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Racer X wrote:
I am still baffled why no one makes a small aluminum-blocked diesel electric hybrid. Small light diesel that runs a generator to suplament batteries. run biodiesel or ultra low sulfur.
FYI, the sulfur is an upper cylinder and injector pump lubricant. These ultra low sulfur blends cause some real challenging engineering problems for the engine manufacturers.
That is why biodiesel is looking attractive. It has a higher lubricant factor than the ULSD and can make up for some of the loss due to going to a lower sulfur content.
On a different issue, production of fuel from non-food plant growth, a researcher here discovered a microbe that is good at making ethanol. It can go directly from cellulose feedstocks such as plant stalks, wood chips and grasses to ethanol. Other microbes have been used in the past, but they took a two-step process to first convert cellulose to sugar and then fermentation to create ethanol. It was discovered in soil samples taken near the Quabbin Reservoir in W. Mass. and the process is currently under development.
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Something tells me if you could make fuel from trash, the price of trash would skyrocket. Trash is trash as long as nobody wants it.
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Yeah, but 10 times almost nothing is still a low price. Especially when it costs to dispose of trash, if instead you can sell part of it, the economics can favor that.
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There was actually a surplus of corn last year. The high price was mostly speculation.
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Any? BMW and Daimler don't count?
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They have. The US won't buy those cars - not big enough, too anemic. We have to have much more hp. We don't use it often enough to justify it, but insist that the performance be there.
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Trash could be used to make fuel, but we'd have to separate it into vegetable and not vegetable waste for disposal. My guess is that a large segment of the US population will be challenged by such an exercise.
The energy solution is to look at each process that requires energy and determine the most practical solution. Waste treatment plants are now starting to put in power generation systems that are fueled by methane produce by the waste - zero fuel cost. At some of the pilot plants, this system has eliminated their dependence on grid supplied electricity. Trash dumps are looking at the same option. There is a lot of methane produced by the decomposition of garbage.
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gasoline sales are increasing in Europe and emmission controls (diesel) similar to those in this country are slowly being adopted ther (in Europe), too.
I really don't think some of those living in air quality sensitive areas on the West coast would appreciate waking up to the stench of diesel every morning (as with many other countries).
