Real Gasoline in Austin

[GneissGuy]

To expand on what Carl said, it's chemically very easy to break down sugar and starch and use it as food. It's significantly more difficult to break cellulose down chemically. It's not simply a question of experience, the task is chemically much more difficult.

It's not clear to me that cellulosic ethanol will ever be economically viable, but I hope it will be. Research into cellulosic ethanol is a great thing.

While economically turning all our waste cellulose into fuel for alcohol would be a great thing, there's not enough waste cellulose to completely displace gasoline. We'd have to start farming cellulose. That means cutting down forests for wood chips and switchgrass farms, plowing up land and planting switchgrass or something, replacing food production with high cellulose yielding crops, etc. All these farming methods have their own economic and environmental costs. Plus what wastes come out of the ethanol production process?

[GneissGuy]

Originally Posted by tcreative2

Turning cellulose into sugars is also a very simple and well known process ........ cows and horses have been doing it for years ......... a simple grinding and then placed in a tank filled with ruminant bacteria is all it would take for the first step .......

Sounds good in theory. Nobody's really made it work economically in practice in commercial quantities, yet. Termites also digest cellulose with bacteria in their guts. They haven't got the termite process working well in the test tube or commercial production quantities yet, either. Lots of people have tried both cow and termite style cellulose fermentation without success in commercial quantities yet.

There are lots of things that work well enough in nature, but don't work that well in the factory.

It sounds like a good idea. I hope we can make it work in practice. We aren't there yet.

[maxieryan]

For OLD car buffs such as myself.........My car took leaded gasoline so we had to use unleaded and pour a bottle of transmission fluid into the tank everytime we filled it up. Anyone else ever do that?

[shaft.drive]

since we have used up more than 50% of the crude we can drill, we can all count on seeing more new technologies.....
...more on diesel....

In Europe, diesels account for about 40% of new cars sold each year. American drivers have steered clear of diesel since the early 1980s because many of the cars were unreliable, noisy, and polluting. Americans continue to perceive diesel as a "dirty" fuel, though today that image is only partly deserved. Because of their lower per-mile fuel consumption, diesel engines generally release less carbon dioxide—the heat-tapping gas primarily responsible for global warming—from the tailpipe. So that's a check on the good side of the pollution chart. But when it comes to smog-forming pollutants and toxic particulate matter, also known as soot, today's diesels are still a lot dirtier than the average gasoline car.

Diesel pollution can be deadly, causing premature mortality through cancer or heart and respiratory illnesses. CARB has concluded that diesel soot is responsible for 70% of the state's risk of cancer from airborne toxics. In the population as a whole, studies have shown a 26% increase in mortality in people living in soot-polluted cities.

To address diesel's emissions problems, tougher emissions rules are coming into effect. To meet the tougher pollution standards, high-tech diesel engines need low-sulfur diesel fuel. Unfortunately modeling has shown this fuel to be more oil- and carbon-intensive than reformulated gasoline.

factors:
1) petroleum usage;
2) greenhouse gas emissions (global warming pollution);
3) toxic air contaminants (including soot);
4) total cost to purchase, own, and operate

Diesel does have a slight advantage over gasoline in the first two categories. But diesel's tough pollution-control challenges and the high up-front cost of engines and emission controls for diesel vehicles gives gasoline technology the edge overall. That means there is no mandate to bring back diesel in a big way—gasoline-powered cars, particularly gasoline-electric hybrids, are likely the best way to go.

[shaft.drive]

We don't hear much about natural gas either. I have seen it become a lot more popular in Asia.

Existing gasoline-powered vehicles may be converted to allow the use of CNG. An increasing number of vehicles worldwide are being manufactured to run on CNG. The Honda Civic GX is the only NGV commercially available in the US market.

an alternative fuel vehicle that uses compressed natural gas (CNG) or, less commonly, liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a clean alternative to other automobile fuels. Worldwide, there were 11,2 million natural gas vehicles by 2009, led by Pakistan with 2.4 million, Argentina (1.8 million), Iran (1.7 million), Brazil (1.6 million), and India (725 thousand).[1] with the Asia-Pacific region leading with a global market share with 5,7 million NGVs, followed by Latin America with almost 4 million vehicles.[1] The US has 110,000 NGVs, mostly buses.

Too bad for owners of classic hot rods though. I have a friend that wants to sell his old mustang