I've been thinking about this area of how we're going to fuel our cars in the future.
I mentioned recently about seeing that guy pouring vegetable oil into his fuel tank outside my local LIDL store.
A couple of you (thanks M. and Paulie) put some clarity around that and now it makes more sense.
So that got me thinking. And I did some poking around. And I found this interesting article on the Economist website.
Now call me cynical but could it be that some people are vying to convince the powers that be that their fuel should be the one adopted by the whole planet?
I mean right now there is petrol and diesel and aside from a little bit of marketing and price difference petrol is petrol pretty much all over the world.
So clearly we can't have a situation where you drive into a petrol station and they have 20 or so pumps each serving a different variety of fuel (one of which is clearly vegetable oil :-)
So we're back to VHS versus Betamax, DAT versus DCC, or Mini-Disc versus whatever it was competing with back then.
Is a bidding war to become the new future standard fuel on the horizon?
Cue scary music.
On a much more serious note Ireland was dumped out of the Rugby World Cup this evening. Talk about analysis paralysis. Do these TV sports pundits never take a break from pointing the finger. Yawn!
It's only a game and it's over. There'll be another day for redemption.
2 comments:
Good to see someone picking up such a touchy topic. In germany you can pull up at your local petrol station and just fill your diesel car / van / bus with biodiesel (rapeseed methyl esters). That simple. Where in germany the usage of biofuels is subsidised, in ireland the use of any fuel in a "propelled vehicle" is subject to taxes. I used to have a vw golf which i drove on waste veg oil collected from the local chippy. Free fuel for everybody!!!! Ok, not very practical in most cases but doable. Taxi drivers in berlin do it with their taxis so it certainly can't be bad.
I "brewed" my own biodiesel until I converted my golf to straight veg oil, much easier and less handling of potential deadly chemicals. It was fun though !!!
I believe I read an article about the japanese bin lorries all running on biodiesel because the simply ran out of landfill space. Hard to imagine ireland picking up on it when dairy farming is subsidised and farmers don't have to grow rapeseed to compete on the market.
Thanks for your comment.
it's one of those bizarre situations where we just feel more comfortable with the idea of filling the car with nice 'clean' petrol or diesel from the filling station.
the simple fact that the engine will run pretty well on almost any liquid with a similar chemical composition is conveniently ignored.
Humans do tend to 'believe' that officially-provided substances are somehow purer and better.. then we always find out later that we have been fooled by others and by ourselves.
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