Falling to the ground is rather unlikely. If the unit can still be controlled, the best scenario is to just let it autorotate down and lay its cable down gently as it goes.
Available wind power world-wide is estimated at 72 terawatts continuous. If the world can be supplied to US levels on only 9 GW, there's plenty of room for higher living standards on wind power alone. Throw in nuclear, PV, wave and whatnot, and the biofuel-only doom scenarios look rather silly.
Biofuels have one really important use: buffering lulls in the other sources. This does not have to amount to a large fraction of total energy consumption (and will require even less land if e.g. carbon is recycled through algae instead of relying on higher plants for everything).
The energy chain has to be considered as a system. If you aim all your efforts at making diesel fuel, you are going to continue a host of current problems with inefficiency and pollution at the point of use. (Disclaimer: I drive a diesel car. I got it as a stopgap.)
A kilowatt captured with algae is cheaper than a kilowatt captured with PV, but the PV's output yields zero noise or pollution and more of it gets to the end-use than you'd get via a crankshaft. Wind is just as clean as PV but far cheaper. The future is electric.
US electric consumption is roughly 1/1000 of your figures. Net 2005 generation was 4038 billion kWh (not MWh).
The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2, so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.
True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
One of the consequences of a command economy is that those with political power control things like the banks. China's elite has been forcing the banks to lend huge amounts of money to failing state-owned enterprises, which can never repay these loans. The purpose is to buy off the employees of these enterprises and keep them pacified rather than threatening the elite.
The financial consequence is that the banks have huge portfolios of non-performing loans. The only thing keeping them solvent is the net flow of savings into the system. If a recession interrupts that flow, the whole house of cards comes down.
Is this data supported by the start of the industrial revolution in the early 1900's
The Industrial Revolution was taking off a century earlier than that.
and the onset of the comming Ice age and global cooling of the 1970'S.
From your Wikipedia link, "This theory never had significant scientific support...."
Recent data from the hiatus in jet travel in the days after 9/11 and the shutdown of electric powerplants due to the 8/14/2003 blackout shows that contrails and sulfate aerosols have a substantial cooling effect on Earth. We have been cleaning up the sulfur emissions to combat acid rain, but this has removed its previous offsetting effect against greenhouse warming. A decrease in air travel will do the same for contrails.
Robert Rapier went over those numbers and found that one of the outputs had been counted twice. He fixed it, and found that even by the proponent's numbers the EROEI was a lousy 1.09:1.
Look at the Wabash River IGCC plant in Terre Haute. The particulate, heavy metal and sulfur emissions are minuscule.
True, it still emits CO2. On the other hand, steam-reforming the syngas to pure hydrogen would allow all the carbon to be removed and put somewhere other than the atmosphere (at a bit of an energy penalty, but probably not as big as other capture schemes).
There is evidence that humans started influencing the climate 8000 years ago. The anomalous gas concentrations are both unique in the ice-core history (going back several glacial cycles) and explainable by human activity.
how much is solar cycle and how much is greenhouse?
The latest I've seen is that it looks about 20% solar, 80% human activity. The error bar will get smaller as the models incorporate more and better data.
It would be news if Toyota had infringed on their patents, there was money to be made, and they *didn't* sue.
And the outcome could have been "Toyota agrees to license the prismatic cell technology from Cobasys". This would have made Cobasys a lot more money than keeping Toyota out of the market for another 7 years.
Carbon-backed lead acid is not *that* impressive, and if it has the typical lead-acid chemistry reliability, let me be the first to say "no thank you" to a car full of them.
The whole point of the carbon-foam backing is that it eliminates the grid-corrosion failure mode and doesn't have enough room for large sulfate crystals to grow.
Li-ion: see this post for my take on Li-ion.
Neither the lithium iron phosphate nor the lithium titanium spinel chemistries have the fire failure mode (the Saphion demo pierces a cell, and nothing much happens). Some people think Altair Nano is dodgy, but they're claiming 0-100% charge in 5 minutes and 80% charge in 60 seconds. Oh, and 15,000 cycles so far with more than 80% capacity remaining. A123Systems isn't far behind, and they've been shipping product in power tools for a while.
It's always easy to say "NotYetHereTech will revolutionize the world!"
It's harder to deny stuff that you can buy off the shelf today. A few years ago, a small Li-ion cell was a lot of money. Today, you can order cars (Tesla roadster, eBox) powered by the things. The trend is clear.
Not that I'd expect you to admit this, because you're a troll.
You are quoting Cobasys' press about itself. This is not unlike citing the "Live green, go yellow" campaign as "proof" that GM's products are all ecologically beneficial, or "Carbon dioxide, we call it life" as proof that Exxon-Mobil is likewise.
Boschert describes many obstacles hindering widespread production of PHEVs, but none are more important to her than the difficulties that EV developers encounter when they try to obtain large-format nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries.
Chevron then put the battery rights under control of a Joint Venture, "COBASYS," and decided to fund a lawsuit against large-format (electric car battery) competitors such as Toyota-Panasonic. Chevron's lawsuit led to a settlement agreement with PEVE (and Sanyo, etc.) whereby Toyota paid $30M to Chevron, Toyota was granted the rights to use "small-format" batteries on the Prius, and Toyota agreed not to build "large-format" versions of its batteries (needed for plug-in cars) for export to the U.S. until 2014.
There's plenty more, just perform the search suggested at the first link.
It appears likely that the advances in Li-ion and carbon-backed lead-acid will make it far more difficult to keep the next round of batteries out of vehicles. Regardless, the delay in availability of mass-market PHEV's and EV's has meant many billions or tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue for the oil companies and oil exporting nations. (The current administration shares responsibility for e.g. terminating the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which would have delivered 80-MPG sedans about.... now.)
The take-home lesson? Don't believe everything you read.
I suppose my first question is, when the owner inevitably lets the ethanol run out, what happens?
The engine will not be able to run at high boost (power).
Can the engine computer dial down the boost enough to prevent detonation? Or does the engine just have to shut down?
That depends on the static compression ratio of the engine, but if it's kept down to a reasonable value the engine should be able to run but the controller will open the turbo wastegate. If the static compression ratio is high enough to knock at close to atmospheric pressure in the manifold, the controller would have to restrict the throttle opening.
This scheme is a stopgap, pure and simple. 30% is nowhere near good enough — we need plug-in hybrids to displace 80% of our liquid fuel (for starters), not 30%. But when you compare the efficiency losses of gasohol and E85 to the efficiency gains of the smaller turbo engine, and consider that this engine has the potential to run on 100% ethanol (complete flex-fuel operation) and on ethanol with some admixture of water (reducing the energy required for distillation and allowing the ethanol to be shipped by pipeline where it might pick up water), this is a huge improvement.
Unfortunately, it won't be good for much if we have to trade off food against motor fuel.
Once you've filed a patent (one synonym of "patent" is "obvious") and received as much news play as this has, it can't be hidden.
Any attempt to hide it will get as much bad press as Chevron's blocking of high-capacity NiMH batteries for EV's through their Cobasys venture. It will invite things like compulsory licensing.
DS1 could turn its thrust up and down, but the specific impulse rose with increasing power. From the sketchy descriptions in TFAs, this unit can increase the specific impulse while running at constant power or perhaps even lower power. This results in much lower thrust, but stationkeeping operations require little.
<rant>
I really hate the front-page article, because it makes no distinction between the payload boost from a lighter stationkeeping system and the payload increase which would result from a more efficient booster rocket (burning chemical fuels). It also confuses the ultimate energy source for the ion system (the Sun) with the direct power source (electricity); the unit could easily run nuclear-electric, it doesn't care. This sort of nonsense makes it difficult or impossible for the naïve reader to understand the matter at hand. What's the point of putting an article on Slashdot if you're only going to make a logical mess of it? If the stuff here is going to leave people knowing less than before they read it, people shouldn't read it.
If the editors here are idiots, the readership here will slip to that level by both selection and mis- and dis-information.
but switching from oil to methane isn't terrible in the meantime.
In this case, you're wrong. There are two factors you aren't considering:
Sunk costs
Technological momentum
If you invest a lot of money to capture methane from clathrates, you are going to want to continue to use methane regardless of the consequences (look at our situation WRT coal and oil if you have any doubts!). Technological momentum is the tendency of actively-used technologies to get the most R&D, engineering improvements and cost reductions with manufacturing experience. If you need the non-carbon alternatives but you haven't been producing or using them, they are going to be much worse off due to greater cost, worse reliability, etc.
There's no reason not to use non-carbon alternatives even if GW is a fiction. Generally, they are cleaner and otherwise more desirable than historical practice. This is why we should be driving them hard regardless.
Either way, you aren't worth talking to any more. A few statements to establish your record of lies (or is it just stupidity?) for anyone who reads this later, and I'm done with you.
You could put a million PHEV's on the road tomorrow and people could plug them into any convenient 110 volt outlet at night.
No, you couldn't, because people wouldn't buy a million cars in a day.
Way to misunderstand the English language. The first clause was clearly not a proposal to do so (even so, a million cars is only about 21 days of sales and could theoretically all be delivered to buyers on the same day) and you ignore the truth of the second clause.
You are either too stupid to understand English, or trolling.
you assume people are idiots. You act like they're just going to watch fields go dry one by one while twiddling their thumbs.
Given you as an example, that's a pretty safe assumption.
That's exactly what we did in the 1960's as US oil production peaked and fell while consumption continued to climb. This led to our vulnerability to the OPEC oil price shocks in the 1970's. Why should I expect the public to learn such lessons from history? It's not like they ever did before. Heck, the same thing happened again in the 90's: business interests fought energy-efficiency standards for buildings in the name of "consumer demand", and now we are looking at having to import LNG in order to heat them. Designs available during that same period would need little or no heat. Why didn't we use those designs? Because people are idiots, QED.
And since I did the research for this, I'm going to post it:
even spiral-wound lead-acid is sufficient to get started.
No, not really (not to mention would be disastrous for the environment). At 25 Wh/kg, half a metric tonne of batteries alone -- a bloody 11 cubic feet -- to your car would only get you 12.5 kWh (and with how heavy your car will be, meaning wasteful use of energy for accel, that would be a range of something like 15 miles or so).
25 Wh/kg will get you 4 kWH out of 160 kg. That's plenty for driving around the neighborhood (12 miles @ 200 Wh/mi) plus surge power and regenerative braking. When they wear out, you replace them with carbon-foam backed lead-acid at 260 Wh/kg. They might be only 1/3 as dense, so you'll only get about 90 Wh in the space of your former 25 Wh cells; your capacity goes from 4 kWh up to 14 kWh while the weight falls to about 55 kg. This brings your all-electric range up to 50 miles plus surge power. The carbon foam backings eliminate the corrosion and sulfation failure modes of standard lead-acid, so they last about 10 years. If the car is worth refurbishing at 13 years of age, Li-ion chemistries will be ready to take over from lead-acid at that point (or you might just fit it out with 5-year-old units from a newer car being upgraded for better range).
As a consequence, the Chevy Volt, the type of car that we're both wanting to see as a stopgap, hinges entirely on the advancement of battery
global trade is important for efficiency. Whether we're an exporter or an importer isn't important to me.
I disagree that our trade status is irrelevant. Right now, the US produces around 7.5% of global oil production and imports another 15% or so; this is a factor in many issues of concern to the public. As we shift to the production of vehicle fuel from food grains, we are increasingly affecting the ability of people overseas to avoid starvation. Further, the fact that we can't trade electricity between continents doesn't hurt efficiency; the transmission losses of such long distances make it a rather poor idea. Last, the conversion of foreign forest and cropland to make vehicle fuel for the USA is politically problematic and, if it affects food supplies (as ethanol already is) it is morally untenable.
The USA is in a position to be an exporter of carbon-free renewable fuels. This would more likely be charcoal for electricity, rather than liquid fuels for ICEs.
I pointed out that there is plenty of production to take up the slack
Sure. For now. But nature isn't refilling those fields, and sooner or later the last one of them will be going empty just like Maui. When that happens, the problem won't just be finding a new fuel source; it will have grown to building a new generation infrastructure. A small country like New Zealand doesn't have the investment capital or manufacturing base to go on a crash conversion program when that happens (and I wonder if the USA still does). The only way to make sure you address the problem in time is to start early.
There is also the issue of carbon emissions. Natural gas has the least carbon/BTU of all the fossil fuels, but it's still not low enough to stabilize the atmosphere even if we used nothing else. If New Zealand is going to do its part, it has to avoid gas, oil and especially coal in favor of solar, wind, biomass, hydro and nukes (like they'll ever do that). The world is just a bigger version of the same picture.
I'd like to see [oil prices] go higher; it encourages research.
I'd like to see oil products taxed higher; that way, the money wouldn't go to hostile regimes and movements. The externalities of oil justify large taxes, and I'd rather see "bads" taxed than "goods".
My only concerns are A) that it hinges on technology that doesn't exist yet outside of the lab (technology rarely comes according to human schedules, unfortunately -- and sometimes never comes),
What doesn't exist outside the lab? Electric motors? They've been equal to the Otto-cycle engine for a century, and today they're much better. Power electronics? Adequate for years, price/performance still increasing rapidly.
The only problem is batteries, and even spiral-wound lead-acid is sufficient to get started. If the car is designed to a standard form factor for batteries and can handle varying voltages and charging curves, there is no reason that it can't be upgraded as its old batteries wear out and better ones become available.
and B) There's so much existing infrastructure that it will take a very long time to convert.
Excuse me, but what infrastructure? You could put a million PHEV's on the road tomorrow and people could plug them into any convenient 110 volt outlet at night. The average passenger car is about 8½ years old, meaning that it's ultimately retired at the age of about 17; there's plenty of time for any infrastructure needs to be built out as the vehicle mix changes.
Even the Volt, which is only to be completely electric-powered for short hops is expected to require commercialized battery breakthroughs to be economically viable. It's current design would use over 20k$ worth of lithium according to one article that I read.
I honestly *don't* like the idea of forcing each nation to be insular.
And forcing ourselves to be dependent upon nations which foster terrorism is desirable?
Global trade is important for efficiency.
Until about WWII, the USA was an oil exporter. The world does not depend on the US importing large amounts of its energy supply. We might as well be part of the supply side.
Kapnui can ramp up its production pretty much at will, and there's untapped new discoveries at Turangi-1, Pohokura, and Kupe, for starters.
And when they run out, what then? Gas isn't like oil. Oil is a viscous liquid and it flows more and more slowly as a field is drained. Gas flows easily through all but the tightest rocks and goes right down to zero. Lifespan of a gas field in N. America is down to about 18 months. This gives you very little time to obtain new supplies or convert to other sources.
Wars and natural disasters create temporary supply disruption, which is why reserves and diversified production should be encouraged.
Precisely why we should be working to create alternatives for the main uses for oil. Peaking oil production is already leading to military adventurism to grab resources; create ready alternatives, and the pressure to grab (and the value of what's grabbed) goes way down. If the alternative is superior in other ways, it puts even more downward pressure on the value of oil.
Any planner that never plans for disruptions from a single source is a bloody idiot.
Quite right. This is why I think our primary medium for transportation energy should be electricity rather than liquid fuels, because there are far more ways of making electricity than gasoline/ethanol. It's also much cleaner and quieter, and available from the plug at about 75 cents/gallon equivalent (after losses on the way to the wheels).
what you use as input for charcoal production affects the properties of your output; cellulosic matter varies greatly.
Does it matter? Cooper was using a range of stuff including de-ashed coal. He got his best activity from bio-chars. What you're implying is that the differences are sufficient to make a DCFC work badly, and you've cited no evidence in support.
To replace an ICE, the engine and everything it needs to run must be small, light, and resilient, tolerating cold, heat, unusual angles, vibration, and a whole host of other problems. So must it's fuel. Sure -- let's call it an engineering problem.
That's why the article says "... even heavy trucks may be too small." The analysis went forward assuming only batteries, backed up by internal combustion engines burning biofuels. Would you agree that those engineering problems have been essentially solved?
saying something is just an "engineering problem" is a cop-out.
Maybe it means that you can't deal with the problem cost-effectively with units smaller than ten megawatts. Maybe you need an eddy-current pump recirculating electrolyte through a mixer to add charcoal. (Cooper proposes pneumatic feeding.) If you can't manage this well on scales smaller than 300 megawatts, guess what - we can't manage coal-fired power on scales much smaller than that, and it's far harder to throttle a steam turbine than a fuel cell.
Nobody's even tried this on a pilot scale yet, but the commercial MCFC's are doing fine. There's a 1 MW plant at the Sierra Nevada brewery, running since 2005. Believe me, this is just "engineering problems", ones we'd be well-advised to tackle right away.
Slashdot Mirror
The USA could get its base load from biofuels alone. See the link in the sig block.
Falling to the ground is rather unlikely. If the unit can still be controlled, the best scenario is to just let it autorotate down and lay its cable down gently as it goes.
Available wind power world-wide is estimated at 72 terawatts continuous. If the world can be supplied to US levels on only 9 GW, there's plenty of room for higher living standards on wind power alone. Throw in nuclear, PV, wave and whatnot, and the biofuel-only doom scenarios look rather silly.
Biofuels have one really important use: buffering lulls in the other sources. This does not have to amount to a large fraction of total energy consumption (and will require even less land if e.g. carbon is recycled through algae instead of relying on higher plants for everything).
The energy chain has to be considered as a system. If you aim all your efforts at making diesel fuel, you are going to continue a host of current problems with inefficiency and pollution at the point of use. (Disclaimer: I drive a diesel car. I got it as a stopgap.)
A kilowatt captured with algae is cheaper than a kilowatt captured with PV, but the PV's output yields zero noise or pollution and more of it gets to the end-use than you'd get via a crankshaft. Wind is just as clean as PV but far cheaper. The future is electric.
US electric consumption is roughly 1/1000 of your figures. Net 2005 generation was 4038 billion kWh (not MWh).
The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2, so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.
True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
One of the consequences of a command economy is that those with political power control things like the banks. China's elite has been forcing the banks to lend huge amounts of money to failing state-owned enterprises, which can never repay these loans. The purpose is to buy off the employees of these enterprises and keep them pacified rather than threatening the elite.
The financial consequence is that the banks have huge portfolios of non-performing loans. The only thing keeping them solvent is the net flow of savings into the system. If a recession interrupts that flow, the whole house of cards comes down.
Recent data from the hiatus in jet travel in the days after 9/11 and the shutdown of electric powerplants due to the 8/14/2003 blackout shows that contrails and sulfate aerosols have a substantial cooling effect on Earth. We have been cleaning up the sulfur emissions to combat acid rain, but this has removed its previous offsetting effect against greenhouse warming. A decrease in air travel will do the same for contrails.
The use of "God" instead of "a diety" implies things that aren't true to the average reader.
I thought real Christians frowned on that sort of thing....
Any scheme to replace petroleum with biofuels requires much greater efficiency at all stages than we have now.
Check out the link in my sig for one take on how to get the job done.
Anthony Flew is now, at most, a deist.
Robert Rapier went over those numbers and found that one of the outputs had been counted twice. He fixed it, and found that even by the proponent's numbers the EROEI was a lousy 1.09:1.
Look at the Wabash River IGCC plant in Terre Haute. The particulate, heavy metal and sulfur emissions are minuscule.
True, it still emits CO2. On the other hand, steam-reforming the syngas to pure hydrogen would allow all the carbon to be removed and put somewhere other than the atmosphere (at a bit of an energy penalty, but probably not as big as other capture schemes).
For a short piece on what summer gasoline is about, see Refining 101: Summer Gasoline.
He has another essay on winter gas, IIRC.
Not that I'd expect you to admit this, because you're a troll.
The difference is that spray-guided direct-injection is here, and available for passenger cars. That wasn't true 60 years ago, or even 20.
You're probably right about the auto companies (I know them, from the inside), but they don't have a choice any more and they seem to realize it.
Other people have different things to say about Cobasys:
And this, which killed the electric RAV4:There's plenty more, just perform the search suggested at the first link.
It appears likely that the advances in Li-ion and carbon-backed lead-acid will make it far more difficult to keep the next round of batteries out of vehicles. Regardless, the delay in availability of mass-market PHEV's and EV's has meant many billions or tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue for the oil companies and oil exporting nations. (The current administration shares responsibility for e.g. terminating the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which would have delivered 80-MPG sedans about.... now.)
The take-home lesson? Don't believe everything you read.
This scheme is a stopgap, pure and simple. 30% is nowhere near good enough — we need plug-in hybrids to displace 80% of our liquid fuel (for starters), not 30%. But when you compare the efficiency losses of gasohol and E85 to the efficiency gains of the smaller turbo engine, and consider that this engine has the potential to run on 100% ethanol (complete flex-fuel operation) and on ethanol with some admixture of water (reducing the energy required for distillation and allowing the ethanol to be shipped by pipeline where it might pick up water), this is a huge improvement.
Unfortunately, it won't be good for much if we have to trade off food against motor fuel.
Once you've filed a patent (one synonym of "patent" is "obvious") and received as much news play as this has, it can't be hidden.
Any attempt to hide it will get as much bad press as Chevron's blocking of high-capacity NiMH batteries for EV's through their Cobasys venture. It will invite things like compulsory licensing.
DS1 could turn its thrust up and down, but the specific impulse rose with increasing power. From the sketchy descriptions in TFAs, this unit can increase the specific impulse while running at constant power or perhaps even lower power. This results in much lower thrust, but stationkeeping operations require little.
<rant>
I really hate the front-page article, because it makes no distinction between the payload boost from a lighter stationkeeping system and the payload increase which would result from a more efficient booster rocket (burning chemical fuels). It also confuses the ultimate energy source for the ion system (the Sun) with the direct power source (electricity); the unit could easily run nuclear-electric, it doesn't care. This sort of nonsense makes it difficult or impossible for the naïve reader to understand the matter at hand. What's the point of putting an article on Slashdot if you're only going to make a logical mess of it? If the stuff here is going to leave people knowing less than before they read it, people shouldn't read it.
If the editors here are idiots, the readership here will slip to that level by both selection and mis- and dis-information.
</rant>
- Sunk costs
- Technological momentum
If you invest a lot of money to capture methane from clathrates, you are going to want to continue to use methane regardless of the consequences (look at our situation WRT coal and oil if you have any doubts!). Technological momentum is the tendency of actively-used technologies to get the most R&D, engineering improvements and cost reductions with manufacturing experience. If you need the non-carbon alternatives but you haven't been producing or using them, they are going to be much worse off due to greater cost, worse reliability, etc.There's no reason not to use non-carbon alternatives even if GW is a fiction. Generally, they are cleaner and otherwise more desirable than historical practice. This is why we should be driving them hard regardless.
Respiration produces CO2 in both plants and animals. (For instance, the roots of plants respire.) The oxygen-producing step is photosynthesis .
Way to misunderstand the English language. The first clause was clearly not a proposal to do so (even so, a million cars is only about 21 days of sales and could theoretically all be delivered to buyers on the same day) and you ignore the truth of the second clause.
So right on the first page, it has:
In transport-speak, "infrastructure" refers to highways, streets, roads and bridges, rails and pipelines (consistent definition here).
You are either too stupid to understand English, or trolling.
Given you as an example, that's a pretty safe assumption.
That's exactly what we did in the 1960's as US oil production peaked and fell while consumption continued to climb. This led to our vulnerability to the OPEC oil price shocks in the 1970's. Why should I expect the public to learn such lessons from history? It's not like they ever did before. Heck, the same thing happened again in the 90's: business interests fought energy-efficiency standards for buildings in the name of "consumer demand", and now we are looking at having to import LNG in order to heat them. Designs available during that same period would need little or no heat. Why didn't we use those designs? Because people are idiots, QED.
And since I did the research for this, I'm going to post it:
25 Wh/kg will get you 4 kWH out of 160 kg. That's plenty for driving around the neighborhood (12 miles @ 200 Wh/mi) plus surge power and regenerative braking. When they wear out, you replace them with carbon-foam backed lead-acid at 260 Wh/kg. They might be only 1/3 as dense, so you'll only get about 90 Wh in the space of your former 25 Wh cells; your capacity goes from 4 kWh up to 14 kWh while the weight falls to about 55 kg. This brings your all-electric range up to 50 miles plus surge power. The carbon foam backings eliminate the corrosion and sulfation failure modes of standard lead-acid, so they last about 10 years. If the car is worth refurbishing at 13 years of age, Li-ion chemistries will be ready to take over from lead-acid at that point (or you might just fit it out with 5-year-old units from a newer car being upgraded for better range).
I disagree that our trade status is irrelevant. Right now, the US produces around 7.5% of global oil production and imports another 15% or so; this is a factor in many issues of concern to the public. As we shift to the production of vehicle fuel from food grains, we are increasingly affecting the ability of people overseas to avoid starvation. Further, the fact that we can't trade electricity between continents doesn't hurt efficiency; the transmission losses of such long distances make it a rather poor idea. Last, the conversion of foreign forest and cropland to make vehicle fuel for the USA is politically problematic and, if it affects food supplies (as ethanol already is) it is morally untenable.
The USA is in a position to be an exporter of carbon-free renewable fuels. This would more likely be charcoal for electricity, rather than liquid fuels for ICEs.
Sure. For now. But nature isn't refilling those fields, and sooner or later the last one of them will be going empty just like Maui. When that happens, the problem won't just be finding a new fuel source; it will have grown to building a new generation infrastructure. A small country like New Zealand doesn't have the investment capital or manufacturing base to go on a crash conversion program when that happens (and I wonder if the USA still does). The only way to make sure you address the problem in time is to start early.
There is also the issue of carbon emissions. Natural gas has the least carbon/BTU of all the fossil fuels, but it's still not low enough to stabilize the atmosphere even if we used nothing else. If New Zealand is going to do its part, it has to avoid gas, oil and especially coal in favor of solar, wind, biomass, hydro and nukes (like they'll ever do that). The world is just a bigger version of the same picture.
I'd like to see oil products taxed higher; that way, the money wouldn't go to hostile regimes and movements. The externalities of oil justify large taxes, and I'd rather see "bads" taxed than "goods".
What doesn't exist outside the lab? Electric motors? They've been equal to the Otto-cycle engine for a century, and today they're much better. Power electronics? Adequate for years, price/performance still increasing rapidly.
The only problem is batteries, and even spiral-wound lead-acid is sufficient to get started. If the car is designed to a standard form factor for batteries and can handle varying voltages and charging curves, there is no reason that it can't be upgraded as its old batteries wear out and better ones become available.
Excuse me, but what infrastructure? You could put a million PHEV's on the road tomorrow and people could plug them into any convenient 110 volt outlet at night. The average passenger car is about 8½ years old, meaning that it's ultimately retired at the age of about 17; there's plenty of time for any infrastructure needs to be built out as the vehicle mix changes.
$20K of
And forcing ourselves to be dependent upon nations which foster terrorism is desirable?
Until about WWII, the USA was an oil exporter. The world does not depend on the US importing large amounts of its energy supply. We might as well be part of the supply side.
And when they run out, what then? Gas isn't like oil. Oil is a viscous liquid and it flows more and more slowly as a field is drained. Gas flows easily through all but the tightest rocks and goes right down to zero. Lifespan of a gas field in N. America is down to about 18 months. This gives you very little time to obtain new supplies or convert to other sources.
Precisely why we should be working to create alternatives for the main uses for oil. Peaking oil production is already leading to military adventurism to grab resources; create ready alternatives, and the pressure to grab (and the value of what's grabbed) goes way down. If the alternative is superior in other ways, it puts even more downward pressure on the value of oil.
Quite right. This is why I think our primary medium for transportation energy should be electricity rather than liquid fuels, because there are far more ways of making electricity than gasoline/ethanol. It's also much cleaner and quieter, and available from the plug at about 75 cents/gallon equivalent (after losses on the way to the wheels).
Does it matter? Cooper was using a range of stuff including de-ashed coal. He got his best activity from bio-chars. What you're implying is that the differences are sufficient to make a DCFC work badly, and you've cited no evidence in support.
That's why the article says "... even heavy trucks may be too small." The analysis went forward assuming only batteries, backed up by internal combustion engines burning biofuels. Would you agree that those engineering problems have been essentially solved?
Maybe it means that you can't deal with the problem cost-effectively with units smaller than ten megawatts. Maybe you need an eddy-current pump recirculating electrolyte through a mixer to add charcoal. (Cooper proposes pneumatic feeding.) If you can't manage this well on scales smaller than 300 megawatts, guess what - we can't manage coal-fired power on scales much smaller than that, and it's far harder to throttle a steam turbine than a fuel cell.
Nobody's even tried this on a pilot scale yet, but the commercial MCFC's are doing fine. There's a 1 MW plant at the Sierra Nevada brewery, running since 2005. Believe me, this is just "engineering problems", ones we'd be well-advised to tackle right away.