Anyone catch ‘Mythbusters’ recently where they ran a diesel car on used cooking oil? It worked, although they reported a slight decrease in miles per gallon as compared to regular diesel.
There is also an artcile in a recent Consumer Reports about alternative fuels.
Trust me - they will find a way to make that a supply and demand system too! What we really need is competing forms of energy so companies are forced to sell at the lowest price.
Oh, and don’t count out Hydrogen. My engineer friends tell me it would be easy to produce (especially if we used nuclear plants to do it), but the current roadblock is safe delivery and storage. But there’s a lot of work being done to solve that.
All this means is that Ford Motor Company is pretty much useless–they’re the ones (well, among others) who spent the past decade encouraging people to buy giant Excursions and other fuel hogs even if they were commuters who never left the road and never carried passengers other than their own bloated egos. There are guys who mix up biodiesel in their garages and run their cars on the stuff, 100%, so pardon me if I take the word of Ford with a grain of salt…or a salt shaker full!
Steam power wasn’t “harnessed completely” during the age of steam–the most efficient steam locomotives used maybe 5-10% of the potential energy of the coal and wood and oil they burned. There are solar power plants operating now, solar panels on private rooftops and parking lots all over the country. Anyone who claims that biodiesel is useless and solar power is useless until “harnessed completely” must be willing to ignore the evidence piling up around them of alternate energy sources being used every day.
None of the other automakers have anything conventional that will run on a mixture of greater than 10%, so by your obtuse reasoning, they are all useless.
You guys are so corny!! The funny thing is you guys have long long explainations as Mr Know It Alls!! You will continue to argue this subject too and that is the funny part.
By the same line of reasoning, the United States Navy should have stuck with sail until every other navy on Earth had converted to steam, and no one should have purchased an automobile until they all came equipped with air bags! There is no such thing as a technology that has been harnessed completely! Horse-drawn vehicles were being improved even as Henry Ford was pounding out the thoroughly imperfect Model T by the millions. Also note that Ford didn’t replace the T until it had been rendered obsolete by every other auto manufacturer on the planet. (The replacement wasn’t exactly cutting-edge technology, either.) As for their present-day credibility, didn’t Ford just announ
The Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, ME has been working on a demonstration biodiesel project for a number of years using cooking oil collected from local restaurants. Their product is used directly in a diesel powered truck and for heating with no mixing with petroleum diesel. It’s presenlly small scale, making about 200 gallons a week . For details on their process go to:
“Any time we eliminate burning a gallon of fossil fuel,” says Peter Arnold, Chewonki’s Renewable Energies Pathway Coordinator and the overall coordinator for the Biodiesel Project, “we’re ahead. For every gallon of fossil fuel we burn, we release 20 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. But with biodiesel we can cut that figure by about 78 percent.” The Biodiesel Project aims to produce 2000 to 3000 gallons of fuel per year. This is enough to power two 15-passenger diesel van, a Volvo station wagon, three Volkswagon diesels, a tractor, and several staff vehicles, and the remainder is used as supplemental heating fuel.
Thats just about exactly what the RRs will do I think if Diesel fuel goes bazzurk. And on Top of that. the RRs already know how to build cantenary. And its alot less complicated than building a nucler powered loco.
I am not a physical scientist, so I could stand correction on my understanding. But I think that as our global population continues to grow, its geometric progression will always outpace our abilities in technology. So, I tend to be pessimistic that we will have to “find a better plug in the big bathtub” rather than to try to get a faster tap to fill the tub. That is, we must check our population growth (directly related to energy usage) if we want to succeed in the long run.
Also, solar energy sounds great…every golfer and gardener rejoices in it…but I fear that large solar farms will have deleterious effects on atmospherics that we might come to regret. For example, what will happen to local winds when we shade large sections of the desert and alter adiabatic effects? What will be the effects in outlying areas?
Pretty much. The auto industry these days kind of reminds me of the computer industry in the 1970s: dedicated to the status quo, producing gigantic machines that aren’t really that useful. Meanwhile, tinkerers in their garages are leapfrogging the big boys and somehow able to make use of existing technology in ways that the big companies say are impossible. And if you recall the computer industry of the 1970s, some of those tinkerers in garages ended up becoming the richest people in the world.
This has all happened before: some maniac named Fulton strapped a stationary steam engine to a boat, and some suicidal idiot named Stephenson built one and attached wheels to it, with the ridiculously inefficient idea that it could move under its own power, or, through some inefficient method, pull a little bit of cargo! Those with more sensible ideas, who knew that sails and horses would never be replaced as the means of propelling watercraft and wheeled vehicles, shook their heads in disdain.
People have been making predictions like this for centuries and they have always been proven wrong. Centuries ago people keep predicting that if we do not check population growth, there will be mass starvation in a decade or so. Guess what, we’re still here. Yet people still make such predictions today. Never underestimate the ability of man to improve and come up with new solutions you never thought possible.
Much of the developed world, including the US of A, would be close to steady-state population, or Zero Population Growth, by now if it were not for recent immigration. World population growth is fueled by the less-developed nations and the third world. China is probably the only place which is really taking on the problem by placing legal restrictions on family size.
Back in the 1800’s, people worried about not being able to light our houses because we would run out of whales to get oil from.
Right now, our ability to convert solar power to electricity is so inefficient that putting solar panels in the desert wouldn’t be much of a problem as far as potential climate changes go. Most of the incident energy would still end up as heat. If we could do this much more efficiently, then it would be good enough that we could put the panels right on our rooftops and live with the cloudy days.
Sadly, there was a serious accident on the test track of the German company which is making MagLev trains. It was completely human error - there was a maintenance vehicle in the right of way when the MagLev train, travelling about 120 mph, came along. Close to a couple of dozen people lost their lives in this one.
This shouldn’t have been a dangerous trip, but, like the astronauts, we salute those who have paid the ultimate price to make something better for all of us.