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One of the biggest problems with biofuel and it should be the most important problem
to overcome is that it creates a shortage in the food chain. Something we can not afford to interrupt. Yet, this can be solved
very easily - for instance, think when you cut your grass this year. Grass ferments just like any other plant - did I say plant? As
I sit here and wonder, isn't petroleum fossils from plant life?
Just yesterday, 5.2.2008, I was working around a garbage dumpster and I could
smell the grass someone had disgarded, naturally fermenting in the dumpster where it lied. Like any other recyclible, our local
governments can have a specific pickup for this and it can be sent to a central location to be distiled or burnt in the absence of
air to produce butanol.
Ethanol although the alternative fuel of choice has it's problems.
The first of which it causes a need for more food products to go up in price and it casues a need for more land to be taken up
to grow more raw material to produce it - like more destruction of the rain forrests of the world. A very dismal prospect to say
the least. In a time where we should be fighting to save preserve these lands, we will think of ourselves and this is a bad omen.
The other problems with ethanol, are cost and efficiency and destruction of the
internal parts of our engines. Ethanol may be slightly cheaper at the gas pump but it is more expensive in the end.
Methanol can be very inexpensive also to buy. However, it has
a low specific gravity and many adaptations need to be made to modern vehicles to get them to operate on this highly volatile
liquid. It too has a high water content and needs to be operated in stainless steel engines and parts for it not to destroy the
internal parts of engines. So what does it all mean, it can be a costly venture.
Electric Cars need huge battery packs. Thus, a car can weigh
far more than what it is worth. It also causes us to need more lead to build more batteries. The biggest problem here is in the
United States there are no more lead deposits to get new lead from. Whereby driving up the cost of a lead battery and lead
products. Here, the electrical storage problem can be solved by using a flywheel to store energy, but the weight of the flywheel
has to be immense. Unless someone can come up with the idea of producing a plastic flywheel that will not shatter into a
thousand pieces at high revolutins per minute.
Butanol has about one of two problems. We do not have enough
of it and we can not make it fast enough at present. It has the same specific gravity as gasoline and incidently has a higher octane
which means it can be ran in all vehicles made at present, even those that require that you use premium or super gasolines. Here,
we will no longer have to choose which grade of fuel we will put in our tanks, we will only have one nosel to pick up and put in
and there will no longer be a confusion as to what price we would like to pay, it will all be one price for one grade of fuel.
So what would your choice be and what are you willing to do about it?
There is more to discuss here so stay posted.
See Gasoline and comparisons
Here
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