methanol as an automotive fuel a must read

J. Mullen, where's the link to your must-read? I'm unable to do what I must.

People seem to think that listing the BTUs per pound or gallon for gasoline and methanol (or other fuels) side by side tells us all we need to know.

But what about the fact that the refrigeration effect of methanol makes for a denser charge in the cylinder?

What about the fact that as the methanol/air charge is being compressed in the cylinder, this cooling effect means that it is "fighting back" less (it takes three times more heat to evaporate methanol, so the liquid drops are absorbing lots of heat as the rising piiston compresses the charge) and is creating less "negative work"? (Latent heat of evaporation for methanol is 473BTU/lb.; for gasolines something like 130-140BTU/lb.).

And what about the fact that you can build a methanol engine with a lot more compression, thus more torque and more fuel efficiency? The extra power available from higher compression means that the same jobs might be done with smaller, lighter engines (in other people's cars, not ours here).

Don't all these factors change the picture considerably?

(I'm not promoting methanol as fuel, just pointing out a few things. I actually think there might be a different, possibly better role for methanol, mixed fifty/fifty with water as an anti-detonant injection. I did a search here, and if there's a water-injection thread I didn't see it, so I'll start one separately)

 

The link that this post was about can be found as follows....go to google then type( MIT methanol as an automotive fuel ) its the second site down on the page... I never intended this to become a debate over ethanol/methanol or corn or politics .....I just thought this site had information we all could use and nothing more... that was my only intent

 

With apologies to John, and at the risk of taking this a little bit further off-topic:

Modern commercial farming and organic/traditional farming represent completely divergent approaches. There really is no half-way point between them. This is nowhere clearer than in the respective approaches to soil.

In modern commercial farming the aim is to turn soil into a stable sterile growth medium, in fact not soil at all but a sort of fine crystalline gravel whose purpose is to keep your crops from falling over and to house the fertilizer/biocide cocktail you're feeding them. You're trying to get rid of complexity, trying to get rid of everything that is not your crop, trying to get rid of everything except what you put there specifically to support your crop. It's no wonder that dung from DDGS feeds can be thought of as a "contaminant": there is nothing in the growth medium that can do anything with it. You're only taking profit at harvest, everything else represents expense; so you're trying to maximize your profitable harvest by reducing expenses to the minimum.

In organic/traditional farming the aim is to cultivate a complex soil community, comprising the widest possible variety of bugs, worms, bacteria, fungi, mosses, lichens, plants, animals, humans, and more. The greater the complexity, the more resilient the soil is. You're constantly adding to the soil, and the longer you keep at it the better it becomes and the easier everything gets. The same complexity-based approach extends to the economic angle: you're taking profits at various points in the various processes you've got going on. For instance, you're leap-frogging a pair of chicken runs down a grass-ley rotation to fertilize the land with chicken manure, but all the while you're getting eggs and chicken out of the deal. Needless to say you'll be farming with a variety of products rather than a single crop, because you're trying to make the most of all the possible interactions between the various processes.

The same goes for the business models inherent in the two approaches - and they really are inherent. You can't switch the business models around, neither will work then! A modern commercial farm wants to be run like a factory. You've got a process producing a product, and you're getting rid of everything extraneous that can be a drain on that. Your entire product goes to market, you take your profit, and you recapitalize out of your profit - because this method of farming requires constant recapitalization. But we know that farmers' profits are nowhere these days, so recapitalization has to come out of credit, which can't be covered; so that, too, goes south. The problem is there is no real systemic controls on recapitalization costs because the suppliers are selling to a captive market.

By contrast the organic/traditional business model is based on long-term cumulative capitalization. The longer you keep at it the more net capital value you've got; and this is not only barns and shares in mills - stuff with direct monetary value - but soil fertility, seed-stock development, etc. It all goes to stuff that will be useful for a long time. And because of all this diversified capability there is every opportunity for the farm family to feed their own needs at cost, pre-market.

Now, you might point to acre yields, and ask how much wheat yield we're willing to sacrifice for grass-ley rotations and such. In fact modern commercial acre yields aren't remarkable, and are exceeded many times over by long-established organic field crops - even allowing for "unproductive" rotations. The science in modern commercial farming methods goes to cutting labour costs, mainly, not increasing yields. That's also why modern commercial farming favours larger unit sizes: it allows less labour to farm more land, which can be profitable even at reduced yields. So much for "feeding the world".

What that does do is to reduce the agricultural population in general - especially as regards numbers of land-owners. Organic/traditional methods require not only labour, but labour that knows what it's doing and gives a shit. That tends to favour smaller farms and more land-owners. And that means not only less unemployment, but more opportunities for viable self-employment.

So we've got modern commercial farming threatening to come down like a house of cards, and organic/traditional farming getting more viable the longer it's left to get on with it. Somewhere the cost curves are going to cross - soon, I think.

Now, to the kid in Ethiopia. He isn't hungry for want of modern science (nor yet from being "primitive" or otherwise inferior); he's hungry because he has forgotten how to farm; because his father no longer has a patch of land to work, because it's a coffee plantation these days (and it isn't hiring); because his grandfather couldn't farm effectively in the middle of a war. Colonialism wasn't just a land-grab: it added insult to injury by reducing formerly autonomous people into "markets" for bought goods they could produce for themselves before. Think of that over your morning cup of instant.

 

Don't worry about all that ethanol stuff, ain't gonna happen. The ethanol subsidy died a quiet death on December 31. W/O a subsidy, the business model did not work.

Our gasoline will soon be coming from natural gas as soon as we can get the eco freaks crammed back into their recycled cardboard box. I am a geologist with 24 years experience in environmental remediation & hate dealing with these know nothing fools.

This company, Synfuel International (http://www.synfuels.com/) is holding for patent to build several plants that convert natural gas to gasoline. Several other firms are working on similar processes.

The current Fischer -Troup method to make this change (natural gas to gasoline) is well tested but expensive in energy, equipment. Costs $1Billion to build the plant.

Syn Fuels claims to have method that is cheaper & uses less energy.

I'll leave my political thought out for now but I hope we get this started soon.

 

Not so much that he has forgotten how to farm but because he, and probably his parents, have never been taught how to farm and because traditional organic farming is sooo 19thC. Modern farming has become a science and a flawed and ultimately non sustainable long term business model. It has lost sight of the basics and the economics of sustainability and renewability. It makes one think about the old adage 'What goes round comes round'.

But getting back on topic, it should really be of concern to us hot rodders as to what modern fuels and oils do to traditional engines and their fuel and oiling systems. I have had enough problems with the MTBE laden fuels the government in their less than infinite wisdom stuffed down our throats with insufficient testing and data, only to backpedal furiously one they found the results of their poorly researched and ill advised policies did to the groundwater and fuel delivery systems in cars.....

 

Plenty of natural fertilizer in this post...

 

You're saying that like it's a bad thing ...

 

I'm glad you didn't take it the wrong way...

 

There's a lot of synthetic fertilizer in this post.

 

LNG and Methane is the future for the internal combustion engine. You can go back to high compression engines with little to no emissions. New Zealand should show the way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_natural_gas

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bifueltech.shtml

http://www.squidoo.com/fooled-on-fuel

Besides look at all the methane gas just coming from this thread!

 

High Compression? New performance engine have almost 12-1 on some and even pedestrian engines have 10 -1.Obviously electronic engine management is the key here.
I think it may be narrow minded for us here to think the energy industry is going to cater to 2 percent of vehicles needing old school fuel.
Figure out a way to use what's available,make your own,or drive a fucking new car

 

Whatever happened to all the hydrogen hype from a few years ago, when oil/gasoline prices spiked?
Is everybody convinced already that you can only get as much energy out of a system, as you put in?

Now mainstream talk is back to propane and natural gas, etc..
Petroleum, in one form or the other, will not be replaced by a viable and profitable alternative any time soon.
As long as pump gas stays around 90% pure, the rest can be whatever it will be, as far as I am concerned, as nobody cares what I prefer anyway, realistically.

 

I like HOTRODS!!!!

 

In it's raw bullshit form... so it still needs to be processed.

 

Hydrogen as a motor fuel is a bald faced lie.

Almost all of the Hydrogen available on this planet is already oxidized (combined with Oxygen). In other words, it has already been burned.

The only source of Hydrogen that is "free", not already oxidized, is fossil fuels. Yes, that's right, the Hydrogen that is being used in these pilot programs came from refined crude oil.

The only other way to get Hydrogen that is in the un-oxidized state is to break a water molecule (electrolysis). This is possible, and can easily be done, but it requires a huge amount of electricity. It takes more energy/dollar value/BTU/Watt/whatever in than what you get out.

Remember about 51% of the electrical power in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels.

This works just fine if you have practically free green power, such as geothermal energy in the country of Iceland. They are on their way to Hydrogen-only fuel platform. They, of course, are a country of less than 400,000 people, or smaller than the size of the small U.S. CITY that I live in. Nice, but it wont scale.

You could do it feasibly with nuclear power, but let's not even talk about that.

Beyond all of that, Hydrogen has all sorts of storage (cryogenics, permeation, size of tank vs. capacity, etc.) and transportation problems (Google: blevy), that would take pages to list.

In short. It is not going to work.

 

Sorry to veer more off-topic, but the black-and-white statements are hard to ignore. Nobody knows what the future holds. I think that hydrogen has the potential to work as a fuel. It probably won't happen anytime soon, but then again is any other replacement of gasoline and diesel going to?

http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/HV/300.pdf

http://www.linde-gas.com/en/innovations/hydrogen_energy/production/index.html

 

The Emperor's New Hydrogen Economy

I'm acquainted with the author, Darryl McMahon, through another forum.

 

If we're all dead and gone, and hotrods and kustoms are forgotten history when it happens, what's the point?

 

Sure my wife car has one of those high compression electronic FI 4 cyl (American Built) gets up to 38 MPG on the Highway but I think you missed my point. As this is the HAMB, I'm talking about using existing 40's, 50's and early 60's engines. To make California emissions easily with high compression, remove the carb and convert to CNG or LNG.
The Greenies are forcing this on everyone soon.