Apr

9

Ford Makes a Case for Ethanol and Methanol Blends

April 9, 2012 | 9 Comments

A team of researchers from Ford Motor Company are asserting in a paper published in the journal Fuel that “substantial societal benefits” would arrive for consumers by using higher volume blends of ethanol to leverage the alcohol’s inherent high octane rating to produce ethanol-gasoline blends with higher octane numbers. Octane numbers measure in scale the [...]

Dec

27

Keeping An Eye On ExxonMobil

December 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

For nearly a year and two hundred plus posts we’ve looked at the leading edges of the energy and fuels context coming at us.  The leading one for half a century is petroleum and its not going away.  With fusion, man made alternatives, solar and geothermal in an even longer list, the one we need [...]

Jul

17

Picking on the Pickens Plan

July 17, 2008 | 2 Comments

“Ah! Out with the sharp knives mates.” T. Boone Pickens has his idea of launching wind power so strongly made and out so fast that natural gas could be used for cars instead of some of the gasoline we’re using. Can it stand the test of close examination? Make no mistake; this Pickens fellow is [...]

Jun

19

Iowa Floods – You Might Pay More

June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment

The flip side to food vs. fuel is that the corn crop may come up short enough to drive ethanol in part off the market for gasoline addition. Estimates are putting the price increase at 15% or nearly 60 cents per gallon. At 10% in E-10 mixes that could be high but even at a [...]

Jun

13

How Much at What Pressure and Temperature?

June 13, 2008 | 35 Comments

The American Petroleum Institute had me out for a tour of the premier oil refinery in the U.S. Located out or up in Billings Montana, depending on where you are, this refinery is in a truly beautiful and picturesque location smack in the middle of a mid sized city. It’s an easy walk from the [...]

May

20

The Next Fuel Craze May be Methanol

May 20, 2008 | 3 Comments

The week before last saw the Basques offer they have a fuel cell that can be fueled by methanol. With in a day I had received multiple notices that MIT in Massachusetts and Sharp of Japan were also in the hunt for methanol fuel cells. There is a lot of valuable “why” in those efforts. [...]

May

13

So, How Much Electricity to End Gasoline?

May 13, 2008 | 11 Comments

One blogger I admire is Robert Rapier who writes the R-Squared Blog who posted on Monday about the solar base of electricity needed to displace the equivalent of today’s gasoline use. It is an interesting concept that is rife with problems of equivalency. The U.S. is reported to be going through 389 million gallons of [...]

Mar

28

Another Way to Bio Gasoline

March 28, 2008 | 1 Comment

Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell and Virent Energy Systems of Madison Wisconsin announced their collaboration to develop biogasoline. The deal is using the existing research and development work of Virent in catalysts that convert plant sugars into hydrogen and fuel gas, a combination of hydrogen, methane, propane and CO2. The research so far has been quite [...]

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