Methanol/Ethanol is not currently a feasible answer. It is produced at an energy deficit. In other words, more energy is required to be put in to growing the organic base and processing it than can be derived from the final product. It is far from being the environmentally friendly alternative that it is so often touted as.

Fuel cell/electric vehicles - Where do people think the hydrogen and electricity come from? HYDROCARBONS. The overall emissions output using current electrical generation methods would be higher, and of a more polluting nature, if we switched to electric cars.

The simple fact is that vehicle emissions form a relatively insignificant part of the global air pollution problem.

The number one contributor to the problem is the air line industry, ever heard of emissions regulations for air planes?

Last I heard, with advances in scrubber technology, coal fired power generation had dropped to #2 overall, but is still the largest contributor to acid rain.

The third largest contributor is the military. Tanks, aircraft carriers and F-16s are far from fuel efficient, low emissions vehicles.

That's why I find things like controlling snowmobile and dirt bike emissions (especially 2 strokes) so incredibly assinine. All the snowmobiles in North America don't contribute as much to pollution annually as a days worth of flights in and out of Laguardia or JFK. They make a real easy target though.

Nuclear power generation is the future. Even now, with current reactor technology, nuclear energy could power the US at zero emissions, while producing an amount of radioactive waste that wouldn't even fill your living room. The technolgy to deal with this waste is rapidly advancing. Check TorqueKing's post in the thread Future Fuel Prices. Unfortunately the American/Canadian public has been brainwashed into viewing nuclear energy as evil and deadly. More people die every year of respiratory illnesses brought on by air pollution than have ever died in nuclear related accidents. Overall, (barring the Russian disaster) the nuclear industry has a nearly flawless safety record that far exceeds that of any other energy producing industry.

Coal bed methane is attractive because it is relatively inexpensive to produce, abundant, methane dominated, and sweet. Downsides are the large surface footprint, infrastructure costs, water disposal (in some cases the water is actually fresh, and is used for irrigation, unfortunately that's not the norm), and the yet uknown factor of compaction. Though I would suggest that this is not a major issue as most coal beds are not at pressures where interstitial fluids are supporting overburden.

Waxy

 

i think we need to get rid of the tree-huggers and start more drilling off of the california coast,florida coast, and tap large reserves off of the east coast, not to mention alaska. Its ironic that the same people that are against drilling do not want their lifestyles infringed upon.I do not believe we should tap our strategic reserves.It is cheaper to buy foreign oil than to drill domestically, which is part of the problem.We tax our oil and gas products to death.There are some who think oil companys are greedy, but the oil companys are the ones taking the risks,spending millions to drill one well.Like i said on another post
states that have oil + gas reserves and refuse to utilize them should pay double for petroleum products.

 

Waxy , In the summer months here in the DFW area we have a thing the weather guys call the Mexican Plume......it is a boundry layer of hot air situated at 15,000 ft. Now , most of the jets making their low-level ..(below 15,000 feet) ...low speed approachs into DFW are pumping tremendous amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. But , the Idiot EPA when calculating total pollution DOES NOT even recognize the jet exhaust as a bonafide source. Then , they try to attribute all the pollution to mainly cars , trucks , and diesel construction equipment......Of course all the big jets would look kind of funny with Cats about 6 feet in diameter grafted on their *** end. The Epa is a bunch of political assH---s. They try to dump this Boatload of DoDo on us everyyear.........I feel better already.....fd

 

heres part of an article i read on msn auto news and a link to the whole article:

http://autos.msn.com/advice/standard...20586&src=News


Performance Affected

Hybrids also can maintain or, in some cases, improve performance over a comparable vehicle with an internal combustion engine only.

Officials at DaimlerChrysler said the hybrid Durango and Liberty have been shown to achieve up to 30 percent better fuel economy—22.3 miles per gallon combined city/highway driving for the Durango HEV compared with 17.1 miles per gallon for a comparable conventional V8 Durango.
Yet the hybrid Durango's power, acceleration and performance are similar to that of a V8 Durango. In fact, in testing the hybrid has a quicker 0-to-60-mph time than does a Durango with 5.9-liter V8.

The reason? Electric motors can provide immediate torque as a vehicle begins to move, while an internal combustion engine has a torque curve that requires a certain rpm level to be reached before high torque is achieved.

Ford said its four-cylinder Escape SUV hybrid delivers nearly 40 mpg in city driving, can travel more than 500 miles on a single tank of gasoline, and yet delivers acceleration akin to that of an Escape with a V6.


if this becomes the norm i would have no problem in considering the purchase of a hybrid especially if the govt gives tax breaks for purchasing an auto like this

but what scares me what will this do to all of us who like to modify

will we have to conform to the masses and drive a car or truck that makes us blend in with the every day norm

will we still have the option to have our mega horsepowered fuel gulpping beasts to take out on weekend or will we be like japan and have to discard our vehicles after so many miles or suffer huge tax consequences

just some various thoughts to ponder

-Kevin

 

fatdaddy,

We've stumbled onto a real hot button topic for me. All these greenies flying around to protest, families flying to Hawaii or Europe for a vacation, they all pollute as much or more than I do riding my snowmobile for a year. When have you ever heard anyone mention that? Let alone have millions of tax dollars spent on it? It sickens me. Why don't planes have new emissions standards for 2006? Because the airline industry is far more powerful than Joe Snowmobile (dirt bike), that's why. It's a bunch of BS and ticks me off.

I'm all for protecting the environment, I actually consider myself an environmentalist. (a bad word for many these days) I work for an oil company, I drive a truck with a V10, I have snowmobiles and dirt bikes. Am I any less of an environmentalist than Joe Granola hiking up a mountain, heck no!. I treat it with the utmost respect and always try to leave it better than I found it. These extreme environmental groups, and even more so the POLITICIANS THAT CAVE TO THEM, are public enemy number one to me. If they have their way they will take away everyone's right to access and use OUR land. This a is fight that more people need to take up and make their own. The greens are swallowing up huge tracts of OUR LAND, and doing it largely uncontested.

Waxy

 

I think I saw the future of the automobile Sunday morning on the CBS Sunday Morning show. There are some vehicles, buses and cars, running on hydrogen right now. Of course there are many problems to iron out, like fuel availablity and fuel cell availability. They made it clear that hydrogen vehicles for the common folks are 20 - 30 years out, but it seemed to be a reasonable alternative. There are no emissions and the only byproduct is water that drips from a small hose on the order of an air condtioner. On the surface it seemed a reasonable alternative to me.

 

I disagree with the "energy deficit" idea concerning ethanol, methanol and hydrogen.
Ask a farmer what he does with all the corn stalk that is left over after harvest, or the trash company what they do with all the yard clippings they collect. Through the pyrolitic method, all three of the aforementioned products can be produced using only enzymatic breakdown of organic compounds. Take a large vat, dump in your organic waste matter, such as agricultural biomass, and pour in some active enzymes, seal the bad boy off, and heat the vat to just above 75* F. It takes less than a week for the product to begin producing large amounts of hydrogen gas, and, though I don't know exact figures on this, an amount of biomass can produce hydrogen as it breaks down for weeks on end. And it would take no more than sunlight to heat the vat to the required temperature, via radiant heat in temperate climates or photovoltaic electrical cells and a heating unit in colder temperatures.
The production of ethanol only requires distillation. If that were done at an energy deficit, your bottles of booze would be much more expensive. And what your forgetting is that you are producing FUEL, so if you power your equipiment using the fuel you are producing on-site, there isn't going to be a deficit related to the delivery costs of fuel or electricity.
I don't much care about pollution. Everything contributes to pollution somehow, even the wind. And yeah, jet liners have got to be the biggest producers of pollution, considering the amount of emmissions they put off, so I don't care about automobile emmissions. There has been an improvement in air quality because of emmissions standards, but there is only so far you can go, and we are there. What matters to me is that we need to progress towards better energy sources; in the 19th century, steam power was considered to be the "greatest form of power" mankind could harness. It's time to move beyond petroleum as a primary source of transportation energy, because there is a better way.
BDV

 

Wow thanks Big Daddy, gasoline is produced at an energy defecit that would be why jets use kerosene and diesel.

 

Actually, kerosene and diesel are produced at the same time as gasoline. They are just different lengths of hydrocarbon strands.
And yeah, consider the costs of transporting crude oil all over the globe; I can't imagine how much of a deficit that creates.

 

Electric vehicles do use power generated by fossil fuels. The reason they are considered 'low emission' is because the power plants are a stationary emission source and are very strictly regulated. Any new power plant built is required to use BACT, or Best Available Control Technology for emissions control.

Scott

 

I found some info to help prove that ethanol is actually very good energy source, and that it is not produced at a deficit.

It's kinda long, and if you don't like techinical papers, just skip down to the conclusion.

http://www.carbohydrateeconomy.org/c...a_Gallon_.html

One of the many nice things about ethanol is the leftover corn mash can be used as a high protein feed for cattle.

 

Doesn't that get the cows smashed?

 

Interesting paper, but I've read more than one that suggests ethanol cannot be produced at an energy surplus. The only reason ethanol is currently being produced is due to large government subsidies (in Canada anyway).

I think the numbers used by the authors are very optimistic and perhaps a bit misleading, they continually use the "best existing" and "state of the art" numbers, numbers that are not representative of the typical farmer in the US or Canada. Also, they base the study on corn, which produces large amounts of byproduct organic matter, the vast majority of crops produce very little organic byproduct and require the same or greater inputs of energy, ie wheat, barley, canola, etc.. IMHO, including credit for byproducts in the ethanol energy numbers is in error, as the same byproducts may be used to the same degree of energy efficiency regardless of being used in the generation of ethanol. The byproducts are a non factor, they work out roughly equal for both sides of the argument.

BDV, I can't speak from knowledge on the pyrolisis of organic matter to produce hydrogen. I would question how you handle the hydrogen gas and it's practicallity given the current technology. Is there a safe way of collecting, compressing and transporting it? I would also question the economics behind it.

As for the production of booze, that's apples and oranges. Think about it, do you really think there's more energy in a bottle of JD than it took to produce that bottle? Not by a long shot. That, and I think booze is pretty dang expensive, heck of a lot more for a gallon of Jack Daniels than a gallon of gas.

Waxy

 

Like BDV said, they all come from the same barrel of crude oil, they are separated out during the refining process based on their molecular structure (C atom number) and corresponding vaporization/condensation points.

Kerosene and diesel have higher kcal/mole values. In other words, there is more energy (calories converts to BTU's) in a gallon of diesel than a gallon of gasoline. THAT is the reason why jets use kerosene/diesel. That and the economics of supply and demand.

Waxy