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godzilla 22 August 2006 Technology 178 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

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Our cars, while necessary, are very harmful to the environment. The average American automobile emits its own weight in pollutants into the atmosphere each year. Auto emissions account for about 60% of air pollution (especially ozone smog) in U.S cities.

The problems inherent to automobile transportation stem from the use of gasoline for power. The burning of cheap, ordinary gasoline gives off primarily three pollutants: hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen oxides (NO). These products contribute greatly to smog, ozone, cancer, lung disease, illness, and the greenhouse effect.

The internal combustion engines in cars produce oxides that combine with water vapor in the air to form acid rain. Smog is formed from the chemical reaction between unburned hydrocarbons and the oxides of nitrogen in automobile exhaust. The tons of carbon dioxide produced by burning gasoline is the leading cause of the greenhouse effect, which causes global warming. Vehicles contribute to an estimated 60-70 percent of urban air pollution. In cities such as Los Angeles, California, the problem is extremely apparent as the city is covered in smog much of the time. Ozone, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides all take away from people’s health through destroying tissue, inducing breathing problems, and sometimes leading to cancer.

Automobiles do not maximize the energy they are producing, creating unnecessary waste. The largest area of needed improvement in the automobile is energy efficiency. Only 13 percent of the energy used by today’s vehicles is used for propulsion. The most promising solution to this problem is alternative fuel vehicles. Aside from modifying the use of ordinary gasoline to decrease emissions, a somewhat more promising tactic is the conversion to other chemicals for fuel. Methanol, petroleum, natural gas, and electricity could all be theoretically utilized with less cost, less emissions, and more efficiency than ordinary gasoline. Both methanol and petroleum would yield 50% less emissions and 10% more horsepower than ordinary gasoline in automobiles, but for a 10-20% decrease in cost. Electricity could be used for one-third of gasoline’s cost, and producing zero harmful emissions, yet would cause more pollution to be produced at wherever the electricity was initially acquired.

The problems that air pollution and harmful emissions entail are complex and varied. However, with government legislation, increasing knowledge of the bigger picture, and the ability to profit from shifts toward less pollution, the harmful effects of emissions will eventually be abandoned in favor of cleaner, safer, and more efficient means of gaining energy from nature. In the next few post, I’ll atttempt to highlight some of the other common alternative technology employed or tested on automobile besides the ETHANOL Methods.