Methanol is another pipe dream that won’t work in the end. The best bet is Fischer-Tropsch synfuel from coal and natural gas. Can do it right now, and the fuel is clean, loaded with energy, and doesn’t eat up the fuel systems of today’s vehicles. BTW, according to the US geological survey, we have 462 billion tons of recoverable coal. Our gas reserves number in the trillions of cubic feet. Add in our oil shale and that of our neighbors to the north, and no ships bearing foreign oil or fuels need dock at any US port for the next few hundred years.
For the green-nuts among us, if they would put the climate change hoax behind them, there is a bit of good news. People have scoffed at algae oil or algenol, but I believe it is viable of you can pump enough sunlight and CO2 into it. Fischer-Tropsch produces lots of CO2, which could be utilized in algae beds or other growing operations. But that will require certain brainwashed individuals to quit thinking of CO2 as a pollutant. In any case, algae is more sensible than corn-based ethanol, which was been shown to be a net energy drag.
What we need is an act of congress that turns our federally owned fossil fuel reserves over to social security lien holders (those who have contributed). Any taxes or fees collected on fuels or raw materials extracted or mined from federally owned lands would be the property of individual account owners. Think of it as the same system that Alaska has, but the money from the sale of resources goes into privatized social security accounts.
A big added bonus of this domestic energy plan is thousands of new high-paying mining jobs.
See post #39. And I think one of the major points of the article is that "today's" vehicles are largely compatible with methanol. The bigger problem is that OLDER vehicles are not, and the effort to make them compatible is more difficult.
I’ve read that the only major stumbling block with algae is figuring out how to harvest it. That the algae is really good at fouling any equipment designed to suction it from whatever liquid medium it’s in.