Northwest Slobovia wrote:Screensaver wrote:
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.