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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 18:12:25 :
In Reply to: Re: E-15 is coming!! posted by Jason [75.37.51.7] on Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 17:54:40 :
The only realistic alternative fuel, in terms of being able to make lots of it at a competitive price is the Fischer-Tropsch process for making liquid hydrocarbons out of coal. It's tough to make good gasoline that way, but it's easy to make excellent distillate including diesel. That's part of why the Nazis pushed jet engine development so hard during the war. The Fischer-Tropsch process doesn't have to just use coal either. It can use biomass, natural gas, or garbage as feedstocks. The basic plant is pretty simple in theory -- just basically pressure-cook the stuff in the presence of a catalyst of scrap iron. A big tank full of hot flammable liquid under pressure is a dangerous thing, but it's no worse than what we have in any oil refinery.
For now I expect the greenies will keep any American company from building a Fischer-Tropsch plant, but let the price of diesel get up into the $10/gal range, and stay there for a while, and people will change their tune. Also, China has more coal and less oil than the US, as well as looser environmental laws, so I suspect China will the first modern Fischer-Tropsch plants will be built there. While nobody talks about it much in this country, a couple years ago, when oil spiked, the US DoD funded a feasibility study (and maybe even a pilot plant) of using Fischer-Tropsch oil to meet military needs in the event that foreign oil is cut off. That's a smart thing for them to study, although the two implications of it are disconcerting. One is that even the DoD admits that the US is running out of oil. The other is that in time of war (or whatever euphemism they use for the next one), we civilians are not going to be getting ANY fuel.
It seems to me that a guy who's handy with a welder, and has plenty of acreage so the neighbors don't see his first few experiments exploding, could build his own Fischer-Tropsch plant without too much trouble.
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