oils.
Both ethanol and biodiesel can be produced from various crops, but the processes and the final result are very different.
I wonder why there has been such a buzz from ethanol cars (e.g. in Sweden), while biodiesel of sufficient quality could be used as a direct replacement of ordinary diesel, without infrastructure changes?
There is no large-scale production of biodiesel and it's still not a 100% solid technology. To be able to supply that much, billions would need to be invested over quite a few years and noone is willing to finance it yet as it seems. And since it won't be saving any money (see my post above) I think it's doomed anyway.
Ethanol is much cheaper and easier to produce, check out what Brasil is doing (way to go, Brasil!), but it's also doomed IMHO.
All the indication point to hybrids and maybe fuel cells some 10-20 years down the road.
Ethanol is much cheaper and easier to produce, check out what Brasil is doing (way to go, Brasil!), but it's also doomed IMHO.
All the indication point to hybrids and maybe fuel cells some 10-20 years down the road.
A common misconception is that driving on ethanol is environmentally friendly. It isn't. And another one is, that it increases the efficiency. It doesn't.
Simply put, if you fuel the machinery used to produce plants and turn them into ethanol on that same ethanol, you might just break even, energy wise. And that is disregarding all the other effort put in growing those crops and paying the people who do so.
Simply put, if you fuel the machinery used to produce plants and turn them into ethanol on that same ethanol, you might just break even, energy wise. And that is disregarding all the other effort put in growing those crops and paying the people who do so.
Cartoon Corpse
Veteran
kids make cars out of jellybeans all the time. i did.....vrooom! vrooom! screeee! crasssh!
Well, fossil fuels are just a fantastic source of energy. It's really hard to find any sort of reasonable alternative, and most that we do find end up requiring just as much energy to produce as can be obtained from the final product. Personally, I think this is more a statement that we need to get a whole lot smarter about our fuels. There are many companies who have very recently claimed to have passed the break-even point in energy consumption for various different biofuels. Hopefully it won't be long before we can transition off of oil almost entirely.nintenho said:
No problem.nintenho said:
But you see: if there is no net energy gain, it isn't an energy source. It's mostly an energy carrier. So it won't help in that respect, as we would need a different fuel to be able to produce it and save enough to have cars run on it.
Like many other "solutions": if you need nucleair reactors that produce another kind of fuel (very inefficient) to be able to do it, what's the use?
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Well, not entirely. I mean, it can help for places where you need an energy carrier, such as with cars, trains, and airplanes. It's rather unfeasible to have any of those powered by nuclear or solar energy, for example. But it's very possible to have a biofuel refinement plant work on nuclear, solar, wind, hydrodynamic, or whatever.DiGuru said:
Anyway, break-even has been achieved for a number of biofuel sources, so hopefully it won't be long before we transition to them.
While I hope you're right, I have this suspicion that they only look at the net energy requirements, and disregard anything else. Like having to pay the workers, who like driving their car as well, which also need energy for their production and all that.Chalnoth said:
Accoring to this report 98 tonnes of plant matter were required to make a gallon of Gasoline. This being the case, it's pretty easy to see why fossil fuels contain so much stored energy!
Yup, so biofuel should only really be a solution for things like cars and other vehicles where you need a compact, portable storage of energy. Nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy would be needed to make up the rest. But any way you slice it, we need to find ways to dramatically reduce power consumption while continually increasing productivity. One has to wonder if there will be tremendous world wars fought over energy sources within the next 50 years, as quite a bit of fiction has theorized.Mariner said: