5 Surprising Substances That Can Actually Power a Car – SlashGear

Sometimes things are designed a certain way because that’s how they have to be. A shoe is shaped to fit the foot, and the shape of an airplane wing is determined by the laws of physics to generate lift. There’s only so much fiddling you can do with either one without losing what makes them a shoe or a wing. Other times things go one way when they could have gone the other way. The car engine falls into the latter camp.

Today we assume that cars run on gasoline refined from oil extracted from the ground. That’s how it’s done, largely because that’s how it’s always been done. But all you really need to make an engine work is a way to reliably convert fuel into work. In a conventional internal combustion engine, gasoline is mixed with air and burned in a series of small, controlled explosions. The pressure from that reaction moves a piston, which in turn sends you down the highway. Of course, there are many ways to move a piston and many ways to fuel a car.

As climate change becomes an increasingly serious global problem, people are looking for alternatives to fossil fuels. So far, electric cars have led the way (no pun intended), but many researchers and innovators are coming up with unconventional fuels to keep combustion cars on the road. These are five of the weirdest and coolest.

Sargassum seaweed is an invasive and troublesome presence in parts of the Atlantic Ocean. A giant mat of the stuff, called the Atlantic Sargassum Belt, often sheds chunks that wash up in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico. Once on land, sargassum begins to rot, breaking down to produce hydrogen sulfide, a smelly gas that makes the beach a little less heavenly.

Multiple groups of researchers, including a team from Princeton and another from the University of the West Indies in Barbados, are working on ways to turn this unwanted invasive plant into an energy source. The Caribbean team has developed a method for this transforming sargassum into a functional fuel for cars by mixing it with other waste products.

They can collect the algae as it washes up on shore and mix it in a fermentation tank with manure from local farms and wastewater from alcohol production. Bacteria from the manure break down the sargassum and produce biogas, which can be used to power a vehicle. With a little work and the ability to hold your nose, you can turn a water invader into an asset.

Abe Hertzberg, a retired professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, has argued that liquid nitrogen is the fuel of the future. As a proof of concept, Hertzberg converted a Grumman Kubvan mail truck into an experimental vehicle called the LN2000. Instead of gasoline, the LN2000 is powered by liquid nitrogen, in a process similar to that of an inverted steam engine.

In a steam engine, water is heated until it turns into steam and expands, turning a turbine. In a nitrogen engine, liquid nitrogen is kept at an ice-cold negative temperature of 320 degrees Fahrenheit in specially insulated tanks. It is then drawn through a series of aluminum tubes and pipes and warmed to ambient temperature by the circulating air. During the process of transforming from a liquid to a gas, the nitrogen expands to 700 times its original volume, powering the engine. The only exhaust product is gaseous nitrogen, which already makes up 78% of the atmosphere. Unlike carbon dioxide emissions, nitrogen emissions would have no measurable negative impact on the environment.

Hertzberg has also argued that the process of producing liquid nitrogen actually removes pollution from the atmosphere. Air is passed through a cooling system to cool and condense the gases. Nitrogen is then isolated, while pollutants, including carbon dioxide, are removed and trapped. It’s not a completely carbon-neutral process, but it could be a dramatic improvement over the status quo.

The use of chicken waste as fuel has a surprisingly long history. Some students converted a car to run on chicken manure in the 1970s. As chicken poop decomposes, it creates methane gas, which can be used to power an engine. At the time, the students estimated that 100 pounds of manure would move the average vehicle about 400 miles.

Today, more complicated chicken waste operations are in the works. They used manure, as in the 1970s project, but also feathers, bones and processing waste from chicken farms. Often all that waste is thrown away, spread to nearby fields or ends up in the water system. Automotive entrepreneurs want to offer an alternative fate.

Waste products would end up in anaerobic digesters, heated tanks where microbes break down the waste products and convert them into methane gas. The leftover byproducts can even be used as fertilizer. However, it’s worth noting that methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas, so while this may be a good way to deal with waste from the meat industry, it’s not necessarily the most climate-friendly option.

In the United States, approximately 34 billion gallons of sewage are treated every day. Using a process called hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), it is possible to convert human feces (or other wet biomass) into biocrude oil and ultimately into liquid fuel.

Waste products are placed in an HTL reactor, pressurized to 3000 psi and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit. The process takes only about 30 minutes and converts roughly 60% of the feedstock into biocrude or biofuel that can be used in the same way as petroleum, according to a discussion between the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technology Office and scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

HTL reactors could be installed in wastewater treatment plants and could produce as much as 30 million barrels of biocrude per year from the waste products already present. In fact, because reactors could be located at the community level, they would help reduce the burden of transporting petroleum and petroleum products around the world.

Coffee is a common fuel for people and it turns out that you can also use it to power a car. In 2010, inventor Martin Bacon drove a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco 337 kilometers (about 209 miles) from London to Manchester, with a few modifications and a whole lot of coffee. This feat earned him a world record for the longest journey by coffee car. The modified vehicle heated coffee grounds in a charcoal fire, releasing hydrogen gas. The gas was then cooled and used to power the engine.

Later, Bacon built another coffee-powered vehicle, this time a Ford P100 pickup, and set a separate record for top speed. The Coffee Car Mark 2 reached 105.5 miles per hour and later went on tour. The Mark 2 could reportedly travel about 55 miles on a 22-pound bag of coffee grounds.

Meanwhile, researchers from the University of Bath discovered that used coffee grounds can be converted into biofuel through a process called transesterification. A catalyst initiates a chemical reaction in which fats in the coffee grounds are converted into biofuel. Used coffee grounds are made up of up to 20% oil, and researchers estimate that the average small coffee shop produces enough coffee grounds waste to make about half a liter of biofuel every day.