Petrol Or Alcoholl, Gas Economy, Fuel Cells: Where Is The Future?
Read more articles on Science and Technology and Cars and Trucks and Politics.December 16, 2007
Posted by neillevine
December 16, 2007
Posted by neillevine
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The Congress currently favors alcohol as a fuel for cars because it can be produced domestically,, circulating money through the national economy for economic growth, and since alcohol burns somewhat cleaner than gasoline, it reduces pollution. This makes productive use of corn surpluses and helps keep agricultural prices high, reducing subsidies, two factors that farm state representatives like. Best of all, it reduces expensive petroleum imports and is renewable annually in favorable weather. Plainly, a poor harvest would create supply problems.
Of course, there are other draw backs such as the high costs involved in producing this alternative fuel. Brazil, the leading user of alcohol to power cars, encountered economic problems when the price of crude oil dropped in the 1980s. Alcohol also produces less energy unit volume than conventional gasoline, approximately twenty percent less, so to get the same economic benefit per gallon gasohol would have to be priced twenty percent less.
There are also other serious limitations. Alcohol has to be transported by tanker rather than fed continuously through a pipeline like petroleum making delivery comparatively expensive. It has also been noted that maximum production even including cellulose used as a fuel base would probably only replace one third of the gasoline burned by domestic drivers. These problems make alcohol only a reasonable alternative substitute source of energy to power the economy in the twenty first century.
The new automotive gas mileage requirements also have interesting implications. Presumably replacing petroleum with alcohol would result in a significant increase in gas mileage. So would the use of hydrogen powered fuel cells or even electric batteries to power automobiles. Obviously, such substitutions would also result in significant increases in miles per gallon driven. Making the new mileage requirement a self fulfilling prophecy should these new technologies be allowed to succeed in the marketplace.
Where would the hydrogen come from, you ask?
As the President explained, from the basic hydrolysis of water into burnable hydrogen gas and pure presumably non-polluting oxygen.
It is well known that hydro-power produces very cheap electricity. Whether or not these new water rationing storage facilities to be built and shared by drought plagued states generates any hydro-power, it is possible to use water wheels very effectively for this purpose, as has been done in the past.
Basically, the game plan would be to generate cheap electricity and use the excess to create burnable and storeable hydrogen.
The holdup is that Congress has an excess of former lawyers looking for an angle to milk the situation for all its worth instead of actually doing anything meaningful in the real world. It would take not only engineering acumen but legal talent to untangle the twists and turns put in the way of progress.
Remember there are facts, there are laws and there are results based on wise decisions. Methinks it would take a Judge with the wisdom of Solomon to straighten out this mess.
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