First, the cyclone Yasi has passed through Queensland causing a lot less damage than expected. It was most fortunate that Yasi had struck on the sparsely populated stretch of land between Cairns and Towsnville. Everyone's impression of the cyclone is that it could have been much worse if Yasi had hit the coast a little bit to the north or south. The biggest casualty of the cyclone were banana plantations. It looks like we'll be paying $6/kilo of bananas for the next couple of months.
I came across a very interesting
article about fuel usage and efficiency. The author of the article tried to determine the type of car fuel that would be the cheapest to use. He compared E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline), E10 (90% gasoline, 10% ethanol) and 98 octane premium gasoline. Based on current prices, E10 was the cheapest fuel to use, while E85 came out to be the most expensive.
This comparison is only valid for current fuel prices. Any pricing changes would requiring some recalculation to determine which of these fuels is most cost effective. The interesting part about the article is that it gives you a true, empirical result of how different fuels behave when put under the same test. E85 just does not have enough energy in it to be able to effectively move you from A to B as well as gasoline can.
It is amazing to note that after more than a hundred years of using gasoline as a fuel, humanity has still not come up with a fuel that is more cost effective and easier to use than gasoline!
Did you know that 1 litre of gasoline contains 9.6 kWh of energy? The internal combustion engine is only 20% efficient, which means that 80% of the possible energy in that gasoline you pay for is never utilized. I think we could save a lot of 'oil-shortage' issues by improving the engine.
As I write this post, I am starting to wonder if anyone out there has thought of a way to make the current car engine more efficient. Thank you, Google.
According to Mohit Sanguri, there are numerous
ways to improve the efficiency of today's car engines. Anything from twin spark plugs, turbochargers, direct fuel injection, variable injection timing and variable valve timing. Many of these enhancements need to be mandated for all cars on the road. Increasing the efficiency of all car engines would result in a decrease in pollution, as cars would need to less fuel.
Are there any radical new car engine designs that improve the fuel efficiency? As a matter of fact, I was able to find two such new designs. Cargine Engineering has developed a
camless engine which is smaller and lighter than current engines but has higher efficiency as the energy loss to a cam shaft is eliminated. An MIT Sloan Automotive Laboratory researcher
talks about a small engine that will have equivalent power to a current SUV engine.
I am not saying that one of these engines is the answer, but we have a lot of people doing research on alternative fuels, why not spend more time on alternative, more-efficient engines with the same fuel. I still believe that a plain-old internal combustion engine, combined with a small electrical motor which uses breaking and solar energy to recharge itself (type of a hybrid car), is what needs to be mandated as the minimum efficiency engine as of 2016. Force the industry to come up with something useful and efficient, as opposed to having the car industry spend all its money and talent on styling and marketing the cars.
