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| Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California (20122) | |||
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Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California |
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Posted by JohnL on Fri Mar 18 17:36:42 2005, in response to Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California, posted by SelkirkTMO on Fri Mar 18 12:54:01 2005. Forgive me for going Penn and Teller, but ethanol is BULLSHIRT. In order to distill, you need HEAT. Current ethanol technology uses natural gas or oil to heat same ... the ethanol recovered has about 60% of the energy expended to make it. Better to have just sent that damned oil or gas down the pipeline to someone who could have spent it more wisely. For OTHER "alternatives" the numbers decline RAPIDLY. :(Absolutely, which is why I say it’s just a wasteful subsidy to farmers in the square states. Now, if we were fermenting the corn and getting some useful chemicals out of it, the story might be different. But no, sugar to alcohol might be free, but distillation is energy negative. However, if the corn were dried (sun=free) and burned directly to produce electricity that might be energy positive. I could sort of see the big crop fields out in the West punctuated by high-tech windmills (there’s a lot of wind blowing over the flat lands). Your comments in other posts about electric motors becoming ever more efficient is very apposite. Variable frequency multi-phase AC has the potential to knock the socks off everything else. We just need a good method of energy storage, and I don’t know how much better chemistries we’re going to find than LiIon. Sodium Sulphr looks promising, but I would have to feel very comfortable with the engineering when I consider that the chemistry works around 300°F, and molten Sodium metal is not something I would really want travelling around in an automobile. Methanol, as a method of transporting hydrogen sounds promising, but we have a way to go yet. Most all of the hydrogen experiments use oil as a source with some sort of handwaving “alternate source in the future”, excuse. We need to start doing the hard slog research, working out what’s real and what’s just a pipedream. Maybe the $5/gallon of gas (which I confidently expect next year) will start concentrating some minds. |
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