Green Daily

Methanol fuel can be made from any biomass without exception, such as urban trash, sewage, weed plants, crop residues, etc. - your imagination is the only limit.

Ford invented "flex fuel" cars that can run on methanol or gasoline with equal ease in 1986. Adding this ability costs about $100 more when done by the automaker - some better materials in the fuel line and fuel tank, a sensor to determine the fuel mix, a re-programmed electronic fuel injector, and that's it. A lot easier than the major conversion effort described in the article.

Flex fuel cars already sell today, although they are only certified for ethanol, which currently can be made only from the starchy or sugary parts of certain plants rather than any biomass as with methanol - and a methanol car can run any of the higher alcohols including ethanol. In fact they quietly out-sell hybrids several-fold.

But they're still only 3% of the auto market and thus alcohol fuel pumps are scarce; FFVs mostly just burn gasoline like other cars. If Congress passed a law mandating that all new cars have this feature standard, like seatbelts, there'd be a market for alcohol fuel, including trash-derived methanol.

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