Russell,

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 19:01:16 +1200, Russell McMahon wrote:

>...<
> Extracted from various place in my "energy" file with no attempt to 
> give them context.
> 
> There are a few contradictory figures here but overall it gives a 
> reasonable indication.
> 
> Hydrogen is king :-)

And completely pollution free!

> Ethanol has over 25% more energy per than Methanol but is well down on 
> liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
> Anthracite is better than alcohols (but really hard on the injectors).

LOL!  When I was a kid we had an anthracite boiler in the kitchen - it used bean-sized pieces that fed down 
from a hopper "automatically".  The main maintenance item was removing the clinker, which formed a 
pancake-sized mass, every coupld of days.  Otherwise just topping up the hopper was all that was needed.

> Interestingly, diesel is notably higher in energy content than petrol 
> (depending which of my 'data' you believe :-( ) -  and is far cheaper 
> per volume in this country than petrol

Sadly not everywhere - it used to be a lot cheaper here, but it's now a few pence a litre more expensive than 
ordinary petrol.

> - and "super" petrol is  slightly lower in energy content than standard grade ie octane rating, 
> which relates to resistance to compression ignition, and energy 
> content are not well correlated,

A lot of people don't realise that - the octane rating is nothing to do with the power produced.  In the days 
when we had four "star" ratings of petrol, from about 91 to 101 octane, some people would use higher grades 
then they needed because they thought it was more powerful, or did the car good in some way!  In fact you 
should use the lowest grade that will run happily (without "pinking" or detonation).

Cheers,



Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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