Talk:Alternative fuel vehicle

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The article contains the following observation :

The term "'Alternative Fuel Cars' refers to cars that run on Alternative fuel; any method of powering an engine that does not involve petroleum. The term car may be used for different types of vehicles, starting from light three wheeled vehicles to road trains".

There is no method of fueling an (internal combustion) engine which does not somewhere along the line involve petroleum. The only question is that of degree. Often this involvement is behind the scene and must be dug into persistently rather than simply seen immediatley or off-hand.

Other types of alternatively fueled engines exist which in a similar fashion obscure their dependence -- to one degree or another -- on petroleum.

That's an odd statement. I guess if you look far enough back along the chain, you'll find something that wouldn't have happened without petroleum - but it's a bit of a stretch. If I fuel my car with propane gas (as my father did for many years) - I'd be using an alternative fuel in a regular internal combustion engine. The propane might have been made as a byproduct of petroleum distillation - but a lot of propane is extracted from natural gas - which is totally unrelated to petroleum - there are plenty of natural gas wells that produce no oil whatever. So if my local source of propane happens to come from natural gas then no petroleum was directly involved.

I guess you are going to argue that the truck that delivered the propane to the dealer was fuelled by petroleum products - or that the man who runs the propane extraction stage at the natural gas well drove to work in a petroleum vehicle or that the paint on the propane storage tank was made from oil. Therefore (you will probably argue) petroleum was involved somehow in the process. But that's a ludicrous argument - you might as well say that there are no alternative fuels that don't rely on cheese because the guy who runs the propane production plant eats cheese sandwiches for his lunch. Everything on the entire planet has some connection (however tenuous) to everything else on the planet. So if you are arguing for a really indirect connection then this is a true-ism - it's so obvious that it doesn't need to be said.

So let's assume you aren't talking about really indirect contributions from petroleum. In that case, you are definitely wrong. There are hydrogen-fuelled cars that get their hydrogen by the electrolysis of water using electricity that comes from nuclear power which in turn is fuelled by uranium isotopes that are obtained by refining naturally occurring uranium using gas-centrifuges that are powered by electricity that comes from other nuclear power stations. This would be an example of an alternative fuel (Hydrogen) which is burned in an internal combustion engine - where no petroleum whatever was directly involved in the production process. Of course you could argue that the bearings on the gas centrifuge were lubricated with oil that was refined from petroleum...but as I said, if you are looking at such indirect sources then you might equally argue that all cars are run on fuels that are ultimately derived from cheese - which is not something worth mentioning.

SteveBaker 22:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Photo locations

I moved some of the photos around, and cleaned up a couple of the links. I don't think that all the photos needed to be on the right-hand side. I think this makes the article a little more visually interesting. Bry9000 (talk) 05:36, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Brazilianethanolposter.JPG

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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)