Seems they are skipping over the bits that that electric cars don’t work, and ethanol as a system, doubles the amount of CO2 released (which is the only pollutant folks worry about anymore) and doesn’t save any fossil fuels.
Details I guess.
😉
Ethanol seems more interesting as an energy independence strategy than as a CO2-reduction strategy. I was interested to see today’s announcement of a breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol production by Mascoma Corp (click my name for the link). Cellulosic ethanol may turn out to have technical advantages over corn ethanol, but I doubt it’ll have the same political advantages, and it will be difficult for it to compete in the market with subsidized corn ethanol.
I am so not buying it. This smells like “global warming” science, where you cut ‘n’ paste various true things together in a plausible, but hardly unique, way, and call it science, which it ain’t. Science is not about what might be true — that’s called “speculation” — but what must be true.
I can’t get the Science article, not being in the right place, but I’m guessing the rat in the woodpile is right here:
primarily due to the higher efficiency of the all-electric drive
Especially in stop ‘n’ go driving, right? Hmm. Now, how’s that going to work out for long-distance driving, of which there is quite a lot, particularly in the industrial delivery business (e.g. trucking) or just for people not in the densely urban Northeast? Are there any all-electric vehicles for that purpose? Why, no, there are not. There aren’t even electric locomotives in the West. Nor are there going to be, the problems with battery capacity and charging time being what they are.
I thought Zubrin’s responses were pretty good, however. If he’s right about the cost of adding “flex fuel” ability to new cars ($100-200 he says) then that’s a damn good idea. It would hugely reduce the barriers to adoption of alternative hydrocarbons, and let the market sort out which is best, because everyone who had a bright idea for a new combustible would have a fleet of cars standing by who might try it, if the price and mileage are right.
Of course, it doesn’t do dick for the unions or various “green energy” tax-eaters, so don’t look to Team Obama and the Payolacrats for such wisdom.
Carl, you don’t have pure electric locomotives in the west, but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives. So the electric is there, just using locally generated electric power.
The benefit of an all-electric drive is more than just regenerative breaking for stop and go traffic, or other places where the geometry of the area leads to sudden acceleration/deceleration (mountainous terrain, sinuous roads, etc). If you have direct power to the wheels you reduce transmission losses as well.
I think Zubrin is wrong. The future will be electric. It provides true independence from the energy source. The technology is good enough to make a Tesla Roadster or Model S using presently available mass-market batteries and there are better, not to mention cheaper, batteries in the lab right now with no obvious limits to growth.
I believe in the next generation all cars will have an electric drive train and engine, with energy storage being provided either by hydrocarbons, batteries, or both. Possible hydrocarbon energy generators units IMO will be more compact than present ICE and could be Wankel engines, turbines, or SOFT fuel cells.
s/SOFT/SOFC/
“but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives”
Yea, just start calling them “hybrids” and everyone will marvel at the transportation of the future.
“will be more compact than present ICE and could be Wankel engines, turbines”
Which unfortunately are not as mature technologies as piston powered combustion and the wankels and turbines that are currently available on commercial scales don’t get very good fuel economy. The Mazda RX-8 gets 15-18 mpg on the highway — terrible. Chrysler had turbine powered cards in the 60’s and only got around 18 mpg. That is on gasoline mind you so it would be much worse with lower energy density fuels.
To me a better hybrid would be one that couples steam power with gasoline combustion. I believe BMW has a prototype that recycles the wasted heat through the exhaust into a boiler which feeds steam into an extra set of cylinders. Aircraft have long used water injection to boost power such as the Harrier for instance.
With power comes economy as Top Gear demonstrated when they raced a BMW M3 against a Prius until the first one ran out of Gas. All the M3 had to do was keep up on the Prius’s back bumper. The Prius was getting about 17 mpg while the BMW was averaging 19
This begs the question of what will people really do when they get their wonderful save the planet green machine. Are they really going to drive barefoot so they can press the gas peddle with their pinky toe and pray to Gaia that they get 100 mpg today. No, they are going to flog their cars, ride peoples ass, and race to red lights like they always do. Plugin hybrids are a joke cause no one is ever going to religiously plug in the damn thing every where they go. I have hard enough time keeping my cell phone charged up half the time.
Really the only serious green solution that seems practical to me is to build nuke plants, crack water, and start mining platinum.
Ethanol strikes me as a dead end. If you are going to make liquid fuel from biomass, you want to preserve as many of the carbon-carbon bonds in the original material as you can (since breaking them and forming new molecules tends to dissipate energy as low value waste heat).
So, look for biofuel systems that break cellulose into simple sugars or sugar-like monomers, then transform those sugars by removal of oxygen and addition of hydrogen. As an example, a two-step chemical process that converts cellulose to 2,5 dimethyl furan looks interesting, pending further yield optimization.
The Mazda RX-8 gets 15-18 mpg on the highway — terrible. Chrysler had turbine powered cards in the 60’s and only got around 18 mpg.
Yeah, I know the deal with turbine engine fuel consumption. You just need to compare a Leopard 2 with an M1 to see the difference. Wankel engines are somewhere in between a turbine engine and a piston engine. My point was that by that time most power should come from the batteries, and the combustion engine is just an emergency power unit. The less weight it takes the better. Hybrids currently use small piston engines, but I suspect piston engines will eventually be considered too heavy.
If you ignore global warming, there is plenty of hydrocarbon fuel that can be extracted from coal or gas via Fischer-Tropsch. IMO hydrogen powered vehicles are crap. Electrics have one problem: the battery. While hydrogen vehicles have several problems: tankage, fuel cell power pack, cheap generation.
More nuke plants are always good.
“My point was that by that time most power should come from the batteries”
Ah, yea more like an APU, I got ya.
I do have to admit though that this creation by a Ford engineer is pretty cool. It is this sort of stuff that was promised to us by the car shows in the ’50s. I say bring it on.
Carl, you don’t have pure electric locomotives in the west, but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives. So the electric is there, just using locally generated electric power
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? No one doubts an electric engine is a far more efficient and reliable thing than a combustion engine. The problem is that when you engineer an entire car, you can’t just consider the efficiencies of the engine. You’ve got to consider how efficient it is to bring along your fuel, and, unfortunately, the immense penatlies incurred by all our known ways of storing electricity for mobile use, versus liquid reactants for an IC engine, mean burning hydrocarbons are the way to go. Even for those locomotives.
If you want to ask me, I think the far future belongs to fuel cells with nano-engineered membranes. If you can build a membrane permeable to only one charged species — and this is (1) thermodynamically possible, and more to the point (2) already routinely done by living systems, then you can split apart any redox reaction (e.g. hydrocarbon + O2) so that the flow of electrons has to go through an external circuit, and there you go: all the advantages of carrying your energy supply as a compact liquid, plus all the advantages of using electricity to generate motion. You could only do better by generation the motion directly from the chemical reaction, the way muscles do. (That may come too, but I’m thinking it will prove easier to engineer membranes permeable to one species only than to do the microscale mechanical engineering implicit in building artificial muscles.)
This crap about carbon footprints is going to be the child-abduction milk-carton fetish of the 00s, maybe 10s, that’s all. Fundamentally, from the thermodynamic point of view, it’s a total dead end. There’s no way to get your energy more efficiently, when you live at the bottom of a giant lake of oxidizer (atmospheric O2), than to allow things to oxidize, and given the existence of a massive carbon cycle already in use by the animal and plant world, it makes zero sense not to simply tap into that, divert some of the stream to power our own machines.
The solution, if one needs to be found, to dumping excess CO2 in the atmosphere, will be adding to the adsorption of CO2 so that things balance out. It’s not like that’s hard. Growing a lot of green plants will do just fine.
Seems they are skipping over the bits that that electric cars don’t work, and ethanol as a system, doubles the amount of CO2 released (which is the only pollutant folks worry about anymore) and doesn’t save any fossil fuels.
Details I guess.
😉
Ethanol seems more interesting as an energy independence strategy than as a CO2-reduction strategy. I was interested to see today’s announcement of a breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol production by Mascoma Corp (click my name for the link). Cellulosic ethanol may turn out to have technical advantages over corn ethanol, but I doubt it’ll have the same political advantages, and it will be difficult for it to compete in the market with subsidized corn ethanol.
I am so not buying it. This smells like “global warming” science, where you cut ‘n’ paste various true things together in a plausible, but hardly unique, way, and call it science, which it ain’t. Science is not about what might be true — that’s called “speculation” — but what must be true.
I can’t get the Science article, not being in the right place, but I’m guessing the rat in the woodpile is right here:
primarily due to the higher efficiency of the all-electric drive
Especially in stop ‘n’ go driving, right? Hmm. Now, how’s that going to work out for long-distance driving, of which there is quite a lot, particularly in the industrial delivery business (e.g. trucking) or just for people not in the densely urban Northeast? Are there any all-electric vehicles for that purpose? Why, no, there are not. There aren’t even electric locomotives in the West. Nor are there going to be, the problems with battery capacity and charging time being what they are.
I thought Zubrin’s responses were pretty good, however. If he’s right about the cost of adding “flex fuel” ability to new cars ($100-200 he says) then that’s a damn good idea. It would hugely reduce the barriers to adoption of alternative hydrocarbons, and let the market sort out which is best, because everyone who had a bright idea for a new combustible would have a fleet of cars standing by who might try it, if the price and mileage are right.
Of course, it doesn’t do dick for the unions or various “green energy” tax-eaters, so don’t look to Team Obama and the Payolacrats for such wisdom.
Carl, you don’t have pure electric locomotives in the west, but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives. So the electric is there, just using locally generated electric power.
The benefit of an all-electric drive is more than just regenerative breaking for stop and go traffic, or other places where the geometry of the area leads to sudden acceleration/deceleration (mountainous terrain, sinuous roads, etc). If you have direct power to the wheels you reduce transmission losses as well.
I think Zubrin is wrong. The future will be electric. It provides true independence from the energy source. The technology is good enough to make a Tesla Roadster or Model S using presently available mass-market batteries and there are better, not to mention cheaper, batteries in the lab right now with no obvious limits to growth.
I believe in the next generation all cars will have an electric drive train and engine, with energy storage being provided either by hydrocarbons, batteries, or both. Possible hydrocarbon energy generators units IMO will be more compact than present ICE and could be Wankel engines, turbines, or SOFT fuel cells.
s/SOFT/SOFC/
“but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives”
Yea, just start calling them “hybrids” and everyone will marvel at the transportation of the future.
“will be more compact than present ICE and could be Wankel engines, turbines”
Which unfortunately are not as mature technologies as piston powered combustion and the wankels and turbines that are currently available on commercial scales don’t get very good fuel economy. The Mazda RX-8 gets 15-18 mpg on the highway — terrible. Chrysler had turbine powered cards in the 60’s and only got around 18 mpg. That is on gasoline mind you so it would be much worse with lower energy density fuels.
To me a better hybrid would be one that couples steam power with gasoline combustion. I believe BMW has a prototype that recycles the wasted heat through the exhaust into a boiler which feeds steam into an extra set of cylinders. Aircraft have long used water injection to boost power such as the Harrier for instance.
With power comes economy as Top Gear demonstrated when they raced a BMW M3 against a Prius until the first one ran out of Gas. All the M3 had to do was keep up on the Prius’s back bumper. The Prius was getting about 17 mpg while the BMW was averaging 19
This begs the question of what will people really do when they get their wonderful save the planet green machine. Are they really going to drive barefoot so they can press the gas peddle with their pinky toe and pray to Gaia that they get 100 mpg today. No, they are going to flog their cars, ride peoples ass, and race to red lights like they always do. Plugin hybrids are a joke cause no one is ever going to religiously plug in the damn thing every where they go. I have hard enough time keeping my cell phone charged up half the time.
Really the only serious green solution that seems practical to me is to build nuke plants, crack water, and start mining platinum.
Ethanol strikes me as a dead end. If you are going to make liquid fuel from biomass, you want to preserve as many of the carbon-carbon bonds in the original material as you can (since breaking them and forming new molecules tends to dissipate energy as low value waste heat).
So, look for biofuel systems that break cellulose into simple sugars or sugar-like monomers, then transform those sugars by removal of oxygen and addition of hydrogen. As an example, a two-step chemical process that converts cellulose to 2,5 dimethyl furan looks interesting, pending further yield optimization.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/02/researchers-dev.html
The Mazda RX-8 gets 15-18 mpg on the highway — terrible. Chrysler had turbine powered cards in the 60’s and only got around 18 mpg.
Yeah, I know the deal with turbine engine fuel consumption. You just need to compare a Leopard 2 with an M1 to see the difference. Wankel engines are somewhere in between a turbine engine and a piston engine. My point was that by that time most power should come from the batteries, and the combustion engine is just an emergency power unit. The less weight it takes the better. Hybrids currently use small piston engines, but I suspect piston engines will eventually be considered too heavy.
If you ignore global warming, there is plenty of hydrocarbon fuel that can be extracted from coal or gas via Fischer-Tropsch. IMO hydrogen powered vehicles are crap. Electrics have one problem: the battery. While hydrogen vehicles have several problems: tankage, fuel cell power pack, cheap generation.
More nuke plants are always good.
“My point was that by that time most power should come from the batteries”
Ah, yea more like an APU, I got ya.
I do have to admit though that this creation by a Ford engineer is pretty cool. It is this sort of stuff that was promised to us by the car shows in the ’50s. I say bring it on.
Linky no work:
http://jalopnik.com/5246006/ford-engineer-builds-125-mpg-hyperrocket-in-spare-time
Carl, you don’t have pure electric locomotives in the west, but you have lots of diesel-electric locomotives. So the electric is there, just using locally generated electric power
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? No one doubts an electric engine is a far more efficient and reliable thing than a combustion engine. The problem is that when you engineer an entire car, you can’t just consider the efficiencies of the engine. You’ve got to consider how efficient it is to bring along your fuel, and, unfortunately, the immense penatlies incurred by all our known ways of storing electricity for mobile use, versus liquid reactants for an IC engine, mean burning hydrocarbons are the way to go. Even for those locomotives.
If you want to ask me, I think the far future belongs to fuel cells with nano-engineered membranes. If you can build a membrane permeable to only one charged species — and this is (1) thermodynamically possible, and more to the point (2) already routinely done by living systems, then you can split apart any redox reaction (e.g. hydrocarbon + O2) so that the flow of electrons has to go through an external circuit, and there you go: all the advantages of carrying your energy supply as a compact liquid, plus all the advantages of using electricity to generate motion. You could only do better by generation the motion directly from the chemical reaction, the way muscles do. (That may come too, but I’m thinking it will prove easier to engineer membranes permeable to one species only than to do the microscale mechanical engineering implicit in building artificial muscles.)
This crap about carbon footprints is going to be the child-abduction milk-carton fetish of the 00s, maybe 10s, that’s all. Fundamentally, from the thermodynamic point of view, it’s a total dead end. There’s no way to get your energy more efficiently, when you live at the bottom of a giant lake of oxidizer (atmospheric O2), than to allow things to oxidize, and given the existence of a massive carbon cycle already in use by the animal and plant world, it makes zero sense not to simply tap into that, divert some of the stream to power our own machines.
The solution, if one needs to be found, to dumping excess CO2 in the atmosphere, will be adding to the adsorption of CO2 so that things balance out. It’s not like that’s hard. Growing a lot of green plants will do just fine.