A lot of the scientific community believes we are running out of oil and as a result gasoline. Our government has been hyping the fact that HydroButanolgen will be the future of power for automobiles. It may in fact be substituted at least in the next couple of years by ethanol or Butanol.

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Ethanol has been making the news as a fuel that can be used in automobiles and eventually as a substitute for gasoline. Right now you are probably using ethanol in your car because it is used at 10% mix with gasoline to make it burn cleaner. But for higher concentrations, like the marketed E85, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline you have to have your engine modified to run on it. The positives of Ethanol are the ingredients to make it are home grown corn or soybeans fermented to make ethanol. The negatives are it corrodes pipes and tanks it sits in so, it is hard to transport and store. But then there is Butanol.

Butanol is more like gasoline then Ethanol. It has more fuel economy then Ethanol. Meaning you get more mpg and it does not corrode pipes and tanks it sits in. This means that a gas station can easily store it and dispense it. So it is a win, win, for the gas station. They don’t need to upgrade their equipment either for ethanol or hydrogen and most automobiles can run on it without needing an engine modification.

To this …

So it really depends on the future and the customer. Right now there is a slight problem with finding a strong enough microbe that can produce the Butanol. The survivability of the microbes in the fermentation of Butanol on a constant basis is hard and the fact that you want the Butanol or ethanol to use cellulose plant material makes its use an issue. After all you want to have ample corn and soybeans for food and not just being used for fuel.

Oil may still be a big seller in the future but it can be diluted with either ethanol or Butanol to extend its use. The gas companies will eventually figure out that it makes more sense to switch over from oil production to biofuels or hydrogen production. You will see the gradual phasing in of ethanol or Butanol with gasoline until oil runs out. Then you will see more solar power plants, windmills or nuclear reactors built to produce hydrogen and we will have the slow phasing out of ethanol and Butanol in favor of a hydrogen infrastructure in place.

Hydrogen is no easy thing to store and dispense either but in the end what the nation needs is home grown energy. We need to stay away from oil producing countries that take out money and use it against us. We need to just change over our economy and then as we buy our future automotive fuel say at least, “My money stays here.”