On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 03:00:56 GMT, "Bill Daniels"
wrote:



well those claims are deluded nonsense arent they.
ethanol is less efficient as a fuel energy source than avgas.
200 litres of ethanol does not have the anywhere near the range of
avgas and being a fermented biological material we'd denude the entire
world of arable land if we switched to it globally as a fuel.

...but then the greens were never good at maths.
Stealth Pilot
It is actually far worse than that. Without distillation, the best you
can do is 97% ethanol, with 3% water, which makes it unacceptable as
fuel. So you have to distill it to get rid of the 3% water.

The problem is that it takes more energy to distill the alcohol than
it produces as energy. That is why 100% ethanol is so expensive. The
only thing that makes it cheaper as fuel is the favorable tax
treatment it usually gets.

I've always wondered why those clever bioengineers couldn't teach some bugs
to produce iso-octane instead of ethanol. Iso-octane is the lab reference
for 100 octane motor fuel.

now that really is the answer isnt it. we have the studies (they were
published in scientific american a few months ago) that point to
petrol being the most efficient fuel on the planet.

pressure with chromium and iron as catalysts will synthesise
hydrocarbons from constituent elements. there must be some
bioengineering available that makes use of that fact or some other
method for synthesising hydrocarbons. after all how were they produced
in the first place?
Stealth Pilot