Why haven’t we moved past the point of using oil to fuel cars? I know we have hybrid cars, electric cars, etc., but the vast majority of cars use oil. In the 70s they were talking about using corn oil or something which was far cheaper and less polluting, but 30 years have past and we’re still using oil. Aside from helping the environment, wouldn’t this bankrupt stop the inflow of cash in to these Middle Eastern nations that aren’t exactly our pals? Is this a conspiracy by the oil industry, or are there legitimate technological/economic hurdles that prevent this?
[Ed Begley a la The Simpsons]
“I prefer a vehicle that doesn’t hurt Mother Earth. It’s a go-cart powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction.”
[/Ed Begley a la The Simpsons]
To be viable on a large scale, any “alternative” fuel must meet the following requirement:
Pound for pound, the total amount of energy expended to acquire, process, and transport the fuel must be less than the energy you get out of it.
Most popularly-touted “alternative” fuels and energy sources do not meet this requirement. Examples include solar PV arrays[sup]1[/sup], hydrogen, alcohol, and electrochemical batteries. Note that it matters little if any of these are “clean burning.” If more energy is expended to acquire, process, and transport the fuel than what you get out of it, then it is not clean burning, even if the emissions are 0%. In fact, it’s not even proper to call these “fuels.” In reality they’re energy vessels.
Corn oil is probably not a fuel. More than likely it’s an energy vessel.
[sup]1[/sup] [sub]Solar may improve in the future[/sub]
Recently, some researchers claimed that they can produce an alcohol-based fuel from corn with a net gain of energy. This should be possible, since the solar energy used to make the corn grow is basically free. Whether they actually did it or not remains to be seen, but if true thism would be a first true alternative fuel. (As opposed to an alternative energy storage medium, which is what alcohol-based fuels currently are.)
The simple reason is that there is no pressing need to do so at present.
We can go on pumping oil out of the ground very cheaply for a good while yet. Sure, it’s not sustainable, but until it gets scarce enough to become pricey, inertia means we will go on using it.
Think about it - there is currently a massive infrastructure devoted to extracting and refining crude oil, transporting it around the world, storing it and pumping it into our vehicles. All that has to be modified or replaced to convert to a cleaner fuel. It ain’t going to be cheap, and at the moment nobody really wants to be the first to take the plunge.
It’s sad, but that’s the way capitalism works.
(I’ll ignore the dubious sentence about “bankrupting those nations in the Middle East”… the Ay-rabs aren’t all out to get you, no matter what CNN tells you.)
There are valid engineering reasons why gasoline & diesel are good choices for vehicle fuels, at least just considering the vehicles’ needs, no thte larger societal impacts.
BUT …
It’s really all economics. We will consume whatever fuel source is cheapest first.
IF we could create a way to make, say, alchohol, at a cost that leads to a retail price of $0.05 per gallon, crude oil consumption for fuel would drop to practically zero as fast as we could build the alchohol plants. Even at $0.50 a retail gallon it’d sweep oil off the market within a few years.
IF your local gas station had an alchohol pump right next to the three grades of gasoline but it sold for $4.50 a gallon, how often would you buy it instead of unleaded regular? Me neither.
The entire process of converting crude oil in the mideast / artic / north sea into gasoline in Kansas is very mature technology and remarkably economically efficient. Until the competition gets equally economically efficient they won’t overtake gasoline.
Naturally governement can have a lot to say about the relative economics of various fuels. If they slap a $5.00 / gallon tax on unleaded regular, suddenly the $4.50 alchohol fuel looks pretty cheap. That’s why everyone in the energy game makes sure their politicians are well-lubricated and I don’t mean motor oil.
Just like with organic produce, a timy minority of folks will pay a small (25%??) premium for a social good like lower pollution or fairer terms of trade or general do-gooder-ness. But in bulk, we’re all selfish pigs out for the best deal we can get today and to heck with any consequences. Our economic system and our engineering reflect that bulk behavior.
Sad but true.
Ahhh, Love that good ol’ Market Economy.
Of course, we could drive the market our way. We citizens could unite and stop buying fossil fuels to push the alternate R and D (Workers Unite!, and all that - I’ll go call Karl) But who of us would like to be the first to walk to work?
Actually, I feel that the hybrid (gas-electric) tech has come a long way. It is now reasonable in cost and feasability, and its a step in the direction to use less fuel. Further, if hybrids sell well it will push the market in that direction (they ain’t building 'em to be kind to the planet, they need a profit).
If it’s true, then it’s obviously good news. But I’m skeptical.
Also keep in mind that an alternative energy source must also be viable on a large scale. This is why the following energy sources have significant problems:
-
Burning wood. If I cut down a tree with a hand saw, then burn the wood, the amount of energy I expended will certainly be less than the amount I receive from burning the wood. It would thus appear that wood is a fuel. This is true on a small scale, but not on a large scale. There simply not enough wood available to compete with oil and coal.
-
Solar. There’s a “law” in economics that says the unit price of a good will decrease as total production volume increases. But with PV arrays the opposite is true. Why? Because the silicon used in PV arrays is usually obtained from rejected semiconductor wafers. Thus the price of the silicon used in PV arrays is artificially low. If we decided to implement a large-scale PV power system, the PV manufacturers would have to manufacture their own silicon wafers. This would likely drive the price way up.
Diceman, I have a dispute about that corn thing too. (and I realize you are just the messenger here)
Sure, sunlight is still free (I’m sure someone’s working on that problem) but don’t farmers use fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and water that is not free? Not to mention man-hours for seeding, sowing and application of said products (even “organic” farmers have overhead similar to these, right?).
So even if the energy produced is cheaper (net gain), the means would certainly detract from the end savings, no? (Are we now back to the energy vessel problem?)
Yes, that is a problem, and I don’t know of the guys in the article were taking this into account. (I kinda doubt it, however.)
I’d expect that you’d have the same scaling problems that Crafter_Man was talking about. If these reserchers were working at a land-grant university, then they could very well have gotten some corn from the Agriculture department, which grew it in a field out in the nature study area using organic methods and tended by slaves…err…grad students. This corn would have required almost no energy input to grow. But to grow enough corn to power hundreds of commercial alcohol-fuel refineries, you’d have to dump tons and tons of fertilizers on the fields, and use big machines to harvest the corn. And you’d need to manufacture that fertilizer and those machines, and provide power for those machines. By the time you add it all up, you’re back to the energy vessel problem.
(BTW, I didn’t know that solar panels were made from scrap silicon. Interesting.)
This whole “fuel” versus “energy vessel” argument has a lot of artificiality to it if we’re not careful.
Oil is merely an energy vessel too. If I pump X gallons out of the ground and by the time I’ve transported, refined, etc, I’m only getting .01% of X gallons to do something useful with, then I’m still ahead. The Earth is behind, but I’m ahead.
The total supply of energy in the Universe is finite. Everything is a vessel for transporting or converting that energy. For our present needs, the instantaneous supply of oil is infinite; we can waste all we want today. Not that we should, I’m just asserting that we can. Clearly that’s not sustainable forever, and there’s a lot of debate that it’s not sustainable for even our current lifetimes.
For our foreseeable future needs, the sun appears to supply infinite energy if only we could figure out how to harness it economically. But that’s just an illusion. The Sun is no more infinite than the oil supply is. It’s just an energy vessel that’s so big it looks like a fuel to the unsophisticated eye.
I should point out that Cecil has a recent column entitled What’s the true story on ethanol? (28-Nov-2003) that has some bearing on the present question. Not his most inspired column, but there is also an associated CCC thread that has some good discussion (as well as some stupid discussion, but hopefully they’re easy to tell apart) on the use of ethanol as an alternative fuel, including whether or not ethanol production provides more energy than it uses up. Includes some interesting studies. Relevant to this OP, I know I had linked in the previous thread to an Argonne study calculating well-to-wheel efficiencies of various fuels, which might include biodeisel. However, it’s a pdf, and I’m on dial-up right now, so I’m not up to sorting out the info. Might be interesting, though.
Canola has anti-oxidants which resist coking, varnishing, and polymerization, so it can be used as a motor lubricant.
Furthermore, hot canola is thin enough to be used as diesel fuel…one renewable resource which takes the place of two refined toxins.
How much energy must go into creating four quarts of lube and a tank of diesel oil compared to the same amount of canola?
With canola oil, all you basically have to do is take the oil seeds, crush them, and press out the oil, and then filter the oil.
As well as prepare the soil and till it, grow the seeds, fertilize, pesticide, herbicide, and irrigate them; harvest them, clean and transport, etc. There’s a lot of energy involved in some of those steps.
And with petroleum, you have to prospect for it, drill it, and refine it.
Is that less…or more… energy intensive than growing a crop?
It’s a good point and a frequent subject of competing debates. IIRC there is much less energy use exploring for, drilling, processing, refining, and transporting petroleum than used in making biocrops ready for use at an equivalent state, but I do not have authroitative links handy, so it must rank as my unsupported (at this time) opinion only.
There is also the very large problems of making vehicles which can use this fuel and educating the public on the use of those fuels and the care of the vehicle. If someone were to develop an alternative fuel tomorrow which cost a mere .05 cents (US) to sell out the pump (meaning that the production and distribution costs were nonexsitant) you still wouldn’t have large numbers of folks adopting the fuel immediately. Vehicles cost lots of money to design and build these days (GM spent something like $1 billion to develop one model, and that’s using conventional technology), so unless the government were willing to hand out massive subsidies to the car makers (a possibility, but not a certainty), the first cars capable of using the new fuel would most likely be high end models.
Even if the automakers were given massive subsidies and were able to switch all of their vehicles over to the alternative fuel, you’d still have folks who were unwilling or unable to make the switch to the new fuel.
Biodiesel certainly comes close to being an ideal alternative fuel, it can be used in existing designs (though there are some issues, I’ve heard that biodiesel can eat the fuel lines in VWs, this could be easily corrected by simply changing the material the fuel lines are made of), handles nearly identical to petroleum based diesel (so no special gear is needed), and once production facilities are built, can be produced for about the same cost as ordinary diesel.
Still, you have the problem of getting folks out of their gas powered cars. Some won’t want to do it because their car is a “classic”/well loved vehicle, and they don’t want to replace it. The vast majority of folks, I suspect, simply won’t be able to afford to replace their vehicle, unless the government subsidizes the cost of the vehicles to the point where they’re nearly free.
Until the pressing need (i.e. it becomes so expensive to purchase fuel) develops, gas powered cars will be around. Even artificially inflating the costs of owning a vehicle won’t help. In places where insurance costs are incredibly high, people simply drive uninsured vehicles (IIRC, it’s gotten so bad in some cities that a “grey market” of used cars has developed where people buy and sell cars without ever bothering to register them so that if they’re involved in an accident, they can easily abandon the car with few worries about ever getting caught), and states routinely run stings where they check tanks on semi’s to verify that the drivers are purchasing their fuel from places selling it for use in vehicles and not filling their tanks with untaxed fuel intended for home heating use or agricultural purposes.
Another “alternative fuel” option is synthetic oil - Thermal Depolymerization allows one to make oil from almost any carbon/hydrogen based waste - turkey guts, sewage, waste plastic, ect, and the process both creates enough oil from waste to keep it running(15% of the oil is needed fuel the process, the other 85% is available for other use) and the process isn’t much more expensive then conventional oil. I don’t know how easy it would be to come up with enough extra waste material to replace conventional oil, or the amount of energy it would take to collect the waste; those could be issues.
The oil itself is identical to normal petroleum, allowing for existing refining plants and distrubtion systems to be used, and gas made from this oil could be used in current cars with no modifications or alterations in performance.(Because it would be identical to current gasoline.) This gets rid of the adaption problems ** Tuckerfan ** mentioned.
And finally, as long as the raw feed stock you use for the process is recently grown organics(i.e. - turkey guts & grass clippings, not coal) using this fuel won’t add any net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, though you would still have the usual problems with other chemicals - nitric oxides and so on.
I know Una has some doubts about the process, but she’s the engineer, so I’ll let her speak on those (if she still has them).
While thermal depolymerization does solve the issue of where to get gas/oil from, it does not address the issue of ground/air/water pollution. A well maintained car isn’t going to pollute too badly, but a car that’s got oil leaks, coolant leaks, and other problems is going to really screw things up by comparison. Then there’s the issue of spills when people are refueling their cars, or the fuels being transported. Remember, folks are trying to figure out what to do with MTBE (a gasoline additive) since just a small amount of gas with that in it that gets into the water supply is enough to render it unfit for human consumption (by law, the tumors won’t show up for untold numbers of years later). So, something’s got be found that has the flexibilty of the automobile, but doesn’t dump pollutants into the environment at the levels even the best cars today produce.
I don’t remember enough from the last discussion, but I think my only real doubts were on the subjects of cost, efficiency, and supply available, not whether or not it works.
Since the last time this came up I actually did a study on the economic viability of a proposed poultry waste synthetic oil project for a government agency. Without giving away confidential details (not secret or antyhing, just client-engineer confidentiality) the main barrier was cost. If oil was about $75 a barrel the cost would have equivalent. And then the next issue was supply - there was not nearly enough to make it worthwhile. We could not for the life of us figure out how the project could work economically.
The second project I worked on was making bio-derived oil from wood waste. Again, the problem was cost, not technology. The client was told that there was a “green credit” that would “somehow” be available at 200 cents/MBtu which would allow the process to be viable. With respect, that was bollocks - figure the total average cost to mine coal and transport it across half of the US is only about 130 cents/MBtu average, and you see how unreasonable 200 cents/MBtu is as a “credit”.
Plus there just wasn’t enough wood available. It takes a lot of continuous wood waste to supply a power plant or fuel fleet of any size. Much more than you think. Coal power plants burn coal measured in millions of tons per year. At a high heating value, too, relatively speaking. Finding 10 million tons/year of wood waste (assuming 50% utilization) for a single medium-sized plant is really hard to do.