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The Future Of FuelA look at new energy sources for the road ahead |
5 Comments |
| By Joel Williams in Bicycles, BioFuel, Biodiesel, Energy, Fuel Cells, Green Living, Hybrids, Transportation, Travel | February 7, 2008 | ||
Cars are not friends of the environment, however many people can’t do without them. Having just moved to a place in the US with limited public transport, it has become apparent that some people just cannot do without. Thanks to high (well, higher than they’re used to) gasoline prices in the US, vehicle manufacturers have finally woken up to the fact that in order to sell more cars they’re going to have to produce ones that are cheaper to run and own. That usually means alternative fuel vehicles, but what are the options?
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Electric
The staple of sci-fi movies and failed entrepreneurial projects, electric-powered vehicles are often erroneously seen as the greenest of all alternative fuels. While producing no emissions is great, the way the electricity is generated is a cause for concern, as is the energy intensive battery production process. Power demands often outstrip supply in many parts of the world, or are almost at their limit. Increasing coal-powered electricity generating stations in order to power your electric car is just shifting where the pollution occurs. Generating the power through solar or wind energy makes this a much better proposition of course, but isn’t always feasible. Another problem with electric vehicles is the range – worrying when your battery is going to run out is not a pleasant situation to be in. This is where REEV (Range Extended Electric Vehicles) come in. As well as having an electric motor, these vehicles have a traditional (or more advanced) internal combustion engine that kicks in after the electric battery is drained. This isn’t used if your commute is short so you can still be emission free, but if a longer journey is required, or you forgot to charge up, the engine removes the “recharge anxiety” that previous electric-only vehicle owners have suffered. You will soon see more of these vehicles, especially those displaying the claim “150 miles per gallon”. This is worked on the basis that it’s zero mpg for the first ~50 miles – once the combustion engine kicks in it’s more likely to be (a still excellent) 60 mpg.
Biodiesel
Regular diesel is popular in Europe but not so in the US (for cars at least). However, most diesel vehicles are also capable of running biodiesel. Biodiesel is just the term used for diesel that is created from natural sources, usually processed vegetable oil and fats (note, this is not the same as using vegetable oil in your vehicle). Releasing about 60% less carbon dioxide than regular diesel, it does however have a slight increase in nitrogen oxide emissions. Minor conversions are needed for some diesel vehicles, but in the short-term switching to biodisel is one of the easiest and cheapest ways of reducing emissions. Due to increased diesel technology, you’ll see more of these vehicles in the next two years, particularly from the European manufacturers.
Biofuel
Biofuel – meaning fuel created from biomass (biological material), with the most common being ethanol (especially in Brazil) – is popular for many reasons. They’re much cleaner burning than gasoline; it can be made yourself (if you have the know-how of course); and also, critically, requires little change to the current refueling infrastructure and no real change in customer behavior. E85 ethanol is called such as it contains 85% ethanol and 15% regular gasoline. The gasoline is required for the engine to run properly, primarily in starting the vehicle. People are used to the way they fill up their tank now, and biofuel would not change that. It’s not all good news though; using crops such as rapeseed and corn to use as the biomass uses a lot of water, not to mention potential food, and also releases a lot of nitrogen. Alternative methods of production are being developed to address these problems, mainly using a technique known as plasma gasification. Particularly interesting is the tie-up of GM and Coskata creating ethanol from almost anything (just not glass or metal), including trash, and also potentially algae biodiesel production.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles emit only water vapor; they’re often used in buses and public transport at the moment. Several concept vehicles are on test (the Chevy Provoq for example) and some believe they will be very popular. Hydrogen is, of course, flammable (or is that inflammable?!), but contrary to some people’s belief it’s no more so than gasoline. The main problem with hydrogen fuel cells is that they run on compressed hydrogen and that isn’t exactly as readily available as electricity and gasoline. New pipelines and storage facilities need to be built, as they are currently only available in a few select regions (in the US). (Ed Note: Hydrogen is also energy intensive to produce, although research is underway on alternatives to current methods)
Natural gas
Natural gas vehicles are perhaps the least well known. Again, testing is primarily being done with public transport buses in metropolitan areas. Often known as a PZEV (Partial-Zero Emission Vehicle), natural gas-powered vehicles, such as the Honda Civic GX NGV, are on your roads today. They cost half the price to fill up, but they get less mileage and the tank takes up a lot of luggage space. Besides suffering from a lack of available places to refuel currently, they are also still using up fossil fuels. However, the technology isn’t as expensive as other options and is available now.
So what’s the future of fuel? No one knows! Car manufacturers are hedging their bets, with companies such as GM producing different vehicles for different fuels. One thing is for certain, demand is increasing and alternatives are at last being aggressively sought. I’m sure when you fill up, you think, “there’s got to be a better and cheaper way than this” – well there is, and if it’s not available now, it will be in the next year or two.
Joel Williams writes for Life Goggles, a site that features eco-friendly product reviews, green news and interviews.
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Matt said,
Its an interesting discussion but you are way too dismissive of electric cars without any facts to back it up. Your statement “Power demands often outstrip supply in many parts of the world, or are almost at their limit. Increasing coal-powered electricity generating stations in order to power your electric car is just shifting where the pollution occurs.” is poorly researched and based on some pretty big misconceptions. Electric cars even when powered by coal use a third of the CO2 and half the energy of a Toyota Prius (http://www.teslamotors.com/efficiency/well_to_wheel.php) or compared to a sports car are 6 times more efficient and use 1 tenth of the CO2. Sure the pollution isn’t right behind you but you are creating drastically less of it. Its also much easier to clean up one or two power plants than it is to clean up thousands of cars, as the grid mix gets cleaner so does your car. As for increased strain on power stations- since electric cars are generally charged overnight (typically 6-8 hour recharge) it is simple to have them charge only when the electrical grid is off peak demand. No additional capacity is required since the demand curve drops pretty steeply at night. Electric cars would actually allow power plants to run more efficiently as they would help smooth out the 24hr load curves, this would optimise the potential of the current system compared to hydrogen which requires a whole new infrastructure.
Unless you are planning on travelling interstate there would be no reason to worry about running out of charge. Even a well made DIY conversion using lead acid batteries can be capable of a 60 mile range per day, with new technologies giving 250 miles, which is above and beyond the limits of most cities and would suit the vast majority of drivers without any difficulty. whatsoever. Often the range of electric cars are off putting when compared to ICE vehicles but you ‘fill them up’ every night in your own home not once a week, so they only need enough range to do your daily driving. If you are honest with yourself most people will find it hard to think of the last time they drove more than 60 miles in a single day, and if they keep a second gas car just for holidays then they can get the best of both worlds.
When you look at the most efficient use of resources battery-electric cars are by far the best solution.
Joel said,
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your reply, very interesting. I am in no way dismissive of electric vehicles, merely trying to highlight the downsides to a potentially very exciting technology. I appreciate your comments about the increased efficiency which is one I neglected to mention. We’re a long way away from the problems of owning electric vehicles could cause – I don’t believe that everyone will charge them overnight but only time will tell.
You’re obviously more au fait with the battery technology than I, but most mainstream car manufacturers, due to cost, seem to aiming at a 40 mile battery. Whilst I still do not drive this amount every day, I used to commute 45 miles and have street parking which would make owning an electric vehicle problematic. I agree that new technology and investment would help this.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to own a battery electric car (when I get a car), but looking even further ahead than my quick round up, water, or even air power would be preferable. I don’t personally believe hydrogen will catch on, see ethanol and biofuels as a short term thing (20 – 30 years) so electric IMHO will be the short term “winner”.
wayne said,
dear matt
my name is wayne i am a college student and i need to know how to work a car with daisy chains???
please help me out
Jack said,
I have to disagree with Matt on this one. You can’t base a prediction on entirely unpredictable population on what you consider to be the normal situation. Consider that at night, power is used to run lights and facilities that wait for the “peak demand” to go down. You may turn your lights off at home when you go to bed and sure, there is a significant reduction in power usage, but there are still many things that go on at night. Lights are turned off for the day as there is natural light and solar powered signs and lights cut down on power consumption during the day. So let’s say the see-saw is pretty balanced.
It’s also hard to expect the average person to create a new routine for vehicles. As you say, new infrastructure is more expensive and harder to create, but if you can use the existing infrastructure, the cost of the supplied fuel as well becomes cheaper. Therefore, it costs less to run your car on this cheaper alternative. Natural gas is already dominating overseas and it is very efficient. Even the Tesla Roadstar your article has statistics on uses Natural Gas. Pure battery driven cars are more of a large toy than anything else. Batteries take a lot of power to produce and they go bad eventually. Combine your increase to your power bill and the nature of batteries to eventually die and put that on a one year timeline; you will be spending a lot on batteries and electric bills. What if Joe Somebody didn’t plug his car in at night? Or something happens, and they need to charge again during the day? This is more likely than every nuclear family plugging the car into the wall every day. BTW, plugging into the wall is still getting electricity from coal-burning power plants and therefore, still creates pollution in the same way that running your refrigerator does.
Don’t forget about the huge population that lives in housing with public parking like an apartment complex. They wouldn’t have access to power plugs in the parking lot, nor would it be easy to regulate who’s using power from whose apartment, unless you install power plugs that take money, and then you’d have to provide enough for everyone. I’m not dismissing batteries altogether, but I agree with Joel; batteries seem to just be a short term “winner.” They’re more of a back-up system than a primary power source and they would be entirely too much work to change the entire population over to.
I’m not sure that any of the current technologies (pun) will win out on the energy battle. i think there are many more variables to be considered and it will take some time regardless to have the populace adapt to something new. This is why, whatever the new alternative power source may be, it will most likely be something easily converted from the existing system.
Matt said,
@Joel
Why do you think a water or air car is more preferable than electric? They are all ‘charged’ by the same power grid, its just whether its via a battery charger or electric compressor. Surely the most efficient is the most useful? I am open to either of those options (pragmatically) but I haven’t seen anything which suggests they are more efficient that BEV’s, in fact I haven’t seen any mention of their efficiency You have to realise that nearly all renewable alternatives are about energy storage not ‘power’, hydrogen, air, battery, they aren’t sources they are storage devices. They will all have a bigger impact on the grid.
As you said that 40 mile range is simply a cost issue, there is no-one who is mass producing appropriately sized batteries for an electric car so they are (at the moment) quite expensive. But once the people, for whom a 40 mile range is fine, start to buy them, that market justifies mass production to drive down cost. Thus longer range for the same cost.
@Jack
Lets say you have 10 power plants that have to run at 95% capacity at the peak time of 3-5pm. At midnight they would probably be running at more like 60%. So you can increase the load by 35% with more cars (a huge amount) without a change in peak load which wouldn’t require any infrastructure changes, just more coal getting burned at night. Check out this graph for what I’m talking about (http://www.diyelectriccar.com/blogs/assets_c/2008/02/OffPeakPower-thumb-350×240.jpg)
Sure there will be odd sheep who charge in the middle of the day, but many EV owners opt to off set their EV’s use with solar panels as well I think would probably more or less equal it out. Either way your not going to see a substantial increase in peak load.
An entire natural gas fleet would require a substantial increase in infrastructure and would be less efficient to directly run a car than if you use it to make electricity to power a BEV.
Its easy to expect people to get into a new routine if its easier than the old one. How hard is it to plug in your vacuum cleaner, especially if it didn’t sat in one spot and had a dedicated power point. You would even need to think about it after a week. Then try and convince the same person to drive somewhere else, watch the price go up and down (and generally up) and wait in line then stand there while the car fills up then go inside and pay for it.
Electric cars after they are paid for are around 50% cheaper to own and run compared to an ICE, they don’t need servicing aside from tire rotation and brakes. Their ‘fuel’ is dramatically cheaper and battery packs last between 4-15 years depending on the chemistry. The electric car i’m planning to build will cost me about $40 (batteries replaced every 5 years & charging costs) compared to $60 just for fuel for my ICE (got to add servicing, parts breaking etc).
If Joe Sombody forgets to charge his car at night then he will feel very silly and embarrassed in the morning when he needs a taxi to get to work and won’t do it again. It would be like locking your keys in the car. You make the mistake once and (hopefully) never again. Very few people will charge during the day, the vast majority will be off peak. Compare this to hydrogen or compressed air production which would probably run mainly during the day (if not 24hr), BEVs are better in that sense too.
As for facilities, once the people with garages have electric cars then it would be fairly easy to lobby for the infrastructure to add some outdoor power points near apartments, workplaces etc. But lots of people do have garages so lets get them to stop using 3-6 times more C02 per mile first and then make some simple points to connect in parking lots etc. It would be just like a parking meter except you are actually getting something for you money rather than just paying for the space. Don’t tell me it would be hard to design/ install a parking meter with a power point and meter. Again compare this to the chicken before the egg paradox of hydrogen, or adding substantially more Natural gas capacity) it makes more sense. I think within 15 years it would be possible and not very expensive to make it possible and easy for every person who drives less than say 100 miles a day to have an electric car that met all of their needs. Then when they have actually made hydrogen or air cars which have advantages for distance travel then hire companies or people who really need then can also get one of the alternative alternative vehicles for those trips.
Sorry this is so long but you asked a lot, i’m not inherently tied to electric cars, its just I am a pragmatist so for me the most efficient wins. I have researched a fair bit and EVs (besides range) seem to always come out on top.