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Originally Posted by Shawnski
Fine... everything I have read is that it comes from corn oil... the corn itself. If husk and cob technology is making headway without impact to the kernel foodstuff itself, cool. Link it.
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The show was on Scifi and was called Eco-tech, so I can't link it directly. Here is a link that discusses the basis behind the technology and the yields in ethanol.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1207161153.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by EddyBeers
Biodiesel is the biggest crock out there, in terms of alternative fuels. It merely is a well disguised government subsidy for farmers. It provides another market for their product, thus increasing the price.
Both on a national scale and a provincial scale, biodiesel is far from the solution to the oil problem.
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There's the problem. People think that
one product has to be the solution. It doesn't. No one has said that using oil and petroleum products is going to stop. The idea is to find new ways to reduce the amount of petroleum products we use in certain areas, like transportation and energy production. Through a combination of technologies we can reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and clean up the environment. Through the implementation of bio-diesel, multi-source ethanol, solar, wind, hydrogen, hybrid vehicle technologies, electric vehicle technologies, etc. we can reduce our need for fossil fuels and be more environmentally conscious.
Here is a link that explains extraction of wood ethanol. There are some waste by-products that can be collected and used in other technologies. Hydrogen is a by-product of the process, which can be captured and used in fuel cells. Methane is a by-product which can be captured and used to turn a turbine which can create electricity and heat for the plant itself. All of this comes from waste products that would normally find themselves in a land fill or left to rot naturally. The idea is to stop being wasteful, and utilize the waste products we produce, and turn them into energy. I don't know why this is so hard for people to grasp. You should take a trip to some of the Hutterite and Mennonite colonies around the province and see what they are doing. They use biomass (waste products) to generate electricty and heat their communities, and sell excess power back onto the grid. If they can do it to iprove their lives, we can certainly do it to improve ours.
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Originally Posted by Flames89
20% of every unit of gas in a car actually moves it forward, while the other 80% is lost as heat.
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That was another interesting technology shift discussed in this Scifi presentation last night. They talked to a group that is revisiting the building of cars using carbon fibre and hybrid technology. They have developed a prototype that gets 120 mpg. They have also developed the technology that allows carboin fibre parts to be developed cheaply, efficiently, and quickly. They also claim their plug-in hybrid is so efficient that you can sell electricity generated by the vehicle back onto the grid. I'm skeptical on this claim, but the other aspects make sense. They say they are talking with a major manufacturer and you should see this technology on the market in 3-5 years in mass numbers.