The seven weirdest car fuels

[theholycow]

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/daily_gr...car-fuels.html

Article about fuels made from:

• Chocolate waste
• Coffee grounds
• Used diapers
• Sawdust, wood chips, nuts, switchgrass
• Styrofoam cups
• Turkey guts
• Cow farts and poop

I've posted articles about some of those before.

[Jay2TheRescue]

I thought the car in the final scene of Idaho Transfer had an interesting (and shocking) fuel source...

-Jay

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Never seen it. Wasn't named Soylent 87 by any chance?

Read something about burning metal powder for fuel (as opposed to generating hydrogen with it). That struck me as pretty odd.

[jmf]

There is alot out there, but oil is so easy and cheap to get and we have an unending supply!

[Jay2TheRescue]

Maximilian - The fuel source was the main ingredient in Soylent Green...

-Jay

[theholycow]

I saw an episode of Boston Legal (my wife loves lawyer dramas) where someone was prosecuted for exporting liposuction waste to a biodiesel brewer...

[dkjones96]

Making your fat work for you... I like it!

[GasSavers_Scott]

My grandfather in Europe during WW2 had a Maguirus cab over Laurie flat bed. Right behind the driver was what looked like a hot water heater. It had a hatch on top, you filled it with wood scraps, threw in diesel, heating oil, oil, whatever could burn to get the fire started. On the bottom was a weighted flapper door that kept the fire smouldering, you'd get the engine running on fuel, then turn the petcock off and the carb was hooked via pipe to the top of the burning tank and Viola the truck would run. My grandfather said power on wood gas was cut 50% and the truck was a pig to drive, but during rationing and when fuel just wasn't available, wood gas worked. He ran a delivery business and had access to pallets and wooden crates, plus he could always walk out to the forest and grab some fuel.

Volkswagen also had a woodgas barrel that would fit on front of their cars that would essentially make a fire and run a pipe to the engine.

The Stanley Steamer got 14 mpg, I think it ran on Kerosene.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

The later models did run on kerosene.

[GasSavers_RoadWarrior]

Urine, that's an odd one that came up lately, apparently the electrode potential for liberating hydrogen from the urea content is very very low for certain electrode compositions.

Unfortunately though you're at the mercy of the urea concentration and basically the water is so much dead weight in this system.

However, it seems like you'd get the hydrogen to run a bike a couple of miles off your morning pee, with the assistance of only a calculator sized solar cell.

Unfortunately it won't scale up too well, you don't want to be tankering 2 tons of pee behind your car to get a reasonable range.

But as a combined cycle home fuel it could have promise, could use direct solar to concentrate it.

Yes, I looked at it as an alternative to HHO ... even as a supplemental fuel you'd need gallons of pee, and a system for continuous electrolyte flow.