Re: Energy Cost of Ethanol

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Greg Hansen wrote:

Diesel isn't popular, either. But a lot of it is used, including by consumer vehicles. It doesn't have to be "popular" to be "cheap".

Some years back, 1999 iirc, I was in Korea and petrol (ie gasoline) was AUD1.80/litre, as compared with about AUD0.60/litre back here. LPG and diesel were both cheaper there than here. Amazing what you can do with taxes! The government there obviously had this plan to either (1) reduce traffic or (b) get rich if plan (a) failed. It didn't seem to discourage driving very much, but it was encouraging people to buy LPG or diesel cars.

How do you keep dunderheads like me from filling my tank
with ethanol instead of gas? A study of what had to be done

How do you keep dunderheads from plugging the 60 volt line into the TTL socket when they're side by side and identical connectors? Sometimes you just have to get the grad student to fix the damage.

Identical connectors means somebody should be spanked. I was once faced with a connector with 4 equally spaced identical sockets, to connect to 4 equally spaced pins. Perfect mirror symmetry, except for the voltages on the connectors. No manual. I guessed wrong :(.

But, lesson learned, I think I'd make the ethanol nozzle incompatible with the gasoline socket. Make it bigger, or put a flange on it or something.

You underestimate the resourcefulness of fools if you think this will stop them. Yes, it will stop mistakes, but ...

Yes, miles per dollar. I think gasoline actually gives you more miles per gallon. I don't think Brazil subsidizes ethanol, but labor is cheap and they have good land for growing sugar cane. The switch was driven by economics.

They were even doing it when it was more expensive to make ethanol than to import gasoline. Low oil prices, but the sugar prices were so low that the sugar industry would have been in big trouble. Avoid complete collapse of a major sector of the economy, keep money at home, so still driven by economics, but economics beyond pump-price.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html

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