gas prices,Follow

If it's comng from cellulose, it's really methanol, but who really cares if it bruns in the car, eh?

The major problem I see with ethanol is the production capacity. We'd have to grow a LOT of crops just for our fuel needs. A LOT. While that may appeal when gas hits $20/gal, the lure just isn't there right now.

Same thing with biodiesel. It's a great product, but it's not great enough for the average guy to drop his existing crops and start growing nothing but soybeans and peanuts. Let me tell you: about a quart of boiled peanuts is all a fella needs to lubricate the works for a while. After you get your quart in, you don't want much to do with the other 1000 acres or so out there.

I can see where that idea has some merit, but desert farming probably isn't all it's cracked up to be. Temperature swings and all that. The best place to farm algae has been lost to man. It was the wading pool I had as a kid. I swear, 2 days after being scrubbed, bleached and refilled it was already turning green.

Well, we could always build giant wading-pool greenhouses over the Dakotas; they're not being used for much else.

The point was that the bulk of our electricity production comes from burning. 'Green' sources such as solar or hydropower aren't able to meet the national demand and nuclear has its own host of problems. Japan largely uses nuclear if I'm remembering correctly but that's driven largely by Japan's lack of fossil resources of any type.

Hah. I love how Shadow starts out by arguing against the idea that unless you generate electric power via nuclear, hydro, geo, or solar power plants, that you're just consuming fossil fuels in a different location. But then he later counters more arguments by saying "Yeah. But where I live, we have nuclear power, so that's not a problem...". Um...


Hybrid technology is a good idea since it reduces our total oil usage (or will if/when implemented fully). But it's expensive. And don't think that the batteries used in those systems are "clean and natural" either. It's worthwhile technology to pursue but to argue that it's an ideal alternative "today" would be stretching the truth quite a bit.

Ethanol is also a viable direction to go. But it's *also* expensive. In California, we're replacing the current chemical additive (which turned out to be worse for the environment then the air pollution it was designed to reduce) with an ethanol replacement. The problem is that the ethonol costs 4 times as much as what it's replacing. BTW, this is one of the main reasons why California has the highest gas prices in the country. It's not *all* about rising crude prices.

Going all electric isn't quite the savings it could be. As mentioned earlier, you still have to generate the electricity you put in the vehicles, and if you burn fossil fuels to do that, you aren't really gaining a whole lot. While Joph is correct that this will "reduce our reliance on foreign oil", I'm still not convinced how big a deal that is. Ultimately, cost is cost. And increased coal mining and use (the most likely source to generate the extra power needed for electric vehicles) is probably not the "ideal solution" most environmentalists have in mind. Buying oil from a foreign nation may not seem like the wisest geo-political choice, but it does put the wells in other countries (arguably a more contentious environmental issue then the use of gas to fuel cars in the first place). Clearly, the rejection of drilling in Alaska, new drilling in the continental US, and bans on drilling offshore are pretty good indicators that preventing drilling in the US is more important to the environmentalists then whether we end up reliant on foreign oil as a result. I'm just not sure how many would rather we reduce that reliance on foreign oil if it meant increased coal mining and burning domestically...


Which is why any mass movement to electric powered vehicles really does need to come with a push to build more power stations and (preferably) ones that don't burn fossil fuels to get their power. It's a lot more complex then just saying "Build alternative fueled vehicles...".

Four times the current price of the replacement? I'm curious to know just what additive is being replaced. Could it be you're being charged more for the equipment/service changes than the actual price of the ethanol blend?

It's still strange to think that parts of the country haven't ever had ethanol blended gasoline. It's been in my region for over ten years now. Our gas stations have also just started adding E-85 pumps for flex-fuel cars. The standard ethanol blend runs about 6 cents cheaper than non-blended gas while E-85 is about 30 cents cheaper.

I firmly believe in large gas-guzzling SUVs. Just keep pumping those oil prices higher you american ********

hurray for alberta!

That would be MTBE

It was originally chosen back in the 70s as an additive because it was cheaper then ethanol and met clean air requirements of the day. It's a great example of how "one sided requlation" (that made to strictly set a goal, but without carefully considering the alternatives available to meet that goal) can result in causing more problems then they solve. You'd think we'd learn from this kind of mistake...

Cooper Spec in the UK (suburb of Europe).

www.mini.co.uk




Sorry I know it is slightly off topic, but WTF? What do you mean we think of our cars like paper towels. What about Porsche, Jaguar, Lotus, Mercedes, Lamburghini, Ferrari, BMW, Alpha Romeo, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Daimler? Thats right mate we don't use them for status symols round these parts. We all drive Jaguars!

The difference of course is in the fact that fuel is so expensive over here. We do tend to make every day cars more fuel efficiant because only the people that can afford to buy high status cars can afford to run them at our fuel prices.

Even having said that the emphasis in design is on efficiancy over engine size. Focus is more likely to be on improving aerodynamics and weight savings in order to keep the engine size to a minimum.

Just for perspective it is (approx) £0.91 (GBP) per litre of Unleaded petrol at my local station. That is about $6.31 per US gallon. I hope my conversions aren't shoddy there. Granted the fuel costs in the UK are a bit higher than those in the rest of Europe because of a stupid amount of tax, but you get the general point.