Introducing the Car-puccino
Imagine stopping at a gas station for coffee and walking out with a cup for yourself and a bag of grounds for your car. Sharing your love of java with your car is exactly what the people at ‘Bang Goes the Theory’ (a British TV show) had in mind when they designed the Car-puccino. This Java Jalopy (lame, I know, but I can’t pass by an opportunity for alliteration) can travel at a maximum speed of 60 miles per hour with a slightly disappointing mileage of 56 espressos per mile (which translates into 1.4 miles of travel per pound of coffee grounds). To make the Car-puccino designers retrofitted a 1988 VW Scirocco (chosen because of its resemblance to the Delorean used in Back to the Future) with a charcoal burner that heats the coffee grounds to 700°C to release a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (also known as syngas) which is then burned in the motor.
Although the concept makes for great TV and publicity when the creators drive it 210 miles from London to Manchester, the car is just that: a novelty. The Daily Mail article (which also has a diagram describing how the car works) about the car-puccino cites the excessive cost of powering the car with coffee (about 25 to 50 times the cost of gasoline, depending on the cost of the coffee), although the car can be powered with grounds that have already been brewed. In addition, drivers must stop frequently both to add grounds to the burner (as it requires about 1 pound of grounds to travel a mile) and to clean out the filter which prevents tar and soot from the burning coffee entering the motor. By now you may have realized that this car doesn’t have to run on coffee, but can run on nearly any organic waste such as wood chips, peanut shells, or the mythical switchgrass. And perhaps you could design a better filter that would require less frequent cleaning (currently it must be cleared after every 60 miles of travel). Nonetheless, the energy balance of this car will still be negative. Burning charcoal to make the syngas the car then burns to operate raises the question: why not just use the burning charcoal to power your car? The procedure for producing syngas in this car essentially wastes the energy of the charcoal by only using the syngas to operate the vehicle.
Though this is just a fun TV show project, I think it illustrates the difficulty we have encountered time and again in developing a mobile energy source for cars. The energy density and physical characteristics of petroleum based fuels has yet to be equaled by an economically viable sustainable fuel. Not even venti coffees, which propel thousands of college students through treacherous degree paths each year, can provide sufficient energy to power your car from your house to the grocery store. Now that gets me thinking about what gasoline could do for me… shot of premium unleaded, anyone?
Bottom Line: The car-puccino is a fun and slightly functional experiment in alternative energy, but don’t expect to be sharing your morning coffee with your ride any time soon.
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A Cellulosic Ethanol story to follow
The New York Times recently reported on work at the University of Wisconsin in which a new method was developed to break down lignocellulose into sugars. A recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ronald T. Raines and Joseph B. Binder outlines a process which uses an ionic liquid combined with water and acid to decompose cellulose to sugars.
For a long time, cellulosic ethanol has been the holy grail of renewable fuel technology (recall former President Bush’s call for fuel from switchgrass in his 2006 State of the Union Address). Humans do not have the proper digestive equipment to consume cellulose (cows, on the other hand, have four stomachs and various other features that allow them to eat grass and other cellulosic foods). Thus, producing cellulosic ethanol could potentially bypass the food vs. fuel conflict that other biofuels (think corn ethanol and biodiesel from palm oil) have run into.
Current methods of breaking cellulose down to sugars requires the action of costly enzymes and as yet hasn’t been economically viable at large scales. Raines and Binder hope that their process, which produces sugar yields approaching those of enzymatic methods (nearly a 90% yield of glucose from cellulose), can be scaled up to convert non-food crops into ethanol. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read Raines and Binder’s full article, but the one detail that caught my attention in the NYTimes article is the importance of water in the sugar producing process. Apparently, without water the ionic liquid can continue to react with sugars produced and further degrade them. I am curious how water intensive this process is and whether this will pose constraints when scaling the process up. I guess I’ll have to read the full article to find out!
Bottom Line: Cellulosic ethanol has promise as a sustainable energy source if only we can find an economic way to produce it. It looks like researchers at the University of Wisconsin have found a good contender.