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Driving Without Gas
Introduction
Petroleum
"Since early exhaustion of the supply is foreseen, it is worth remembering that the pursuit of happiness was not unknown before 1859."
(Columbia Encyclopedia, 1935)
In 1859 Col. Drake struck oil at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania.
After he became erect and abandoned his forelegs for locomotion, man was still limited in his mobility by the modest length of his hind legs. He could sprint briefly, a few hundred yards, after a deer, or he might extend his radius to a dozen miles, by jogging or walking. Early Greek storytellers, with wish-fulfilling fantasy, invented the centaur, combining a horsy speed and range with a human torso and the capacity to enjoy travel.
This need for better personal transportation was achieved, after a gestation of several millennia, in the motor bike and the automobile. To imagine that man will now lay down his new love-objects on demand, only because the price of fuel is going up, or because his money is said to be gravitating to far-off countries, is a folly comparable to national prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
When lines of cars formed at the pumps in 1974 and again in 1979, the degrees of irritation, anger, and violence that were manifested by the otherwise civilized people of the United States, approached those appearing during the Vietnam War. Although fuel for transportation is but one quarter of our liquid fuel consumption, it is the most sensitive area. Few motorists, and few politicians had any constructive ideas about how to escape from the terrible dilemma. Few could remember the 1930s, when a farm-produced alcohol fuel movement spread to about 2,000 service stations. These stations blended alcohol with gasoline. Almost none knew that about four million automobiles, trucks, and farm tractors in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Philippines, have run, with no major mechanical alterations, on fuels derived from non-petroleum sources. This all occurred before 1938.
Peacetime Use of Alcohol
In peacetime, the use of alcohol as a motor fuel was sometimes fostered by its low price in the United States. Abroad, governments encouraged its use through high import duties on oil, subsidies for producers of "power" alcohols, and other supports of alternative fuel supplies, in the likely event of military emergency. In the United States, interest in alcohol fuels was intensified by rising gasoline prices, by stagnation in the liquor industry and by glutted grain markets, when corn sold for a dime a bushel, and farmers burned their grain to heat their houses or trucked it to a distant distillery, to barter it for motor fuel and some fertilizer and cattle feed.
Another strong force for alcohol fuel appeared in the form of a serious ecology movement: professors at the University of Iowa, and other grain state agricultural institutions, initiated legislation conducive to alcohol-blending with gasoline. They did not know that gasoline exhaust, inhaled over a period of time, was hazardous, but they did know that the replacement of the horse by tractors removed an important fertilizer from the farmers’ dwindling store. Spent mash from distilleries was to become the manure from the iron horse.
It was unlikely that the professors knew that alcohol, even in a one-to-seven mix with gasoline, would reduce harmful exhaust emissions to a point nearly satisfactory to lawmakers 40 years later. This farm-grown fuel was ethyl alcohol (ethanol, or grain alcohol).
The reason for my emphasis on alcohol fuels (methanol and ethanol, in particular) is that they may be produced from a wide range of raw materials, and they may be mixed with gasoline to produce Gasohol, so that there need be no sudden shift in distribution methods. Unfortunately, this compatibility with our present fuel supply system and our rolling stock is not available to hydrogen-, methane-, or electric-powered vehicles
Because it can be made from cellulose wastes from forests and cities, from coal and peat, methanol has become the chosen alternative motor fuel in Europe and Scandinavia, where projects sponsored jointly by governments and manufacturers, such as Mercedes, Volkswagen and Volvo, have shown the feasibility of the fuel. Countries whose rich crops contain high sugar and starch fractions and do not compete with the food supply have chosen ethanol. Brazil, for example, plans to operate its transportation system almost entirely on ethanol by 1985.
In the United States, where there was a substantial underutilized capacity for ethanol production (now being absorbed rapidly for fuel in-stead of beverage production), Gasohol, a blend of 10 percent, high-proof ethanol with 90 percent unleaded gasoline, is the leading alternative fuel for the near future. Despite its controversial economic status – it is on the borderline of energy balance – its sales have blossomed fast; it is an excellent nontoxic octane booster; and it reduces, by a little, dependence on foreign imports. The proportion of alcohol may be increased, as new facilities come on stream.
Doomsday predictions have a way of softening with time, but it is quite clear that we are running out of oil and natural gas in the United States. Anxious readers may be consoled that motor fuels used in 1910, and now more desirable than ever, are being re-examined and found more than adequate. Volkswagen engineers have designed and tested engines for use with pure alcohol fuel. The reports demonstrate performance and economy superior to gasoline, without need for emission control gadgetry. Although there is no mention of the strategic value of homemade fuel in case Europe and the Western hemisphere are cut off from Middle Eastern oil, this is an important consideration.
Other Systems
While methanol, and in certain circumstances, ethanol, are practical potential extenders of the gasoline supply, there are other strategies and systems. Some are well known, like the electric vehicle, and others are only dimly remembered from the past. The portable gas generator, seen most frequently overseas, was one of the latter. It appeared all over Europe, on taxis, trucks, and private cars, to consume enormous quantities of wood chips, charcoal, coke, lignite, and plain coal. This miniature portable gas works, with a bit of contemporary technology, might be reduced in size and improved in convenience and efficiency to become the omnivorous goat of autodom, in case of an emergency. This unsophisticated creature has had little attention since 1946.
The layman’s confusion about the energy problem is excusable. The magnificent, nostalgic steam car was revived in the early 1970s with much fanfare, because it was discovered to be nonpolluting. However, when it proved to be an oil hog, it was quickly reinterred.
Various Problems
Many other unorthodox automotive engines, and a few alternate fuels, such as methane and hydrogen, have been exposed to an eager public, but the engines can’t be produced reasonably, and the fuels can’t be burned or shipped, with economy and safety, and without disruption of a huge segment of the personal and commercial lives of wheeling Americans, particularly those in the one-sixth part of United States population connected with the traditional, tightly controlled systems of distribution in automotive, fuel, and associated service industries. One exception – there may be others – is alcohol, a renewable fuel, blended with gasoline.
Although the change from petroleum to other fuels made from renew-able sources rather than from fossil material is the dominant theme of this book, it must be obvious to temperate observers of the energy problem that no single fuel substitution, no technical breakthrough, no specific rule of conservation, nor any superimposed economic theory, will enable the American people to continue their once-carefree life with a full tank of gasoline at a dollar per gallon. Only a compromise can be achieved, and then only by the use of every appropriate technical, legal and economic strategy available to us.
The doom of the private automobile is not sealed. I am heartened to see how many farmers are making their own fuel. I rejoice to read, frequently, that Jack Smith, of Jones’ Garage, has driven his old sedan 80 miles on a gallon of Gasohol with a carburetor he made himself. I find good news for New England and southern motorists in a report from a Scandinavian car manufacturer experimenting with turpentine, a fuel that may become an important product of softwood forests.
Copyright 1980 by Garden Way, Inc.
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