Link: One Hand Clapping - Blog Archive - Mythbusting E85.
Nice post by Donald Sensing regarding the likelihood (his take - not very) that the E85 ethanol/gasoline mix will replace pure gasoline as a transportation fuel. I've been reading a bit about alternative energy sources for transportation and other uses recently. I'm not an expert but Sensing's arguments make sense in the context of what I have read.
One thing you figure out very quickly is that a lot of the material about how one fuel or another is going to replace gasoline is actually only thinly disguised advocacy (or attack) material funded by one of the industrial parties to either the current system or the new system they are trying to achieve in the future. Hydrogen good or bad? Electrical cars - good or bad? Different types of hybrids - good or bad? Ethanol - good or bad? All good questions but you need to be very careful of the sources for the information behind what you read and understand their agenda.
For me, ethanol just doesn't seem to make sense as a short or long-term fix. Hydrogen also seems to have too many problems, many related to totally replacing our current infrastructure and also the need for additional technological breakthroughs, to be anything but a very long-term solution. In the shorter term, improved hybrid systems of various sorts seem promising. In the short to mid-term, it's entirely possible that a new generation of electric car technology will provide a solution to gasoline - but not without raising equally challenging issues regarding the source of the electricity.
If you don't believe in the short term potential of electric cars - and who wouldn't have doubts if all you've read about is the aborted GM EV1 effort - just read a couple of the articles on the Tesla Roadster...0-60 mph in 4 seconds, a torque curve you won't believe, a range of 250 miles on a charge and fuel economy equivalent to something like 135 mpg, all on a platform derived from the Lotus Elise.
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