Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: miraje who wrote (30900)	10/20/2010 2:12:15 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

Having been involved in a lot of ethanol work with BP Oil International back in the day, when the previous oil crisis was on in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and alternative fuels of all sorts were under study, ethanol and methanol are fine as fuels. <This new E15 rubbish is going to ruin a whole lot of engines.> There are performance issues [such as phase separation, corrosion, latent heat of evaporation and octane quality - ethanol and methanol being high octane] and there is less energy per litre in methanol and ethanol, meaning more refueling [twice as much with pure methanol as with gasoline]. But 10% ethanol is quite doable. As is 15%. In Brazil they use 100% ethanol. It's clean burning fuel. Ethanol is an excellent chemical. It's so good that people like to ingest it right into their brain cells. As car fuel it's disguised as gasoline, and as human fuel it's disguised as wine or whisky [not much disguise with whisky]. The reason to not use ethanol is that it's totally uneconomic to grow crops for fuel when there are mountains of coal, huge reservoirs of oil, any amount of heavy crudes such as Orinoco and Athabasca not to mention shale and methane which can be turned into methanol or synthetic gasoline. If CO2 emissions are in fact a problem due to the dreaded Greenhouse Effect which is as well hidden as the Loch Ness Monster, The Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot, then the solution is not ethanol from plants, or emissions trading scams, it's carbon dioxide emission taxes and increased efficiency to avoid such taxes. To avoid the carbon tax, people would have to demonstrate that the carbon they are burning is sequestered or otherwise not released into the air. To compensate for the tax on carbon, taxes on other things such as cyberspace could be cut by at least as much and preferably twice as much. and government profligacy cut along with carbon consumption. If some country didn't introduce a carbon tax, it wouldn't matter as they'd have to raise taxes some other way which would make them uncompetitive. So it's not as though all countries in the world would have to introduce such a tax. It's not like some tragedy-of-the-commons situations where absolutely everyone has to keep their paws off the commons though it would be better for common approaches to such carbon taxes. Mqurice