On 3/11/2006, Garry Dalrymple posted:
Last week while I was going through a month or so's accumulated newspapers I saw a brief mention that I regret now that I didn't keep. It was in a motoring section and it was a brief statement by a researcher to the effect that you can run a car on plant matter, that is heat up wood and drive the car on the resulting volatile fumes.
I was brought up on stories of how 'during the war .....' cars were run off charcoal burners and canvas gas bags. A small amount of petrol (or Brandy?) was used to start the car, then switched to gas for driving.
Like I say, I regret not keeping the article, but I believe it quoted something like 5 Kg of burnt wood could replace 2 or 3 litres of petrol, at any rate much less 'stuff' to grow to produce ethanol or biodiesel. I believe there was even speculation about burning paper and other waste products.
I have no idea how dirty the resulting emissions would be, but using 1940s technology could allow motoring of a sort to survive in a 'Post Oil' Mad Max/Bartertown sort of a world?
Well, yes and no. I'm unsure of the exact chemical composition of the
fumes from smouldering wood but would guess it's mainly carbon monoxide
with some light organic compounds like methane, methanol or
formaldeyhde. All lovely toxic stuff but perfectly viable as fuel.
(Very similar to the old 'town gas' used here prior to the natural gas
discoveries of the 1960s.)
But what we need to understand about the fuels question is it's all a
problem of scale. The problem with oil supplies is not that we're
actually running out of oil, but that we're using it up as fast as we
can pump it out of the ground, and the future of oil production is
downward, not upward.
The most dense biofuel source we've got is methanol obtained by
digesting wood. It's entirely doable but even so, it can't be scaled
up to match our current level of petrol consumption because the
resources are too limited. (There probably isn't enough water to grow
all that timber for a start.)
Biofuels will certainly provide transport fuel on a smaller scale, but
then so will oil if we scale down our consumption. It's all a matter
of how much we need. If there's 20 years of oil left at current
consumption levels, that's the same as 200 years at levels that are 10
per cent of current consumption. That's about as much as we can
realistically hope to sustain with biofuels.
Geoff Pain responded:
I've been looking at biofuels recently and it is possible to produce
eucalyptus oil for less than $1 per litre. It was used as fuel in spark
ignition engines in road demonstrations in Perth in the early 1980s and
seriously investigated in the US.
It stabilizes ethanol/petrol and ethanol/diesel mixtures against phase separation due to water.
Biomass can give about 300 kg of liquid fuel per tonne and the technology for ethanol from cellulose is well developed.
So it seems to me ethanol with eucalyptus oil as denaturant and multiphase stabilizer would be the go.
Using eucalyptus for electric power generation has successfully been
demonstrated by Verve with a $12.5 million experimental plant at
Narrogin and produced charcoal and activated carbon as well as oil (20%
of plant income) as by-products from coppiced mallee.
A town of 5000 people can be self-fuelled (including biomass harvest)
by such a plant and its waste heat can also desalinate the town's water
supply.
Australia's tree plantations have quadrupled in the last decade but still only cover a tiny 700,000 hectares.
Meredith (Soundwarp) commented:
My grandfather built his own burner, called a 'Gas Producer', when
petrol was scarce circa 1940. It was made from second hand materials (no
new materials available then), and put onto a trailer behind the car, a
30's something Oldsmobile Coupe. Coke was fed into the fire. With all
the pumping of bellows and looking so weird, my mother used to cower in
the back seat, hoping no one would see her!
Nisaba cackled:
I have a few of those old-technology "gas producers" in my household.
There're two attached to the south end of dogs, and one attached to the
south end of a teenager.
I really should put up a warning sign reading "No open flames - house
subject to spontaneous explosions without warning".
Do you think it would keep the burglars away?
Garry Dalrymple wrote:
I
suppose I shouldn't be telling you this, but apparently (in Melbourne)
there's a popular indoor sport called 'Farting Cricket'.
If
its heard, its one run, if its commented, two runs, if it fills the
room, four runs and if people leave the room it's a six!
Gerald Cairns retorted:
I shall describe an LBW that occurred in our Hotel in Holland.
We chose to eat at the truckies rest stop restaurant opposite the Hotel (way too expensive in their up market dining room) where the food was good and very reasonably priced - actually a bit lower than Australian prices which was surprising. One colleague discovered "Russian Eggs" and liked them so much he almost became addicted. This dish consisted of 3 large sections of three different fish with three or four eggs on top plus a very spicy sauce and garlic bread - a huge dish. The morning after I was following him out of the Hotel and he was walking very fast toward and out of the revolving door. I don't walk so fast these days but I discovered I was following a really foul odour trail that later explained why he was walking so fast. Close to the door was a group of black suited businessmen in serious conversation who as it happened turn around to see where the foul odour was coming from and guess who was in just the right place to get the blame? :-)) I felt like pointing to my colleague outside with both hands but decided a fast exit was the best move. When I got into the double compartmented revolving door the odour was truly foul and was very glad there was no one else present.
Having reached outside said colleague said he could not help it and had to make a rapid exit out into the very cold atmosphere, for which I thanked him, now that on his account I was now a marked man. :-) Unless he could control himself he would be banned from Russian Eggs in future! Be warned - a great meal but has consequences. Maybe we could strap him to the carburetor and feed him Russian Eggs ought to be worth excellent fuel consumption with nutrition thrown in as a bonus. His office is in Perth and mine in Fernvale Qld which is just as well.
I shudder to think what would constitute a LBW.
Peter Adderley added:
I went looking for Billy Connolly's summation of "things we should avoid
as we get older."
A google search didn't produce much, but from a related quote from a
live performance a friend told me about last week:
"When you're our age:
1. don't EVER fall over.
2. if you pass by a public toilet, use it.
3. never trust a fart.
4. if you have an erection, use it."
Garry you're disgusting, but isn't it that why it makes it funny?
We should cherish these ideas before they evaporate completely.
Perhaps this is the other face, or bottom, of fundamentalism.
