[SGVLUG] Especially for Tom & his Prius....

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:10:23AM -0700, Christopher Smith wrote:

> and ethanol (sugar cane).

Foreign dependence!  Aaaahhhh!

Seriously, Brazil is trying hard to convert to ethanol, and as Chris
mentions it actually makes sense.  They have a good sugar crop to start
with.  From corn it doesn't so much because you get so little net energy
production (some say negative, but I think it's modestly positive, like
1.3 or something).

> Other alternative fuel source to throw in the ring: butanol. Supposed to
> be more efficient/less polluting but can be made from the same organic
> sources that make ethanol. It also can apparently work without
> modification to one's car.

I didn't look far into butanol because it seems utterly unavailable, and
I'm focused on the tradoffs of something I can actually do.  I have to
buy a car at some point. :-)  But butanol is very interesting precisely
because of the no-mod thing--I'd love to be able to fill up the 4Runner
on it since it's such a gas hog.  Any further info?

Best down here would be to convert it to a bi-fuel vehicle and run it on
cng while in Southern California--the stations are all over and the fuel
is cheap.  If it weren't for the computer, that would probably be easy
because natural gas is such a good spark-ignition fuel.  But it's
probably tens of thousands of dollars with the computer unless someone
has already developed the software.

Moral: closed proprietary software hurts you even when you think it
doesn't.

Dustin

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