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Originally Posted by nekokami
Steve,
Make magazine ran an article on converting your own car to electricity in Vol 5. It looked doable, even to a non-electrician like myself. You can subscribe to the digital edition now and get the archives for free.  http://www.makezine.com (though as I type this, something seems to be not quite right with their server).
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Comment There is a place that converts cars to electric but a conversion costs from 15 to 40 grand.
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yvan, all carbon fuels put CO2 into the atmosphere, but growing plants for biofuels takes it out again. That's how the energy is stored. Remember, plants make sugars as a food source by using the energy in sunlight to break up CO2 and recombine it, ready to be combined again with oxygen to release the energy stored in the sugar. Plant sugars are nature's battery for solar energy. Alcohol fuels (including ethanol) derived from plant sugars harnesses yeast to convert the sugar to a form human machinery can more readily use for energy-- though I still have a problem with converting sugar/food into fuel. However, plants also convert CO2 into cellulose for structural purposes, and that can also be converted to human-usable energy, either by burning, as with wood, or by fermenting to methanol. Biodiesel uses fats created by plants to store energy, which again use CO2 from the atmosphere.
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Comment The biggest problem I see is that those fuels will for a long while be harvested with petroleum guzzling machinery. The second is that if all petrofuel was replaced now with biofuel, there wouldn't be anything left to eat in a couple of years. And third all crops dedicated to this type of fueling is drastically depleting agricultural quality of the soils they grow in.
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The remaining problems are efficiency (do we design engines to use as much as possible of the solar energy stored in the biofuels?) and clean burn, which are related issues. Alcohol burning at perfect efficiency should produce only water vapor and CO2 - no more CO2 than was removed from the atmosphere to produce the alcohol in the first place. But incomplete/inefficient burn can result in CO (carbon monoxide, a poison), NO (nitrous oxide), O3 (ozone), and soot (carbon particulates). All of these are health hazards to most animal life.
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Comment It is proven that an unmaintained or unproperly cared for alcohol burning vehicle will pollute more than a petrofueled one. They have been tested on since WW2.
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Sorry for the lecture-- I guess I've spent too much time thinking about this lately.... |
No don't be sorry! I applaude your quest for info on the subjects. It is the second step that a growing consciousness must reach to attain the majority of individuals necessary to start a positive motion.
To maintain the actual vehicle park, the only fuel acceptable is Hydrogen. Unfortunately a full tank will get you only 125miles. There is also a storage problem that is not easily fixed, that of the gas permeating through its confinement. Hydrogen is one of the smallest particles and it's the toughest to keep. You lose about 3% a week in the best cases. But the most awful thing I've heard from manufacturers is that they plan to extract the hydrogen from......petroleum!!!
