Alternative Fuels

[Mohoender]

Hey, never thought of it but as many cars over Europe are diesel, regular vegetable oil (olive, wheat, peannuts...) would be used more often than alcohol. In some regions that is easier to make.

With the oil price today, people are already using this (illegaly) here in France. Moreover, my wife's father used it as a lubricant and would tell you that it works better than petroleum.

Thinks about the general smell in T2K. Each time you fry something you fill up your tank .

[kato13]

Given methanol production as described in the rules is nearly impossible, and reworking a diesel engine for alcohol is very difficult, this is very likely. I hope to have some sort of realistic organic fuel production rules/equipment list ready by the spring.

[Marc]

That's a good point Mohoender! After the last and demoralizing post of Kato about methanol production I was near to tell to my players: "Ok, everybody out that Hum-Vee. This thing no longer works. I know,...I know, but rules has changed. Chemistry is Chemistry..."

[kato13]

My original methanol post

I don't want to ruin anyone's game with science

You could say that in the T2k timeline, cellulose (wood) processing yeast or bacterium was developed to make ethanol (not methanol). IIRC there were over 300 collegiate papers on Ecoli producing ethanol from wood published before 1995. A similar number for yeast were also published.

In reality we are just getting to that point now with yeast and 3 different bacterium. If you want to keep the current rules (doubling the fermentation time however) you could say that specially bred yeast or bacterium are available. Since it is a biological it could be reproduced and distributed quickly.

I defiantly do that in my Morrow game but advanced tech is commonplace there. The HMMWV would have needed a tremendously overhaul, most likely an engine swap to run on ethanol as it cannot run on Gasoline. The source books made another error on that fact.

I am going to look for a morrow project post i made on this a while ago. It was removed from rpghost in the great purge.

[kato13]

But here comes the good news. Ethanol.

Ethanol is produced naturally by many biological organisms. Its production is probably one of the most well documented chemical processes man has ever performed. The biggest problem is that natural ethanol production uses up raw materials (sugar) which could otherwise be used as food. The goal is production of ethanol from wood or agricultural waste (cellulose), this happens naturally on a small scale, but not at levels desired by industry. That is where scientists come in.

Through the use of genetic manipulation yeast and at least 3 bacterium have been shown to be able to produce significant amounts ethanol from cellulose. In case anyone wants to do any research they are Zymomonas mobilis, Clostridium thermocellum, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (bakers yeast), and Escherichia coli.


In my game Morrow scientists have developed what are considered to be the 2 Holy grails of ethanol production.

Species
Saccharomyces morrowis (ethanol resistant yeast used for sugar based ethanol production)
Able to survive up to a 25% ethanol solution.
Able to ferment to a 18% solution in 24 hours.
Minimal genetic Drift (this is important as yeast can mutate quickly)


Zymomonas morrowis (bacterium capable of processing both sugars and cellulose)
Able to survive up to a 15% ethanol solution.
Able to ferment to a 10% solution in 48 hours.
Able to enzymatically initiate Cellulose hydrolysis

The last note means the cellulose will require minimal pretreatment. Normally pretreatment requires sulfuric acid, which can be reused but complicates things, or an enzymatic solution which requires a constant supply of enzymes unless managed very carefully.

Both of these organisms would be fantastic for trade with any brewers. The Zymomonas would probably be the most valuable as only the largest or technologically advanced cities would have the infrastructure to process cellulose into ethanol, and if they were doing so it would be at great cost.

On to stills.

If you are using normal world technology T2K vastly overestimated the weight of an empty still IMHO. They are closer when compared to the weight of a still while in production.

A minimal still consists of the following
55 gal (208 L) steel drums. 31.8 kg empty (2)
fermentation lock (pressure valve) 4 kg
multi fuel barrel boiling units. 15kg
barrel bands, heating, electric 3kg
Mixing centrifugal pump 6kg
Ethanol Refining Tower 50 kg. (takes to 96% pure)
Molecular Sieve Ethanol Dehydrator w/ zeolite 50kg (takes to 100%)
Metal Piping 10kg
PVC piping 8kg
Hand Pump 8kg
Barrel Cooling Coil 5kg

Regular non genetic engineered yeast can reach a 8-10% alcohol solution in 40 hours. So theoretically in 2 days with just 2 drums (to allow transfer and collection) you could produce 10 liters a day (with morrow yeast you could triple that). At a weight under 250kg empty, 500kg full. And you can scale barrels up to about 15 before you need a another dehydrator and up to 50 before you need another Refinery tower and efficiency only goes up with larger scale.

Other equipment is needed for the material preparation (seed grinders, wood chippers, mashers etc) but I don't consider that to be the weight of the still.

I know that the T2k people wanted to keep things simple. and make a still a tough choice weight wise, but the real world numbers don't add up even when you factor in the ad hoc nature of most still construction in that world. They should have at least made quality options where price goes up as weight goes down.

Someday I will make a full document with stills and bio-diesel production kits with high/medium/low tech options but I have too much on my plate at the moment and as you can see I sometimes get trapped in the minutia and I still have a ton of research to do.

[Mohoender]

Everyone seem to have forgotten another point . Spain has plenty of vineyards, not to talk about France, Italy, California, Hungary, Chile, Australia (even Vermont as some and the guy makes a failry good ice wine) ...

That will produce a lot of ethanol and actually it already does. However, much less than 50 years ago as it has become a great sin to be drunk.

People are currently talking about second generation bioethanol gas using waste parts of the plants. I found that funny, as the industry with which I was working 15 years ago was already producing ethanol from the parts of grapes that remains when you are making wine. of course it was not fuel but still it was ethanol. Building what you need to do it is not that difficult getting a pure product is a little harder, then. The smell is hard too as the decaying process is fairly long but, after armageddon, who cares? Personnaly, I find insane to grow corn to make fuel; who is the jerk who came up with that idea.

Russia will be fine, tanks will run on vodka, and that won't change much for the crew.

For oil, you just need a stone basket and a round stone press . Every little village in the Douro Valley of Portugal still has one of these things.

In my own village of the south of France, I know at least 5 or 6 people who could produce one or another (in small quantity but they still can). I also bet that people living in some remote places of the US retain such capacity.

By the way, I'm not sure if it is the case with the Leclerc, but the AMX-30s were known to run on about anything but water.

I forgot one, I met an old man (probably dead by now) who whas making a terrific 78% calva from apple. That was not his strongest and trust me he didn't know anything about technology.