shakran

They tear down the engine of a pro dragster after it runs for less than a mile. One mile and you're in for a total engine rebuild. Comparing race car engines to street engines is like comparing apples to spaceships. There's just no comparison.


Well. . . actually if you're talking REAL street cars at the race track, they run on high octane gasoline. I'm talking real racing, with turns here, not drag racing. They've been rebuilt to take the massively increased power their engines are putting out. The specialized gasoline they run is only a higher octane to prevent predetonation, and the subsequent grenading of their engines.

Sure, I suppose you're right there. So we're going to totally redesign the entire automotive infrastructure for a fuel that costs more, both monetarilly and in natural resources, to make than the fuel we have now? Where are the advantages here?


You're right. But I never made that argument. I said it raises the octane, which, as you mention below, it does.


I never said it CAN'T burn without additives. I said you have to add crap to it to make it work in a car engine. If anything that burned made a car go, I'd be filling my tank with paper.


That's right. And increasing octane lowers performance while hurting gas mileage as well. It can also damage your engine, as it becomes dependent on the higher octane due to carbon deposits from the incompletely burned fuel causing lower octane to predetonate due to the heat output of the carbon. This is why, as was discussed in a thread a year or so ago on here, it is a bad idea to run premium gas (ethanol-enhanced or not) in a car that does not require it.

That's a very good argument. But let's stop shoving biofuels down everyone's throats until they're ready for prime time. If any other industry tried to force the public to pay, and suffer, for its experimentations they'd be burned at the stake. It's as if a doctor decided "well in the future this artifical lung will save lots of lives so, even though it doesn't work now and it will kill 50% of the patients we install it in, and make the other half so short of breath that they're confined to their bed for the rest of their lives, we're gonna run with it because of it's future potential."

Go do the research. Go make biofuels work. THEN bring them to market.


I know that, and I mentioned that above. The reason they're made from corn and, in the case of biodiesel, soybeans in large quantities is because corn and soybean farmers reap enormous profits from selling their corn to biofuel plants. The ag lobby has mandated that not only do we use a fuel that, at least at the present and in the foreseeable future, is crap, but they've also mandated that we use some of the most inefficient source materials out there to make it with.


And again we'd have to look at the total energy equation. Turning garbage into gasoline will require an input of energy for the conversion process. If we can't get that input energy below the energy we get from the resulting fuel, it is a wasteful fuel that we should not bring to market.