I hate to say it, (and I'm sure a hard rain is gonna fall on this thread for my saying so), but I think that any development of alternative sources of fuel is going to run afoul of our (the U.S.) policy of propping up the Saudi government at all costs. Besides Israel, Jordan, and Egypt (the latter two lukewarm at best), they are our best allies in the Middle East. If the Saudi Royal Family falls, then the Islamofascists will take over. And the only thing preventing that is oil money.

Diesel is very much the way for us to go, for the reasons you list, plus a few more. Not the least of which is that the crops that people keep talking about during into ethanol, which only has 70-80% the potential energy of gasoline depending on water contamination (it's a hydrosorbic material, it sucks water out of the air, that's why all the flexfuel vehicles have wonderalloy or synthetic lined tanks and fuel lines), could instead be turned into biodiesel, which has almost the same amount of energy as diesel. I forget the exact number, but it's something like 97%+ comperable.

Unlike ethanol, which is an energy negative process, biodeisel is almost energy neutral. What you need is:

vegitable oil (from pressing, not cooking the stock)
ethanol (you do need a LITTLE)
lye (it's a catalyst)

All three of which you can get out of corn. (Lye comes from burning the stalks.) If we are going to put the acerage under the plow, we should at least get the best bang for our buck.

And unlike gasoline alternatives, nothing has to be done to an existing vehicle. No need to open the carb nozzles or reprogram the fuel injector, no need for fancy fuel lines. Every deisel on the road today could be filled with 100% bio and roll away happily. And if we get the additives out of deisel that make it stink (so people won't use it instead of #2 oil in their heaters, which works just fine), deisel runs cleaner, bio even cleaner.

And my favorite- you've got a fuel leak, BIG DEAL! Biodeisel is biodegradable.

Of course, if you were willing to sacrifice a little in performance, and do some higgery jiggery under the hood with changes to glow plugs and the like, you could run off of straight vegitable oil. An unmodified deisel will supposedly run off super pure vegitable oil, but it gets funky below freezing. Once upon a time, the olive oil merchant was rich becuase his product was used for light, cosmetics, food, et al. Corn and soy oil could do the same in the future, particulalry if someone would slap the anti-genemod luddites until they shut up, and we could get a corn specificially designed for oil production rather than starch production.

The great irony of supporting and blaming the House of Saud is that the US only gest about 7% of our petrochems from them. We are somewhere (depending on who's numbers you see) 40-48% self sufficent, and we get a LOT from Canada.

By compairison, we also get about 7% of our supply from Mexico, which is the same amount we used to get out of Venezula until a couple years ago. We get more out of Nigeria than we do out of Saudi.

Oh, and in case no one has checked, the Saudi's aren't all that cuddly. If you are an animist (like me) or Jewish, it used to be you couldn't even get off the plane without being arrested, even before you hit customs. That might have changed, but I doubt it. They look the other way for our troops, but not very well. Hell, they still have the guys with the sticks that wack you in public if you break even the smallest and obscure Koranic tenant, as they see it. Even if the official word is they don't, I've spoke with people who've returned from deployments there in the past year, and say those "religion police" are still on the beat.

What they Saudi's have going for them is that they are pro-Western theofacists, at least at the leadership level. It's the whole shi'a-sunni thing with the added variable of a lot of money and thier national defense is pretty much taken care of. They have a "military", and again, based on what I've been told by people who've been there in the past year and war gamed against them, a US National Gaurd brigade with a carrier group and airborne battalion or MEU to grab an airport could roll them up. That's why the Saudi royal family stays pro-Western- if we pull out, they either run away to Switzerland and Monaco, or thier heads are on pikes outside the ruins of the big palace is Riyhad. Instead, we GIVE them heavy weapons, and hire contractors to maintain that gear becuase the Saudi's only want to do the fun parts of having a military, like the hitting range and racing tanks.

Give me the Kuwaiti's any day. They might be a little greedy, but they are much better friends than the Saudis. Why do you think we buy more oil from them?

Part of why Brazil uses sugar cane is because they have the right climate for it. Most of the US's sugar is from domestic sugar beets.

The other big reason is, they had all these acres of cane when we clamped on the big mungo tax on sugar imports to protect our domestic growers. When that happened, thier economy took a solid kick in the jimmies, which made gas an out of reach item economically, and with all the sugar going to rot in the fields, they solved the problem themselves.

Wasn't that a MythBusters episode? I didn't watch it, but they briefly mentioned it on another episode. I think they took a Mercedes and poured in straight used cooking oil. I don't think that they really noticed any difference in how the car drove, so it works.

You'd have to filter it. I forget the size of the strainer we used to make a five gallon batch of biodeisel in college chemistry, but I remember that it had to a fairly good strain lest you try to such a bit of french fry into the combustion chamber. That could be.... bad. That said, we used a a very fine mesh metal strainer with a couple layers of tightly woven cloth, felt like muslin but I'm not positive.

And I missed some of that segment. I know that part of why the ethanol goes into biodeisel is so that it sucks up some water, you are using the lye as an emulsifier. The two also lower your gel and flash points. So unless you are Pheonix or the like, you'd probably not want to run pure vegitable oil.

They used left over fry grease. It was filtered (I think quite a bit from the sound of it on the show). The car got the same mileage as with PetroDiesel. Sounded rather impressive all things considered (unknown maintence requirements/firing issues, etc)

Here's an article I read a while back that holds a lot of promise for speedy and mobile production of your own diesel. I would tend to agree that ethanol is not the end all of our problems with fuel, but I think it's still needed for the diesel process as you mentioned. It will have it's place and with the flexfuel vehicles, you can switch between gas and E85. With Diesel, you can switch between Diesel and BioDiesel (and maybe Veggie oil!). Diesel isn't as easy to find as gas and BioDiesel is even harder (so is E85 for that matter). If we could manufacture our own from home grown oil stocks, farmers could sell you biodiesel! Talk about bring it back home for the working man. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

The other thing I'm intersted in is the new Algae feedstock for biodiesel which can be produced while it filters power plant emissions. Very cool indeed.

I've read about the gas algea, very, very spiffy. There was some work done about 15 years ago with making an algae or fungus that could could be air scattered that would eat petrochem based plastics and rubbers. I'm not sure if DoD ever got anywhere with it, but that could be adapted to be used to recycle plastic garbage into fuel by the a process similiar to that of the smoke stack guys.

And it doesn't have to be ethanol. It could be methanol, which is what the pulp based process which have been mentioned would be producing. The down side is that methanol, while a better fuel, burns a little dirtier. But certainly not as bas as gasoline.

Mr. Diesel, creator of the diesel engine, DESIGNED it to run on peanut oil.

Here is an interesting thread on biodiesel at the Permaculture Institute of AU forum. These people are actually DOING it! "Running on Veggie Oil":
http://forums.permaculture.org.au/viewtopic.php?t=799

We had the warning of gas problems thirty years ago, and not much changed, except for making bigger, heavier vehicles with lousy gas mileage. Really, how fast do you think our government is going to move this time?

BTW, I read somewhere not long ago that our federal government now consists of over a million people. "Okay, guys! Everyone take one step to the right!" Talk about ponderous...

Sue

I read once that Henry Ford had a car designed to be run and built primarily from hemp. From the paint, to the body to the biomass fuel that run it. Then the whole "Reefer Madness" (which refers to hemp's cousin, marijuana btw) insanity took hold. Some believe that there was a push by a certain well known company now in the news for the possible toxic effects of one of its non-stick coatings to get hemp outlawed in the 1930s because they had developed chemical alternatives for a lot of the things hemp was used for...cornered the market on it as it was. But that might sound like a conspiracy theory to some and I won't go into it. Of course that company is still thriving and hemp production in this country is still illegal and our own government still gets hemp and marijuana confused...

But like I said, probably just conspiracy theory...