I am doing research for a alternative fuel project for my Environmental Science Class. I am having a hard time deciding on a fuel to use because I don’t want to use a well known one that many people will use. Any suggestions? I was thinking Liquid Nitrogen or BioButanol.
List of alternative fuel sources.?
Categories: Future Cars
| 
Tags: Alternative, Fuel, List, sources.
| 
Leave a reply
liquid nitrogen has no energy and is not a fuel.
Bio Butanol is inefficient and a waste of energy.
Well many alternative fuel sources are out there.
There’s the fuel made out of corn( sorry can’t remember what it’s called). However it would cause corn prices to go up.
Energy wise there is geothermal, solar, hydro, wind, and obviously fossil fuels (I doubt you’ll pick those however.)
Sorry if I listed energy sources and not fuels. Probably not what you wanted but hey I figured I’d give it a shot.
Go for bio-diesel. You can make it yourself out of the oil that fast food restaurants dispose of from their fryers. And most diesel engines are easy to tweak in order to run on bio-diesel.
Wood gas. You can get a flammable gas from partially burning wood chips. The Mother Earth news published an article on it back in the 80s and sold plans to make your own wood gasifier to run a pickup truck. http://www.woodgas.net/files/FEMA%20emergency%20gassifer.pdf
That depends upon how serious you want to be and how speculative you want to be. In the realm of very alternative so that to my knowledge it is not under consideration would be:
wind power as in a land cruiser or land sailor.
solar thermal power. It is currently more efficient than solar photovoltaic and there are several ways that heat energy can be stored and used. One way would be to use a stirling engine and have liquid nitrogen provide the difference in temperature levels.
Several “fuels” come down to an alternative way to use or store electricity. These include:
a compressed air vehicle
flywheel energy storage
steam power can be applied in a far more modern fashion than the steam cars of vintage years. There is a huge potential here for many different fuels.
For a more common route but still a little off the beaten track you might be inspired by:
Methane or methanol
electrifying roadways for electric cars without batteries.
And lastly if there is something you probably should learn a little more about:
bio-diesel from algae.
you should do some research on cellulosic ethanol… it’s supposed to be ground breaking and a very secretive process.
Or you should try looking up MSW (municipal solid waste) they basically collect the methane that landfills produce and use it for energy.