Posted on 02/03/2008 7:18:44 PM PST by Delacon
bring it on
I believe methanol is absorbed through the skin much more readily than gasoline and is therefore a greater danger.
You have not said one thing to refute the assertions made in this article. I welcome honest criticism but your post contained none.
Yet without the short term, there is no long term.
But then again, without the long term, there is only more short term.
“Spent Liquor Gasification.”
Sounds like something I do after a hard night of partying. My wife makes me take it out of the house.
“I believe methanol is absorbed through the skin much more readily than gasoline and is therefore a greater danger.”
Well I don’t want you to bath in it. :)
post-Superbowl ping
Just want to add again that unlike ethanol which is causing food prices to go up, methanol can be made from ANY plant material. That means we can tell the farmers go back to farming food stuffs and get more farmers to grow grass, or wood in areas not suitable to growing grains. Also it can be made by trapping C02 or from methane gas. So no food production problem.
That surely doesn’t sound technologicly impossible to resolve and cheaply.
That problem is already solved. Modern automobile gas tanks are sealed to the atmosphere when the gas cap is properly secured.
That's methane, the predominant component of natural gas. That's produced by most critters and people. It's not easy to recover for use as fuel.
Alcohol-based electricity generation represents desperation, not advancement.
The article didn't discuss electricity generation much, if at all, IMHO. The main point was methanol, derived from multiple domestic sources, for a motor vehicle fuel.
“I recommend folks read Energy Victory.”
Absolutely. Read this book. No excuses. It will “blow you away” when you realize what it is saying.
What surprised me in reading this book is that ethanol is not the government boondoggle I had been lead to believe.
Actually, I started reading it over the holidays, got about 2/3 of the way through, then dropped it — not because I was bored with it, but just because I moved on to something else. I need to get back to it. And we need to get serious about breaking our dependence on oil for transportation.
Zubrin is quite a character. Several years ago I attended an AIAA dinner meeting in which he spoke about his plan to get humans to Mars within ten years. He is very smart and inspiring. His plan to get to Mars obviously didn’t pan out, but I doubt it was due to any major flaw in his plan. I can only hope his energy ideas receive a better hearing.
“Methanol” sounds speedier than “ethanol”.
“That problem is already solved. Modern automobile gas tanks are sealed to the atmosphere when the gas cap is properly secured.”
I liked this part:
“Manufacturing a car as an FFV requires only the use of a corrosion-resistant fuel line and a change in the programming of the chip controlling the car’s electronic fuel injector. Thus FFVs can be produced—and currently are being produced in two dozen models, amounting to about 3 percent of total automobile sales in the United States—with essentially no price differential between them and comparable models that only use gasoline. As a result, there is no downside to making flex-fuel capability the standard. If it were required that all new cars sold in the United States had to be FFVs, there would be 50 million automobiles capable of burning methanol on the road in the U.S. within three years. Under such conditions, with methanol producible for a fraction of the cost of gasoline, the methanol pumps would appear soon enough, and the methanol economy envisioned by Olah and his collaborators would soon follow.”
Who is taking a bath in it? If there is a large accidental exposure, all you need is water.
I think you are missing the point here.
Yes, nuclear power is the answer for electric power, but not for transportation.
And yes, we should be drilling for more oil domestically, but that is only a temporary solution. Ethanol and methanol *combined* with more oil production are the long-term solution.
No science fiction at all. Read the book. Zubrin knows what he is talking about.
If this was as good as the author says we’d already be doing it. There are E85 cars on the road today. What isn’t said is that methanol doesn’t have as much energy as gasoline, so you don’t get as good mileage. Given that a gallon of gasoline now costs $3, then methanol costs ($1.6/67%)=$2.5 and is cost competitive even in a mix with gasoline, but not by a lot.
Bump
I would have been the last to think that a government mandate was the answer, but I think Zubrin is right on this one. Flex-fuel capability costs next to nothing to add on the assembly line, so go ahead and mandate it for new cars. In a few years, when the cost of gasoline goes up even further, gas stations will then have incentive to install ethanol and/or methanol pumps.
“You name any plant matter that we dont eat and it can be used to make methanol unlike ethanol.”
It still has to be grown and harvested on farms that could be producing food.
It seems the advantages of methanol comes from the fact that you could get it from other sources, such as natural gas or via CO2 extracted from the air.
Zubrin discusses all this at length in his book. Read it.
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