"The first thing I noticed is the absence of black smoke when it’s burned indoors."
More from the too-good-to-be-true dept.: I am not endorsing this. And I know there's got to be a downside. But for now, I think I would be remiss if I didn't let whoever comes here know about Butanol -- a fuel that replaces gas with no engine modifications, made from, well, cheese. (Cheese? you ask. Isn't that expensive? Apparently it's waste cheese. Dairies throw tons of it away every so often.) It can also be produced from other waste biomass, such as corn.
The author of this article, Bob Fitrakis, met a guy named David Ramey who drove cross country on it.
Ramey points out that the production of industrial butanol and acetone through the process of fermentation using clostridia acetobutylicum began as early as 1916. Ramey says Chaim Wizemann, a student of Louis Pasteur, isolated the microbe that makes butanol.
It costs $3.75 a gallon right now. It won't cause the clear-cutting of Brazilian rainforests for soy-based buel. And it burns clean:
At the Springfield, Ohio [EPA] test center, butanol reduced smog-producing hydrocarbon emissions by an astounding 95%. Ramey’s own Environmental Energy, Inc. (EEI) puts combined test figures at a still remarkable 25%. EEI claims that butanol also reduces carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline’s 12% to 7%.
The article, on The Free Press, is here. Green Car Congress posted a detailed page on it last July (with a comment from Ramey himself). There's also a Butanol Web site. There's even a Wikipedia page on it.
Here's the problem, as far as I see it. Butanol has been around for a while. So why hasn't it taken off?
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