The best alternative fuel

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I am curious. Why do you think that biofuels would be better than hydrogen, electricity, compressed air, liquid nitrogen, or synthetic petrol or diesel?

For starters, the ones in bold are just containers for moving energy from an existing power source to stick in a car. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's not adding adding any new source of energy to our supply. Because of that, there's the question of storage and transport efficiency: no process of transforming or moving energy is 100% efficient. Ya can't win, ya can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

That leaves the synfuels. They can be made from coal or natural gas, in which case, they're just energy containers. Very useful ones, I might add, since a coal-burning car would suck mossy rocks. OTOH, both are targets for biofuels, especially diesel fuel.

So: biofuels. Their fundmental advantage is that they're another way to grab solar energy. They're not very efficient -- 2-4% overall energy conversion yields are pretty typical -- but they are in principle very cheap. I know of only two proposals for making them that don't compete with existing ag/forestry uses: algae and tequila. Well, alcohol from agave, but tequila sounds better. Both sound promising from a technical standpoint, so the real question is cost.

Synfuels can also be made from biomass. There is an American company called Syntroleum that uses the Fischer-Tropsch process to make synthetic Diesel, Jet Fuel, and Propane from biomass.

[Ifreann]

The blood of the innocent.

[Screensaver]

The blood of the innocent.

Too late. Someone beat you to it.

viewtopic.php?p=13320059#p13320059

[Genivaria]

Biofuels become inefficient when transported too far, but one good idea would be for larger farms to get their own small biofuel plant and run it with their own fuel crops, to run their agricultural machines.

I want a bio-fuel generator attached to my toilet, fuck Green, go Brown!

[Immoren]

Wood gas is obviosly best

[Fintanland]

I want a bio-fuel generator attached to my toilet, fuck Green, go Brown!

An interesting idea, but I fear the body is too good at extracting all the usable energy from its food. Fecal matter is about equal parts bacteria (usable biomass, but inefficient to convert to fuel), dead colon cells (same as bacteria) and food residue. It would be incredibly expensive to refine that to any kind of usable fuel.

EDIT: Of course you could get a miniature methane generator like a water treatment plan uses, but no idea if that would produce enough biogas...

[Screensaver]

I want a bio-fuel generator attached to my toilet, fuck Green, go Brown!

An interesting idea, but I fear the body is too good at extracting all the usable energy from its food. Fecal matter is about equal parts bacteria (usable biomass, but inefficient to convert to fuel), dead colon cells (same as bacteria) and food residue. It would be incredibly expensive to refine that to any kind of usable fuel.

Talk about a shitty fuel source

[Immoren]

I want a bio-fuel generator attached to my toilet, fuck Green, go Brown!

An interesting idea, but I fear the body is too good at extracting all the usable energy from its food. Fecal matter is about equal parts bacteria (usable biomass, but inefficient to convert to fuel), dead colon cells (same as bacteria) and food residue. It would be incredibly expensive to refine that to any kind of usable fuel.

EDIT: Of course you could get a miniature methane generator like a water treatment plan uses, but no idea if that would produce enough biogas...

fluidized bed boilers

[Prizyetsa]

Algae based bio fuels? I mean, large tanks of algae lining the walls of business buildings in hot countries could not only grow the shit faster, but serve to lessen the brightness of the light...

Just an idea...

[Genivaria]

An interesting idea, but I fear the body is too good at extracting all the usable energy from its food. Fecal matter is about equal parts bacteria (usable biomass, but inefficient to convert to fuel), dead colon cells (same as bacteria) and food residue. It would be incredibly expensive to refine that to any kind of usable fuel.

Talk about a shitty fuel source

Oh it's nothing, I just pulled that idea out of my ass.

[Meinkraft]

Water, or sodium chloride.

[Zavea]

magic.

[Immoren]

magic.

Sadly Rule of Conservation of Reality makes use of magic too much work to bother.

[Fintanland]

Water, or sodium chloride.

Unfortunately, both are highly stable compounds with a very exothermic formation reaction. Meaning you will get energy by creating them, not breaking them apart.

[Meinkraft]

Water, or sodium chloride.

Unfortunately, both are highly stable compounds with a very exothermic formation reaction. Meaning you will get energy by creating them, not breaking them apart.

Water and salt?

[Malgrave]

Soylent Green is the way of the future.

[Fintanland]

Water and salt?

Yes. Very useless as fuels because breaking them up consumes energy instead of producing it.

EDIT: "Consumes" and "produces" are meant in the conventional sense, before any physicists throw a fit about Conservation of Energy

[Umbra Ac Silentium]

How about Thorium? :D
Dat concept car

Would have a lifetime of fuel built in.
Of course, I personally believe trains/monorails/subways > cars but that's just me.

[Acrainia]

Small controlled quantum singularities.

[Vitaphone Racing]

Where do I start on this...

Alright, well.

Nuclear cars are a pipe dream. Although never refuelling again sounds like a swell idea, when you add together the weight of the reactor (which would have to be designed to resist severe impacts), the cooling mechanism (which would always have to be on), the radiation shielding and the turbine to generate electricity, it starts to be become apparent why this will never come to fruition. When something breaks in a normal car, you tow it down the road to get it fixed. When something goes wrong in a nuclear car, you might just have to cordon off the area and service it in a radiation suit.

If we can make synthetic oil, this would obviously be the first preference. Petrol is fantastic for powering cars. You can refill it in a matter of seconds, get two weeks worth of driving out of one tank and even months if you're good. It produces a good amount of power and sounds tits when we burn it. The infrastructure to support synthetics already exists and people won't have to change over. The problem is that it could be years and years before the production meets the demand.

Combusting hydrogen makes as much sense as flushing your toilet with coke but using it in a fuel cell is clever and comes as my number two choice. Recharging a battery pack takes half an hour at supposed best, refilling with hydrogen takes no longer than refilling with petrol. There are practicality issues with this though as the synthesis of useable hydrogen is energy intensive and transporting the stuff is difficult due to hydrogen being a gas at room temperature. If these issues could be overcome, I'd back it. The all-powerful Toyota believes in the power of hydrogen and few could argue against Toyota being the best car manufacturer in the world at predicting and adapting to market changes.

If you combine either of the above two choices with a battery pack (and an electric motor for synthetic oil), you're on a real winner.

Pure electric comes in third for me but it is pretty close to hydrogen. I respect the new age electrics like the Tesla Model S a lot better than I respect it's predecessors because the Model S is finally the electric car you'd buy even if you didn't care about it being electric. It's a good looking, good performing, good value car that stacks up well against the prestige euro competition and for that it deserves love and admiration. The issue for me is that batteries aren't a technology that has a lot of development left in them and their weight and efficieny deficits to petrol and hydrogen will probably always remain. For some classes of car they make good sense and pure-electic cars will definitely become common place on roads by 2020.

Biofuels are a good alternative for places where car ownership is low and crops are plentiful, so they're relevant for places like South America but they haven't got much point in western countries. There are other ideas like Algae fuel but these are a while off.

Compressed air and liquid nitrogen are not worth consideration imo.

My next car may be a hybrid if the bank approves my loan (and I choose to put myself in a lot of debt), but if not, the car I buy after it almost certainly will be.

[Pope Joan]

Electricity is popular with government because it can replace the fuel tax with utility taxes.

Which is of course a horrid reason.

I vote for hydrogen. Make up for loss of fuel tax by jacking up registration fees and increasing the number of toll roads.

[Meritocratic States]

Hydrogen (Fuel Cell).

It produces water as a by-product.

That is all.

[Empire of Vlissingen]

Synthetic OIl i was it on discovery channel it's possible and it could be used in the near future.

[Democratic Koyro]

Hamsters running in wheels.

[Big Jim P]

Idealism. There seems to be an endless supply of it, and the only pollution it generates is hot air.

Hot air which we can use to drive turbines to generate electricity.