Interesting article on Brazil’s rapid reduction of oil dependence thanks to ethanol: New York Times
Great and thorough presentation on ethanol by Vinod Khosla (found on Infectious Greed):
A couple of things I’m curious about and haven’t been able to find the answers for:
- How do ethanol and biodiesel stack up against each other (Khosla briefly touches on this saying that over time ethanol will be more land use efficient)?
- Can existing gasoline cars be retrofitted to become flex fuel and work with Ethanol?
squizato 9:43 pm on January 25, 2007 Permalink |
Hi Tony, first congratulaitions for your nice blog.
I have the answer (at least a partial one) for your second doubt. I’m a Brazilian and I write a blog in portuguese about biofuels. Here in Brazil 70% of the cars sold last year were flex. And when flex cars are launched here, in Dec 2003, soon after some shops began to sell chips that make the cars run on both fuels. since then I talked to some people that did that and, in some cases, there are some corrosion problems with some motors parts. But if you change that parts too it is totally possible.
One company to look after is magnetti marelli. They developed the software that made flex cars possible and feasible even for the Brazilian market.