Alternative Fuels and the Impending Future

As we all know, gasoline prices are insanely high and climbing. Nearly everyone in these United States has been affected by the cost of gas. You can't even watch fifteen minutes of the news without being bombarded with the doom and gloom of our Nation's economy crisis. I'm tired of the bad news, so I thought I would take a minute to highlight a handfull of good things that could (or have) come of this.

Gasoline has been powering internal combustion engines for something like a century already. Gas is unclean, it's unrenewable, and now it's gotten expensive. I think we're past due to replace it. That thought is a little unnerving, I know, but science has come a long way over just the last few years. The process won't be as difficult as we might imagine.

Believe it or not, there are already a handful of alternatives to traditional gasoline and diesel in use around us. These can essentially be broken into 4 classes: Electrical/Hybrid, Alternative Gasoline, Alternative Diesel, and Gasses (gasseous gasses, that is.)

As you've probably noticed, electric and hybrid-electric vehicles are already becoming an established means of transportation. In the short few years since these cars have hit the road they've evolved in leaps and bounds. I've noticed the most advancements in the storage of energy, particularly battery technology. As batteries get smaller and more powerful, more of them can be fit into a smaller space. This helps bring weight down while boosting power and efficiency. As time goes on I'm sure we'll see some very clever advancements in this field.

I think we can expect to see a lot of this, mostly because this is the best solution for most vehicles already on the road. Ethanol has already been introduced into most of the gasoline in the United States. Ethanol, if you didn't already know, is an alcohol usually made from fermented and distilled corn. When mixed with gasoline (usually around 11% ethanol to gas ratio.) It's a cleaner-burning, and presumably cheaper alternative to pure gasoline. Ethanol doesn't burn with as much energy as gasoline, so there is some power loss with mixed fuels. Some people have postulated that there's also excessive strain on vehicles that weren't designed to process ethanol with gasoline, but I haven't seen any proof of this myself.

Today I discovered another alternative to gasoline. It's called Butinol. Butinol functions similarly to Ethanol, but it's more powerful, and can be produced biologically and apperently more easily than Ethanol. Both Ethanol and Butinol are renewable.

There are some smart ideas in this field lately. The first that comes to mind is Veggie Oil. The same cooking oil used to make fries at fast food joints can be pumped into a diesel engine and run with comparable power and economy. What's better, you can get used cooking oil for free! For a pretty reasonable price you can get a home-filtering system to clean the oil for use. You'll also need to modify your diesel car, by installing a heated fry-oil tank in addition to the diesel tank, and some modifications to the existing fuel system. I've seen the whole conversion and filtering package for sale for under $2000. The car will need to be started using diesel fuel and can then run on 100% fry oil. Before you turn the car off again, the car needs to idle for a while on diesel fuel again to purge the fry oil out of the system. If the fry oil cools in the lines it solidifies.

There's also been some clever replacements to diesel to come about lately. Biodiesel is the first to come to mind. Biodiesel can be made by processing vegetable oil or animal fat. It is, of course, renewable. Blends of Biodiesel and diesel are comercially available worldwide now.

These are basically flammable gasses like Methane, Hydrogen, Oxygen (and maybe others) in different mixtures. Natural Gas could be used in vehicles, now it's used for heating and things like that. Propane is already in use on American roads. More renewable gasses like Biogas (made from decomposition in oxygen-lacking environments) are in development to replace Natural Gas and Propane.

Then there's Hydrogen gas. Hydrogen can be produced by electronically separating water into Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules. This process could be done within a vehicle, so you would only have to add water and plug it in. Hydrogen is immaculately clean-burning. The only byproduct is water vapor. That's better than being green, that's crystal-clear! Hydrogen cars are slated to be commercially available as soon as next year. Who knows where you will find a hydrogen station, but it's still awesome.

Another cool thing about gasses is you can store a lot more in a container than you can other fuels because gasses will compress, and liquids will not. You can store more gas in less space than liquid. Seems to me the more fuel you can put in a car, the further it can go before stopping agian.

Finally, as I understand it, liquid gasoline isn't actully flammable, gasoline vapor is. One of the reasons gasoline is such an inefficient (and dirty) fuel is because there are so many older fuel systems (like my 2-barrel carburetor) that can't particulate gasoline well enough to burn it at peak efficiency. Vapor is by definition the gasseous form of a substance that is usually in another state of matter, like a solid, or a liquid. Gasses are already Gasses. I imagine that will save a few engineering headaches.