It fuels your party, your buzz and your hangover the next day, but believe it or not tequila may soon be fueling your car. That's because the agave plant extract used to make liquor can also be used to make an ethanol like alcohol which can serve as vehicle fuel, won't interfere with food crops, and can even be grown in the desert. Someday, our cars may hit the bottle more often than we do, but at least it won't be hitting our wallets very hard.
Link Image via Wikimedia Commons
So are we short on tequila or not? Either way can we stop burning it?
"In 2006, the Bush administration introduced new regulations to begin substituting gasoline with biofuels made from corn-based ethanol, the idea being to ease America's dependency on foreign oil. One side effect was that ethanol prices skyrocketed to the point that farmers in Mexico started abandoning their old crops in favor of corn to ship off to the U.S.
Unfortunately, this included destroying crops of agave cactus (from which tequila is made) by setting them on fire, because that's how they roll in Mexico."
Requires tons of energy (heat) to extract alcohol from agave. More than corn, which is already requires more energy than can be produced.
Ethanol only makes money because of subsidies.
Most biofuels proposals are dubious and make little sense, but this one is just pure nonsense. You would use alcohol from agave plants to power your car to get from one part of a post-Apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel to another, because there was literally nothing else to use as fuel, not as part of a viable civilization.
Uh, it IS ethanol. That's "drinking" alcohol, the same ingredient that gives ALL our alcoholic beverages their kick.
And you can ferment the sap from maple trees, too, but nobody's going to call it an alternative fuel source.