well teflon mate its like trying to knit fog this but hey what do we know

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Obviousely not a lot my freind. Was just pondering gibstorms comments on alternative fuels; and whether it was worth expounding the debate on them; interesting topic; I mean, LPG is a mineral fuel with the main advantage of being cheap by virtue of having historically been a 'by-product' of petrol production, as Diesil was until it became main-stream; but protected from a bit of duty by virtue of its low emmissions.
Bio-Fuels, are a wonderful idea, except that the only reason that they are in any way 'ecconomical' against mineral fuels at the moment is becouse of EEC subsidies..... if the farmers were'nt paid to grow oil seed, then it would be a lot more expensive than it is; if it wasn't for enviro-legistation that makes it even more expensive to throw away than to process into oil, more expensive still...... rediculouse thing about SVO.... is that more than a greater quantity of mineral fuel has been used processing the seed into oil, than is produced as fuel!
Ecconomically, and enviromentally, the stuff is crazy!
Yanks are currently going silly over 'Bio-Ethanol'..... an enviromentally 'freindly' alternative to Petrol, basically, what we used tgo call 'Methanol', and ran things like grass-track bikes on! But mixed with mineral petrol - which somewhat defeats the point, but salves thier conciounces over Iraq

(Yank Logic, I guess)
Alchohol, as an alternative fuel, though, has all the ecological advantages of Bio-Deisil or SVO; and the added advantage that processing the raw bio-mass to make it is a lot less energy intensive.... microbes do most of the work for you.
And you can run a conventional petrol engine on the stuff with little more adaptation than reeming out the carb's main jet to about 1/4" or so, which is a little less effort than mucking about with diesil engine pumps and pre-heaters and stuff!
But is still inordinately energy demanding; and commercial manufacture of alchohol fuel would still be inordinately more expensive than mineral ones.
Whats the duty on a litre of Diesil? What's the duty on a litre of Vodka? Whats the duty on a litre of Vegetable oil?
Take off the tax, and compare like for like...... then take off the subsidy to grow oil seed....
Then start looking at adapting or converting engines to run on the alternatives....
Enough subject matter to write a few thesis on!
Would have been interested to contemplate it; but Hey, I've only provided 'opinion' on here, not 'facts', unlike our clerical freind, who has provided opinion CLAIMING it to be fact
I dont hold anything against deisils either; though I would defend Land-rover's efforts..... at least as far as the old two and a quarter.... beyond that they haven't been great. Two and a quarter though; for its day weren't too bad.
Yes, it was flat as a witches, but then the petrol equivilent didn't exactly set the world on fire! Reliable enough, and for its day, and even now, had a pretty respectable rev cieling compared to the competition. Mind you, its consumption wasn't that brilliant.
But, I'm going to go off and ask a sensible question about spark-plug gaps and LPG, I think, then ponder a little over the best procedure to bleed ABS brakes, and if I run out of interesting things like that to do, migt ask myself what the attraction is to sitting on a river bank, watching a bit of string dangle in a pool of water, in the hope of out witting a creature with no brain
