Pour A Shot Of Tequila-In Your Gas Tank



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

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"ethanol like alcohol"

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.
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Agave plants are slow growing (as you might expect of a desert plant) and require 8-12 years to mature to the point the pinas are big enough to flower and harvest for making booze. Which means that only one eighth of your planted acreage could be harvested in a given year - whether you are considering the planted acreage of one planter or the agave production of the whole world. Even in Mexico, agave can only be grown here and there in about one third of Mexico's land area. (Tequila, as registered Denomination of Origin product, can only be made from a specific variety of agave from a handful of states and localities.)

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.
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Bad idea.

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.
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