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Originally Posted by Keith  It's a first step though. If your car runs on hydrogen, the fuel plant can be converted from coal to something else and your car will still work.
But if your car runs on oil then you're stuck with oil, period. |
Not true. Our cars' (gasoline) engines were actually originally designed to run on alcohol. While, today, there are issues with running on straight alcohol (mostly due to parts that corrode easily in the presense of water and/or pure alcohol), these issues are cheaply solved by manufacturers. Futhermore, both wood and grain alcohol (methanol and ethanol, respectively) can be converted to a gasoline substitute very cheaply.
One such example is Switchfuel, which is made from methanol (from switchgrass, hence the name). Switchfuel is a synthetic gasoline at 104 octane. While it IS gasoline, it contains no petroleum. All modern gasoline engines can run it without modification. (Yes, your car will run fine on 104 octane fuel. No, it won't get better performance. A discussion of what octane ratings actually mean would take several paragraphs and does not belong here.)
Gasoline engines can also run on a number of gaseous fuels, albeit with numerous modifications (mostly to fuel intake and storage systems, not to the engine itself). These fuels include wood gas and methane. Both are natural and cheap. Wood gas can be made on the fly from wood, paper, grass clippings, dried dung, etc, using a wood gas generator. You would be left with an ashy byproduct similar to coke, which can be burned, mixed with unburned wood, to heat homes and water. Methane, of course, is easily obtained from dung.
Deisel engines were originally invented to run on lard. Unlike their gasoline counter-parts, these engines can still run on lard, unmodified, at least in warm weather. In cold weather, an inexpensive fuel heater is required (alternatively, methanol can be added to the oil). Deisel engines can also run on (unmodified, except for the fuel warmer) vegetable oil, used cooking grease, used motor oil, automatic transmission fluid, kerosene, gear oil, fish oil, etc.
To say that engines designed to run on petroleum products must always run on petroleum products is completely and utterly false. Natural organic alternatives (truthfully, the originally intended fuels) are available for all common engine types.
Now the real question is why don't we run on these fuels. The truth is because the gasoline distributors won't distribute these alternate fuels. In most cities, you can buy filtered cooking grease and motor oil from a number of "semi-commercial" sources. Where I live, I know of at least three people who buy used motor oil and used cooking grease, filter it and sell it to local deisel truck and car owners. In the winter they add methanol to it, to keep it from solidifying (this is what is meant by bio-deisel). These guys sell it for about a dollar less than the going diesel price and they're still making multiple dollars per gallon.
Another reason we don't use alcohol based fuels, is that congress pressures farmers into growing corn for alcohol production. Unfortunately, corn sucks for making alcohol. Grasses and beets are much cheaper (approximately one eighth the cost) and more efficient, but the gov't keeps paying people not to grow them. The most efficient plant would be hemp, which can be used to produce very cheap oil and methanol, as well as a fiber significantly stronger than cotton, nylon, rayon or wool, which can be made into both fabric and paper, at a fraction of the current cost. Unfortunately, that plant is straight-up illegal.