Huge Breakthrough in Energy Production

[badwolf.usmc]

I don't think Butanol is a replacement for gasoline, but it could surely help to reduce the amount of oil we consume, while at the same time reducing the amount of material being put into landfills.

Perhaps, but the public has been lectured about putting less stuff into the landfill for decades now, and how many people really recycle?

 

[Westside]

Per the wiki, 13 billion gallons of Ethanol was produced last year, or ~50 millions gallons per day. At current level, we need about 378 million gallons of fuel per day. Is there the ability to build & produce 7 times as much as we produce now?

How much plant material would it take to meet current fuel demands?

Using the same process you get roughly 2 parts butonal to one part ethonal. So that puts you at roughly 1/3 of what you need to fuel cars.

Also Fuel production as quoted is all fuel, home heating oil, jet fuel, diesel, gas etc. The difference is were you open the tap on the distillation column.

We can convert used cooking oil to bio-diesel. and we can turn chaff into butonal there is most of the fuel sources we need.

There is no single "magic bullet" to solve all the fuel problems. But if several options can be massed produced and are readily interchangeable. The price demand curves will naturally lower prices to lower leaves if you take out inflation.

 

[RockofStrength]

So long as the government doesn't subsidize this, too. It can't be made efficiently, cheaply, and in the proper money-making quantities if the .gov inflates their budgets.

I'd like to hope that this would reduce our oil dependency, and would reuse a lot of generally useless material which is always a win.