Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

Well, Rachelle may be a bit dramatic about all this, but she does bring up a good point. If you’re determined to use the greener fuel and avoid using gasoline, then a natural gas flex-fuel vehicle probably is not your best choice.

Natural gas does have some distinct advantages, though:

• It emits 60 to 90 percent less smog-producing pollutants than gasoline.

• It emits 30 to 40 percent less greenhouse gases.

• It’s less expensive than gasoline.

However, natural gas intrinsically has less energy than gasoline, and that means you can’t travel as far on a single tank of fuel. Also, flex-fuel vehicles have to have two separate fuel tanks (one for gasoline or diesel and the other for natural gas), so that cuts into your cargo-carrying space.

Propane

Propane is another clean-burning fossil fuel. Like natural gas, it’s still a limited resource, but, again, it comes primarily from domestic sources—85 percent of the time. A propane-powered vehicle—such as a forklift or a propane-powered personal vehicle—runs much cleaner than one powered by gasoline. Propane is derived from crude oil, so it’s not as environmentally friendly in many ways as other alternative fuels. But it is definitely cleaner. Vehicles powered by propane produce fewer toxic and smog-forming emissions, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is less expensive than gasoline.

You can retrofit a gasoline or diesel vehicle to burn LPG—or to burn natural gas, for that matter. And propane is relatively easy to find. You just go to the same place you would go to refill the propane tank for your barbecue or your space heater.

For a while, no one was offering a vehicle that operated solely on propane. Then a company called Roush, a supplier to the automakers that has a long-standing relationship with Ford, introduced the 2007.5 Roush Ford F-150. It’s got a liquid propane injection (LPI) system. Roush converts a Ford F-150 pickup with the 5.4-liter Triton V-8 engine to run on propane, and the truck’s got the same horsepower and torque ratings as the gas version. You even order it and have it serviced at a Ford dealer. So it should be about as easy to live with as the gas-powered version of this truck, while reducing emissions.

Biodiesel

Traditional diesel fuel has been a big problem. What we’ve suspected for years—what your nose and lungs tell you, what your breathing apparatus tells you—is that diesel emissions are very bad for your health. And now that’s been proven.

The problem is the particulate matter (PM) that comes out of a diesel vehicle’s tailpipe. The allowable threshold for this sooty matter has changed. Once upon a time it could be up to PM 10; that’s 10 microns in size. Now nothing over 21?2 microns is allowed, and it’s a fraction of the width of a human hair. Still, diesel exhaust has a lot of PM 2.5, and these little particles are very damaging to your lungs. Because they’re so small, they get in there really deep and really far.

Clean diesel has a lot less sulfur in it than traditional diesel fuel, and that’s a step in the right direction. Still, we’ve long viewed “clean diesel” as an oxy-moron, because even the clean diesel is made from traditional crude oil products, so it’s just not as clean as so many other things available today, including natural gas. Electric cars are much cleaner, as are hybrids.

However, there is something called biodiesel that’s cleaner than clean diesel—and, more important, it’s not refined from crude oil, like regular diesel fuel. Biodiesel is made from vegetable oils, animal fats, or recycled restaurant greases. You can even take vegetable oil, refine it slightly in your garage, and then run your car on it. That burns pretty clean.

But keep in mind, on the plus and minus sides, even biodiesel emissions have some PM 2.5 and NOx, that is to say, oxides of nitrogen in it. If it’s made from vegetable oil, I imagine it’s less harmful than crude oil particles, but the exhaust still contains particulate matter that’s not good for your lungs. Simply stated, the tailpipe of a hybrid is cleaner than the tailpipe of a biodiesel car.

The reason I mentioned biodiesel at all is because it’s not a refined product coming from crude oil. There’re none of the challenges that we get with Mideast oil and all the many forms of pollution that come from drilling and what have you. But I’m not strongly in favor of biodiesel either, because there’s an energy stream that’s involved in making biodiesel. It’s made from new corn and new soybeans, which are harvested with lots of John Deere equipment, which may or may not run on biodiesel. All the equipment used to harvest the crops—and all the fossil fuels used to make the fertilizers to grow the corn and the soybeans—tax the environment, too. Now, biodiesel can be good for U.S. farmers—it’s a great cash crop for them—and I want to support the farmers just like Willie Nelson does. I want clean fuel, and I want to help the farmers, too. But maybe we can help the farmers in other ways, by making biodiesel from AG (agricultural) waste. Grow the corn to feed people, and what have you got left? A big old cornstalk, a huge stalk with lots of cellulose in it that can be turned into biodiesel. Lots of other crops have AG waste that can be used to make biodiesel, too. It’s another win-win.

Maybe we also can help farmers by having them plant switchgrass, which is so easy to grow, it grows wild. If we can make the biodiesel from switch-grass or from AG waste, then I’m really in favor of it. It’s much more desirable economically, environmentally, in every way.

Even as is, biodiesel is biodegradable and nontoxic, so if it does spill, it doesn’t require a hazardous waste cleanup program.

In short, biodiesel has great promise. And can they clean up the problem with oxides of nitrogen in biodiesel exhaust? Absolutely. Can they