Making Due with the $5 Gallon

Over the last 7 years the price of gas has been in an ever increasing spiral. As the value of the dollar falls (relative to other currencies) and global demand for oil based products increases, the law of supply and demand has propelled the price of a barrel of oil to record highs. So my question is: what can we (the consumer) do about it?

Here are a few ideas to get the discussion started…feel free to add your own

• Should we peg the price of the oil barrel to the Euro instead of the dollar?

• Is the problem that there aren't enough refineries and we should make sure that more are built?

• Can we, convince our governments to subsidize the cost of hybrid cars and research into alternate fuel sources.

• What if we convinced China to move towards Hydrogen powered vehicles instead of gasoline (think of it, China's fuel distribution infrastructure is still young and could probably be adapted to hydrogen more easily than the older European or American structures)

• What about alternate sources of energy (bio fuel, electric engines etc…) any interesting possibilities there?

• Oil companies having been making record profits (Exxon alone made $40,000,000,000 in profit last year) and in the end, those profits are coming out of our pocket… should we petition for a law limiting the profits an oil company can make on each barrel it buys and sells?

• What if we were to target one oil company for a whole year or until they dropped their prices by 10% would that make a difference?

• What about solar power, I know you can't power a car using solar power directly but you can use it to charge batteries that you use the next day…

• More bike lanes…don't knock it, most of us could use a little more exercise and even if we only used them 1% of the time, that translates to a saving of 3.8 million gallons of gas per day in the US alone.

• How about State and Federal taxes, should we do anything about those?

I'm starting a discussion on YakYourIssues.com Yak Number 147 feel free to post your replies / comments there and maybe together we can figure out what to do about this.

Article Source: The High Price of Gas and what we can do about it

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To Swiftly Go

This is cool: an alternative to both gasoline and regular ethanol. Gasoline is bad: it pads the pockets of Bush/Cheney/Terrorists; it's expense and it's finite. Ethanol is bad: it uses food crops that people would rather eat; it produces a low octane; it will cause valve wear in a manner inferior to regular gasoline. What if there were something that could power internal combustion engines and not fund planes crashing into buildings?

Enter Swift Fuels.

Swift Fuel is created as a replacement for aircraft fuel. Through a patented process, Swift Fuel is converted enthanol that does not create engine wear like ethanol; and it has a high enough octane to keep planes in the air. The current fuel used in piston fired aircraft is 100 Low Lead (100LL). The United States and Europe have banned the use of 100LL due to tetraethyl lead which is needed to bring the octane number to 100. There currently is a moratorium on this ban until 2010. Swift has this solution.

Unlike the current process of refining crude oil to arrive at a final fuel, we synthetically create hydrocarbons from bio-mass. This creation method is superior to the existing refining method because we maintain control over the entire process giving us the flexibility to meet or exceed current ASTM specifications.

The advantages of Swift Bio-Synthetic Fuel are:

• Seamless replacement of 100LL (no engine modifications)
• 15-25% increase in range over 100LL (no oxygenates)
• 20% drop in pollutants over the current 100LL fuel
• 15% more volumetric energy than 100LL
• No need for stabilizers or additives

DIY Fuel

I knew people who made moonshine year back. The process involves a morning of Value Village rummaging, an afternoon of soldering, and a week of the beer making. E-Fuel are taking all of this one step further and producing fuel for $1/gallon.

This from Wired News

People were making ethanol at home long before there were cars. They called it moonshine. With gas prices going through the roof and everyone worried about global warming, a California company is betting people will jump at the chance to use the same technology to turn sugar into fuel for less than a buck a gallon.

E-Fuel Corporation has unveiled its EFuel 100 MicroFueler, a device about the size of a stacking washer-dryer that uses sugar, yeast and water to make 100 percent ethanol at the push of a button.

"You just open it like a washing machine and dump in your sugar, close the door and push one button," company founder Tom Quinn told us. "A few days later, you've got ethanol."

Is it really that easy?

According to Quinn, it is. The MicroFueler weighs about 200 pounds and hooks up to a water and 110 or 220 volt power supply and wastewater drain just like a washing machine. It uses raw sugar (not the refined white stuff) and a proprietary time-release yeast mixture as feedstock. You can also use left-over booze if you've got any lying around. Toss it all into the fermenting tank, turn on the machine and in seven days you've got 35 gallons of ethanol. The MicroFueler has its own pump and hose - just like the pump at your corner gas station - so you can easily fill up your car.

"It's so simple, anyone can make their own fuel," Quinn says. Depending upon the cost of electricity and water, he says, the MicroFueler can produce ethanol for less than $1 a gallon. Quinn likens the MicroFueler to the personal computer and says it will cause the same sort of "paradigm shift."

"Just as the PC brought desktop computing to the home, E-Fuel will bring the filling station to the home," he says.

Maybe. Maybe not. Making ethanol at home is not as easy as Quinn might have you believe, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. Making a lot of ethanol has generally required a lot of equipment, he told the New York Times, and quality control can be uneven.

“There’s a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It’s entirely possible that they’ve done it, but skepticism is a virtue,” Kammen says.

Quinn is not some moonshiner trying to make a quick buck on the alt-fuel craze. He's a longtime entrepreneur who patented the motion-control technology Nintendo uses in the Wii. His partner in the E-Fuel venture is Floyd Butterfield, who has been distilling ethanol for more than 25 years and in 1982 won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still.

They say they've overcome many of the hurdles to making ethanol at home cheaply, easily and efficiently. Quinn says the biggest breakthrough is the MicroFueler's membrane distiller, which uses an extremely fine filter to separate water from alcohol at lower temperatures and in fewer steps than conventional methods. Using sugar as a feedstock makes the process virtually odorless, he says, and leaves the wastewater so clean you can drink it. It also avoids the food-for-fuel debate that plagues corn-based ethanol because we're in the midst of a worldwide sugar glut.

A permit from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms will allow you to make ethanol legally, but running 100 percent ethanol in your car is against the law. No problem, Quinn says. Mix it with gasoline to create E-85. Just put a few gallons of gas in your car, then drive home and top it off with ethanol. Quinn says running sugar-based ethanol will produce about 85 percent fewer carbon emissions than using gasoline. You're all set if you've got a flex-fuel vehicle.

It's an open question whether switching to home-brewed ethanol will save you much money. The MicroFueler costs $9,995, although federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. Another $16 buys you enough yeast to make about 560 gallons of ethanol, and you'll have to pay for the sugar and water. You'll need as many as 4 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of ethanol.

The sugar is where the math could break down - it currently sells for about 20 cents a pound in the United States, and you need 10 to 14 pounds of it to make a gallon of ethanol. Factor in the cost of electricty and water and you may not be coming out ahead. But Quinn says changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement allows the importation of inedible or "ethanol-grade" sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents a pound and E-Fuel is creating a distribution network to sell it to consumers.

That same distribution network will deliver and install MicroFuelers when E-Fuel begins delivering them at the end of the year, he says.

How Beat China, Chavez and Bin Laden While Driving Your SUV to the Bank

China is using capitalism to take over the world. Hugo Chavez has threatened to choke off Oil to the U.S.. Bin Laden funded 9-11 with Saudi wealth earned from the American appetite for oil. Oil is the problem. It's also the solution.
A drastic jump away from an oil economy to solar, wind, nuclear and hydrogen could propel a company into a position of safety: immune to the OPEC pricing strategies. Replacing gasoline cars with electric cars could leave gasoline car companies in the same position as VHS manufacturers. India has rolled out the gasoline powered Tata. When China tries to export its Lifan model, it would find its car unwelcome in eclectic car countries. China's bureaucracy could be used as a weapon again China-- slow to change, it would be unable to shift gears and produce electric vehicles for the same price as the Tata.
The most patriotic thing an American could do is turn away from oil. The conversion process of moving away from oil, would mean new opportunities. Think about how many times people buy a new computer to keep up with the software requirements. An on-rush of new vehicles sales could buoy the economy. New fueling stations, new opportunties for manufacturers. All of these could be available to the country that opts to go away from oil: stop giving strength to Chavez and money to Bin Laden funders.