Posted on 03/29/2006 3:43:18 PM PST by kellynla
(CBS) The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood.
But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week's Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot.
A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the academic crop.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
How come all the National Bio Diesel sources say you have to have a blend? Curious, how do you do this or is it a trade secret?
A bunch of high school gearheads!
No surprise. Back when these types were building for Detroit, American cars were still worth driving.
Right on Bro! Hit the nail on the head!
Right you are. It is the Achilles heel you use more energy producing the ethanol then you get by using it.
LMAO!
How easy it is forgotten when we see the grammar police around here...
I think sugar cane requires a lot of rainfall too. That would eliminate it from the Southwest.
"I'd like to see you back that up with actual scientific evidence"
And it better be a reliable source too. Keith has data from an Iowa community college to back up his ridiculous rants in favor of moonshine fuel
"Guessing that Brazil don't have all of the regulations on production and thus overhead that we have here in the US"
Brazil produces their ethanol with sugar cane, not corn.Lets swich all of our taxpayer dependant midwest corn farmers to sugar cane and then try it
See post #66.
>>>Right you are. It is the Achilles heel you use more energy producing the ethanol then you get by using it.
No, wrong you are. Scroll up for reality.
And, if you believe everything you read in wikipedia, you should apply to wikipedia Rummy's 3/24/06 admonition to CNN's Jamie McIntyre about believing MoDowd: "If you believe everything you read in Maureen Dowd, you better get a life."
Sugarcane.
Ethanol is a perfectly acceptable motor fuel. It's not yet price competitive with oil on a straight-up basis, but at the current subsidy level (a partial fuel tax exemption) it is. The first issue is where oil prices are headed. If oil drops back to $20-$30 a barrel, none of the alternative fuels will be competitive. If oil settles in at $60 and above long term, ethanol will be part of the adjustment to a new energy economy.
Whether ethanol will become a dominant player in a post-oil environment depends on its cost vis-a-vis coal liquefaction, electric cars, fuel cells, etc. The jury is still out on that, but mid-term ethanol is a good bet because it's a decade ahead of the others in terms of commercialization.
FWIW, cellulosic ethanol is a big deal. I'm neither an engineer nor a chemist, but I'm told the issues are (1) scaling up the process from the lab to industrial scale; and (2) bringing down the process cost. The cost issue (I'm told) has to do with a biochemical reaction between the chemical prewash that is used to start the process and the enzymes that finish it. The prewash is somewhat toxic, so you need lots of enzymes. That's expensive. There's a lot of work going on to solve the problem -- find a less toxic prewash or breed tougher bugs (ok, ok, an enzyme isn't a bug) -- and the lab guys seem to be confident they can do it.
When they do, costs will plummet. Cellulosic will be able to utilize numerous agricultural and forestry wastestreams, so you won't have to pay for corn or sugarcane. Or we will use switchgrass, which has a very high conversion ratio and is extremely cheap to grow. And all that is before the plant scientists have even begun to develop strains optimized for ethanol production.
I used to be a big critic of ethanol, back when it was an ADM corporate subsidy issue. (Actually, that's unfair to ADM; it was always a sop to the corn growers, who saw it as a way to burn the surplus.) That, however, was 30 years ago. Things change. The Chinese are buying cars. We may be looking at $100 oil before too long.
I wouldn't bet against ethanol.
>>>And it better be a reliable source too. Keith has data from an Iowa community college to back up his ridiculous rants in favor of moonshine fuel<<<
I'll take fact over wild-arsed speculation from people who know nothing of what they speak any day.
Sugar beets do really well out on the High Plains of NM and TX but I don't know the sugar content of beets as compared to cane. We also have a lots of sorghum and corn which are now mainly grown for feed. Sorghum is a grass like sugar cane and corn and it could probably be used for sugar production but I don't know.
"His company is investing heavily in ethanol plants around the country. It is coming"
Good. Does this mean we can drop the 4 billion subsidy to the ethanol industry? It isn't viable or private money would have flocked to this many years ago.
"I'll take fact over wild-arsed speculation from people who know nothing of what they speak any day"
OK here's a fact for you,without the 4 billion in taxpayers subsidies, ethanol is only good for mixed drinks.Without countless other taxpayer subsidies the corn farmers can't even grow their crop at profit. It's not a viable alternative. Switch to sugarcane in the midwest, make your ethanol at a profit with private money and then you have an argument
I think the school program is a good thing. Getting these kids interested in something worthwhile is great. Unfortunately the media, due to their total lack of technical knowledge, represent it as "the next big thing" which it isn't.
See post #66.
yep.
If you want to see a negative energy balance, consider electricity. Think of the energy involved in mining the coal. Think of all the BTU's that go up the stack when you burn it. Think of the massive energy loss in transmission. There is a net energy loss at every step of the process. Electricity, in fact, is just about the least energy efficient power source we have. But that doesn't mean we are going to stop using it. We are willing to pay a hefty premium to convert other forms of energy into an extremely convenient one.
The net energy balance issue is a red herring. FWIW, the Pimentel studies (the ones that show a negative energy balance for ethanol) are the outliers and have been refuted by everyone else who has looked at the issue. Pimentel is an entemologist, not an economist, agronomist, or energy guy, and (in the opinion of his many critics) he uses bad and/or outdated data on fertilizers, irrigation, corn yields, ethanol conversion ratios, and the energy consumption that must be attributed to other byproducts. Aside from that, Pimentel is right on.
Everyone else in the field finds that, under current conditions, ethanol has a significantly positive energy balance. But that is still irrelevant. The issue is price. Ethanol is still more expensive than conventional oil and requires a subsidy (a partial fuel tax exemption) to compete. But it is getting closer to full commercialization all the time, while the price of oil is (probably) going nowhere but up. I don't know when the tipping point will be reached, but I expect it sooner rather than later. Five years? Ten years? I don't know, but I think its coming. What we are paying for now in ethanol is a big headstart in developing a new energy economy. The cost is fairly modest and I think it's worth doing. Your mileage may differ.
"I used to be a big critic of ethanol, back when it was an ADM corporate subsidy issue. (Actually, that's unfair to ADM; it was always a sop to the corn growers, who saw it as a way to burn the surplus.) That, however, was 30 years ago. Things change. The Chinese are buying cars. We may be looking at $100 oil before too long"
Here's an idea, let's get the Chinese taxpayers to subsidize this snakeoil in their country. Then we can just steal the technology like they do ours
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