Breakthrough in materials science may allow methane-power cars soon!
I’m a big supporter of alternative fuels for vehicles. I’ve tried biodiesel for an old car I had. I’d use ethanol fuel if I could get it. One of the big potential fuel sources is methane. Easy to make, heck our landfills already make tons of it. Problem has been that methane needs to be kept at high P.S.I. to be useable and that means huge tanks with think walls. Not very practical for your average (or any) car. That may have changed:
Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City have devised a way to change all that, however, by using corncob waste to create “carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas at an unprecedented density of 180 times their own volume and at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tanks.” In layman’s terms, this discovery allows natural gas to be held under much less pressure and in thin-walled tanks similar to cells used on current vehicles, which could instantly make natural gas a viable (and readily available) alternative fuel source. A prototype system has been working just fine since last October, and the backers are currently crafting a second revision in hopes of storing even more natural gas and driving production costs down, but there’s still no hard deets on when this invention could see commercial light.
Source: Corncob waste could enable methane use in vehicles - Engadget
There is more detail at AutoblogGreen, but suffice to say this could be huge! If cars could be easily retro-fitted to use methane, then we can run cars on a renewable energy source and use up a source of greenhouse gas in one fell swoop. Yahoo!