If at all possible to speculate on this, what is the most or at least a likely candidate for an alternative fuel or otherwise energy source in the future? What are we most likely going to be using instead of what we have? Of course it has to be cost effective, or just so high in demand that people would pay anything for it.
Well, I don’t want anyone to take my current opinion as a hard and fast prediction, as I’m no expert on these things, but here are my candidates:
1) Biodiesael. It works in diesel engines with no or minimal modifications. We already know how to make it. Some people are even using it right now.
2) Ethanol. Not a “blended fuel” ethanol + gasoline mix, though that could be a transitional fuel, but pure ethanol. Again. some people are already using this (if I recall correctly, many Brazilian agricultural aircraft run on the stuff, as well as ethanol being a significant component of auto fuel there). The original Model T Ford was designed for ethanol fuel, not gasoline/petrol though obviously it would run on that, too.
The advantage of the above two are that we know how to make them and we have actual experience in using them. Additionally, production is not nearly as limited by geography as petroleum and coal production is. The downside, of course, is the food vs. fuel issue - if we’re growing plants for fuel then fuel will compete with food for growing area. As people need to eat, this could be a serious issue.
Solar and wind power will probably have limited applications - we certainly do see more solar power in the past, but it tends to be small scale and, compared with other energy sources, more expensive at this time. Wind power is location limited - some areas have more wind than others, and we can’t change that. Ditto for extracting energy from tides (you need to be near and ocean), geothermal features (you need to be near volcanoes or hotspots or the like), or hydroelectric (not all rivers are suited to to hydro power, and there are some disagreeable consequences to it as well). We will certainly use all of these energy sources - we’re using them now after all! - but they won’t be the major players for the foreseeable future.
Nuclear is a candidate for energy, but not for a transportable fuel. I think we’ll see more nuclear origin electricity in the long term, even if not the short term.
So - biodiesel and ethanol for transportable fuels in vehicles, nuclear generated electricity for the energy grid you plug into with a small addition from other sources.
Hydrogen is the most abundent element in the universe and can be combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to create power with the byproduct being simply water. I’m dubious that it can be used to create large amaounts of electricity but there’smany car companies are exploring ways to use it to power cars. In fact a few already do so, such as the Honda Clarity but Ford have dropped their research into hydrogen vehicles instead concentrating on electric cars. Personally I’d much prefer hydrogen fueled cars and this technology stands a better chance of success in my opinion because the way we would operate such cars (filling up at a station) match the way we currently use petrol cars.
i would agree that biodiesel and ethanol would be the fuels because of the infrastructure and machine transition. the breakthrough would be to get these in the amounts needed from nonfood and nonenergy intensive sources.
for stationary use methane is a fuel that can be produced from some of the waste stream.
electric vehicles and mass transit are conservation and alternate source contributions to lessening fuel needs. regenerative breaking is and important conservation in hybrid and electrical vehicles.
You have to keep in mind that and “energy source” and “fuel” are different concepts.
Hydrogen is a fuel but not an energy source. There is no hydrogen sitting around waiting for us to use; we have to produce it from some energy source. The two good properties it has as a fuel are that it’s (1) non-polluting and (2) energy dense. The energy density benefit is offset by the difficulty in storing it and converting it to power.
Petroleum is both: it’s ready-made energy that, with only a little processing, can be used to to run engines. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else out there that’s as great as petroleum. We’re living the good life now; when oil is gone, transportation is going to be a lot more expensive.
As for fuels of the future, I’m not betting on hydrogen. It will be batteries in the near term. The problem with alcohol is that it’s too energy intensive to distill it. I think botanical oils (bio-diesels) have more promise. Right now the only bio-diesel is food and cooking waste, but I can imagine crops being bred or genetically engineered to produce fuel-ready oils that can be extracted from their tissues without a high energy cost.
I mean fuel. Fuel for a car. Fuel for every day use by people everywhere.
I’m concerned about some fuels because of their efficiency, and availability.
Ethanol for example goes something like 20 miles per gallon. I’m not so sure about this.
The price for per gallon ranges between $1.50 to $2.00 among U.S. States
and to make one gallon of ethanol you need 26 lbs of corn.
Imagine how much farmland would be devoted to producing corn for ethanol production.
6000 lbs of corn per acre…
6000/26= 230 Gallons of Ethanol
230 Gallons of Ethanol will:
drive you: 4600 miles
cost you: $345-460
So how much fuel do americans use up driving per year??
How much land would we have to sacrifice to corn to meet that value?
And is the cost worthy of the transition?
I figure as long as petrol is in high demand they can keep charging whatever they want for it.
Are they going to do the same thing with alternative fuels???
Squeeze em for all they’re worht?
I mena is it profitable to buy out a crapload of land and make all the ethanol you can when its high time for the switch?
Well, again… whats the land is required and can it be managed? Is it plausible at all?
378 million gallons/day is the U.S. gasoline consumption by motor vehicles listed at this website:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
For a full conversion to ethanol, to meet current daily gasoline usage is absurd. Gasoline takes you twice as far per gallon.
We would need double that amount in ethanol
that means:
26.1 * 756 million= 19.7 Billion lb’s of corn
3,288,600 Acres of corn must be grown to meet ONE DAY of current motor fuel consumption
I don’t know what you mean by this. Gasoline doesn’t get a set mileage per gallon. It depends entirely what engine you use and what speeds you drive. How would ethanol be any different?
Probably not. Which is why every future projection tries to take corn out of the equation, unless it is corn grown in areas not good for feed corn.
Corn ethanol today depends almost entirely on government subsidies and the price of gas at the fuel pump. When gas prices are high, ethanol is profitable. When it isn’t, firms go out of business. If the government doesn’t subsidize corn ethanol, even more firms will go out of business. It’s unlikely that subsidies will remain high for too many more years.
Ethanol can be made from a large variety of stocks, from switchgrass to algae. There is no question that these will be in larger use as the production methods become better. Corn is mostly irrelevant for the future.
But there is no good way to speculate on what alternative fuels will become economical. If anybody knew that’s where all the money would be going. But the money goes off in every direction, meaning that nobody knows. And really, how could they?
2.3 billion acres of land in the U.S.
18% of U.S is Arable Land
to meet the gas consumption. 5% of the entire UNITED STATES must be designated for Corn in order to meet U.S. motor consumption demands.
This means that 27% of U.S. Arable Land would be occupied solely for ethanol
MIT, CIT and many other tech schools are looking into this and even offering courses and some majors in alternative fuels. They are not looking at cold fusion or anything like that, but they are looking at efficiency standards and what is most likely to be the most profitable [for the gov’t] and most efficient for the consumer. BP, Mobile et al. are also looking into this, though it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what their bent is.
I wish I knew more, I’m on the macro innovation side, looking at what smaller municipalities can do to offset their fuel consumption. There are towns out here in Colorado [neighborhoods really] who invenst in large solar arrays to fuel their neighborhoods. They pay what looks like an association fee, when in reality it pays for the staff and upkeep of the 10 acre solar array they have running in their backyards.
Kinda cool.
That wasn’t relevant to anything. Thats jsut a crappy estimate for any car that goes whatever on gas will give you something like 30 mpg using gas. you would get 20 mpg out of ethanol in that car.
for reference car is CAMRY, will post source later if I find it
The idea I’m putting out is that maybe no matter what biofuel we use, we may not have the land necessary to meet demands based on how much fuel we use.
and if the earlier post is too much claiming you’d need double the ethanol to meet gasoline. Then just take 75% of the my estimate
hopefully ethanol can be sourced from waste streams, grasses and algae which are lower energy input than a cultivated crop and could be done on less valuable land.
The stoichiometric ratio of gasoline to air is 14.7 to 1. That means a gas engine uses 14.7 parts air to one part gas. Ethanol’s ratio is 6.5 to 1- that makes for generally crappy gas mileage compared to gasoline, and there’s no way around it. Ethanol simply has much less energy per gallon than gasoline does. Diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline and that’s essentially why diesel engines get better mpg than gas engines of the same displacement.
That storage issue makes Hydrogen is one of the least energy dense fuel sources out there when you consider how small a molecule it is. While it has something like 150 MJ/kg (which is very high, by mass), the energy per volume is very low - about 6 MJ/l for compressed H2, and 0.01 MJ/l for gaseous. We’ll ignore the practicalities of carting around liquid H2 (10 MJ/l) since most home vehicles are not going to be equipped for severe cryogen storage.
By contrast gasoline and diesel are around 35-40MJ/l
I think that much greater use of all-electric cars is the main way we will transition away from oil. We need efficient generation in that case - which means a combination of nuclear and solar/wind/tidal/etc.
Brazil has millions of vehicles running on 100% ethanol. It doesn’t matter how the MPG compares to gasoline, it depends on having adequate feedstock.
Corn ethanol is a stopgap (as is Brazil’s conversion of sugar cane, which is probably worse, when you consider rainforest depletion to raise the stuff). If cellulosic ethanol works out, feedstocks need not be raised on the current pool of arable land. Switchgrass, mentioned above, and similar plants, can grow on marginal land that is currently fallow. 40 million acres are currently in the Conservation Reserve Program. Something like switchgrass could possibly be grown and harvested on that land without adverse ecological impact.
Here are some figures, admittedly from an ethanol advocate, from a few years back, as to where they claim 1 billion tons of ethanol feedstocks from various sources could be harvested annually in the US, yielding 95 billion gal/yr of ethanol:
http://www.ecoworld.com/articles/images/ethanol_feedstocks.jpg
It’s not entirely unreasonable.
Brazil’s ethanol fuel is effectively subsidized by their massive sugar industry, though. The parts of the sugarcane they can’t turn into sugar, they turn into ethanol instead. It’s only profitable because the cane is a waste product from the already-profitable sugar production; it’d never work on its own.
Not quite; hydrogen has a high specific heat (energy per unit mass), but low specific gravity, even at cryogenic liquid condition. One of the major problems in using hydrogen as a fuel for motive power is that it is hard to cram enough into a suitably small envelope to make it practicable for a vehicle.
I assume by “CIT” you mean California Institute of Technology, or as it is colloquially known, Caltech. Although both schools do have research programs into alternative energy sources (MIT Energy Initiative and the Caltech Center for Sustainable Research), they are hardly the first or even at the forefront of alternative fuel and energy sources research, much of which is being conducted by lesser-known academic research institutions, contract research groups like Southwest Research Institute and Midwest Research Institute, and federally-funded research and development corporations (FFRDC) such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. As far as I am aware, no major institution is offering an undergraduate degree program in alternative fuels, as this type of work falls under traditional engineering and science disciplines, although there are many graduate, Ph.D., and post-graduate positions in research programs for alternate energy sources and fuels.
The conversion process from sugars to combustible alcohols is very inefficient and not likely to every be a cost-plus proposition unless you can actually engineer plants that produce an extractable fuel. This is why plant-oil-based biofuels, while of low density, are at least marginally useful as a supplemental source to petrofuels, but will likely never be a replacement. The most likely replacement is some kind of next generation high density battery storage or a complex hydrocarbon fuel that is capable of being sequestered and produced with a reasonable cost.
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