BENEFITS OF ETHANOL FUEL, BiODiESEL, HYBRiDS, HYDROGENFUEL CELL, PURE ELECTRIC POWERED CARS, ...........?

Question

SOLAR ELECTRIC CARS, AND COMPRESSES AIR POWERED CARS

Answer 1

Ethanol will never work. It's a "distilled spirit".  Distilling takes tons of energy.  They're actually building new coal plants to support the ethanol plants in the midwest.  How does that make sense?  Well, it's American coal, you see, rather than foreign oil. And the corn helps the American farm lobby.  It's make-work for politically connected farmers.  Terrible fuel.

Biodiesel makes a lot of sense, because it doesn't take much energy to make from veggie oil crops. You could also use the oil directly.  Large ships can do that right now with no modification.  Cars are a little harder but you can always make biodiesel.   Trains (locomotives) can run on veggie oil too, but hey, they can run straight electric, no oil needed! And railroads run right through a lot of the big wind areas, so that's where they can get the power!

Compressed air takes a lot of energy to compress, and you can't hold very much of it in a tank.

Hydrogen fuel cells have a problem.  You make the hydrogen from electricity, then you compress it into a tank (see the problems with compressed air there), then you run it through a battery-like fuel cell to get energy out.  Wait, since we're effectively carrying electrons anyway, wouldn't a battery do that more efficiently?  Yes it would.  Plus you can charge a battery anywhere there's power!

Pure electric... maybe. But the more likely thing, at least for now, is electric cars with a little gas engine for cruising once you exceed the battery's range. Then you get the best of both worlds.   Could be a diesel or turbine, doesn't really matter as long as it charges the battery.  Later on people may decide they don't need the engine.  We'll see.  We can do that technology today, you could even build one yourself if you were into it.

Of course... people could always just stop driving. I know that's a little hard to imagine if you live in some sprawl suburb full of ranch homes, but there are wonderful cosmopolitan cities right in the USA that are nice to live in without a car.

Answer 2

Compressed-air powered cars aren't likely to gain much ground as (if memory serves) the process of compressing is only about 20% efficient - meaning you'd be throwing away 80% of the energy spent to compress the air in the first place.

Biodiesel is a contender but SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) is just as good if not better for the engine. Just needs to be preheated and the engine must start with diesel or bio-diesel, then switch over.

Ethanol has gotten off to a ridiculous start as corn-derived ethanol requires more energy than it provides in the end. Switchgrass is a viable alternative ethanol crop but it'll take a while to popularize, what with the ag industry having just begun to invest in developing seed, fertilizer, growing techniques, etc.

Of all the contenders you mentioned, I do like anything that could run on methanol or ethanol as the methane is easily and cheaply produced by microbes (called 'anaerobes') that eat anything with carbon and hydrogen content (nearly, anyway) and give off copious amounts of methane. Then, there's another bacteria that eats the methane (a gas) and gives off methanol (a liquid).

Hybrids are a makeshift solution but are very efficient for the time-being. Solar electric cars won't likely be cost-effective or even provide good performance for a very, very long time. However, Plug-In EV's, if the grid goes mostly solar, would give the same end effect.

Hydrogen? I don't see how it could ever work. It costs more to produce hydrogen - and often uses more fossil fuels - than it saves. The hydrogen must be compressed to something like 5,000 psi and, even at such astronomical pressures, the range is like a hundred miles. Direct Carbon Fuel Cells, Methane Fuel Cells, etc, all stand a much better chance of reaching viability.

Keep in mind, though, that a train can transport people comfortably using a tiny fraction of the fuel cars require...even the most efficient cars still in the early CAD stages.

A smarter transportation technology might be the development of a track-switching train design that could pick your micro-car up and deliver it to just about anyplace roads go. Just get on the outer (feeder) track nearest your home, that train speeds up, comes along-side a specially-designed receiver train, locks in, slides your micro-car over onto it and just keeps going. Then you'll be brought along-side another one that shifts your car over to it, and delivers you to your destination.

Lots of ideas out there. It's fun watching these things develop.

...

Answer 3

that is many big questions rolled into one

i will take the first one

ETHANOL

They are intending to replace most of the indigenous Forrest's in the world ,with mono cultures for the production of Ethanol,

Non sustainable, chemically grown ,heavily irrigated (with water needed for communities)one specie Forrest's,that have only plagues of insects as fauna which are controlled with pesticides.

Killing all bio diversity,in both flora and fauna ,adding to the destruction and extinction of species ,like nothing we have ever seen before.

All in the quest for alternative energy and to save the Environment ,

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay. "We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms. Oil palm has become the world's number one fruit crop, well ahead of bananas.

Biodiesel offers many environmental benefits over diesel from petroleum, including reductions in air pollutants, but the enormous global thirst means millions more hectares could be converted into monocultures of oil palm. Getting accurate numbers on how much forest is being lost is very difficult.

The FAO's State of the World's Forests 2007 released last week reports that globally, net forest loss is 20,000 hectares per day -- equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris. However, that number includes plantation forests, which masks the actual extent of tropical deforestation, about 40,000 hectares (ha) per day, says Matti Palo, a forest economics expert who is affiliated with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

"The half a million ha per year deforestation of Mexico is covered by the increase of forests in the U.S., for example," Palo told IPS.

National governments provide all the statistics, and countries like Canada do not produce anything reliable, he said. Canada has claimed no net change in its forests for 15 years despite being the largest producer of pulp and paper. "Canada has a moral responsibility to tell the rest of the world what kind of changes have taken place there," he said.

Plantation forests are nothing like natural or native forests. More akin to a field of maize, plantation forests are hostile environments to nearly every animal, bird and even insects. Such forests have been shown to have a negative impact on the water cycle because non-native, fast-growing trees use high volumes of water. Pesticides are also commonly used to suppress competing growth from other plants and to prevent disease outbreaks, also impacting water quality.

Plantation forests also offer very few employment opportunities, resulting in a net loss of jobs. "Plantation forests are a tremendous disaster for biodiversity and local people," Lovera said. Even if farmland or savanna are only used for oil palm or other plantations, it often forces the local people off the land and into nearby forests, including national parks, which they clear to grow crops, pasture animals and collect firewood. That has been the pattern with pulp and timber plantation forests in much of the world, says Lovera.

Ethanol is other major biofuel, which is made from maize, sugar cane or other crops. As prices for biofuels climb, more land is cleared to grow the crops. U.S. farmers are switching from soy to maize to meet the ethanol demand. That is having a knock on effect of pushing up soy prices, which is driving the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into soy, she says. Meanwhile rich countries are starting to plant trees to offset their emissions of carbon dioxide, called carbon sequestration. Most of this planting is taking place in the South in the form of plantations, which are just the latest threat to existing forests. "Europe's carbon credit market could be disastrous," Lovera said.

The multi-billion-euro European carbon market does not permit the use of reforestation projects for carbon credits. But there has been a tremendous surge in private companies offering such credits for tree planting projects. Very little of this money goes to small land holders, she says. Plantation forests also contain much less carbon, notes Palo, citing a recent study that showed carbon content of plantation forests in some Asian tropical countries was only 45 percent of that in the respective natural forests. Nor has the world community been able to properly account for the value of the enormous volumes of carbon stored in existing forests.

One recent estimate found that the northern Boreal forest provided 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services such as absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere and cleaning water. The good news is that deforestation, even in remote areas, is easily stopped. All it takes is access to some low-cost satellite imagery and governments that actually want to slow or halt deforestation. Costa Rica has nearly eliminated deforestation by making it illegal to convert forest into farmland, says Lovera.

Paraguay enacted similar laws in 2004, and then regularly checked satellite images of its forests, sending forestry officials and police to enforce the law where it was being violated. "Deforestation has been reduced by 85 percent in less than two years in the eastern part of the country," Lovera noted. The other part of the solution is to give control over forests to the local people. This community or model forest concept has proved to be sustainable in many parts of the world. India recently passed a bill returning the bulk of its forests back to local communities for management, she said.

However, economic interests pushing deforestation in countries like Brazil and Indonesia are so powerful, there may eventually be little natural forest left. "Governments are beginning to realize that their natural forests have enormous value left standing," Lovera said. "A moratorium or ban on deforestation is the only way to stop this."

This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ - International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

© 2007 IPS - Inter Press Service

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/...

Answer 4

well i thought they had made water fueled cars it clean and reusable