My Sportage did something similar, but it was a LOT of white smoke. Turned out to be a bad fuel injector that was allowing too much fuel to squirt into the engine, it couldn't burn it all and thus the white smoke. I could rev the engine higher and it would run better because at higher

revs it was better able to use the extra gas.

You might check the injectors, I'm not sure how you would do that though on the Sporty. What I did was removed all my injectors, had them professionally cleaned (the guy used some special ultrasonic injector cleaner machine) and refurbished to supposedly like-new condition, after I put them back in the problem was gone and it ran smoother than I ever could remember.

just an idea

Another idea off the top of my head, you could have a blown head gasket or cracked block or head, causing water to enter the cylinder thus the smoke.

Maybe try this, remove the radiator cap and start her up, let the engine warm up enough that the thermostat opens up so your water pump is circulating water, and watch for bubbles in the radiator fluid. Often times a blown head gasket or cracked block will cause exhaust gas to push its way into the water jacket and then you see little bubbles coming up from in the radiator. I saw this on my friend's Geo that had a cracked block, it was funny <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/drunk.gif" alt="" /> but he kept driving it that way for a long time lol...

Another thing, I guess it could be oil, but usually oil smoke looks blue or black, but it can be hard to tell. This one is the easiest of all, you just check your oil regularly and see if it is disappearing... That is, unless you ALSO have an oil leak, then it can be hard to tell which place the oil is going <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/shiner.gif" alt="" />

Last but not least, you could also try to check that every cylinder is getting spark, if one cylinder is not getting spark then the fuel would not ignite, and might cause white smoke as the unburned fuel exits the exhaust. Unfortunately it's harder on the sportage to tell if you are getting spark or not, on most cars you would just hook each spark plug wire to a tester or an extra spark plug (touching the block to ground it) and verify that you see a spark. On the Sportage I don't know how you would check this since the spark plugs have those funky coil-on-plug setups. You could have a cylinder not getting spark due to a bad wire, or arcing, or heck you could have a bad COIL which would make 2 cylinders not get spark! <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/scared.gif" alt="" />

So yeah, good luck with that, sucks to be you right now <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/cheers.gif" alt="" />