Biofuel Cars: How They Run From Green Fuel

Biofuel cars are any cars that run on fuel that isn’t derived from refining crude oil – meaning rock oil or petroleum.  Biofuel cars are generating a fair amount of interest these days as the world becomes aware of the limited nature of petroleum supplies.  

So What About Biofuel Cars?

To let you in on a little secret, nearly all diesel powered cars can be biofuel cars.  Biodiesel, or diesel sourced from plant or animal mass rather than the usual process, can be used in any regular diesel engine (yes, even my Mazda truck). The performance of biodiesel cars if they are running on pure biodiesel (which is labelled B100) is not quite as peppy as those running on a blend of biodiesel and regular diesel, and owners have noticed that straight biodiesel is a bit more corrosive than regular, so gaskets and rubber hoses may need to be replaced more often, especially in older cars.  But you can bet your bottom dollar that car companies are working on modifying their regular diesel engine cars so that all their cars can be called “biofuel cars” and marketed as being environmentally friendly.

Biodiesel For Use in Petrol Powered Cars

But what about petrol engines?  Can petrol engine cars be biofuel cars without modification?  Well, sort of.

Petrol engine cars can be semi-biofuel cars if they run on a blend of petrol and ethanol.  Ethanol is an alcohol derived from plant sugars and is very easily produced, so it certainly qualifies as a biofuel. Ethanol blends can be bought at the pump in Australia.  Pure ethanol is labelled and sold as E100, while a blend of 30% ethanol and 70% petrol is labelled E30.  In Australia, E10 is the ethanol blend sold most commonly at the petrol pumps. Again, this fuel runs in your engine and creates a little more wear and tear than other types of energy but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and more kind to the environment.

Other Types of Biodiesel For Use in Cars

But other biofuel cars are out there.  These are the ones that need modification to be able to run.  Biofuel cars that have been specially modified include those that run on:

• straight vegetable oil,
• methane (also known as landfill gas – in compressed form, this is already used in modified cars as CNG or compressed natural gas),
• wood gas (these cars need to have a special burner attached via a trailer or similar to burn the wood chips/sawdust needed to power the cars).

Biofuels in general are considered more carbon neutral.  Yes, they do put out some carbon as they’re burned (and the exhaust is still bad for air quality and contains some poisonous gases, depending on the actual biofuel used), but as that carbon was around in the atmosphere just a few years ago before it was used by a plant (or algae, in the case of algae biodiesel), burning biofuel doesn’t add any new carbon into the atmosphere.  This is not the case with crude oil, which releases carbon into the atmosphere that has been trapped under rocks for goodness knows how long, thus adding to the total carbon in the atmosphere.

Of course, it’s not just biofuel cars that are generating interest.  Biofuel buses and even biofuel aeroplanes are also hot topics and an area receiving a lot of research attention.