It's not clean and certainly not green - it's a coal-powered Caddy
by Sam Abuelsamid on Jan 6th 2009 at 12:02PM 
The legacy of experimentation with alternative fuels to gasoline is nothing new. It started back in the earliest days of the car in the late 19th century. Alternatives to piston engines are also not new, although none but the Wankel rotary have had any notable commercial success. Starting back in the 1950s, there was a lot of interest in trying to run cars on turbine engines. Turbines had some inherent advantages,including high power density and, most importantly, the ability to run on virtually anything combustible. In the wake of the first Middle East oil embargo, the search for gas alternatives heated up again, and the engineers at General Motors came up with a novel idea: a coal-powered Caddy. The US had plenty of coal, after all, and GM had a turbine engine. The General's engineers therefore built a Cadillac Eldorado with a turbine engine that ran on powdered coal. As a proof of concept, it worked. The car ran fine. As a practical alternative? Not so much. The coal powder was messy and difficult to handle and the engines produced high NOx emissions. Then there was that pesky problem of a re-fueling infrastructure. Where have we heard that one before?
[Source: New York Times]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Norton 12:21PM (1/06/2009)
If you got into a wreck you would be black
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Mulad 2:39PM (1/06/2009)
Nifty! (Well, sorta, considering all the issues.)
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GoodCheer 6:37PM (1/06/2009)
Never mind the NOx (ok, well, mind that too), think of all the mercury and arsenic a highway full of those things would have put out. There would have been dead zones all along the highways by now.
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Chris M 12:12AM (1/07/2009)
Another problem is fly ash, it would be abrasive on the turbine blades, making for fairly frequent repairs and maintenance. Then add in the regular turbine problems of high cost and slow throttle response and noise, and it becomes quite obvious why this idea never went anywhere.
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john riley 11:19AM (1/07/2009)
Re slow throttle response: maybe not an issue if the turbine was used in a hybrid?
Woodenbee 9:30AM (1/07/2009)
It's interesting to see how the bigwigs haven't changed their thinking in 30 years, "oh you want alternative look at all this "clean coal" we have, why don't you joe sixpacks buy that from us?" and what is with these people that all they can think to contribute is what if you were in a wreck? if you don't want to wreck don't drive cars, duh!
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Carney 4:35PM (1/09/2009)
Coal can be turned into methanol, which burns much more cleanly. No NOx emissions, no ozone smog, no smoke/soot/particulate matter at all. You do still have CO2, but still way better than coal itself.
And it's more convenient being a liquid a room temperature and atmospheric pressure.
And since the invention of flex fuel in 1986, we can have cars that can run just as easily on both methanol or gasoline, in any mix or none. And since methanol is the simplest alcohol, a methanol FFV can run any higher alcohol too, including ethanol.
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