- Aug 23, 2007
- 16,829
- 3
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what are you talking about? :roll:
do you even know what you are saying? The concept of hybrid are green because they more efficiently use the fuels that are put into them.
Actually you are wrong, it says the thoretical maximum amount of corn ethanol we could produce if we used all corn currently being produced would replace 14% of gasoline. And that would obviously have disastorous effects on food prices. The increase in corn prices has already led to huge increases in tortilla prices (a basic food staple in Mexico)which has led the Mexican government to put price controls into effect. As far as just "growing more corn" they would need to plant somewhere between 10-15 million additional acres to replace 10% of our gasoline which is hardly trivial. Here are some inconvenient facts regarding ethanol:
1) It can't be transported via existing pipelines, it must be sent via truck which is much less efficient. This bottleneck is already causing problems in getting ethanol to market (and has led to a 30% decrease in corn prices due to lower demand)
2) Cellulostic ethanol is in its very primitive stages of research and devolopment. There is absolutely no guarantee that it will ever be a cost effective solution. Most people speak as if it is just a matter of time, at this point nobody knows if it will ever be a reality.
3) Only about 45% of the petroleum we use is refined into gasoline. So when you talk about ethanol displacing gasoline consumption realize you are are ignoring over half of our oil consumption. And some of the energy used to create and transport ethanol comes from oil.
4) Currently E85 equipped automobiles get about 25-30% worse fuel economy, something that has been well documented in the automotive press. This amounts to a 25-30% increase in fuel costs at current prices. So ethanol actually has to cost less per gallon than gasoline just to be competitive in price.
- Aug 23, 2007
- 16,829
- 3
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Jeff7
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2001
- 41,596
- 20
- 81
And also make reprocessing legal. People love to complain about the nuclear waste produced, and it's a legitimate concern. Reprocessing would mean less waste.
That's probably why the ethanol-from-corn thing went over like it did.
Those who stood to profit from higher corn prices probably had a little bit of an involuntary ejaculatory response when they realized what drastically increased corn ethanol demand would do for their bottom line. After cleaning up, they decided that this was really in the best interest of country.
Globalization is coming, and those who try to stop it will lose. Trade benefits people.
How local do you want to keep your money? Maybe you live in a coal-producing town, but you can get coal for 20% cheaper from a place 100 miles away, still in the same state. Do you keep your money local? Or maybe you can get it 30% cheaper by crossing state lines. It's still in the US, right? How local do we want to keep our money? Trade can allow for more efficient resource utilization. That's why trade is so darned popular.
Big industries can be slow to change. Look at the recording industries. They stood against VCR technology because it would be the death of the movie industry. Not so. Now the record companies are slow to get onboard with downloadable music that doesn't make the users feel like they're wearing shackles. Change is risky, and some people like to maintain the status quo at any cost.
This of course would bring corn prices back down to levels we were accustomed to. But we can't have that now, can we? Can't give up those bloated profits, right?
That just strikes me as a "duh" moment, that grass would be more efficient than corn. As I understand it, ethanol from corn makes use of just the kernels, a small part of the plant, whereas ethanol from switchgrass would use the majority of the plant.
Corn has commodity value because it's useful as a food for animals and people. That's what can make it worthwhile to expend energy to produce those small kernels. But when viable alternatives exist which make far more efficient use of resources such as farming equipment, water, and soil area, it seems to me that the only reasons for continuing to use corn for ethanol are greed and fear of change.
Long story short, we need a solution to our energy problems. Oil may not run out for a long time, but problems remain: a lot of it is in politically unstable regions of the world, and extracting from other areas is getting more expensive. Better solutions must exist, and they may well be expensive. But it's better to have some backup plans in the works. I liken it to scaling a cliff: If we begin the work now, it's like having a ramp to get to the top of the cliff. The change would be gradual, and easier to adjust to. If we don't work on alternatives, we'll run head-on into the cliff, and overcoming it will be exceedingly arduous and resource-intensive.
Ethanol IS a green fuel - if you own a corn field and are able to convert it yourself.
It's useless to those of us not living in the breadbasket states - the carbon cost of transporting ethanol displaces its benefits as a greener fuel than most fuels.
And to those claiming that using corn for ethanol will increaes food costs - we pay many farmers to not produce anything and this already artificially raises food costs. Your taxpayer dollars are paying farmers to not farm. Instead, they could farm and produce ethanol for use as fuel and sell it on the market.
Frankly, solar power is the way to go anyway. There just need to be more breakthroughs in battery technology.
It's useless to those of us not living in the breadbasket states - the carbon cost of transporting ethanol displaces its benefits as a greener fuel than most fuels.
And to those claiming that using corn for ethanol will increaes food costs - we pay many farmers to not produce anything and this already artificially raises food costs. Your taxpayer dollars are paying farmers to not farm. Instead, they could farm and produce ethanol for use as fuel and sell it on the market.
Frankly, solar power is the way to go anyway. There just need to be more breakthroughs in battery technology.
Hybrids use more tech, computers, exotic composite materials etc as well as batteries. The batteries Nickle Metal Hydried are some of the worst batteries environementally, partially because the mine in Ontario is one of the worst pollution mines in the world. The Nickle then gets shipped to Europe for further processing then to China then to Japan then back to NA in the car. . . . Its a lot easier to recycle a small lead acid battery than the large ones in a hybrid.
A small simple car made from steel without a lot of electric everything is way more environmentally freindly than a high tech one.
In that study they said the SUV, which was done by a research firm 'not a student' , drove more than 3X as far as they hybrid because upon studying hybrids they found on avg the dirver of a hyrbrid only puts on 7500 miles a year so after 10 years wouldn't even come close to miles a typical SUV drives and the study broke down the environmental cost to mile driven. They also factored in things like how far does the worker have to commute to the plant that builds that certain type of vehicle and the Prius comes from Japan none are built here 'or were at the time of the study'
A small simple car made from steel without a lot of electric everything is way more environmentally freindly than a high tech one.
In that study they said the SUV, which was done by a research firm 'not a student' , drove more than 3X as far as they hybrid because upon studying hybrids they found on avg the dirver of a hyrbrid only puts on 7500 miles a year so after 10 years wouldn't even come close to miles a typical SUV drives and the study broke down the environmental cost to mile driven. They also factored in things like how far does the worker have to commute to the plant that builds that certain type of vehicle and the Prius comes from Japan none are built here 'or were at the time of the study'
Ethanol has never really been about being green. It's about reducing dependency on foreign oil. We can do ethanol blends with gas to save some oil in the short term until we come up with a real solution to energy issues. It's an option. I'm not saying it's the best option, but it's one.
Gunslinger08
Lifer
- Nov 18, 2001
- 13,234
- 2
- 81
- Aug 23, 2007
- 16,829
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- 0
Since it means using a huge amount of land to replace a small amount of oil, partially with coal or whatever, it's actually UNGREEN. Same with switchgrass-- AFAIK it's meant to replace natural vegetation rather than food crops. The CO2 emission reduction just isn't worth it.
The focus on greenhouse gases is causing people to ignore wilderness and biodiversity. In every presidential candidate's platform, "environment" refers 100% to CO2 and ethanol is presented as a politically correct solution. It benefits farmers and everybody loves farmers.
Jeff7
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2001
- 41,596
- 20
- 81
Rubycon posted an article a week or two ago about something new - it uses silicon nanofibers infused with some lithium compound. It gives about 10x the capacity of current Li-ion cells. Most excellent news.
It's a shame that the USA is so dependent on individual transportation, and not mass transit. Having a well-organized mass transit system would save loads of fuel.
DrPizza
Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Solar??! Takes up too much space. Go ahead and google the numbers you need: average hours of sunlight (6), watts per square meter, and current efficiency of solar cells. Then google how much energy the US uses per day on average. Do a bit of math after that to discover how HUGE the array of solar cells would need to be.
Zenmervolt
Elite member
- Oct 22, 2000
- 24,514
- 44
- 91
Mass transit only works well in areas where the population is highly centralized. Aside from a few urban centers (which do tend to have reasonable public transportation), most areas of the US are simply not densely populated enough to support a viable mass transit system.
ZV
Ethanol is the key to higher efficiency vehicles. It allows for designs with greater thermodynamic efficiency, so that our energy resources can be stretched farther. PHEV and ethanol optimized vehicles are the only solutions that can be brought to market in a reasonable timeframe, and both could be released as early as 2010.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...06/10/061027183740.htm
Pint-sized Car Engine Promises High Efficiency, Low Cost
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2006) ? MIT researchers are developing a half-sized gasoline engine that performs like its full-sized cousin but offers fuel efficiency approaching that of today's hybrid engine system--at a far lower cost. The key? Carefully controlled injection of ethanol, an increasingly common biofuel, directly into the engine's cylinders when there's a hill to be climbed or a car to be passed.
See also:
Matter & Energy
* Fuel Cells
* Aviation
* Vehicles
* Alternative Fuels
* Fossil Fuels
* Petroleum
Reference
* Common ethanol fuel mixtures
* Automobile emissions control
* Alternative fuel vehicle
* Internal combustion engine
These small engines could be on the market within five years, and consumers should find them appealing: By spending about an extra $1,000 and adding a couple of gallons of ethanol every few months, they will have an engine that can go as much as 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than an ordinary engine. Moreover, the little engine provides high performance without the use of high-octane gasoline.
Given the short fuel-savings payback time--three to four years at present U.S. gasoline prices--the researchers believe that their "ethanol-boosted" turbo engine has real potential for widespread adoption. The impact on U.S. oil consumption could be substantial. For example, if all of today's cars had the new engine, current U.S. gasoline consumption of 140 billion gallons per year would drop by more than 30 billion gallons.
"There's a tremendous need to find low-cost, practical ways to make engines more efficient and clean and to find cost-effective ways to use more biofuels in place of oil," said Daniel R. Cohn, senior research scientist in the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC).
Cohn, John B. Heywood, the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory, and Leslie Bromberg, a principal researcher at the PSFC, have an engine concept that promises to achieve those goals.
For decades, efforts to improve the efficiency of the conventional spark-ignition (SI) gasoline engine have been stymied by a barrier known as the "knock limit": Changes that would have made the engine far more efficient would have caused knock--spontaneous combustion that makes a metallic clanging noise and can damage the engine. Now, using sophisticated computer simulations, the MIT team has found a way to use ethanol to suppress spontaneous combustion and essentially remove the knock limit.
When the engine is working hard and knock is likely, a small amount of ethanol is directly injected into the hot combustion chamber, where it quickly vaporizes, cooling the fuel and air and making spontaneous combustion much less likely. According to a simulation developed by Bromberg, with ethanol injection the engine won't knock even when the pressure inside the cylinder is three times higher than that in a conventional SI engine. Engine tests by collaborators at Ford Motor Company produced results consistent with the model's predictions.
With knock essentially eliminated, the researchers could incorporate into their engine two operating techniques that help make today's diesel engines so efficient, but without causing the high emissions levels of diesels. First, the engine is highly turbocharged. In other words, the incoming air is compressed so that more air and fuel can fit inside the cylinder. The result: An engine of a given size can produce more power.
Second, the engine can be designed with a higher compression ratio (the ratio of the volume of the combustion chamber after compression to the volume before). The burning gases expand more in each cycle, getting more energy out of a given amount of fuel.
The combined changes could increase the power of a given-sized engine by more than a factor of two. But rather than seeking higher vehicle performance--the trend in recent decades--the researchers shrank their engine to half the size. Using well-established computer models, they determined that their small, turbocharged, high-compression-ratio engine will provide the same peak power as the full-scale SI version but will be 20 to 30 percent more fuel efficient.
But designing an efficient engine isn't enough. "To actually affect oil consumption, we need to have people want to buy our engine," said Cohn, "so our work also emphasizes keeping down the added cost and minimizing any inconvenience to the driver."
The ethanol-boosted engine could provide efficiency gains comparable to those of today's hybrid engine system for less extra investment--about $1,000 as opposed to $3,000 to $5,000. The engine should use less than five gallons of ethanol for every 100 gallons of gasoline, so drivers would need to fill their ethanol tank only every one to three months. And the ethanol could be E85, the ethanol/gasoline mixture now being pushed by federal legislation.
Through their startup company, Ethanol Boosting Systems LLC, the researchers are working with their Ford collaborators on testing and developing this new concept. If all goes as expected, within five years vehicles with the new engine could be on the road, using an alternative fuel to replace a bit of gasoline and make more efficient use of the rest.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...06/10/061027183740.htm
Pint-sized Car Engine Promises High Efficiency, Low Cost
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2006) ? MIT researchers are developing a half-sized gasoline engine that performs like its full-sized cousin but offers fuel efficiency approaching that of today's hybrid engine system--at a far lower cost. The key? Carefully controlled injection of ethanol, an increasingly common biofuel, directly into the engine's cylinders when there's a hill to be climbed or a car to be passed.
See also:
Matter & Energy
* Fuel Cells
* Aviation
* Vehicles
* Alternative Fuels
* Fossil Fuels
* Petroleum
Reference
* Common ethanol fuel mixtures
* Automobile emissions control
* Alternative fuel vehicle
* Internal combustion engine
These small engines could be on the market within five years, and consumers should find them appealing: By spending about an extra $1,000 and adding a couple of gallons of ethanol every few months, they will have an engine that can go as much as 30 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than an ordinary engine. Moreover, the little engine provides high performance without the use of high-octane gasoline.
Given the short fuel-savings payback time--three to four years at present U.S. gasoline prices--the researchers believe that their "ethanol-boosted" turbo engine has real potential for widespread adoption. The impact on U.S. oil consumption could be substantial. For example, if all of today's cars had the new engine, current U.S. gasoline consumption of 140 billion gallons per year would drop by more than 30 billion gallons.
"There's a tremendous need to find low-cost, practical ways to make engines more efficient and clean and to find cost-effective ways to use more biofuels in place of oil," said Daniel R. Cohn, senior research scientist in the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC).
Cohn, John B. Heywood, the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory, and Leslie Bromberg, a principal researcher at the PSFC, have an engine concept that promises to achieve those goals.
For decades, efforts to improve the efficiency of the conventional spark-ignition (SI) gasoline engine have been stymied by a barrier known as the "knock limit": Changes that would have made the engine far more efficient would have caused knock--spontaneous combustion that makes a metallic clanging noise and can damage the engine. Now, using sophisticated computer simulations, the MIT team has found a way to use ethanol to suppress spontaneous combustion and essentially remove the knock limit.
When the engine is working hard and knock is likely, a small amount of ethanol is directly injected into the hot combustion chamber, where it quickly vaporizes, cooling the fuel and air and making spontaneous combustion much less likely. According to a simulation developed by Bromberg, with ethanol injection the engine won't knock even when the pressure inside the cylinder is three times higher than that in a conventional SI engine. Engine tests by collaborators at Ford Motor Company produced results consistent with the model's predictions.
With knock essentially eliminated, the researchers could incorporate into their engine two operating techniques that help make today's diesel engines so efficient, but without causing the high emissions levels of diesels. First, the engine is highly turbocharged. In other words, the incoming air is compressed so that more air and fuel can fit inside the cylinder. The result: An engine of a given size can produce more power.
Second, the engine can be designed with a higher compression ratio (the ratio of the volume of the combustion chamber after compression to the volume before). The burning gases expand more in each cycle, getting more energy out of a given amount of fuel.
The combined changes could increase the power of a given-sized engine by more than a factor of two. But rather than seeking higher vehicle performance--the trend in recent decades--the researchers shrank their engine to half the size. Using well-established computer models, they determined that their small, turbocharged, high-compression-ratio engine will provide the same peak power as the full-scale SI version but will be 20 to 30 percent more fuel efficient.
But designing an efficient engine isn't enough. "To actually affect oil consumption, we need to have people want to buy our engine," said Cohn, "so our work also emphasizes keeping down the added cost and minimizing any inconvenience to the driver."
The ethanol-boosted engine could provide efficiency gains comparable to those of today's hybrid engine system for less extra investment--about $1,000 as opposed to $3,000 to $5,000. The engine should use less than five gallons of ethanol for every 100 gallons of gasoline, so drivers would need to fill their ethanol tank only every one to three months. And the ethanol could be E85, the ethanol/gasoline mixture now being pushed by federal legislation.
Through their startup company, Ethanol Boosting Systems LLC, the researchers are working with their Ford collaborators on testing and developing this new concept. If all goes as expected, within five years vehicles with the new engine could be on the road, using an alternative fuel to replace a bit of gasoline and make more efficient use of the rest.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jeff7
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2001
- 41,596
- 20
- 81
Such is my point. Most of the country was built from the ground up based on there being an eternal availability of individual transport.
But just think of how much delicious money you'd stand to make if you were involved in the corn industry. Suddenly it's not just a mundane food product - it's a matter of national security. You're providing fuel here so the terrorists can't blow it up over there. Demand goes up, prices go up, profits go up.
Its called subsidizing a struggling agricultural industry. yay for protectionism. we say free trade is the way to go but we are contradicting ourselves
there's an article i read contradicting that...lets see if I can find it.
EDIT:Social Age
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