Back in 1975 Newsday Among Others Said (1 Viewer)

[NovaBlitz]

Do yourselves a favor and read this article on Ethanol:


http://www.caranddriver.com/features...-promises.html

 

[Buzz Foster]

Please, please please...I am NOT talking about putting ethanol in a gas tank and burning it in an internal combustion engine at all. Ethanol can be used in a fuel cell at 60% energy conversion, much like hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell. Such vehicles are electric. In a plug-in hybrid version, batteries can store grid power to run the vehicle, but the fuel cell is there for when the batteries run low.

60% energy conversion in an ethanol fuel cell is somewhere around two and a half times the energy from the same amount of gasoline in an internal combustion engine.

Current cars are not adaptable to the type of technology I am talking about. In fact, ethanol fuel cells are still experimental, but they are possible, and the rest of the technology is available.

I am fully aware that ethanol as a replacement for gasoline in IC engines is dubious in its benefits. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a quantum change in not just the fuel we use, but in how we use it.

 

[Buzz Foster]

Please, please please...I am NOT talking about putting ethanol in a gas tank and burning it in an internal combustion engine at all. Ethanol can be used in a fuel cell at 60% energy conversion, much like hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell. Such vehicles are electric. In a plug-in hybrid version, batteries can store grid power to run the vehicle, but the fuel cell is there for when the batteries run low.

60% energy conversion in an ethanol fuel cell is somewhere around two and a half times the energy from the same amount of gasoline in an internal combustion engine.

Current cars are not adaptable to the type of technology I am talking about. In fact, ethanol fuel cells are still experimental, but they are possible, and the rest of the technology is available.

I am fully aware that ethanol as a replacement for gasoline in IC engines is dubious in its benefits. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a quantum change in not just the fuel we use, but in how we use it.

 

[Chu Gai]

Buzz, even if we go with your numbers and thoughts that ethanol would not be used as a gasoline additive and assume that it will completely supplant gasoline, according to the Car & Driver article, the most that's going to do is eliminate about 45% of the petroleum that would make it's way into gasoline. Now, that's a pretty big number but is still only 19% when we consider all fossil fuels. Further, one needs to consider that energy will be required to turn that corn or whatever into ethanol. At the present time and even in the forseeable future, that's going to largely come from fossil fuels, so all those apparent gains go down. By how much, I don't know. But they go down.
Also, as we've recently seen in Mexico, our relatively modest use of ethanol right now as it's derived from corn, has caused rapid increases in the cost of corn. That's not been too much fun for a country where a substantial amount of the population relies on tortillas. Diverting substantially more corn into ethanol production will then result in pretty large price hikes for everything made from corn. That's going to affect the entire world.
In the meantime, I applaud efforts to make things more efficient, to use less energy, to pollute less, to be better stewards of the world we and future generations live and will live in. I'm not a big fan of Kyoto. It's not been thought out well and while many countries that've signed on, Russia, China, Canada, and others have done so after wrangling concessions that eliminate any hits on them. It's kind of like me agreeing that I'm going to help you build an addition to your house but because I'm letting you use my truck, for which you pay for, I don't have to lift a hand to hammer a nail. There's a lot of self-serving going on with these protocols. As long as mom & dad pay for it, it's OK though.

 

[Buzz Foster]

"Buzz, even if we go with your numbers and thoughts that ethanol would not be used as a gasoline additive and assume that it will completely supplant gasoline..."

That's not what I am describing.

Read this: Direct Ethanol Fuel Cell

This isn't ethanol in an internal combustion engine.

This isn't a hydrogen fuel cell.

The car I envision isn't a hybrid electric as you know it today.

You plug this baby into the wall at night and let it charge.

The next day, you run on batteries until they give out.

Then the auxilliary power generation for the electric motors that turn the wheels kicks in and is NOT and IC engine, but a direct ethanol fuel cell.

I'm talking about a huge magnitude order of efficiency, and a need for ethanol that would be, compared to present levels, 90% lower than our current need for gasoline.

Gasoline cannot be used in fuel cells in the same way, as its carbon content is too high.

I'm not about replacing gasoline with ethanol. I am about replacing the gasoline, the engine, the drivetrain, ALL OF IT. Replace it all with a vaslty more efficient machine that mostly runs on grid power.

It is a quantum change in automotive technology, but it uses mostly off-the-shelf components. And the positive side of it is that from the consumer end, if you could get one of the cars, the only thing special you would need would be the pure ethanol and a free outlet in the garage.

 

[Chu Gai]

I understand what you were saying Buzz. My point, if it wasn't clear, was that the ethanol would still have to be manufactured. The electricity would still have to be produced and so forth. The net effect is that you'd eliminate around 19% of the petroleum currently being used, give or take. That's all fine and well assuming the rest of the world doesn't become economically better off than they are now. That's fine if the population is frozen and doesn't increase. Then what?

 

[Buzz Foster]

The ethanol does still need to be manufactured, but there are bio-technologies on the horizon that are potentially going to improve the yield. If you could replace all cars right now with a car like I described, then gasoline for transportation is eliminated, and people would only need an amount of ethanol equivalent to ten percent of the current amount of gasoline being used.

In that case, you are lowering the amount of resources required to make the ethanol, having to make less of it, having to transport less of it, and having to use less of it.

As far as electricity goes, the current available grid power has been measured to be sufficient AS IS to power 84% of vehicles, if all personal transportation were converted to plug-in hybrid electric. This is because of excess capacity and reduced demand at night.

The thing is, a lot of the pessimistic views I have read on petroleum alternatives and alternative technologies have not taken certain things into account, like:

Internal combustion inefficiency. IC engines only use 18% of the stored energy in gasoline. If it took 100% of the stored energy of all the gasoline we use to locomote ourselves, then yes, converting to something else is a daunting prospect. But, electric moters are near perfect in efficiency. Most of what goes in goes toward moving you forward, not being spit out a tailpipe. Take the total amount of stored gasoline energy consumed and multiply it by 18%, and you are starting to get an idea of what kind of energy we need to come up with, if we switch to a more efficient auto technology, like electric.

Grid capacity. Borwnouts and blackouts on hot summer days aside, the US power grid has excess capacity at night that can be used for charging 84% of plug-in electric hybrid cars, assuming an immediate and total switch-over. We probably need a few more power plants, but nothing like the 10,000 new nuclear plants I have heard quoted. We already have most of what we need.

Design efficiencies. If your focus is on making IC engines more efficient, you will hit a wall that cannot be overcome. The design is inherently inefficient. Existing hybrid electrics suffer the same inherent flaw in IC engines. Increase the efficiency of your transportation by using a better propulsion method, and you decrease not only its net energy use, but the net energy required to go into it every step of the way.

Where, exactly does the 19% figure come in? I have read that half of all petroleum is used for automotive fuel. My proposal requires some work, research, and money, but the net savings would be the elimination of petroleum as a motor transport fuel, as well as the petroleum used for lubrication, etc.

 

[Chu Gai]

I'd love to see the technology come to fruition Buzz.

 

[Jack Briggs]

Don't we already have a (marathon) thread about global warming going on? For this thread to continue, why not stick to the notion from the original post about early predictions in the mass media about calamaties that never in fact happened? Then, for those who enjoy poo-hooing the notion of global warming, go to the other thread.

 

[Holadem]

That was the thinly disguised intent of this thread.

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H