Rudolf Diesel

He had a thing for peanuts.

Ok, America is addicted to oil. However, do you know where we get most of our foreign oil from? Canada, that wondrous land of loose women, social politics, moose, and Jennifer Granholm, is where we get the biggest share of our foreign oil from. The fact of the matter is that right now it takes a barrel of oil to get five barrels of oil out of the ground. Add in the cost of transporting it thousands of miles from the persian gulf, and it becomes even less economical to get our oil from the middle east. Russia, France, and China are in a much better geographic and infrastructure position to use middle eastern oil than America will ever be.

Hmm, I seem to remember France and Russia disagreeing with us over an issue in the middle east a few years ago...

Any ways, world oil reserves are finite. There is only so much oil, and we, the world, are consuming it at an incredible pace. We are on track to pass the thousand barrels a second mark this year. Think about that; one thousand barrels of oil, 55,000 gallons, gone in a second. That's 3 million, 3 hundred thousand gallons a minute. One hundred ninety eight million gallons an hour. Do you remember reading about the oil crisis in the 1970s, and how the experts postulated that there is only fifty years left of oil? They are eventually going to be right.

So, what can be done? We have all heard of ethanol and switch grass, biodiesel and soybeans, and hydrogen and wind power. Well, the idea is good, but in my opinion, the methodology is all wrong. Ethanol is better used as bourbon than as fuel. Butanol, on the other hand, is very, very promising.

What is butanol, you haven't asked? I'm so glad that you didn't. Butanol is a more complex alcohol than ethanol. It is toxic, raises an unholy stink while it is fermenting, and is more difficult to ferment than ethanol.

What's good about it, however, is that it has a BTU per gallon rating of one hundred four thousand eight hundred, compared to ethanol's BTU per gallon rating of eighty four thousand. Due to butanol's higher energy content, it can be used without any gasoline in any modern gasoline engine. It can also be mixed with gasoline, just like ethanol, except you don't need a flex fuel vehicle to use it.

On a related note, why are we using soybean oil for biodiesel? You can only get 40 to 50 gallons of oil from an acre of soybeans. There has been some laboratory data that has suggested that algae could produce ten to twenty thousand gallons of oil per acre. Ideally, you would only need .3 percent of the landmass of the United States to totally kick the oil habit for transportation fuel. Even if real world production is only a quarter of the lab, that still equates to 1.2 percent of the land mass of America.

What I am trying to point out, is that the green meanies are spreading FUD. Oil can be replaced without a massive shift in the paradigm. George Bush might be funding the wrong alternative technologies, but the market and good old American laziness will develop the right ones really quick...

Discordant thought; gasoline was once a waste product...