Posted on 08/09/2010 8:45:02 AM PDT by Red Badger
Instead of a wholesale switch to electric cars, with all their inherent range and charging problems, a seemingly easier way to wean ourselves off gasoline is to find alternate fuel that could be used in slightly modified internal-combustion engines. Unfortunately, there are some very real reasons—never mind what conspiracy theorists might tell you about oil companies and corrupt government officials—why most alternative fuels are not ready for prime time yet. Here’s a look at the current status and near-term future outlook of the major alternatives to gasoline.
Modern turbo-diesels get about 30 percent better fuel economy than their gasoline counterparts, have gutsy low-rpm torque, and work well in vehicles with automatics and for towing; they’re a seemingly perfect solution for the U.S.
Unfortunately, diesel emissions are far dirtier than gas emissions. Removing diesel’s pollutants requires costly pieces of emissions equipment. Diesel also requires approximately 30,000-psi fuel-injection systems. These costs make diesels more pricey than even turbocharged, direct-injection gasoline engines, and those gas engines have the potential to achieve about two-thirds of diesel’s fuel-economy advantage.
While diesel costs about the same as gas today, it has run as much as 30 percent higher—and it is taxed at a higher rate than gas. There’s no easy fix to keep diesel prices low, relative to gas, because American refineries, in general, produce about 19.5 gallons of gasoline and 10.3 gallons of diesel from each barrel of oil. That means a gas-powered vehicle getting 20 mpg can drive about 390 miles on a barrel of oil, while a diesel, at 26 mpg, can go only 270 miles.
Since a barrel of oil doesn’t go as far in a diesel car, a wholesale conversion to diesels is unlikely in America unless we suddenly figure out how to make diesel fuel from something other than petroleum. European refineries produce more diesel and less gasoline from each barrel of oil, but making that switch would essentially require building brand-new refineries. Don’t hold your breath.
One approach is to transform animal fat or vegetable oil, via a transesterification process, into what is called “biodiesel.” The resulting fuel doesn’t contain sulfur and can be used in pure form, though many vehicle manufacturers recommend that it be blended with petroleum diesel in proportions between 5 and 20 percent. Biodiesel contains about 9 percent less energy than petroleum diesel, but it has a higher cetane rating (which promotes more-efficient combustion) and better lubrication properties.
Despite America’s appetite for french fries, there isn’t enough used cooking oil to make very much biodiesel. In fact, it has been suggested that to replace all of our petroleum needs with biodiesel would require the planting of soybeans on all of the arable land in the United States. New approaches for making biodiesel from algae are being explored, but they are likely decades away from mass production. Until then, biodiesel’s limited availability and higher cost will keep it a bit player.
Another diesel alternative is synthetic diesel, made by a variety of chemical conversion processes that transform natural gas, methanol, or coal into diesel. The resulting fuel is usually sulfur-free and has a higher energy content than petroleum diesel, plus cleaner exhaust emissions. Converting natural gas to diesel fuel, also known as “gas-to-liquid,” makes it easier to transport because it requires no refrigeration or compression.
The cost of synthetic diesel is also reasonable, although the environmental and energy-independence benefits are minimal. Converting coal to diesel creates much more carbon-dioxide emissions than simply using petroleum diesel. In fact, this is a problem, in varying degrees, with any of the synthetic-fuel processes. However, North America has plentiful natural-gas reserves, and this could be a simple way to convert it into an easy-to-use motor fuel.
The use of E85, which mixes 85 percent corn-based ethanol with 15 percent gasoline, has stalled due to the fuel’s limited availability, high price (no thanks to our government’s tariff on E85 imports), the roughly 30 percent fewer miles to the gallon it gets, and the understanding that its use provides little in the way of carbon reduction if the energy required to grow the corn and turn it into ethanol is factored in.
Brazil, a country that achieved energy independence by using home-grown ethanol, makes the fuel from sugar. Starting with corn is a much more complex and energy-intensive process. In the U.S., sugar-based ethanol would be challenging because most of our land is unsuitable for sugar production.
If we could produce ethanol efficiently from easier-to-grow plants, ethanol would be a good solution. Dubbed “grassoline,” this ethanol is produced from tall prairie grass or even algae. Several projects to develop a workable process are under way, but commercial quantities won’t appear before 2020.
A more readily available alternative fuel is compressed natural gas (CNG). Converting a gasoline engine to run on the same stuff most of us use to heat our homes is an easy, low-cost approach. Natural gas is also cheap, and America has a lot of it. And natural gas contains far less carbon than gasoline. In fact, a normal engine running on CNG almost matches a plug-in hybrid for its carbon-dioxide emissions. The price of CNG for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline is less than a dollar (before taxes).
Still, automakers are reluctant to embrace CNG because it emits some pollutants, while a hydrogen car or an electric vehicle does not. Also, since it must be compressed to 3500 psi to get enough of it into a tank to provide a decent range, CNG requires cylindrical Kevlar tanks that are heavier, more expensive, and harder to package than normal gas tanks.
Hydrogen is the holy grail of synthetic alternative fuels. Whether burned in an internal-combustion engine or used to power a fuel cell, its primary byproduct is water. And with that emitted water, you can produce more hydrogen. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Most commercial hydrogen produced today is made by stripping carbon atoms from natural gas—a fossil fuel. The removed carbon atoms then hook up with oxygen to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you work through the losses in the process, it would be cleaner, easier, and cheaper to simply burn natural gas in an internal-combustion engine.
Hydrogen, in its gaseous or liquid form, isn’t easy to store or transport. The network of pipelines that currently moves natural gas around the country is too porous to keep the tiny hydrogen molecules from escaping. In automobiles, hydrogen has to be stored in stout cylindrical tanks and compressed to between 5000 and 10,000 psi.
Creating hydrogen using solar, hydroelectric, or wind power are pollution-free solutions, but solar cells, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams aren’t free. Until we come up with a cheap, large-scale, and pollution-free method of generating electricity so that we can produce hydrogen from water, the widespread use of hydrogen as a fuel seems unlikely.
Well said.
Thanks.
All that being said, I think that we both agree strongly that our own government should stop interfering with the ability of companies to produce energy domestically in the United States.
I think that we're likely in agreement that we should be drilling in ANWR, drilling off the coast of California, drilling nearer to shore, in shallower waters of the Gulf, off the Atlantic coast, the Bakken - wherever there's oil. We should be doing the whole shale thing (It'll take decades to ramp up, what are we waiting for?), drilling for natural gas, so on and so forth.
But there is the second part of the equation, and that's how a largely unfree, partly-cartelized, largely sovereign-run world oil market impacts our own energy markets and domestic energy production industries.
How do you view the effects of the largely unfree world market on our own domestic energy production?
What role should our government play or not play in the mitigation of any negative effects?
Thanks again,
sitetest
I see the foreign energy markets have been raised in importance due to the inhibiting of our own.
We are only "held ransom" by them because of our own policies.
We need more nuclear plants combined with nuclear fuel reprocessing. We need better access to our coal, oil, natural gas and shale resources.
We don't need govenment subsidies. We need less govermnent restrictions.
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