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Originally Posted by yvanleterrible
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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I thought the point of switchgrass and other
cellulosic fermentation crops was that they were non-food crops and don't deplete the soil as much as crops like corn? I would definitely oppose using corn to create any kind of fuel, given the environmental damage it does already. (I oppose feeding it to cattle to fatten them before slaughter, as well, but that's even further off topic than we already are.
) But as you pointed out in your second comment, IC engines running on ethanol go "out of tune" worse than petrol burning engines. (Though I wonder if that would also be true for Stirling engines?)
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Originally Posted by yvanleterrible
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!!!  |
Now that's just plain silly... so silly that I believe you.
I remember reading a number of years ago that there was some hope of using
interstitial hydrides as a relatively stable means of storing hydrogen, but I just checked and apparently the best found still only accept up to 2% of their mass in hydrogen, apparently not enough (even though hydrogen is so light).
I found a link of my own to share:
http://grist.org/news/maindish/2006/12/04/montenegro/ The comments are also worth reading.
But this whole discussion about replacements for petrol is because so far it's the most portable high-density fuel source we know of. So, back to batteries. Yes, let's hope they can produce lots and lots of extremely thin film organic polymer batteries (transparent or not) and cram them into all the nooks and crannies of cars and other energy hungry devices we humans seem to depend on.
See, we're back on topic again!
