Biofuels Bridge to Electric Cars
Dec 2, 2008 – What will be the evolution of the auto industry that is in such turmoil today? The Detroit Big Three are heading to Washington, DC for a meeting with Congress on December 3. Possibly, they have joined together and have already started driving from Detroit in a hybrid bus. We can easily bet they won’t be flying in on their corporate jets this time. It’s their own fault for not knowing how to answer the probing questions of the Congressional committee. They could’ve said that for the number of people that came on the jet, it was the most economical in terms of people resources, expenses and energy. Instead, they just cowered.
Will the automobile as we know it just move on to electric vehicles or will we go through a phase where biofuels will be dominant? Remember that there is no magic wand for replacing the car and truck engines that are used today. The US and international auto industry has been optimizing fuels and engines based on gasoline or diesel for a century. A great deal of technology gets developed and implemented over that time. Also, they have been optimizing the conversion of petroleum into automobile, truck and aviation fuel for the same time period. Currently, because of legislation resulting in beneficial treatment for ethanol-based fuel there has been a major push [and controversy] to add ethanol to the gasoline for autos. But, biofuels can mean more than ethanol. It can mean the production of the current petrochemical fuels by biological conversions that require less energy to produce than is inherent in the fuels produced. Please check back here for further information and to add your comments.
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