why not bio diesel?

[rudeguy]

Why not invest some of the hundreds of billions that we are spending on energy and invest in bio diesel? From what I understand its dirt cheap to produce, can be produced from a wide variety of garbage and burns cleaner than regular diesel or gasoline.

So why not spend some serious money on this? I'm sure a $7500 tax credit would get people to change their cars over to this and it would make a lot more sense than a plug in car that only goes a few miles.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Because when the government is hurting for money, the last thing they want to do is give tax credits and reduce the amount of gas purchased.

Another issue is Americans for the most part don't buy diesel cars. There are a few, diesel is mainly relegated to trucks and tractors.
I know Willy Nelsons truck stop(s) use bio-disiel, and they make their own.
But in order to make it work on a large enough scale you have to get enough people on board to dispose of the bio-waste in a manner that can be used. Now you can round up all the used cooking oil and fat from resturaunts and stuff, but I don't think that would be enough. You'd have to be able to collect it from every home in the nation.
The best option is to get all commercial trucks setup on bio-desiel and work towards truck stops only providing bio-diesel.

 

[chucky2]

The short answer is that the lovely folks at CARB will not be satisfied until everything is powered by electricty, produced by fairy farts and liberal dreams. Since diesel gets markedly better mpg than gas, a national push for diesel would significantly reduce CARB's goal, and CARB cannot have that.

Hence, they push greater and greater emmissions regs, both for job justification and their neverending goal of electrification, which include NOx and PM restrictions. NOx and PM* are harder for diesels to hit, which means increased costs. Increased costs mean auto manufacturers are leery about bringing these options to the US public, even though they're cheaper than Hybrid solutions, and get as good or better real world mpg on the highway (where a ton of miles are driven each year).

*PM2.5 is what they currently regulate, which diesels produce much more of than gas, which is why the diesels need a DPF. We'll see how unbiased CARB is since they're finding that gas engines emit large quantities of superfine particulate. If CARB truly isn't playing games and not biased against diesels, they'll put in tough regulations on superfine particulate as well.

Chuck

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Bio-diesel doesn't perform well in cold climates. Bio-diesel is also susceptible to water so condensation in the fuel tank can cause major issues.

 

[werepossum]

I like thermal depolimerization, which creates various energetic short-chain polymer hydrocarbon distillates as well as valuable by-products from garbage. The products and by-products vary according to the feed stock, but without the bad effects of bio-diesel.

Scale models worked great, and there are test plants now in operation, so we'll see how practically it scales up. Personally I think anything that uses garbage as a feed stock is a winner, but so far these plants have broken even only with light sweet crude above $80/barrel and are very, very sensitive to changes in feed stock composition, so that a plant pretty much has to be designed for a particular feed stock. Also, many assumptions (that garbage is free) have turned out to be flawed, as some of the best feed stocks are also marketable for other purposes. Some links.
http://www.thermaldepolymerization.org/
http://www.changingworldtech.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

 

[Throckmorton]

It's not cheap to make. It takes a lot of crops, just like ethanol. A lot of deforestation in Asia has happened in the past few years thanks to the biodiesel push...

 

[PhoKingGuy]

My TDI loves loves loves loves biodiesel, but I cant find it in CA due to CARB being idiots and banning underground storage of the stuff.

 

[Lemon law]

Sadly our OP's understanding is not yet correct. There is some promising bio engineering research that hints that biodeiesel may become practical in future, but its my understanding that its more pie in the sky than reality yet.

As for ethanol production from corn, that is already known to be a established technology but still a very poor idea, but on going research on using switch grass and other agricultural wastes to produce ethanol are also promising.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Why not invest some of the hundreds of billions that we are spending on energy and invest in bio diesel? From what I understand its dirt cheap to produce, can be produced from a wide variety of garbage and burns cleaner than regular diesel or gasoline.

So why not spend some serious money on this? I'm sure a $7500 tax credit would get people to change their cars over to this and it would make a lot more sense than a plug in car that only goes a few miles.

When have you ever seen your government do anything that is beneficial to the people...

There are a sheitload of lobbies that pays your politicians WAY more than they get from their government salary.

You do realise that hte biggest company wins, right? Why do you think Haliburton keeps getting governmental support even after several cases of criminal charches along with bribery have occured?

No one cares about it, if it's the left in charge and someone does they can say that the right does the same thing and since the ONLY thing the US twats care about is left or right that is good enough...

Just so you know it, you can't really have a democracy when you only have one thing with a tint of paint on the right or the left to choose between.

Perhaps the UN should free you first?

 

[shangshang]

I'm opposed to using anything that human can eat as fuel. Using grass? fine. But using corn or some other staple crops? That's just crazy.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

I'm opposed to using anything that human can eat as fuel. Using grass? fine. But using corn or some other staple crops? That's just crazy.

Bio diesel is made out of leftover vegetable oil.

Instead of burning the crops (the overproduction is HUGE and it will be burned) from the subsidised farming industry you can produce fuel... nah, let's just burn it for nothing and produce twice the amount of CO2 because retards don't know better.

For fucks sakes, i'm an old Captain, you are supposed to be well educated indiviuals, you are supposed to teach ME about biodiesel and crops for ethanol, not the other way around.

Did one generation just get fucked up between mine and my childrens?

 

[drebo]

I think we should be looking more into hydrogen fuel cells.

Using our food for fuel is ridiculously stupid, and ethanol is no better or cheaper than gasoline. Even when made from better sources than corn, such as switch grass or sugar cane, it still isn't as good as gasoline. Hybrids are a bandaid solution which doesn't really work. Electric cars are not practical. Small diesel cars are excellent, but there is a stigma attached to diesel in the US.

Hydrogen is the mid-term future of portable energy. Is it perfect? No. It's pretty difficult to produce, but it can be mass-produced and there is no shortage of hydrogen and never will be. It's flamable, sure, but so is gasoline. A tank of hydrogen is no more dangerous than driving around with a gas tank that's 90% empty. Yeah, it puts out a greenhouse gas, but it doesn't put out all of those other nasty particulates and toxins that gasoline and ethanol put out.

Seriously, there is no reason not to look to hydrogen fuel cells for the next two-hundred years until portable cold fusion generators get invented.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

I think we should be looking more into hydrogen fuel cells.

Using our food for fuel is ridiculously stupid, and ethanol is no better or cheaper than gasoline. Even when made from better sources than corn, such as switch grass or sugar cane, it still isn't as good as gasoline. Hybrids are a bandaid solution which doesn't really work. Electric cars are not practical. Small diesel cars are excellent, but there is a stigma attached to diesel in the US.

Hydrogen is the mid-term future of portable energy. Is it perfect? No. It's pretty difficult to produce, but it can be mass-produced and there is no shortage of hydrogen and never will be. It's flamable, sure, but so is gasoline. A tank of hydrogen is no more dangerous than driving around with a gas tank that's 90% empty. Yeah, it puts out a greenhouse gas, but it doesn't put out all of those other nasty particulates and toxins that gasoline and ethanol put out.

Seriously, there is no reason not to look to hydrogen fuel cells for the next two-hundred years until portable cold fusion generators get invented.

1. we are not using food for fuel, we already produce more than 400% worth of food, we can make it into fuel or just let it waste.

2. Hydrogen fuel cells makes the cost about as much as gas without the problems and that is with TODAYS short order of hydrogen, knowing how this works in the US though there will be one company and in the rest of the world there will be ten per nation and you'll call tha socialist, kinda like how gas companies work today, through oligopols.

3. hydrogen is abundant as fuel, it is the most abundant gas in our atmosphere and with the addition of more thorium based power generators we can stop arguing if CO2 is a threat or not, it will be irrelevant.

 

[Throckmorton]

Crops don't just get burned. They end up on the world market. You can deny it all you want, but biofuel has directly caused food prices to increase. It doesn't affect us because we're first worlders, but it affects the third world.

 

[Throckmorton]

I think we should be looking more into hydrogen fuel cells.

Using our food for fuel is ridiculously stupid, and ethanol is no better or cheaper than gasoline. Even when made from better sources than corn, such as switch grass or sugar cane, it still isn't as good as gasoline. Hybrids are a bandaid solution which doesn't really work. Electric cars are not practical. Small diesel cars are excellent, but there is a stigma attached to diesel in the US.

Hydrogen is the mid-term future of portable energy. Is it perfect? No. It's pretty difficult to produce, but it can be mass-produced and there is no shortage of hydrogen and never will be. It's flamable, sure, but so is gasoline. A tank of hydrogen is no more dangerous than driving around with a gas tank that's 90% empty. Yeah, it puts out a greenhouse gas, but it doesn't put out all of those other nasty particulates and toxins that gasoline and ethanol put out.

Seriously, there is no reason not to look to hydrogen fuel cells for the next two-hundred years until portable cold fusion generators get invented.

Hydrogen isn't a fuel. It's an energy storage medium, like batteries. You "make" hydrogen by electrolysis of water. The energy comes from somewhere else. Then when you burn hydrogen, or do whatever process the fuel cells use, you get water back.

 

[Throckmorton]

It's really shocking how little people understand about this stuff. Land is a finite resource. You can't get something for nothing-- turn crops into biofuel and you are causing people to go hungry, and wildlands to be turned into farmlands. Biofuel is made from palm oil (no, your local restaurants can't supply enough) which is grown on deforested rainforest land.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37035

BROOKLIN, Canada, Mar 21, 2007 (IPS/IFEJ) - Nearly 40,000 hectares of forest vanish every day, driven by the world's growing hunger for timber, pulp and paper, and ironically, new biofuels and carbon credits designed to protect the environment.

The irony here is that the growing eagerness to slow climate change by using biofuels and planting millions of trees for carbon credits has resulted in new major causes of deforestation, say activists. And that is making climate change worse because deforestation puts far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire world's fleet of cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships combined.

"Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition, an environmental NGO based in Asunción, Paraguay.

"We call it 'deforestation diesel'," Lovera told IPS.

Oil from African palm trees is considered to be one of the best and cheapest sources of biodiesel and energy companies are investing billions into acquiring or developing oil-palm plantations in developing countries. Vast tracts of forest in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and many other countries have been cleared to grow oil palms.
....

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Hydrogen isn't a fuel. It's an energy storage medium, like batteries. You "make" hydrogen by electrolysis of water. The energy comes from somewhere else. Then when you burn hydrogen, or do whatever process the fuel cells use, you get water back.

No twat, hydrogen as a gas is abundant and costs a LOT less than gasoline to get from containment to isolation tank.

Do NOT assume you know shit without at least serching google, at this point, search honda hydrogen fuel cell car.

It's the only viable electic car because of it's hydrogen fuel cells.

 

[rudeguy]

No twat, hydrogen as a gas is abundant and costs a LOT less than gasoline to get from containment to isolation tank.

Do NOT assume you know shit without at least serching google, at this point, search honda hydrogen fuel cell car.

It's the only viable electic car because of it's hydrogen fuel cells.

I saw Jay Leno drive a steam powered car that could do 70MPH and IIRC, had a range longer than that of the Volt.

And I'm sorry if my OP seemed like I was trying to say I knew anything about this. It was meant to be more of a question than anything.

 

[PeshakJang]

No twat, hydrogen as a gas is abundant and costs a LOT less than gasoline to get from containment to isolation tank.

Do NOT assume you know shit without at least serching google, at this point, search honda hydrogen fuel cell car.

It's the only viable electic car because of it's hydrogen fuel cells.

You're partly right, in that it's as much an energy storage medium as any fossil fuel... as fossil fuels were created using energy over million of years from other sources... but you're incorrect that we just scoop hydrogen out of some underground pool. Electrolysis of water is the primary practical source of hydrogen fuel, and that requires another energy source (solar, nuclear, etc). You can also generate it from other sources such as natural gas, but then you are still reliant on fossil fuels.

So you're both partly right. You just sound like an idiot when you talk.

 

[K1052]

You're partly right, in that it's as much an energy storage medium as any fossil fuel... as fossil fuels were created using energy over million of years from other sources... but you're incorrect that we just scoop hydrogen out of some underground pool. Electrolysis of water is the primary practical source of hydrogen fuel, and that requires another energy source (solar, nuclear, etc). You can also generate it from other sources such as natural gas, but then you are still reliant on fossil fuels.

So you're both partly right. You just sound like an idiot when you talk.

IIRC, pretty much all industrial hydrogen is made from steam reforming natural gas. Limited production from electrolysis cells is mostly used in lab applications that requires totally pure hydrogen.

 

[drebo]

You're partly right, in that it's as much an energy storage medium as any fossil fuel... as fossil fuels were created using energy over million of years from other sources... but you're incorrect that we just scoop hydrogen out of some underground pool. Electrolysis of water is the primary practical source of hydrogen fuel, and that requires another energy source (solar, nuclear, etc). You can also generate it from other sources such as natural gas, but then you are still reliant on fossil fuels.

So you're both partly right. You just sound like an idiot when you talk.

I imagine that, with refinement, the process to produce hydrogen gas from water will be far, far cheaper than the process of producing gasoline from dinosaur guts.

Yes, it takes electricity. Yes, that electricity comes from somewhere. But, what if that electricity came from nuclear? Now we're operating completely outside of hydrocarbons, and all the evilness they represent to some.

I mean, producing hydrogen for a fuel cell is no different than plugging in your Volt every night. But it's a hell of a lot more convinient.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

You're partly right, in that it's as much an energy storage medium as any fossil fuel... as fossil fuels were created using energy over million of years from other sources... but you're incorrect that we just scoop hydrogen out of some underground pool. Electrolysis of water is the primary practical source of hydrogen fuel, and that requires another energy source (solar, nuclear, etc). You can also generate it from other sources such as natural gas, but then you are still reliant on fossil fuels.

So you're both partly right. You just sound like an idiot when you talk.

With a proper fuel cell you can get hydrogen from a station in CA use it in the Honda, have the same mileage at the same cost as a gasoline driven car TODAY and the torque of a fucking tank.

Hydrogen doesn't need to be split from water by applying heat, it's abundant in free form as is all over the atmosphere and what we take will be replaced, the method is already there and called scrubbing.

It's not like this isn't available, but what use is it when no one wants one?

In about 50 years we will still be wondering whether it was a good idea while other nations produce them and we are happy if we can afford to buy what the current day third world thinks is cheap.

 

[Throckmorton]

No twat, hydrogen as a gas is abundant and costs a LOT less than gasoline to get from containment to isolation tank.

Do NOT assume you know shit without at least serching google, at this point, search honda hydrogen fuel cell car.

It's the only viable electic car because of it's hydrogen fuel cells.

Hydrogen as a gas isn't abundant on earth. It's locked up in water. You get it by expending energy from another power source. Then you can burn it or put it in fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are a form of battery, not an energy source.

 

[Throckmorton]

Hydrogen doesn't need to be split from water by applying heat, it's abundant in free form as is all over the atmosphere and what we take will be replaced, the method is already there and called scrubbing.

Oh really? What percentage of the atmosphere is hydrogen gas?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen


Under ordinary conditions on Earth, elemental hydrogen exists as the diatomic gas, H2 (for data see table). However, hydrogen gas is very rare in the Earth's atmosphere (1 ppm by volume) because of its light weight, which enables it to escape from Earth's gravity more easily than heavier gases. However, hydrogen is the third most abundant element on the Earth's surface.[72] Most of the Earth's hydrogen is in the form of chemical compounds such as hydrocarbons and water.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Oh really? What percentage of the atmosphere is hydrogen gas?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen


Under ordinary conditions on Earth, elemental hydrogen exists as the diatomic gas, H2 (for data see table). However, hydrogen gas is very rare in the Earth's atmosphere (1 ppm by volume) because of its light weight, which enables it to escape from Earth's gravity more easily than heavier gases. However, hydrogen is the third most abundant element on the Earth's surface.[72] Most of the Earth's hydrogen is in the form of chemical compounds such as hydrocarbons and water.

Very rare in the atmosphere means that it's only about 169 billion times as available for fuel as oil.