Reducing the world's fuel use - my idea

I was watching the very excellent aussie V8 supercar championship this morning, and I thought to myself how boring things will be when theres no motor racing because we've run out of fuel.

Then I thought that maybe we can keep motor-racing by using ethanol fuels for the cars. And I then thought (very linear train of through I have, builds itself up and up) why not start using ethanol fuels, or very high content ethanol fuels, right now (ok, not for 2010 seasons, but you get the idea), so that the petrol that would be used in racing, can be used instead for people who need it to get to work.

I don't know what racing teams would think of this, but I thought it was a good idea. There must be so much perol used up just for going round and round in circles for fun, when it could be saved for use in road vehicles

Thoughts?

Matt

[the_lone_wolf]

Originally Posted by Alpinestarhero

There must be so much perol used up just for going round and round in circles for fun, when it could be saved for use in road vehicles

Must there?

Do ve-hickles need modification to run ethanol fuels? I guess it could be one way of getting dodgy old cars off the road (well kept classics aside).

Also- what would be the source of ethanol? I think the world's established now that bio-ethanol from foodstuffs would erode the food availability (wasn't that a contributing factor to food costs a few years ago?). I guess if there was an ethanol source that could be grown and processed without taking valuable crop-space up, it would be a consideration.

I'm sure that on top of the above, there are very pressing commercial and political reasons why the fuel companies would not allow this (and be careful with your ideas in public, Matt- don't people with practical, radical new fuel ideas tend to 'disappear' from the world at large and get hidden in a basement lab at an oil company for the rest of their natural? )

Thedonal, this is what I was thinking - there isnt enough land space to grow enough crops to provide enough fuel without diminishing the worlds food supply if all cars in the whole world ran on bioethanol, but for motor-racing, there could be enough land

I'm just thinking that we need to reduce our fuel consumption, and motor-racing could be the place to start. Maybe ethanol isnt a good diea, but maybe other fuels could be

TLW - well, I assume alot of fuel is used! A motogp bike uses what, 22 litres of fuel per race and covers maybe 100 miles or so - a typical road bike could do 200 miles on a similar amount of fuel right?

[johnnyrod]

Total oil use for the world is measured on a scale of grillions of somethings per second, the amount used for racing is not so much miniscule as invisible in there. The problem with biofuels of any sort is that they are also small by comparison, simply because of the vastness of mineral oil. To increase the capacity to grow and make these probably isn't possible to replace petrol or diesel. The problem with the food/fuel debate is that you really have to grow crops on land that is capable of yielding something, so whether you grow food and burn it or grow a non-food crop, either way you're taking land use away from food. There are "miracle" crops like jatropha (makes oil for biodiesel) that will grow in the desert. Er, not exactly, it will grow in poor soil but it doens't produce any fruit because the soil is poor, it needs growing in reasonable land just like any other crops. It's a knotty one, no diggity

JR - i see...its very hard to think about how much fuel is used all over the world.

There is a growing interest in fuels obtained form algae, and there is also Syngas, but i dont know how good that is and I think it only produces fuels similar to diesal?

[the_lone_wolf]

Originally Posted by Alpinestarhero

TLW - well, I assume alot of fuel is used! A motogp bike uses what, 22 litres of fuel per race and covers maybe 100 miles or so - a typical road bike could do 200 miles on a similar amount of fuel right?

In absolute terms it sounds like a fair bit, but as JR pointed out as a percentage I'd wager you'll find it's statistically insignificant

damn, so my idea isnt a great idea

[johnnyrod]

Algae are capable of making veg oil, but getting it out and making it clean enough are major challenges, right now they are research-level projects. Okay a quick run down on biofuels...

Biodiesel - made from veg oil, but where to get the oil? Ordinary veg oil i sgreat but too expensive to compete with mineral diesel (80% of the cost of biodiesel is the feedstock oil) unless mandates are brought in or tax breaks given. Waste oil and animal fat can be used, though are a problem in winter, but there isn't much of them around, cooking oil ends up your stomach after all. Non-food crops like jatropha compete for land space anyway, and the world is getting hungrier, look up some population stats to see how much it has grown since you were born, it's scary, I think it's twice in my 37 years. All the world's veg oil would replace about 5% or something like that of mineral diesel, I don't have the figures to hand.

Ethanol or butanol an be fermented from anything that you can get sugar out of - sugar crops, starch, and hopefully cellulose soon. It's not a drop-in fuel though, you need to alter carburetion, and to get the most out you'd want higher compression (ethanol RON is 120) which would rule out giong back to petrol (95ish). Again where to get the feedstock?

There are other possibilities like gasification of organic stuff, but these are also in early days, but promising. A lot of landfill organic waste can be turned into a gas mixture then made into a liquid, but at the moment this consumes more energy than the liquid contains, the processes need developing. Yes you'd probably get more diesel-like fuels out of it.

Brazil has been very successful with biofuesl but then has been at it since the 70s. They have a lot of space and relatively few people though. There's also a mountain of political and grenhouse gas saving stuff behind it all, it's a minefield!

thanks for that jonnyrod, nice run-down