Hi, There has been a lot of buzz about the environmental benefits of biodiesel. One of the many claims is that NOx emissions are either slightly lower or higher (within 10%) of petrodiesel.
My first reaction was that this is good enough. A little more research showed that diesel engines produce a lot more NOx than gasoline engines. Some paper whose link I am still looking for (some conference in CA?) claims diesel engines emmit 5 times as much NOx as gasoline cars. The following link www.osti.gov/hvt/deer2000/eberharpa.pdf has a plot of NOx emissions for diesel and gasoline engines over the past 30 years or so. In the 1980's Diesel engines emmitted about twice as much NOx as gasoline cars. NOx emissions by gasoline cars have been decreasing linearly since 1985, and according to that plot, have reached 0 in 2000. Diesel engines have shown no real improvemnt! (presumably because they don't have catalytic converters) If you want to see the plot without downloading the pdf file I've put a poor copy (digital photo of computer screen) at http://users.rcn.com/tomeberhard/BioDiesel/BioDieselLinks_010_NOx_Cata lytic_Converters.shtml with some other links as well. Another paper whose link I'm still looking for claims that NOx is a much much worse global warming gas than CO2. C02 can get absorbed by plants, can NOx? For these reasons, I'm not so sure that adding new diesel cars is a good idea. Converting the transportation industry seems like a good idea, since they are so heavily invested in the diesel engine. I'm currently researching what kind of catalytic converters can be used in diesel cars. Apparently the high sulfur content of petrodiesel #2 prevents the converters from working well, or at all. This is presumably not a problem with biodiesel? (Some methods use sulfuric acid to make biodiesel... what is the sulfur content of such biodiesel, and what is the sulfuric content of petrodiesel#2? What sulfur content can the catalytic converters tolerate?) Sorry for the long post if this has already been covered. I'm a couple of thousand posts behind. Please don't quote the entire post if you reply. Tom Eberhard. PS: the paper with the plot is by James J Eberhardt, I am completely unrelated to this guy. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> 4 DVDs Free +s&p Join Now http://us.click.yahoo.com/pt6YBB/NXiEAA/MVfIAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
