Comments crisrich has made

Reduction in consumption is the only solution

The most important phrase in the article is: "Most strikingly they wondered if the United States had considered trying to reduce its overall consumption of oil rather than simply trying to replace it with something else."

It seems that very few people know, that the automobile with an internal combustion engine is one of the most inefficient machines man has ever created. Only about 13% (yes, one three!) of the fuel consumed is actually used to move the car. 87% is wasted in all kinds of inefficiencies, starting with the maximum theoretical efficiency of the internal combustion engine of 33%, which is never reached. If you also consider that cars weigh more than 1,5 metric tons and very often are used to move around just one person of 80 kg (160 pounds, I think), the efficiency based on the moved person is about 1% !!! This is absurd.

When people cry out and get angry at increased gas prices because they won't be able to go on being so absurdly wasteful any more, it reminds me of badly educated and spoiled children who are finally confronted with boundaries but don't want to accept them.On Big Ethanol descends on Africa for land, water, and sympathetic governments posted 1 year ago 6 Responses

What to do with surplus gasoline

In the 70s, during the first oil crisis, Brazil created the Proalcool program. During many years 100% of the new cars sold had ethanol enines. At that time Flexfuel technology did not yet exist, so the engines could be run only on ethanol.

This presented a huge problem for the refineries, because, from what I've heard, they aren't flexible at all. It seems that they are built to obtain fixed fractions of different oil sub-products. You can't suddenly say: I don't want the gasoline fraction any more, increase the quantity of something else in the process.

The result was, that during all those years Brazil had a huge surplus of gasoline that nobody wanted, including other countries. Apparently they had to rent a large amount of tanker ships just to increase storage capacity.

If the consumers in the US started to demand more diesel and less gasoline, how would the refinries cope with that?On Volkswagen's new entry to the clean diesel fleet posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

Reduce demand first!

The best energy is the one you don´t use!

If you buy a new heat generation system first, it will be oversized in the future, after you insulate your house. Oversized equipment is always less efficient than one sized correctly. So you would overpay twice: for a too large system and for comsumption of energy that is higher than needed (because of the lower efficiency) over the whole lifetime of the new equipment!

As Umbra wrote, the number of options are very large, so it´s best to invest some money hiring a specialized consultant who will make you a complete project, starting with the reduction of demand, which will consist mostly of insulation measures.

You should also ask around and search the Internet for possible financial asssistance and/or subsidies to do a complete energy savings project.

Have fun! On Umbra on home heating posted 2 years, 7 months ago 14 Responses