onlytrueromeo wrote:Ethanol, no, biodiesel, yes. Truck's are the worst polluters of motor vehicles, not cars. Clean diesel, with natural gas or propane supplements is actually very efficient. There are people out there working on a gasoline engine that runs w/o a radiator, and uses water injection. While I am for this, I see better potential by working more with the diesel cycle. A diesel cycle engine can benefit more from water injection if the temperature is maintained at a higher temperature. This would mean complete engine redesign, but it is really not all that difficult. Ethanol is/was another gimmic that the government and uninformed people promoted - it is also the cause of more food shortages. Again, while ethanol is "clean", using FOOD to make it is stupid. It's one thing to extract alcohols from decomposing waste, such as grass clippings or dead crops, but another entirely to use fields of food to produce an inefficient burning fuel.
You are right that electric cars as the cheap standard is not right around the corner, but I don't think they're that far off either. We just don't have the energy density storage required, everything else we do have.
To Nd4SpdSE:
I'm not talking batteries, or at least conventional chemical batteries. You are right, they are stupid. I'm talking about a quick charge alternative, something like an ultra high capacitance fluid or an array of plates that can store extreme amounts of energy, and still be able to regulate the current out, while not losing excess charge to the outside environment. It's really not all that crazy of an idea, it's just doing it for cheap in a safe way that we havn't been able to crack yet. The future of electricity is not reversible chemical reactions, I believe it is literally the harnessing of free flowing electrons.
Actually, you just outlined some of the misinformation I was talking about.
First, while it's true that Diesel trucks do pollute more than cars, you have to remember that the number of gas powered cars worldwide is enormously higher than the number of Diesel trucks, so, as a whole, cars do pollute a lot more than Diesels.
Second, That BS about ethanol needing to be produced from food crops is just plain ridiculous. Ethanol can be produced from almost ANY vegetable matter, not only "corn". as Americans have been lead to believe. Cellulosic ethanol, unlike what most people think, is WW2 technology. The only reason why it's not widely used is because it's expensive.
Third, ethanol being an inefficient fuel is actually just another load of cr@p. In terms of EROEI, ethanol has a variable number (depending on feedstocks and manufacturing methods) going from 1.34 (that is, it produces 34% more energy than it takes to be produced) for corn ethanol, to 8 for sugarcane ethanol, to more than 30 for cellulosic ethanol. Meanwhile, gasoline has an EROEI of 0.77.
In terms of fuel efficiency, ethanol has an energy density of 24 MJ/L, while gasoline's is 34.6 MJ/L. That is, if you use ethanol in an unmodified gasoline engine, you'd get about 69% the fuel efficiency.
But ethanol has other qualities that can be taken advantage of. It burns much colder than gasoline, and has an octane rating of 129/135. Those characteristics allow you to increase the engine's compression ratio to more than 15:1 (either by modifying the engine, or forcing induction with a turbo/supercharger), which in time can make it's fuel efficiency even higher than gasoline. A few years ago, engineers of either Volvo or Saab (I don't remember), compared 2 SUV's on the track, one modified to work with E85, and the E85 one showed to have more power (they didn't say how much) and an 18% better fuel mileage.
Now, about electric cars, No, they're not close, not by a long shot.
First, economically speaking, it'd take decades to have everybody (or at least, a big percentage of the population) to switch to electric cars. Remember that electric cars are not compatible at all with the current technology.
Second, the grid, at least in the U.S., is overloaded as it is, and could NOT absorb the increase of consumption, even if you convinced everybody (good luck with that) to recharge their cars at night.
Third, technologically, there's still no storage technology that'd come even close to what's needed. The most powerful capacitors in the world (the gold power/gel "supercapacitors") would take whole days to get the charge a battery gets in 24 hs.
Also, to get a cable capable of delivering such charge in a few minutes would call for the use of flexible superconductors, capable of superconducting at ambient temperature, that just don't exist.
Electric cars are a nice toy, and they will be for decades to come. Meanwhile, switching a gas engine to ethanol only takes some fairly minor (comparatively) modifications to a technology already in existence, and changing a Diesel engine to work on biodiesel only takes a cleanup, and, in some extreme cases, a gasket replacement.