After veg oil, sugar waste

I was reading , made by the entity known as Whiskers, that requests spam to be sent to and I became inspired,

Thank you. No bad words about Cadbury. Been there, ate the bar and liked it.

If they use waste that else would go to waste it's green, and with a bit of luck, cheep.

Honestly, There is no green fuel. Hydrogen perhaps. Anything that comes from plants to make a car move isn't green. The plants need a-lot-of chemicals to grow. To get enough fuel from plants to get all cars moved there would not be room for hungry man let alone for their vehicles. There isn't enough waste to produce enough gas to replace good old minerals. We are working on that though. Eat beans!

Hydrogen isn't a 'fuel', so much as a means of storing energy: the energy used to extract the hydrogen from water or wherever. So hydrogen is only 'green' if it is extracted, compressed, and transported, using only 'renewable resources' of some sort - or at least something like wind, rain, tides, rivers, or geothermal energy, that is going to waste if it isn't 'used'.

I disagree about the need to have 'chemicals' to grow plants. While it is certianly possible to boost production in the short term by using lots of 'fertiliser' and 'pesticide', in the long term that only destroys the natural eco-systems that support life. Long term, agriculture will have to be 'organic' just for life on the planet to continue anything like the way we know it.

True. We use cars and airoplanes far too much at present; I can remember when most people lived and worked and went shoping and went to school and so on, all within walking distance, here in the UK. For most of the world's people, that is still true. The crazy amount of travelling we in 'the west' do, is unsustainable even for us - it certainly isn't going to be possible for everyone in Africa, South Amaerica, and Asia, to do it too.

Ah, yes, rocket power ============>>>>>>>>

"2Rowdy" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@nntp.aacity.net:

Not quite sure what this discussion is doing on this newsgroup (although we are getting v.good fuel economy out of my other half's 1.4 (petrol) C2!)... But here's my contribution...

There is no green fuel. Period.

No engine is 100% efficient. Any energy not being converted to movement is lost through sound and (mainly) heat. Heat is a pollutant. BTW, Just saw a program on "Global dimming": if we use clean energy sources that produce no chemical polution (soot, gas etc...), we will save lives (less famines and lung disease), but at the cost of even more global warming. Basically, we can't win.

I think fuel and energy use and conservation in motor vehicles is On Topic, isn't it? :))

On that basis, all living creatures are guilty ;))

That's entropy for you ...

Whiskers wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ID-107770.user.individual.net:

(snip)

Yes, but the amount of heat generated by a car engine is, to use a techical phrase, a helluva lot.

Nope, nothing to do with entropy, I don't think...

Yes.

You just can't get around it; whatever one does, everything tends towards ultimate chaos.

I was reading , made by the entity known as Whiskers, that requests spam to be sent to and I became inspired,

That's why I said: Perhaps. I guess it can be produced in hot sandy countries and make a profit.

But that would make the harvests even smaller than needed to fuel our economy.

We're doomed.

Currently, Iceland is in the lead with using hydrogen in vehicles; they use geothermal power to extract hydrogen from water. They have a /lot/ of geothermal power oozing out under their feet, as Iceland is sitting right on top of the 'mid Atlantic rift' where molten rock is flowing out of the Earth's core and stretching the Atlantic ocean (and Iceland). Lots of volcanoes and 'geysers' and hot springs. New Zealand and Japan are also well endowed with such things.

Not yet. There is plenty of food to go round, but it isn't evenly distributed. We might have to learn to drink less coffee and tea, and eat less chocolate, and consume a bit less recreational cocaine and opium, and learn to eat only locally seasonal produce.

Bio-fuel for vehicles would encourage a big increase in the growing of oil-producing crops, such as rape (also known as canola or colza, I think) or sunflowers. Olive oil and palm oil are a bit 'thick' for most diesel engines.

We shall have to curtail much of our current travelling, if we are to rely on bio-fuel only and still expect not to starve. I don't think that fermenting sugar-rich crops to get alcohol for use as fuel will be efficient enough to sustain very many spark-ignition engines, although some of them could be run on methane collected from sewage-treatment and composting works. Such schemes already exist, the methane being used to drive electricity generators and the 'waste' heat being used for heating.

When the fossil fuels run out, the production of artificial fertilisers will cease anyway. But nature seems to have arranged matters in such a way that animals produce exactly the sort of food that plants most want, and in pretty much the appropriate quantities to replace the plants that the animals ate. We used to be very good at re-cycling all that stuff; I'm sure we don't /have/ to wash most of it out to sea ...