Re: OT: Energy=Horsepower-Hours ???

On Apr 10, 9:17 pm, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@My-
Web-Site.com> wrote:
On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:11:21 GMT, Joerg





<notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:

Anyone have effective energy numbers for gasoline and ethanol in units
of horsepower-hours?

Maybe this helps:
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

Has conversion factors in there as well. Horses are a bit unusual here
so I guess you'd have to go from BTU to kWh and then horses per hour.

Likewise equivalent pounds of CO2 and H2O output?

Probably the DOE has that info, somewhere. Probably needs a bit of googling.

I just realized that I, myself, have been succumbing to the greenie
bull***... ethanol IS a hydrocarbon ;-)

Ethanol is C2H6O - two carbon, six hydrogen and one oxygen. That
single oxygen molecule means that it isn't a hydrocarbon, but an
alcohol.

My bet is, when normalized to unit energy, they're equivalent
greenhouse gas polluters.

As has been pointed out by Joerg, ethanol is produced from green
plants, which absorb their carbon from atmospheric CO2, making ethanol
carbon-neutral.

Furthermore, it contains a lttle more hydrogen than regular
hydrocarbons fuels - octane is C8H18 - so a bit more of the energy you
get from burning ethanol comes from turning hydrogen into water, which
isn't a greenhouse gas.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

Quantcast