Other sources for our cars?

Question

Compare and contrast alternative fuel sources besides fossil fuels to power our cars.

Answer 1

BIODIESEL ...lots of pages on the web on how to make your own.  Then, of course, you could ride a bike.

Answer 2

Some of the major alternate  fuel sources that have been proposed are biofuels, hydrogen,  and electricity generated by renewable sources.

Biofules can be ethanol from corn or cellulose or biodiesel from oils produced from plants.

Biofuels reguire a great deal of energy to grow and process and often do environmental damage as in the case of palm oil where millions of acres of environmentally sensitive rain forest is destroyed in order to plant the palm plantations that produce the palm plants that produce the oil that is used in biodiesel.

Hydrogen does not exist uncombined in nature. Hydrogen is produced most commonly from natural gas or electrolytically from water.

When hydrogen is produced from natural gas, the same amount of carbon dioxide is produced as if the natural gas had been burned directly.

If the hydrogen is produced by electrolysis, (over 50% of the electricity in the United States is produced by burning coal). the result is merely a transfer of the pollutants to the site of the power plant that produced the electricity that was used to produce the hydrogen from water.

Also, hydrogen production by electrolysis from water is a very inefficient process. You have to burn much more fossil fuels to produce the electricity to produce the hydrogen than if you burned fossil fuel such as gasoline or diesel to power a car directly instead of using hydrogen.

Electricity produced by renewable sources such as solar power and wind can also be considered.

Electricity produced by solar electric cells is ineficient and expensive, due to the very high capital cost of the solar cells.

Solar cells with sufficient capicity to power a typical three bedroom house will cost approximately $100,000. Although many people put solar electric panels on their houses at a cost of approximately $25,000 to $30,000, those panels do not produce enough electricity to power the house. That house must still be tied to the grid.

For people who power a house off the grid by the use of solar cells the capital cost for a system that produces adequate power is approximately $100,000.

Electricity produced by wind power is currently the most cost effective source of electricity that is produced by a renewable source.

Currently the cost of electricity produced by wind power is approximately 4 cents per kilowatt hour. That is even chepaer than the cost of production of electricity using natural gas and is almost as cheap as electricity that is produced by the use of coal. (1)

Currently I would say that electricity produced by wind power is the most economically feasible source of environmentally friendly electricity to power cars.

The technology for electric batteries has improved remarkably in the past few years. In a few years we should see commercially viable electric cars that travel approximately i mile per kilowatt hour of electricity used.

Adding transmission costs and profits for the electric utilities you ought to be able to get electricity generated by wind power for approximately 6 cents per kilowatt hour.

That is a fuel cost of approximately 6 cents per mile for an electric car.

That is very attractive compared with the cost per mile of gasoline or diesel.



At the current cost for gasoline, that makes electric cars very attractive economically.

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