A little "news" piece from Clayton B. Cornell over at Gas 2.0:
Ford Motor company announced today it would be offering a new range of alternative-fuel vehicles by early 2010, powered by what some think is the US’s only hope for energy independence: coal.
Ford says that it will be converting the massive amount of empty storage space found on their larger trucks into mobile coal-storage and processing containers:
| “We’ve done some serious research on coal—since it will be the 21st century’s predominant fuel—and we’ve come up with some interesting results. For example, in extensive polling, we found that American’s don’t really care which fuel they use, as long as it’s cheap. Coal is by far the cheapest source of domestic energy we’ve got. Second, we also found that 98% of the bed space in our large trucks goes unused about 100% of the time. So, we just put two and two together.” |
The company estimates that an F-350 could haul about 1,000 lbs of coal without any noticeable sag. Raw coal (yeah, the black blocky-looking stuff) will be fed into the bed of the truck were it will be processed by an onboard coal gasifier.
(To read the whole post, head on over to Gas 2.0)
Edited by stins - Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:40:19 GMT
