zac510 wrote:Ciro, isn't ethanol an alcohol, thus bioethanol would probably work in a conventional spark ignition engine?
Sure. In Colombia is mandatory to use 10% ethanol on all gas. You can go as far as 30% of ethanol on a normal engine without touching it beyond normal calibrations and a cleaning of the tank and fuel lines (the ethanol releases a lot of dirt the first time you use it on your car).
Ethanol "oxigenates" the gas and reduces contaminants (it burns better the gas).
If you want to go full ethanol, however, you require to convert your engine. Colombia has around 3.5 million cars and right now has 250.000 Has of sugarcane devoted to produce ethanol.
Biodiesel, I believe, is different: in this case you recycle cooking or vegetable oils (and perhaps discarded lubricating oils?), not ethanol. As flynfrog explains (I did not know it) a diesel engine can "swallow" any of these oils, but it cannot run on alcohol (I imagine alcohol is harder to ignite without a spark plug).
My car has an engine for gasoline and I converted it to dual use (gasoline/natural vehicular gas or NVG). We have a program for that in our country, as we (as a country) are running out of colombian gasoline around 2010: you pay less for the NVG. I save some money on the normal runs, and when I need "pedal to the metal" I can go to gasoline with the flick of a switch (I live at 2600 meters over sea level, so NVG gives you a sensible reduction in power in engines without turbo).
After all, Colombia has enough gas for car and cooking/heating the entire country until 2060, so gas is cheap "by mandate" and "by market", because the government would be broke (in term of exports vs imports) if we had to buy foreign gasoline.
We have a system for people like you and me that are not buoyant: you can finance the conversion to natural gas by paying an extra amount at the NGV station. The time of the financing is long enough so the amount you amortize each time you go to the natural gas station is less than if you had to pay for gasoline (which, as I explained, is costlier than natural gas).
The cars have a chip on board that you connect to the natural gas pump, when you fill your tank, and a networked system "knows" how much you have amortized.
Finally, the government helps to subsidize the conversion paying about 1/3 of the cost of the conversion kit (they are thinking about the cost of financing the gasoline if the citizens don't convert their cars). It is a cool system (it seems to me, I helped tangentially to design it...
).
We also have a driven-by-numbers program to reduce the contamination in the cities that requires oxigenation: since 2006 all gasoline has to had some ethanol as I explained, but also we had a restriction to circulation of public transportation vehicles (they are private) to encourage people not to dispatch empty buses during low transit hours. USA and most europeans country do the same for the same reasons. California has been doing that fuel oxigenation for ages.
In Europe makes sense to recycle the cooking oil, because they are ahead on the use of diesel cars: in this case, a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil is to use vegetable oil. It is probably cost effective for everybody, as zac510 apparently suggests.
They use diesel cars for the same reason we are going to start to use them in Colombia: increasingly strict regulations on air contamination for manufacturers cannot be obeyed with a production of cars with only gasoline engines.
Diesel engines produce a lot of dust (they are "dirty" to the sight) but they do not produce as much oxide nitrates (NOx) that cause smog or as much sulphur compounds (SO) that cause acid rain.
This is the reason why zac510, surrounded by diesel cars in London, finds logical to have an "urban car" that runs on vegetable oil, an idea that might sound strambotic to the american public, short on NGV and without enough cooking oil in the world to satisfy their driving habits.
I would suggest to talk with your local politician or write to your local newspaper to see if governments around the world can analyze any of these options and devise programs that help normal people to contaminate and pay less.
Sorry for the rant, I only hope I did not "kill the thread" with all that verbosity, but I love the theme.
on 854 cc
) natural-gas/ethanol/gasoline Nissan engine, like the one I have, delivers almost 5 times the power at less than twice the displacement. However, biodiesel can be cost effective in your area.
