HOW IS YOUR CRYSTAL BALL?

I see gasoline engines eventually dying out. One can make a lot more diesel-like fuels from various oils found around the planet than ones with the vaporization properties of gasoline. Plus, we have tons of waste veggie oil, waste motor oil, and many other things which can be used with a diesel engine. Heck, if energy gets cheap, we can use thermal depolymerization to create more diesel oil from landfills.

I see diesel as the future. Diesel engines can literally burn vegetable oil as a fuel and are PERFECT for propane conversions in the interim.

Regular gasoline engines have too low a compression to efficiently use propane. They would need to add turbo's or up the compression to better than 12:1 to work really well on propane. On the up side, propane makes for a ridiculously simple engine management strategy. Propane mixes on a demand basis and is gaseous, so you don't need fuel pumps or injection programming. Just a mixer plate and an ignition curve set by a 36-1 wheel and MAP sensor.

I say we need to convert existing car engines to propane/ turbo and really develop diesel engines to their fullest potential. You could then build small/efficient diesel generators into a car and run everything off motors direct fed by the generator. You could even have dual generators with the second being very small capacity to act as a failsafe.

Jose

The long-term future is fusion... but it requires money to be tossed at it before there are breakthroughs for sustained yield on a level that can be used for 24/7 energy protection.

Mid-term future is nuclear fission, namely thorium reactors. However, the word "nuclear" causes untold panic that people would rather tell their sons stories about those levers on the wall that show "on" and "off" than move to an energy source that can handle future growth.

Near-term, solar and wind are nice... but with the politics as they are, we will still be using gas, oil, and coal for a while still.

As for engine design, since we have common rail fuel injection and very precise metering, it is only a matter of time before someone designs a diesel engine that can burn not just oil, but gasoline, natural gas, and propane.

We also have had turbine engines going on a century now. Turbine engines can run on gasoline, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, propane, diesel fuel, or whatever you can throw at it. This probably is the future of engine design because it can handle virtually anything thrown at it, and who knows what fuel will be cheap and useful in the future. We might end up with a government push back to ethanol, or maybe even wood gas.

The only reason we are seeing a resurgence in natural gas is because energy costs have risen so much that it is now cost effective to harness it, as well as other previously-too-expensive petroleum-based energy sources.

Eventually it will become so expensive to extract further petroleum that other sources will be cost comparable. The future is electric. It will likely be generated by solar, wind, and nuclear power.

Natural gas powers more than 12 million vehicles on the road today. Unfortunately, only about 250,000 of these are being used in the U.S., according to GE. The average growth rate in the U.S. shows a 3.7% increase per year since 2000, as contrasted with a booming global growth rate of 30.6% per year.

http://www.cngnow.com/what-is-cng/Pages/default.aspx

I heard that it is very popular in Thailand. I suppose it happens that a particular fuel tends to capture the majority of the market and then is difficult to change because of the infrastructure cost. Gasoline and diesel pack a big punch per gallon anyway.

I see the same website says natural gas is half the price of gasoline. I wonder if that includes the 100% fuel tax?

Shell, TravelCenters of America Develop LNG Fueling Network
Article

while i'm not suggesting this powered the vehicle, it was parked at wally world in yuma off and on several times and each time the windmill was going pretty good. assuming electrical source looked to be pretty sophisticated. folded down for travel just like a bat wing. i've also seen solar panels here; i wonder about the weight involved in solar panels. also wonder how much power this windmill actually generated (larger than it looks here). in the meantime, i'm glad we still have a fuel option and for our size vehicle, gasoline works.
wind power

http://www.cngnow.com/stations/Pages/information.aspx

The above map shows more CNG station than I thought there were, I know the one in North Little Rock is not real convenient and as it is owned and operated by the city, I don't know about hours of operation.

It was just a thought.

Natural gas gives even less power than propane for the equivalent volume but there is so much of it around. It once was burnt off as waste cause before pipe distribution systems it wasn’t worth the trouble to transport. A tank for compressed natural gas would have to be very large & or very highly compressed to get any range for a class C. We will see CNG as the fuel source for back up generator at home/business a lot more in the near future. We have seen when the power goes down for an extended time shortages occur cause of coarse cant pump fuel at stations that are without electricity.

DutchmenSport wrote:
Nope. Solar and wind will be future.

Because that is all that will be left.