Gas Crisis

Gas is about to hit $3/gallon in my region. I remember not too long ago when gas exploded to over $4/gallon and there was a massive massive freakout. Europe and Asia proceeds to laugh derisively. (The Chinese Guy points out that gas is over $9/gallon where he lives, and he manages.) I think the best thing we can do is to develop alternative fuels, which reduces the demand and thus lowers the price.
* BioButanol
This is a chemical fuel that resembles gasoline, but is made of any vegetative matter modified by a particular bacterial action. You could put it in your gas tank right now.
* Ethanol
Drinking alcohol. Works as 110 octane fuel in your tank, but most cars couldn't handle more than 15%. Flex-Fuel cars can have up to 85% ethanol, and Brazil has cars that work on 100% ethanol due to their excess sugar-cane production. Nice work, Brazil
* Electricity
Electric cars exist that you can buy now. People complain about their lack of range, and the fact that they're a tad difficult to recharge, and the fact that they're expensive due to novelty factor. Still, one would work even for my long daily commute.
* Nuclear
It'll never work, there are still too many anti-nuclear kooks that insist that anything nuclear will at some point violently explode, destroying the entire city with it.
* Biodiesel
Change vegetable oil into diesel gasoline by removing the glycerine. Works in any diesel engine. The catch being: Only works in diesel engines that lack rubber parts. biodiesel has an annoying habit of leeching through rubber parts.

Any other ideas to power our cars? Cars use a lot of energy, and even advertise the fact. Cars measure their output in Horsepower, a unit of about 750 watts, that being the approximate power output of a strong draft horse. So whatever source you use, it'll need to be very portable, have a large power output, and not too expensive or strange to refuel.

Hybrid Construction Vehicles

I'd love a hybrid car if I had the money. They're more fuel efficient, have longer ranges, and are generally cheaper to operate. Also, the electrical components can be charged at home for super-cheap, but you can rely on the gas tank for long trips. More expensive to buy, which is why most cars out there are pure gasoline operated.
Discovery News is now reporting that construction vehicles are increasingly hybrids, both for their efficiency, as gas prices soar, but also for their quietness, as more quiet vehicles means fewer noise complaints on construction sites.
I confess I never thought of making hybrid bulldozers, earthmovers, mechanical shovels, or dump trucks, but that it's making such a big difference is awesome news indeed.

Plastic bag recycling

Paper, or plastic? When people in America buy groceries, they tend to buy about a week's worth at a time, and this is more than can readily be carried by hand. So markets typically provide bags for easy carrying. Almost all of these are immediately thrown away once the groceries are safely in the refrigerator or pantry. Those that are kept are reused once, again to hold something.
This wouldn't be a problem, except that stores go through thousands of bags per hour, and the plastic bags will remain in their current form for geological periods of time. Should they blow loose, they clutter up (and ugly up) the nearby environment, and harm turtles when they blow into the ocean, and the turtle confuses them with a tasty jellyfish.
The bag can be recycled, by melting it down and running it through an extruder to give it a new shape. But Discovery news reports that a laboratory in Illinois can turn them into fuel. For not much more energy than recycling them would take.
The lab heats them in an airless environment, until the atoms dissociate from each other. The hydrogen is siphoned off for the many uses of loose hydrogen, and the carbon forms into "microspheres," (which sound a lot like buckyballs), which have a thousand-and-one uses. The lab hopes that this will change the economics of plastic bags, such that hobos will cheerfully gather waste bags for money. Quickly, the landfills would empty, and no more would a turtle choke to death on something that existed only for hauling a bunch of food for a few hours at most.

Sugar car

Image via Wikipedia

It was suggested to me that since high fructose corn syrup is both rampant in modern products (and therefore cheap and plentiful), and not good for human consumption, therefore it should make a good fuel.

Fuel thought in the untrained is often spoiled by the idea that any matter could be a fuel if it is destroyed by use. Not so. Fuels are specifically chosen because of their internal chemical energy, which the engine extracts to power the work. So "water is a fuel" is a non-option, sorry. (Yes, it is obviously tempting. The earth is 70% covered in salt water, and if that could be made into a fuel, we'd never want for energy ever again.)

All sugars, whether they come from corn, cane, beets, or fruit, have 4 calories per gram. Would this be more or less than gasoline? After all, it won't be worth my time to work it if the sugar car gets only a few miles to the gallon. (This is the problem with electric cars - sure electricity is cheap, but if you can only store enough to go 10 miles, it will only be worthwhile to people in dense, dense cities, and those people tend to walk or have cheap mass transit in the first place.)

Working it out, gasoline has about 10 calories per gram. So if the sugar car is as efficient as my gasoline powered car, it would get 6 miles to the gallon, and only have a range of maybe 100 miles. Sugar might be cheaper, but not that much cheaper.

So the sugar car doesn't work. But wait, while researching this, I discovered that HFCS is made in the first place by digesting corn starch. If you put the corn starch into a yeasty solution, you could produce ethanol from that. Ethanol has at 7-10 calories per gram, and a high octane number (~111). So if manufacturers made ethanol instead of HFCS, that would be a worthwhile thing to dilute gasoline with. (If 10 pounds of corn make 9 pounds of HFCS, then it would make 2 pounds of ethanol. Manufacturer will be slightly less pleased about that.)

So sometimes you can salvage an idea from the jaws of defeat.

PS: I in fact fuel up with 10% ethanol diluted gasoline.

Gasoline Crisis

A highly intelligent classmate of mine tells me that the worst problem here in the United States is the perpetually rising price of gasoline. Gasoline in my area is currently $3.88 per gallon, and will rise to over $4/gallon within two months. Most of the cars in the area are gasoline powered, and should gasoline become unavailable, the economy would shut down. Clearly, some sort of insane solution is called for.

The first possible solution is ethanol, an alcohol-based compound that can power gasoline-engines at some concentrations. (Most cars sold in the US could handle 15% ethanol solutions. I routinely fill up with a 10% solution, and cars are being sold now that can handle 85% solutions.) Ethanol unfortunately is more popular as a beverage, as it is questionable that it could be produced in enough quantities to both feed the bars and the cars in the states. Ethanol also has a lower energy concentration than gasoline, that is to say, a tank full of ethanol will not take you as far as a tank full of gasoline.

The second possible solution is biobutanol, an organic compound produced by bacterial decomposition of starch or waste. The economics have yet to be determined.

A third solution is to change to a completely different fuel source, which would require retooling the cars. My next entry will describe a car that will never need refueling, ever. Well, not forever, exactly, but not for the life of the engine.