Re: Catching a bite

On 2008-03-25, mroberds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mroberds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
pondered onto the tubes:
Matt Erickson <peawee@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-03-11, Peter H. Coffin <hellsop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> pondered onto the tubes:
I love the ones that do things like claim that switching to ethanol
fuels will help prevent global warming...

No kidding. I'm doing biofuels research work at the moment,

If I'm really desperate, I research E3.2, but usually my lower limit is
about E6. E40 is a pretty good all-purpose fuel.

I'm rather fond of 12 year old E40 myself.

and (b) it doesn't throw as much nasty cruft into the atmosphere with
the waste carbon. Note the lack of "less emissions".

That's OK, ethanol is just a stepping stone to the <fanfare>Hydrogen
Economy!</fanfare>. The cut-over of every well, pipeline, refinery,
delivery truck, and fuel station is scheduled for next Saturday at 10
AM; by that afternoon we'll be saving the planet!

s/Hydrogen/butanol/. Problem is that it's much less fun to drink (as
compared to ethanol, not hydrogen).

Ethanol actually provides less mileage than the same amount of fossil
fuel; I don't know what this means on emissions, as I'm working on
the production end and not the econsumption end.

Our little friend, mpgge. I think it originally only cared about
chemistry, but now there are some politics in that equation as well.

It's fun when you start looking at the mechanical engineering and energy
requirements; after a while, most people conclude that all those
engineers in Munich, Detroit, Tokyo, etc really _do_ know what they're
doing when they design automobiles with internal combustion engines that
run on gasoline/petrol or diesel. This is not to say that this will be
the best solution forever and ever, but that it has been a pretty good
solution, given the conditions of the last 100 years or so.

"300 miles to the tank" is a number that I hear scientists throw
around a lot as a target for the auto industry. Butanol (see above)
is really nice for a couple of reasons: first, unlike ethanol, it is
easily seperated from water and *kept* seperate. Second, it has about
96% of the energy per gallon of gasoline.

--
Matt Erickson <peawee@xxxxxxxxxx>
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with
the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequilla." -- Mitch Ratcliffe
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Catching a bite
    ... Matt Erickson wrote: ... I'm doing biofuels research work at the moment, ... E40 is a pretty good all-purpose fuel. ... It's fun when you start looking at the mechanical engineering and energy ...
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  • Re: Ethanol (The Corn Lobby Corn Holes America)
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  • The Federal Flex-Fuel Corn Lobby Fraud
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  • Competing Technologies Push to Commercialize Renewable Petroleum
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