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Personal Outlook and Preparation


WhiteBroncoII2WD

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I don't want to get into too much detail just yet for fear of seeming boring, but I would like to share a few items my wife and I did when we rebuilt our Bronco II's engine while focusing on the future of available energy. In my mind there are two fuel sources that will be utilized in the future, synthetic oil (petroleum developed through biological processes) and bio-butanol. Unfortunately, it seems as though American (our government representatives in particular) have a love for E85 and ethanol is far inferior to butanol as an alcohol fuel replacement or additive to gasoline.

Having this mindset I wanted to rebuild our engine in such a way that it could use the “worst” alternative to gasoline, E85. Ford did do something right with the 2.9 liter and many of their engines, they tin plated the pistons and so when we got replacement pistons I made sure that they were tin plated. Tin is a metal that will not react with ethanol contaminated with water. Another item was the aluminum upper and lower intake manifolds. To be honest I don’t think it would have ever been an issue of real concern after doing my research, but I still went ahead and anodized both.

None of these items really added too much to the cost of the rebuild. The most costly part of the process was taking the time and effort to track down manufacturing engineers to determine what parts are ethanol compatible. The Ford Motor Company was very little help. I believe butanol needs to be a topic of discussion along with synthetic gasoline.
 


AllanD

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Ethanol is a "stop-gap" fuel.

It has even been named as such by the president during a state
of the union adress.

what I consider the fuel of the future is also bio-butanol, probably blended
with gasoline like E85.

E85 was "attractive" as a stopgap because it was "proven" technology
(proven as far back as 3000BC in Ancient Babylon) to make ethanol from grain.

Butanol production still requires some development because the fermentation
process must be done on a continuous basis because the butanol is much more
toxic to the bacteria that produces it from cellulose than Ethanol is to the
yeast that produce ethanol from sugars.

added to that the process also produces 5% Acetone which is REALLY lethal to the bacteria, so the fermenting "wash" must be constantly circulated to allow the butanol to "float off" (it is both imiscible with the aqueous wash and lighter so it floats like oil)
while the wash is passed through a maze of permeable membranes to seperate the acetone.

What's "nice" about bio-butanol is that you only need the corn STALKS
(the grain can be fed to people and animals) but that's only half of it...
the REAL beauty of bio-butanol is that no heat distillation is required
the butanol floats off like a layer of corn oil in cold water.

the bad thing about butanol is that the stuff smells halfway between
Rancid Butter and puke.
 

WhiteBroncoII2WD

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we need to find a way to produce butanol at home. Seriouly though, I do believe that butanol will be the fuel of choice in the very near future.
 

bobbywalter

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AllanD

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THE things that make bio-butanol attractive are:
1)Energy content is nearly that of gasoline
2)Yield from IDENTICAL FEEDSTOCK is actually HIGHER than producing ethanol.
3)BioButanol can be produced from feedstocks that CANNOT be used to produce ethanol, cornstalks, straw, grass clippings, residential trash...

But for reasons I comented on above it isn't something that you are going
to be doing at home because an efficient process requires constant circulation
of the fermenting mixtures and seperating out the desired fuel products via
selectively-permeable membranes to prevent the fuels from killing the bacteria.

Most attractive of all is that a bio-butanol/gasoline mixture or Bio-butanol/acetone mixture could be run in most unmodified gasoline fueled vehicles currently on the road.

the only issues with Bio-butanol are it's high boiling point and low vapor pressure
which make it actually harder to ignite than diesel fuel.
So without mixing in a quantity of somthing both volitile and with
a low flash point there will be serious cold start issues.

The New 3.5liter Ford engine is already planned as being sold in
a GDI multi-fuel configuiration that is primarily intended for
bio-butanol based fuels.

and if you have an engine that currently requires "plus" or even premium
fuels it'll be even happier with butanol, because with butanol's higher octane
it will allow higher compression to be used and that'll give back the economy
lost from it's lower energy content.

If you really believe in Bio-butanol keep an Eye on Dupont Chemical and BP, they have a joint project underway to bring Bio-butanol to a BP-Amoco station near you in the next few years.


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WhiteBroncoII2WD

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If you really believe in Bio-butanol keep an Eye on Dupont Chemical and BP, they have a joint project underway to bring Bio-butanol to a BP-Amoco station near you in the next few years.


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There's no doubt that both I and my wife believe in Bio-Butanol and trust me, I'm always looking to the DuPont BP project waiting with anticipation for the fuel to start showing up in our great state of Delaware(Home of DuPont after all)
 

AllanD

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As I said the high toxicity of Butanol makes the bio process difficult.

And the fact that up to around 7% concentration in the "soup" Butanol IS
miscible in water and many people feel that low concentrations are impractical
to seperate from water, because heat distillation causes the WATER to boil off first.

That implies an ENORMOUS ammount of energy would be used.

However there are many ways to seperate the feline hide from the
rest of the feline...

Selectively permeable membranes.

The fact that butanol is LESS soluble in COLD water...

Other substances that butanol is more soluble in than water,
but which are NOT alone or in combination with butanol soluble
or miscible in water.

As I said there are issues and a bunch of ingenious people working on them.

If nothing else petro butanol will hit the market first as the catylitic cracking process yields a surplus of butane which can be processed into butanol the same way Methane is made into methanol and ethane into ethanol at the petro refineries.

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