Posted on 12/13/2007 12:06:48 PM PST by neverdem
“The additional cost to make a new car an FFV is only about $100 per vehicle”
I’d like some more info on this...that seems awfully low to me considering that ethanol is so corrosive. I would think it would cost more than $100 to protect vital parts from the acidic effects of ethanol.
Or, perish the thought, we could just let the high price of energy drive a solution without the help of the wise-people. The technology will move so quickly at today's prices that any wise-guy recommendation will be obsolete within a year.
woderful! we can eat petroleum and run our cars on food. why didn’t i think of that?
It would be grave error to set up system whereby the production of motor fuel is in direct competition with the production of bourbon.
woderful! = wonderful!
Next we’ll be hooked on alcohol instead of oil....
The effect of going to alcohol would be to rise the price of food everywhere in the world.
We have the coal reserves.
It would be possible to use natural gas as a bridge to hydrogen powered cars (via SMR). Also coal could be used to fire electric plants (building more) and maybe more nuclear plants.
The SMR process actually generates heat besides hydrogen.
The problem is the CO2 produced, but we have huge underground storage that the CO2 could be pumped into (if there is concern about greenhouse gases).
One reason to save the CO2 is that this could be used to produce crops in a shorter period of time...
Ethanol madness is spreading into the scientific community..........
Agreed - the price of booze is high enough as it is.
There is interest in building a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the US mainland, but little effort has been made so far...
Pelosi and Reid, if they had brains, would back such a project.
But the DIMocrats are really dumb these days...
I disagree. Throw it out on the market and our people will decide what they want to do with it. If it works, we’ll buy it. If it doesn’t, we’ll look elsewhere.
Zubrin says Congress can mandate flex-fuel vehicles since it would cost maybe $100 per car and would provide an actual market for alcohol alternatives. Oil dependency would evaporate in a decade automatically.
If Teddy would stop bidding up the price of alcohol, it would work.
To alcohol - the cause of, and solution to...all of life’s problems!
Etahnol closed today on the CBOT at $2.049 per gallon; gasoline closed on the NYM at $2.376.
Another bad idea. Grain prices are already skyrocketing.
Go electric and power the grid with nuke plants.
Right, is this after a big taxpayer subsidy. Ethanol would NEVER exist without govt subsidies. I despise these freaks who say we must "get away from oil and coal." We just need to drill everywhere and get the govt out the way. Slimball Clinton put huge reserves of low sulfur coal off the table to help his Indonesian friends. This entire energy problem is political.
OT, I absolutely hate those stupid BP commercials about all their effort in alternative energy. It is brainwashing.
Ethanol water requirements: 371gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of corn. 371 x 56 lbs per bushel = 20,776 gallons are needed per bushel of corn. One bushel of corn will provide approximately 2.5 gallons of ethanol, thus each gallon of ethanol requires 8,310 gallons. An additional 30 to 37 gallons of water are consumed to manufacture ethanol from corn per gallon of ethanol. Source: Corn Chemistry and technology handbook, 2002. x 1.5 = approximately 50 gallons of water per gallon of gasoline equivalent. 8,310 + 50 = 8,360 gallons of water are needed per equivalent gallon of gasoline in the form of ethanol. 140 billion gallons of gasoline are consumed in the USA annually, times 8,360 gallons of water, divided by 325,851gallons per acre foot (AF), equals 3.59 billion AF of water annually. Note that the USA currently consumes approximately 500 million AF per year. Thus to displace gasoline with ethanol would require over 6 times more water that is currently used for agriculture and all other purposes. Thus making ethanol requires over 3,340 times more water than making hydrogen. By contrast, it takes approximately 2.5 gallons of water to make an equivalent gallon of gasoline in the form of hydrogen. Thus less than one million AF of water would generate all of the fuel now consumed annually in the USA.
My car can run on E-85, the ethanol fuel mix (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline).
I hate it, though, and almost always run on gasoline instead.
E-85 is cheaper, thanks to subsidies paid for by the American People, but the small per-gallon savings is lost because the MPG goes down proportionally and then some, especially in hot weather.
So even though it is cheaper initially, I don’t use it because it costs more per gallon when the MPG goes way down.
Plus, I don’t have to go half way across town to find it.
I’m sure if everyone used ethanol, it would be in every gas station, which would negate one of my complaints, but until the milage problem is fixed, ethanol is not, IMO, the answer.
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