Toyota HypeOrHybrid?, Honda Makes only Pickens CNG car, Israeli "Peace" Offerings
Stafford Williamson
October 21, 2008
How do you tell a meaningless gesture or publicity stunt from a move with some measure of import? I can't tell in far too many instances. Toyota has leaked that it will be showing a "pre-production" version of a Hybrid car in which the internal combustion engine is powered by CNG (compressed natural gas). Conceptually that's a pretty appealing combination. Toyota, however, has not actually made any committment to actually manufacturing any quantity of the vehicle or ever offering the car for sale
I have plenty of compressed natural gas, but it is the painful kind, trapped in my intestines.
T. Boone Pickens on the other hand is doing his best to convince us that every car in America (at least) should be run on CNG. There's no question it would be cleaner than gasoline, or even than biodiesel, but the hazard is that CNG (especially in the form Boone is talking about it) is a "fossil fuel" obtained from deep below the earth's surface, the stuff natural processes buried millions of years ago, and which the atmosphere (and the Planet generally) have no means to dispose of.
Honda (according to the Energybusinessdaily.com report) is the only major manufacturer who is currently offering a factory model (a Civic) of CNG powered car. Honda says it is pleased to have competition in the field, and there certainly is room for some because Honda has a long waiting list for it's CNG vehicles.
What I didn't realize when I reported recently that Exxon was opening a biodiesel blending operation in Washington state was that the state has a "mandate" law calling for 2 percent of the vehicle fuel sold in the state to be ethanol, and 2 percent of the diesel type fuel sold in the state to be biodiesel by Nov. 30, 2008. Chevron, too, is already offering biodiesel blends, and reported prices according the Seattle Post Intelligencer are a very modest few cents more for biodiesel blend than for straight petroleum diesel. Specifically they say B20 goes for "about" $4 per gallon compared to US$3.73 for petro diesel. B100 they say is about $5 per gallon. Guess what? That means that if you can get approval for the licenses and permits, you can buy B100, blend it with petro diesel (100% petro), produce 5 gallons of B20 for US$19.88, which would be a really thin gross margin, except that as a blender you can collect a Federal US$ 1.00 tax credit as the biodiesel blender. It seems to me that there is a fairly large opportunity for some civic minded corporate citizens to save themselves an awful lot of taxes by boosting the biodiesel output in the state.
Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention. The "mandate" on the books in Washington has no penalties according to the Seattle paper, so it's a toothless tiger.
If (and it's a BIG IF) you are the type of person with a LOT of patience, you might want to keep your eye on Ecofasa, a European company from some reportedly Spanish backers who are attempting to develop a biological process using bacteria to create fatty acids from ordinary garbage. The report in autobloggrreen.com is short, but obviously the objective is to convert those fatty acids into biodiesel in the well established and conventional transesterification process. The patience part? The company says it MAY have a commercially viable process in "three or four years." Although the autobloggreen.com article is disappointed that 20 kg. of trash yields "only" 1 liter of biodiesel, that's around a 5% yield, which isn't all that bad depending on what the resultant "waste" is like, both in terms of its chemical viability for further processing and if it has any effect one way or the other on the decomposition rate if the remaining 19 kg. is just going to end up in landfill anyway.
Ultimately some kind of gasification with recycling of the carbon dioxide may be more efficient that this particular bio-based processing, but at least people are working on it, and one never knows where or when the breakthroughs will come.
I am off to New York City tomorrow, before the sun rises in the East. Well, not actually before the sun rises in NYC, but it sure seems like the middle of the night to me. The real pain is that with spending almost my whole day traveling, I won't arrive much before supper time due to the time difference. I've recently started using Continental Airlines, which used to have a rather poor reputation, but traveling business class they have been very nice to me. Mind you, while I was on my last flight, literally between planes, I heard on CNN in the airport that Continental has followed the crowd and started to charge extra for luggage. Oddly though, when I did my online checkin for tomorrow's flight, the Continental website itself was encouraging people to "save time" by using only carry-on luggage (and thus avoiding the extra charges -- which they didn't mention). The web site did say that now that I have printed out my boarding pass, my luggage can be just "dropped off" at a baggage check. I'll see if I need to check bags this time. Hmmm, I wonder if Continetal will give me an upgrade for my (relatively) positive word-of-mouth review?
New shows keep arriving for the new "Fall" season on television. Several more are scheduled to debut in the next couple of weeks. Most that we have seen thus far have been disappointing at best. There is at least one bright light, but as I started to type this paragraph the name of the show didn't come to mind, nor did any of the setting or character details. That bodes ill, but give me a minute and I'll figure it out.
I consulted the oracle, which in this case is the TiVo "Season Pass Manager" only to discover that NO new series have made it into that list, or more specifically, that nothing that was entered has lasted, at least not since the AMC series Mad Men was appended last August, which strictly speaking doesn't qualify as a "Fall Season" addition.
Oddly enough my "ending on a positive note" today is from the Middle East. Yes, the Middle East and it's good news. The website www.stratfor.com is reporting that Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz as quoting their sources that Israel does not consider an attack on Iran to be in their best interests (especially regarding future US relations) at least until Barack Obama has had a chance to establish his administration in Washington. So, in general, Israelis do not "regard such an attack as an urgent necessity." For the present, some small degree of dangerous uncertainty has been removed from the world. For that we can be grateful.
(And did you notice who is predicting an Obama Administration?)
Love and warm wishes,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Learn about the biofuels revolution!
http://making-biodiesel-kit.psyrk.us
I have plenty of compressed natural gas, but it is the painful kind, trapped in my intestines.
T. Boone Pickens on the other hand is doing his best to convince us that every car in America (at least) should be run on CNG. There's no question it would be cleaner than gasoline, or even than biodiesel, but the hazard is that CNG (especially in the form Boone is talking about it) is a "fossil fuel" obtained from deep below the earth's surface, the stuff natural processes buried millions of years ago, and which the atmosphere (and the Planet generally) have no means to dispose of.
Honda (according to the Energybusinessdaily.com report) is the only major manufacturer who is currently offering a factory model (a Civic) of CNG powered car. Honda says it is pleased to have competition in the field, and there certainly is room for some because Honda has a long waiting list for it's CNG vehicles.
What I didn't realize when I reported recently that Exxon was opening a biodiesel blending operation in Washington state was that the state has a "mandate" law calling for 2 percent of the vehicle fuel sold in the state to be ethanol, and 2 percent of the diesel type fuel sold in the state to be biodiesel by Nov. 30, 2008. Chevron, too, is already offering biodiesel blends, and reported prices according the Seattle Post Intelligencer are a very modest few cents more for biodiesel blend than for straight petroleum diesel. Specifically they say B20 goes for "about" $4 per gallon compared to US$3.73 for petro diesel. B100 they say is about $5 per gallon. Guess what? That means that if you can get approval for the licenses and permits, you can buy B100, blend it with petro diesel (100% petro), produce 5 gallons of B20 for US$19.88, which would be a really thin gross margin, except that as a blender you can collect a Federal US$ 1.00 tax credit as the biodiesel blender. It seems to me that there is a fairly large opportunity for some civic minded corporate citizens to save themselves an awful lot of taxes by boosting the biodiesel output in the state.
Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention. The "mandate" on the books in Washington has no penalties according to the Seattle paper, so it's a toothless tiger.
If (and it's a BIG IF) you are the type of person with a LOT of patience, you might want to keep your eye on Ecofasa, a European company from some reportedly Spanish backers who are attempting to develop a biological process using bacteria to create fatty acids from ordinary garbage. The report in autobloggrreen.com is short, but obviously the objective is to convert those fatty acids into biodiesel in the well established and conventional transesterification process. The patience part? The company says it MAY have a commercially viable process in "three or four years." Although the autobloggreen.com article is disappointed that 20 kg. of trash yields "only" 1 liter of biodiesel, that's around a 5% yield, which isn't all that bad depending on what the resultant "waste" is like, both in terms of its chemical viability for further processing and if it has any effect one way or the other on the decomposition rate if the remaining 19 kg. is just going to end up in landfill anyway.
Ultimately some kind of gasification with recycling of the carbon dioxide may be more efficient that this particular bio-based processing, but at least people are working on it, and one never knows where or when the breakthroughs will come.
I am off to New York City tomorrow, before the sun rises in the East. Well, not actually before the sun rises in NYC, but it sure seems like the middle of the night to me. The real pain is that with spending almost my whole day traveling, I won't arrive much before supper time due to the time difference. I've recently started using Continental Airlines, which used to have a rather poor reputation, but traveling business class they have been very nice to me. Mind you, while I was on my last flight, literally between planes, I heard on CNN in the airport that Continental has followed the crowd and started to charge extra for luggage. Oddly though, when I did my online checkin for tomorrow's flight, the Continental website itself was encouraging people to "save time" by using only carry-on luggage (and thus avoiding the extra charges -- which they didn't mention). The web site did say that now that I have printed out my boarding pass, my luggage can be just "dropped off" at a baggage check. I'll see if I need to check bags this time. Hmmm, I wonder if Continetal will give me an upgrade for my (relatively) positive word-of-mouth review?
New shows keep arriving for the new "Fall" season on television. Several more are scheduled to debut in the next couple of weeks. Most that we have seen thus far have been disappointing at best. There is at least one bright light, but as I started to type this paragraph the name of the show didn't come to mind, nor did any of the setting or character details. That bodes ill, but give me a minute and I'll figure it out.
I consulted the oracle, which in this case is the TiVo "Season Pass Manager" only to discover that NO new series have made it into that list, or more specifically, that nothing that was entered has lasted, at least not since the AMC series Mad Men was appended last August, which strictly speaking doesn't qualify as a "Fall Season" addition.
Oddly enough my "ending on a positive note" today is from the Middle East. Yes, the Middle East and it's good news. The website www.stratfor.com is reporting that Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz as quoting their sources that Israel does not consider an attack on Iran to be in their best interests (especially regarding future US relations) at least until Barack Obama has had a chance to establish his administration in Washington. So, in general, Israelis do not "regard such an attack as an urgent necessity." For the present, some small degree of dangerous uncertainty has been removed from the world. For that we can be grateful.
(And did you notice who is predicting an Obama Administration?)
Love and warm wishes,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Learn about the biofuels revolution!
http://making-biodiesel-kit.psyrk.us
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