On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:30:34 -0700, Scott Moore
wrote:


I wouldn't mind, however, I suspect that qatar's GTL solution is far
more practical. The reason why: Brasil. Brasil went in for Ethanol,
derived from natural sources, in a big way. All the cars where (re)fitted
to run on pure Ethanol.

What they found out was that this is a great way to pay high (huge) prices
for fuel, and to suppress food production for people because it was being
used to make cars run.

I'm a convert, probally because I just got my first diesel truck. So I say
bring on the biodiesel, the blends, the GTL, everything that makes sense.
Diesel engines are more efficient, and their wide appetite for fuels make
them a worthy and practical way to move forward into better and cleaner
transportation. Europe figgured this out a while back, USA has not, but
I suspect the times they are changing.
One of the BD benefits is NO retrofitting--unless your car is so old
it still has rubber fuel lines, you can pour any proportion of
BD/petrol into the tank of any diesel engine and it will run virtually
the same.

The low-sulphur fuel we've been about to get for a few years now will
help a lot. First, people will not have as much black smoke coming
out of their tailpipes, so others won't get turned off. Next, the VW
diesels that have been around for awhile but don't like our rotgut
fuel will perform better with less intake clogging, making them more
appealing (if more people drove a TDI, there would be a lot more
diesel converts already). Third, more diesels are becoming available,
and they are light years ahead of the old 1970's monsters (I hear the
new diesel Mercedes is about as good as it gets, but won't personally
be testing that theory any time soon because of budget). All the big
mfgs have diesels in other parts of the world, so if the demand goes
up it would not take long to see more choices brought over.

Also in light of the low-sulphur fuel, (back to my pet project) BD
will be a natural even if used only as an additive. At B1 or B2, the
veggie fuel serves as a supplement to the lost lubrication, while
yielding a more complete burn of the petrol. That doesn't sound like
much, but if one out of every hundred gallons of diesel sold was BD,
it would add up to a huge dent in our petrol deficit. Once we get
more people to understand it (the worst part of using BD is that
mechanics want to blame every problem on the fuel without even testing
their theory, so you have to become your own mechanic unless you are
lucky) it could easily become common to find B20 or better at service
stations, as it currently is in certain parts of the midwest and
elsewhere. Down the line, local production facilities could take
crops straight to the "refinery" and we'd save even more in terms of
transport costs/waste.

Not that I'm pushing an agenda, or anything ;-)

k