What are the negative effects of alternative fuels?

Question

I have to do a presentation in one of my classes that persuades against alternative fuels and their use. I've found some info on ethanol and its negative effects but I need 3 examples of fuels to present. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

You don't get as much btu out of Propane or Natural gas as you do out of gasoline. In other words the return of power with gasoline is greater than the return of power with the CNG or PPG.

In order to produce enough biodeisel to power all of the diesel vehicles in the U.S. we would need to produce corn etc. on an acreage larger than the entire U.S. Possibly all of Africa would be sufficient.

Answer 2

Some well known alternative fuels include biodiesel, bioalcohol (ethanol, butanol), chemically stored electricity (batteries and fuel cells), hydrogen, non-fossil methane, non-fossil natural gas, vegetable oil and other biomass sources.

Answer 3

The energy it takes to create some of the alternative fuels ia a negative. Also,in some fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel crops such as corn is going to fuel instead of fuel. Birds are sometimes killed by wind turbines. That being said I am still in favor of alternative fuels.

Answer 4

The main criticism for many "alternative fuels" is that the process to create/access/process them requires a significant portion of the energy  (and sometimes perhaps more energy) than is ultimately available when they are "burned"

For example I have heard hydrogen identified not as a fuel, but as an energy transport system. This is because there is no place on the planet that you can drill for, mine, or harvest hydrogen. The hydrogen has to be created through a process that involves the use of other raw materials, and energy. Since no chemical or mechanical process is 100% efficient, there is always some energy lost along the way in whatever process is being used.

This means that its takes more energy to create the hydrogen than you get out of it. So hydrogen is not an energy source.

Now if we use solar power to create the hydrogen, its almost the same as charging a battery with electricity from the solar power, but instead we create hydrogen and transport it instead of a heavy battery.

Sounds great right, but the challenge in so many of these types of systems is that we get less energy out than we put in. This doesn't help energy conservation at all. So whatever fuels you choose to examine, it is very likely that you can argue the process to access and create the fuel is too inefficient to actually be an improvement over established fuel sources.

the criticisms you  will get in response to this argument is that traditional energy sources will run out so we have to prepare for that; and that you can't measure the full impact of energy used in one type or another because of the long term effects to public health, biodiversity, agricultural production etc. It becomes very complicated and even the smartest people working on it are sometime not sure what the best path to take is.

good luck.

Answer 5

Because so many alternative fuels consume a lot of fuel in their production, the key argument has been that we are still using too much fossil fuels even when we switch to the alternative.

We are barely touching sustainability.

We have to discard very low efficiency systems immediately.  Fuels produced on farm land of course also take food out of the mouth of people and livestock. We do not have enough farm land to produce all the alternate fuel we would use, let alone enough to do that and also eat.

alternative fuel produced from plant mater grown in ocean dead zones is an exception. It does not reduce human or animal food, allows more animals to live. Harvesting it takes far less energy than it yields.

If we stuck to non-biologicals, electrical storage, hydrogen storage, or super flywheels, we can approach 70% efficiency. Compared to a gasoline engine or diesel that 70% is really good. But that 70% is based on consuming electricity, and does not take into account the inefficiency of providing the electricity in the first place. Once we include that, we are quite close to the efficiency of a diesel. (WHICH IS BETTER THAN WITH BIO-FUELS).