If we could just open those gulf oil wells for US use only, put up a couple more refineries, and tell the middle east to screw off, it would solve the whole problem. You could probably have dollar a gallon gas if it wasn't for the damn futures markets driving the price up every time a terrorist farts in Iran or it rains hard in the Gulf, too. Hell, in Colorado and the eastern rockies there's oil in the shale, it's just cost prohibitive at this time to extract.
These guys are making oil from left overs http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into-Oil1may03.htm
Fair enough. I agree. Sounds like your neighbor's a ****in ******* poser. They derserve to spend their hard earned $ with such frivolity(sp?). Holy ****, where did that come from? Anyways, global warming seems to me to be another tool to scare the m***es. Am I the only one that notices the "almanac" section of the weather channel? i suppose if it meant enough to me to do so I could research the record highs for summer and see how hot it was in the 30s and 40s. I sure see a pile of records for the Det area from that time. Now that we've had a few hot summers again it's our fault. What bums me out about it is how the sweat causes deep rust on my bare metal parts! That aside, until the general public stands up and says leave it alone it ain't broke we're all pretty well ****ed until big oil gets outta the Whitehouse. 'Till then, a *****en tri-power looks good to me for my SBC just to get that 2bbl mileage as I style my *** to work. Didn't wanna flame ya dude, I just hate that sentiment. I personally can't wait for winter. Yeah I said that, winter. What would you think if you were starin at a 200hp snowmobile?
More power using less fuel is the thing we are gonna have to get used to seeing... period. I ***ume we are all gonna have our BigBlocks and Hemi's just for fun, but unless your richer than God, using them as a daily driver is soon a thing of the past. When you have to dip into your savings account just to take a road trip... something's gotta change. I'm now switching all my engine/design ideas around 6cyl./20-30mpg mills... sue me.
Excuse me, but in the transesterfication of the vegetable oil, you are converting part of the oil to glycerin. The yield of biodiesel from the vegetable oil is about 1:1 or one gallon of biodiesel from one gallon of vegetable oil. If you get the vegetable oil for free from your local fast food place, then your only costs are for the methanol and sodium hydroxide. And you can recover over 90% of the methanol and reuse it for the next batch. That's where the $1.64 per gallon cost came from for my brother-in-law's cost for his fuel. Out of a 100 gallon batch of biodiesel you get about 5 gallons of glycerin. Free gallon of vegetable oil + $1.64 chemicals/gallon = $1.64/gallon biodiesel. Let's see do I want to pay $3.00/gallon for petro diesel or $1.64/gallon for my homemade biodiesel? The BTU content of the biodiesel is a little lower than regular petro diesel so your miles/gallon will be a little less, but that is more than offset by the 45%savings in fuel cost. It would take a LOT more than 3 guys wanting used vegetable oil in a town to use up all the used vegetable oil. Every restaurant that offers deep-fryed foods uses vegetable oil in quan***y. That's about 90% of all restaurants. Biodiesel production will eliminate that waste product. They are also finding ways to use other celluous waste streams in biodiesel production. Ethanol: One reason the Federal government went with ethanol vs. methanol is because methanol is poisonous and ethanol is not. The reason you cannot buy E100 (100% ethanol fuel) is because when ethanol burns you cannot see the flame. So you wouldn't see the fire. With 15% gasoline in E85 any fire would be seen. There is some common sense thinking in the Federal government. Since the BTU content of ethanol-based fuels is lower than gasoline, the public will be reluctant to use them because the net effect will be fewer miles traveled per dollar spent. We can only use ethanol or biodiesel to reduce our foreign oil imports. We can never completely eliminate our foreign oil imports. We don't have enough farmland in the USA to produce enough crops to offset our need for foreign oil. That's the reason for the blended fuels E85 and B25. We can drastically reduce the use of foreign oil and still use the same distribution system (gas stations and tanker trucks) to deliver the fuel to the users. The problem comes in the legacy cars and trucks on the road that still require gasoline.
i know this is kinda an old post but its odd that i ran acrossed it couse of what i was lookin into about a week ago.. nikola tessla in the 1920's built a motor that looks alot like this one and has alot of the same kinds of traits its was called a tesla turbine. it works by useing a aerodynamic force called laminar flow or boundry layer effect basicly on any surface there is a layer of air that sticks to the surface the air above this layer is what moves in say a wing or prop. if you have ever used a grinder or any disk that spins fast you can feel air comeing off of it in a sence it kinda acts like an air pump in a way whats the opposite of a pump an engine. in the 20's this engine developed over 2 hp per lb with ****py metal and very basic aerodynamic/thermaldynamic understanding. unfortunatly tesla was thought to be alittle crazy in the head thus was kinda patted on the head like a window licker and nothing realy became of it. sorry for the long reply but its like 0344 in japan and i'm boared on watch. later
Any technological or economic issues concerning nuclear power fade into insignificance compared to the political issues. Plenty of greenies out there would rather sit in the dark in a cave rather than allow a new nuclear power plant to be built no matter how safe the design. It is primarily the legal nightmare that is keeping power companies from moving faster on nukes. Even without that can you imagine the enormous increase in electrical power that would be needed to fractionate water to get the supplies of hydrogen needed for even a small percentage of the U.S. fleet? Fugedabou***. The gummint doesn't have to do a damn thing to increase overall fleet mileage. If prices rise enough people will drive more fuel efficient vehicles. Simple as that. No elaborate paranoid conspiracy theories needed. The law of supply and demand can never be repealed. The feds muck about with this law not at their peril but at ours.
"I have read quite a bit about ethanol and E85, but everything I read was written by it's supporters. So it was all positive spin." Well I'm sure not a positive spinner. I'm su****ious of most alternative fuel proposals with ethanol not the least a**** them. All alternative fuel schemes rolled together can barely scratch the surface of the vast mobile fuel needs of the country never mind the huge needs of fixed installation situations like home heating oil and power generation. All alternative variations will cost us more, in many cases a lot more, than the immeasurably more mature and enormous current portable fuel infrastructure. True some alternative fuels are able to co-exist with the current infrastructure, ethanol is the most obvious case, but to entirely replace it? Dream on. As for the government encouraging alternative fuels, as much as they jawbone and subsidize one or another, they haven't figured out a way to alter the iron laws of economics. For instance let us suppose that the U.S fleet average mileage were to double overnight. What would happen? Why of course the price of fuel would go into free fall. And what would that do besides make your wallet less flat? It would immediately and severely stunt research and investment in alternative fuels is what. When gas was dirt cheap back in the nineties alternative fuel research damped down considerably and big thirsty vehicles became wildly popular. Aside from an insignificant few the general public WILL NOT pay a whole lot more for fuel that is alledgedly "better" in terms of us being good stewards of the environment. The law of supply and demand is not merely iron clad. It is ***anium reinforced and flint steel armored. Use less of a commodity and the price will fall sooner or later. The recent runup of gasoline prices perfectly illustrates this. When pump prices hit three bucks a gallon every country started pumping like mad and every speculator went nuts. When supply flooded back in as it is doing now prices fall smartly. Even if we think the evil oil companies and the ****head Wall Street speculators are shafting us to one degree or another even they don't have any immunity from the LAW. So in the real world for alternative fuels to gain headway against plain old oil the world wide price has to remain high in the short medium and long term. Now the Feds can mandate fuel economy standards, the near doubling of fleet mileage in the past 30 years is a case in point, but it certainly wasn't done overnight. Gross rapid costly changes in such mandates in an industrial infrastructure as vast as motor fuels are bound to be resisted by everyone from car companies on down to consumers. And think about the overall effect that mandating greater fuel economy will have. It'll reduce demand for petroleum and prices will fall which if it is done gradually then ordinary inflation will psychologically mask the real drop in prices. If done quickly the drop is much more perceptible and will have more immediate effects--meaning gas gets noticeably cheaper therefore reducing any economic incentive to get better mileage. Even if we were able to decree Caesar-like that only non-petroleum based fuels could be sold the arbitrarily chosen alternative would be subject to the same supply and demand law that applies to oil or any damn thing else for that matter. In Europe fuel prices are outrageously high but most of the tab for a liter of regular is taxes--a situation to which the population has acquiesced to and adjusted to over a period of six decades. And even on the tax happy continent there would be huge resistance to large quick increases in those taxes as there would be here as well--to put it mildly. Do you feel particularly ethusiastic about a couple bucks per gallon new fuel taxes? Didn't think so. As far as how "green" any alternative is if you don't take into consideration the whole system of it's production and processing then you're only kidding yourself or indulging in a public relations effort. In terms of what comes out of a tailpipe ethanol isn't one dang bit "cleaner" than gasoline. Just plug the sniffer in if you don't believe it. Bio-diesel at least has a slight advantage over regular diesel but even there the coming low-sulphur diesel fuel may erase the advantage. Hydrogen? Don't make me laugh. The stupendous problems of a country-wide hydrogen distribution network doom it in the short, medium and probably long term as well. Using hydrogen, in engines or fuel cells, would reduce output of the current greenie boogeyman CO2 but only if you completely ignore what it takes to make the stuff in the first place. It wouldn't bother me much but would you want one of the hundreds of new nuclear powerplants needed to supply the power needed to crack hydrogen out of water in your "backyard"? As regards electric solutions even if tomorrow someone comes up with a cheap ultra-high capacity battery that could be recharged in minutes, a ridiculous pipe-dream of course, we'd still have to deal with a huge increase in electricity demand. And it'd have to be nukes because if the new capacity was fossil fuel powered we'd be right back where we started whatever the efficiency advantages of replacing many small powerplants with a few big ones would be. There's one perfect un***ailable solution. Buy a small high-mileage car dammit and stop wishing for the technological tooth fairy to show up. Wanna make the mullahs grind their teeth, the Saudi princes shiver in their sheets, and make Hugo Chavez choke on his Cuban stogie? Buy a car that gets 40 or 50mpg and laugh all the way to the pump. What all this means for us in the car hobby is basically not much. The fuel usage of all the collector cars and street rods rolled together are an infinitesimal fraction of the country's usage as a whole. Fill'er up please.
The Jalopy Journal
