At 01:00 PM 1/13/2009, "Dan M" wrote: >I agree, but bioengineered fuels are not ethanol. There are algae that >exist right now that produce aviation fuel with 1000x the efficiency of >ethanol.
I have a hard time with this statement. Corn comes fairly close to 3% sunlight to fixed carbon. If you lose 2/3rd of it in the process of making ethanol, then it's still 1% efficient. 1000x would mean you are getting ten times as much energy out as is going into the process. That's against the law. I suppose over a year corn could be less than 0.1% efficient, but you would still be talking about 100% efficient conversion of sunlight to fuel. snip >No, there are breakthroughs in many fields that are never mass marketed. >What I am saying is that we don't know until we know. In my own career, >there have been many times, before I ran an experiment, I was pretty sure I >knew how something would work, but it didn't, and I had to scramble. Take >for example, scaling up the recent Stanford breakthrough of increasing the >Li-I battery capacity 10x. Is that possible from an energy standpoint? Lithium Ion batteries currently are 25 times worse than gasoline. So a 10x improvement would be 2.5 times less energy than gasoline. But gasoline gets 65% of the mass that goes into tapping it for energy from the air. Thus a Li-I battery with this kind of performance would be darn near as energetic as a tank full of gasoline and oxygen. Have a URL for this report? Keith Henson _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
