Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

Well, methanol only gets you about half as far on a normal-size car tankful as petrol. This means that you need lots of refuelling stations right away to make it practical, and you get into a chicken and egg situation.

The answer, according to Zubrin, is to introduce "flex-fuel vehicles" (FFVs) which can run on methanol, ethanol, gasoline or any mixture of the three. In such a car, you could fill up using existing stations - but as cheap methanol and perhaps ethanol became available, drivers would be able to use them easily. You could gaily top off a half-tank of petrol with Styrofoam-cup methanol or corn ethanol with no ill effects.

Flex-fuel cars have already been developed, according to Zubrin, by pioneering Ford engineer Roberta Nichols. They're great, apparently, and large-scale trials took place in California during the 1990s.

Over 14,000 methanol/gasoline FFVs demonstrated “seamless vehicle operation on methanol, gasoline, and all combination of these fuels"... FFV engines were as durable as standard gas engines ... there were incremental improvements in emissions fuel efficiency.

FFVs are also better for the environment than gas-powered cars... mitigating the immediately pressing problems of air pollution and toxic spills, both on land and on water. Unlike oil, gasoline, kerosene, and virtually all other petroleum fuels, alcohol fuels can mix with water. They dissolve and are readily consumed by common bacteria, which averts long-term environmental degradation.

No more tanker-spill disasters as a fringe benefit. Nice. So why doesn't everyone use FFVs already?

If you believe Zubrin, it's mainly the fault of the US farm/biofuel/corn-ethanol lobby. Seemingly they don't much fancy an upstart rival which could actually undermine the case for corn subsidies, though Zubrin mostly avoids saying this. Nonetheless, his position is fairly clear.

Beyond the CEC’s successful pilot program, there has been very little interest in FFVs. The farm lobby has pushed for them as a means to expand ethanol sales, which is why, for the past decade or so, FFVs have been designed primarily for ethanol use.

Zubrin is definitely not your common or garden farm-lobby, protectionist biofuel advocate, no indeed.

Congress should require that all future vehicles sold in the United States be flexible-fueled, capable of using mixtures of methanol, ethanol, and gasoline... thereby creating a huge global market and infrastructure for alcohol fuels... we could end our current tariffs against ethanol from Latin America. Europe and Japan, too, would likely drop their protectionist measures... Not only would Third World farmers have new markets for their products, but they would also benefit from the collapse of petroleum prices.

One might suspect that actually rather a lot of fuel would get made out of coal or gas rather than plants, as long as those things stayed cheap anyway. But at least that would still serve to break the OPEC monopoly and end the funnelling of the developed world's surplus money into Saudi (and Iranian) hands. Conceivably, Zubrin hints, it would also end the need for the developed world to maintain costly military dominance so as to secure oil supplies.

Only in this way can we destroy the vertical monopoly which will otherwise continue to give the Islamists the ability to loot humanity... Only in this way can we transfer control of the future from those who take their wealth, pre-made, from the ground, to those who make their wealth through hard work, skill, and creativity... We will then be in a position to dictate terms to the terror bankers.

In a game of chess, the struggle ends not with the taking of the enemy king, but with his entrapment. If we could engineer a liberation from oil... the oil-for-terror game will be finished.

Call it checkmate. Call it victory.

So to sum up, Zubrin plans to piss off the farm lobby, Honda, Prius drivers, al-Qaeda and the oil cartels, and then finish up by taking away much of the military-industrial complex's raison d'etre**. No wonder it hasn't happened.

Zubrin also adds a personal agenda, noting that Roberta Nichols - the engineer who developed the FFV tech he advocates, who died in 2005 - came from a generation where almost no women at all went into engineering - rather than merely very few, as we see nowadays.

Personally, I find especially delightful the historical irony that fundamentalist Islam, which detests uppity women, nonconformists, innovators, and liquor, should ultimately face its comeuppance from the brainchild of a gutsy mold-breaking inventress with unshakeable faith in the power of alcohol.

Interesting stuff, at any rate. ®

*A hydrogen-based transport system, if it were not to use fossil hydrocarbon to produce the fuel, would require colossal amounts of additional electrical power for cracking water. One of the more feasible ways for the human race to hugely increase its electricity production while simultaneously dispensing with fossil fuels is nuclear power. People who favour nuclear power often like the idea of hydrogen transport systems, as they would probably require a lot of nuke plants.

**Though some of the military-industrial complex might rather approve of Zubrin's plans.