Car Technology?
Friday, July 31st, 2009 at
1:40 am
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Well you are on the right track but there are at least two viable other renewables you left off – bio-fuels and compressed air. Since bio-fuels currently has a bad PR rep, I can see why you did. Compressed air holds promise for urban areas and sub-55mph trips. Both have a place obviously and not everyone would use one or the other.
If you think about high mpg bio-fuel cars being used for only long range transport and in rural areas, you can see where it has a place in the world without gasoline.
Compressed air is great for areas that have a good renewable energy source and need to have delivery, short trip or light duty vehicles.
On to hydrogen: the biggest problem is cheap fuel cells. Hydrogen, making it on site (at your home, in the car) or in a fueling station is the easy part. Making fuel cells that can deliver 10kW of power for $5-10 is the hard part. Currently the fuel cell stack in the Honda Clarity is about $100K and the stack in the Chevy Equinox is about the same price. That is a long way from the $1-5K we pay for the gas engines in our cars now.
As to the 4:1 ratio, that is solved by making cars lighter, electric and more efficient. About 2/3 of the energy of gasoline is wasted via heat, un-burnt fuel and mechanical losses. The Clarity has a range of 270miles on a full tank of hydrogen, the Equinox about the same. The average midsized car/crossover range is 300-400miles. Not too far away right?
Now onto electric vehicles; PEV’s can be recharged with a host of renewable sources: Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Biomass so we don’t have to rely on dirty gas or coal.
Most of all people will need to change how and why they use a personal vehicle. Does a single person need a 4 or 5,000lb vehicle for a daily commute? Do we need to live so 10-15 miles from everything we need on a daily basis (food, work, school ect)?
The UN says that by 2050, the current population – 6.5B people – will live in urban areas, with the remaining 30% in rural. Sounds like car demand will drop quite a bit.
So overall I think there are many options that can fit a large portion of the world population’s need for transport, the trick will be to allow each to develop fully and find a niche and not write one off because of bad press or political perspective.
Keep discussing this with your friends, it is a great topic!
Hydrogen is today mostly made from natural gas, which will run out too. You *can* make it from water, but doing that takes more power than you need to run an electric car. You *may* be able to make it with biologically engineered microbes, but you can make methane (basically natural gas) using regular natural microbes. There are already natural gas powered cars on the road. There just aren’t many filling stations to service them.
Electric cars are good. They are quiet and clean and if charged up with electricity generated by solar panels or other renewable sources they are sustainable too.
first known oil reserves can power the planet for about 150 years.
second known coal reserves can power the planet for another 500 years.
third hydrogen can be made from water if need be.
the internal combustion engine can run on may different fuels when tuned properly. alcohol, hydrogen, gasoline, liquefied coal, propane, cng, etc.
electric cars can be viable in the future with new battery technology, but for now they need some sort of on board generator to maintain the battery charge if you want to drive more than 150 miles at best. as for where to get the electricity for overnight charging of batteries, nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power sources along with improvements in solar cells can handle that.
All of what eco dave said and if hydrogen is to become a viable future source for energy there are still many hurdles to over come. Such as the lack of supporting infrastructure, lack or clean efficient source to attain the hydrogen, low cost, more efficient fuel cells, and the ability to transfer and store the hydrogen safely in massive quantities. While the electric car could be an more immediate solution do not expect it to fade into the background with the improvements in electric motors clean and renewable sources to get electricity from and increasingly better battery technologies electric cars WILL be one of the dominant players.
I have 2 cars that run on natural gas (methane) – what heats houses and you cook with. They use no gasoline at all and they were made by Ford in 1999 and 2000, so the technology has existed for years! They run very clean and super cheap (64 CENTS per gallon in Utah) and there’s lots of natural gas in the USA. We just need more filling stations throughout the country because they’re spotty right now. Can you believe Ford stopped making these in 2004? They’re becoming highly sought after lately (imagine that), but they can still be found on eBay, etc. I think they’re a great solution, and I sure love driving them.