Gas Prices to Jump - Good News for Hybrid Sales

Actually, last night, I read up a little on Bio-diesel... It isn't purely corn, but also harvested from other things, such as animal fat and also some cooking oils...

Biodiesel - America's first advanced biofuel!

Which was also sort of pointed out in a Television program, CSI, where a guy was stealing used frying oil and converted his car to burn bio-diesel.

How efficient or clean it is, I don't know, but that is another byproduct we have an abundance of as well as methane production.

 

E100 has trouble with cold starts. There are some ways to reduce the problems. EPA emissions are often higher with e100.

Using flex fuels especially if using non corn based alcohol should be helpful. I meant to tax the oil, not add heavier taxes to the biofuel. So I wouldn't be taxing you to death.

 

My SUV takes a couple turns longer to fire up running on straight E85 verses even a blend which I ran for about 10k miles. I have yet to install my E85 converter which has a cold start feature.

Mike :thumb:

 

I was just commenting why manufacturers pushed for e85 versus e100. E100 is really everclear, about 5% water, so the added alcohol is less expensive to produce than the water free stuff used to blend in e10. E85 makes starting in cold weather much easier than e100. One solution is a small fuel tank of gasoline that is used just for starting. Another is with the bigger batteries in a auto start stop car or hybrid, the fuel could be warmed electrically before a start.

As a fuel methanol, or wood alcohol, has been pretty much killed by the ethanol lobby. It is much cheaper today than oil or ethanol, but requires more car modifications and a larger fuel tank. A blend might be a solution. IIRC methanol is most cleaply produced by natural gas today, but can be produced by distillation of many renable fast growing plants. California had a large number of flex fuel methanol vehicles but killed the program because "gas was too cheap".
http://www.fuelfreedom.org/knowledge-base/california-methanol-demonstration/

 

Corn based Etoh is a boon for corn agriculture because of the government subsidy, but fossil fuel use is a wash, pollution is higher, and foreign oil use is theoretically lower.

 

I need a hybrid car that runs on shredded SUV matter.

 

Actually, no, we don't have an abundance of bio-fuel. It's cheap right now because it isn't commonly used. If it were, prices would be sky high.

We saw the same thing several years ago with pellet stoves. Pellet stoves burn compressed wood pellets, dried corn, or even cherry pits. When they first hit the market, fuel was almost free. That caused many people to install pellet stoves.

Supply and demand drive prices; pellet fuel is no longer cheap. It's still a good fuel, but it's not the answer for heating all the homes in the US, just as bio-fuel is not the answer for all vehicles in the US. It will help a bit, but only a bit.

Tom

 

Biodiesel isn't created from corn AFAIK. It's grow from oily plants. Soy (USA), Canola (Canada Yurp and some places in the USA). In other places it's palm oil.

Typically higher NOx emissions but lower in the really nasty stuff. BUT, the problem is that biodiesels are generally more viscous and modern diesel engines don't like them. So, we're caught between Scylla and Charybdis and modern diesels are limited in what biodiesel blends they can use.

I hope that the Next Big Thing in diesel will be a gradual push to make the new, clean engines capable of handling higher percentage biodiesel blends. Petroleum companies would hate it, so probably won't happen.

 

The problem is that biodiesel gels at higher temperatures than petro does. Which is a different property than viscosity. In the winter it needs to be blended with petro diesel or kerosene, or have a heated fuel tank like that used for vegetable oil.

Modern engines can run on it. It appears the emission control systems are the problem. It is ultra low sulfur so the catalytic converters are safe. It also produces less particulates, but still enough that DPF will run regeneration cycles. This is done by squirting the filter with fuel to burn off the dirt. If the vehicle injects this fuel directly into the exhaust pipe, biodiesel isn't a problem.

Most modern diesels squirt the fuel for filter regen through the engine, because it is a cheaper solution and works with petrodiesel. When done with biodiesel, the fuel doesn't readily flow all the way to the filter. Some of it gets deposited along the way, and that could lead to problems.

 

Brazil has the sugar cane ethanol down to a science, it has much higher ethanol yield per acre. Also they collect the dead cane plants and burn them to generate the substantial energy needed to distill the ethanol from the water. This starts to compete with fossil fuels, assuming you don't mind rain forest losses.

The hope is that cellulose ethanol (from switch grass) can be done. IIRC it is already manadated for future inclusion into gasoline, even though it is not yet feasible or available. Fuel blenders will owe a fee for not doing this when the time comes (assuming law is not changed).

I believe there are some uses of corn plants, aside from the proverbial corn cob pipes - but I like corn cob pipes. The should give these out at the E85 pumps.

 

Uhm, I think you all misunderstood my posting... One, someone else stated Bio-diesel was corn. I said it wasn't purely corn, cause I was about to respond to bio-diesel not be great mostly due to that same premise, but stopped and looked it up, as I also recall the one episode of someone stealing cooking oil to be made into fuel. Plus I was about to state the problem with it (if it was purely corn) is the creation of sufficient quantities, the concern for farming such things as that puts a heavy tax on the land if it was purely tasked for that, and not to mention the slight issue of time it takes to raise a crop for that process and the processing of it.

I also never stated we had an abundance of bio-diesel... I stated that we tend to have an abundance of byproduct that can be used to make bio-diesel fuel, namely fat from animals, used cooking oil, grease, just as we tend to have an abundance that could create the byproduct of methane from our own wastes, as that is one of the possible fuel alternatives as well that we can technically 'renew' to a degree.

 

I said nothing about making bio-fuel from corn. Perhaps you have confused me with one of the other posters.

As for an abundance of byproduct that can be used for bio-fuel, the same objection applies: we only have an abundance because it isn't presently used. It won't come close to being abundant if it becomes commonly used. It should be used, but it will only amount to a tiny, tiny fraction of our total need for fuel.

Tom

 

Biodiesel is actually a whole lot more interesting topic than ethanol, because there are many options. You are correct that Soy Bean is the United States subsidized ag policy crop, like corn. But biodiesel can be easily made from just about any veggie oil or animal fats by mixing with methanol. Veggie oils or biodiesel can also be sent to the refinery with crude oil to be converted to conventional diesel, or can be converted to conventional diesel in a stand alone special plant. Each country has their own rules - politics as usual.

 

Uh, yeah, right, 'cause foreign interference is going to close the US/Canada border someday soon. In a word: Huh??

In what way could a "global event" affect oil imports from Canada? They might decide to stop selling it to us -- but they can do that with or without a pipeline. Same argument applies to anything else I can think of short of invasion, which I have to say I think of as fairly unlikely. Kinda sorta.

 

ThatTallGuy -
Building infrastructure to process more Canadian syn oil, means that if foreign events cut down on our ability to purchase OPEC oil then we can increase the north american flow.

Those against the pipeline want us to use less Canadian syn oil because refining it causes more ghg, and getting it causes more pollution in Canada. Since there is going to be less Opec oil in the future, IMHO this extra ghg and canadian pollution is inevitable. The alternative in my mind is more offshore drilling with its own environmental problems.

Most of us also would like policies to reduce oil use, not just switch from opec to more north american sources.

 

We could go back to horse & buggy

Mike

 

To understand why corn ethanol is a dubious replacement for gasoline, you need to understand an important term called EROEI (energy Returned on Energy Invested). See: [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI]Energy returned on energy invested - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

In other words, how much energy does it take to produce the energy in the first place. Gasoline and fossil fuels tend to have very high EROEI while corn ethanol has very low values.

Ethanol requires a substantial energy input. To begin with the corn requires a lot of fertilizer which is mostly produced with natural gas. Then consider the energy expenditure for distilling the fermented corn. Finally, ethanol can not be shipped in pipelines and must be transported by train. RailPictures.Net Photo: UP 5967 Union Pacific GE AC4400CW-CTE at Selkirk, New York by CS927

Brazilian ethanol is produced from sugar cane which requires much less energy to produce since the sugar content is much higher.

 

Can sugar cane be grown in large quantities in the USA?

Mike

 

The climate in the continental US is mostly unsuitable for sugar cane. Only in Florida, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are significant amounts of sugar cane cultivated. The US is not in the top 5 producers of sugar. See: Illovo Sugar - International

 

Do we have enough warm climate acreage to grow the cane to allow the US to use E100 and zero gasoline? Our own oil wells should be sufficient for use as lubricant oil or we could go 100% synthetic oil. I'm just wondering if it would be possible to completely eliminate use of dino oil in the future.

Mike