What do gas stations cost? The tanks have to frequently replaced too. Can you understand that solar energy would keep low maintenance and not rely on trucks hauling gas to them every other day. As a business model, the charging stations are far superior. No fuel costs.
How much research money will it cost to be able to produce biodiesel from algae feasting on CO2 from a coal power plant at $3 / gallon? What, you don’t know? Of course you don’t know - it’s impossible to make a meaningful comparison of spending tax dollars here. You seem convinced that funding your pet biodiesel project will have a better payoff, but we can’t measure its effectiveness. It’s just your personal belief.
The other objection to this approach is that it seems to require continuing to burn coal. Even if we capture 100% of the CO2 and convert it into biodiesel, we get double-duty from those CO2 molecules, but they’re still going from long-term geologic storage into the atmosphere, which is a major problem we’re trying to head off with the electric car investment. Any plan which requires burning coal indefinitely is a non-starter.
If it was a paying business model we’d all have them on our houses. There is nothing superior to a fuel station that depends on the variability of sunlight. The $90,000 cost per vehicle would be useless on a cloudy day and at night. To add a power storage system means doubling the size of the array to account for night time loss and then again for cloudy days. After that you have to add the battery storage system. So the $90,000 per car figure would probably jump to $250,000 per car. This isn’t a math problem that involves quantum physics. Even a politician should be capable of dealing with 3rd grade math.
The raw physics of the matter are that diesels are about 20% more efficient than an equivalent power output gasoline engine. Always have been, probably always will be. The instances you’re seeing where they’re getting any more than that are either cases of puffery or instances where the gasoline and diesel engines are not of equivalent output (which is usually the case-- usually the diesel is a lower-output fuel sipper, whereas the gas engine is the “sporty” option). Diesels have been here for a long time and are available for sale right now-- right or wrong, buyers in the US don’t like them and I don’t see how lowering the NOx standards or shoveling money from the Volt to their direction would help.
Furthermore, there’s some pretty serious drawbacks to expanding diesel’s use as a motor fuel. Gasoline is pretty much used for one thing: powering cars (well, and light-duty trucks, lawnmowers and small airplanes). Diesel is used for a multitude of things from heavy trucks to locomotives to ships to home heating to industrial power generation. The ratio of gasoline to diesel production is only somewhat adjustable, and so shifting usage in one direction or the other will cause some pretty bad price volatility. Already diesel is more expensive than gasoline, and it wouldn’t take much to change prices such that the 20% efficiency advantage becomes moot. And biofuel that yields more energy than it takes to produce is, at the moment, just as much of a pipe dream as the solar charging stations gonzomax is talking about.
It’s not a personal belief to understand that electric cars are not efficient use of carbon reducing technology. Throwing money away on Volts is money wasted. We already have the technology in place (and in use) to substantially reduce carbon emissions without bio-diesel from algae. There are zero costs in infrastructure involved and diesels cover the full spectrum of car use. That means we don’t have to retool for niche groups. It is overwhelmingly the most cost effective method to reduce Co2. Algae based diesel not only makes economical and ecological sense it has a security application by reducing foreign dependency. Part of the money can come right out of the military budget. We already know we can make diesel from algae and it has been tested and certified up to the aviation level. It’s a turnkey technology that greatly improves the environmental impact of coal plants which represents another fuel source that is not dependent on foreign sources.
No, that’s not accurate. Co2 is a recycled product on a planetary scale. You can’t remove it if you tried because it would kill all life on earth. We only need to cut back the amount that cannot be scrubbed by mother nature.
I guess you should edumacate the Ford engineers then. The reality of automotive technology puts diesels far out front.
I guess you should edumacate Brazilthen because their biofuels from ethanol represent a 61% reduction of total life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and fuels 18% of their transportation system.
I understand the technology exists to make diesel from algae; my point was that making it cost-competitive with mineral diesel is a research project. We don’t know how much it’ll cost to get there. Cost competitive biodiesel from algae is not, AFAIK, a turnkey technology, and if you disagree, please provide a cite. I’d love to be wrong here.
No one said anything about removing all CO2 from the atmosphere. I don’t know where you got that from.
Is it your contention that if we burn just enough coal to produce algae-based biodiesel (which we then burn), and stop burning all other fossil fuels, stop deforestation, and stop all other CO2 emitting activities (that aren’t equally compensated for on the production side within the time-frame of the short-term carbon cycle), that atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels will stabilize or fall? If so, can I get a cite for that, too?
The infrastructure for diesel is in place and in use. It is drastically cheaper to operate diesels now. Without adding bio-diesel to the mix we can make a difference NOW instead of feelgood solutions that don’t make a difference. The Ford Focus diesel could be sold in the US today, right now, at a fraction of the Volt. It doesn’t need a binky every night. It already has a fuel distribution infrastructure. It delivers consistent fuel economy across the board regardless of the distance.
It’s my contention that reverting to a co2 cycled fuel will drastically reduce Co2 levels. Currently we are releasing stored co2. The volt relies on predominantly coal fed power plants and that isn’t going to change radically in the near future.
Okay, so you can get a 1.6L 90 HP/159 Ft.lb diesel that gets 74 miles per (imperial) gallon (or a 110 HP/177 ft.lbs of the same displacement that only gets about 60). Or the same-sized petrol engine does 180 HP/180 ft.lbs and “only” gets 47 MPG. That petrol engine is a lot of power for that car, whereas the diesels are merely adequate. The difference between the more powerful diesel and the petrol engine is about 21%, and since the petrol motor is more powerful that’s not even an apples-to-apples comparison.
That 20% figure I cited is not controversial. Per wikipedia:
I love the happy tappy sound and smell of a diesel as much as anyone, but the fact is that there’s no future in them.
Well, if you don’t bother with the whole biodiesel thing, and spend money subsidizing diesels directly instead, you’re saying you’d rather have a guaranteed small decrease in CO2 emissions and petroleum consumption over a chance at an actual game-changer.
Your plan, the one I responded to, cycles that CO2 exactly one additional time. It still involves releasing stored CO2. Again, you’re advocating a small incremental improvement over the game-changer, except this one’s not guaranteed, since it’s not certain we can develop cost-competitive biodiesel from algae.
Doubling the fuel efficency of a car is not a small decrease. If we invest in bio-diesel then that LARGE increase in efficiency and reduction in Co2 is then leveraged with Co2 scrubbing from coal plants. There is nothing game changing about a car that is not produced in volume because it’s not financially viable.
We don’t have a supply chain and infrastructure for drasticly ramping up our diesel usage any more than we do to ramp up our electricty usage.
Your cite doesn’t reflect the ACTUAL fuel efficiencies of diesel cars. and it’s not 47 mpg it’s 74 mpg. The diesel not only returns excellent mileage it is quite peppy around town due to the substantial increase in torque. The new 6 speed automatics are really going to make these things sing.
The fact is that they sell well in Europe because they do everything well.
There are diesel pumps at pretty much every gas station in the United States and the infrastructure to make it.
No no, the PETROL (i.e. gasoline) 1.6L engine gets 47 MPG. There are two 1.6L diesels offered, one of which gets the 74 MPG (again, imperial gallons), but has significantly lower power output, and the other one which gets around 60 MPG and is closer (but still lower) in power output to the 1.6L petrol engine. There is a 21% efficiency difference between the petrol motor and it’s closest diesel counterpart in terms of power. I grant you that it’s sometimes hard to compare a diesel to a gas engine, but the petrol has MORE torque than the diesel and WAY more horsepower. No gearbox in the world is going to overcome that.
They sell well in Europe for two reasons. One, fuel is just more expensive there. It is generally more reasonable to pay a premium for fuel economy. Europeans would benefit from the Volt as well. The other reason is that the taxation policy heavily favors diesels: for one the fuel is usually taxed less, but also vehicle registration fees are based in part on horsepower. Since diesels are more torque heavy, a lower HP engine can suffice to power a car. So taxes on a diesel are lower, even if there’s not much difference foot-feel wise between, say, a 100 HP gas engine and an 80 HP diesel.
There is electricity in just about every structure in the United States.
Too bad you can’t pull over in a Volt and use it while traveling.
Groan… okay then I’ll just have to settle for the still-very-good extended range mileage while I’m traveling and enjoy my non-fuel usage during the other 95% of my driving. Obviously I’m not going to drive a Volt if I’m a traveling salesman or something.
(well, okay, I’ll confess that I’m personally not one of the people who would benefit from the Volt since I walk to work and only really rack up miles on my vehicles doing road-trips and messing around in the mountains. But if I were a more typical American driver, I don’t think an occasional road trip would be enough to offset the commuting savings.)
Furthermore, even if they did perfect the diesel-pooping algae in the near future, it has been shown that electric cars running off power generated at large central stations makes more efficient use of fossil (and presumably bio) fuels than internal combustion engines. So it would make more sense to have bio-diesel fired power plants supplying power to EVs. One of the big advantages of EV technology is that it allows us to hedge our bets on future technology. Betting on biofuel is putting all your eggs in one basket, whereas EV’s can be part of the solution regardless of whether that solution ends up being biofuels, wind, solar, nuclear, clean coal, or whatever else.
If it was financially relevant then it wouldn’t need a $7,000 rebate just to make it suck less. It is not a viable car. Sell it for $41K and let the chips fall where they may. Meanwhile, we could be buying cars for $20,000 less that actually pay for themselves in fuel savings without a rebate. All it takes is a change in NOx mandates.
The Volt is not financially viable and thus should not be promoted at taxpayer expense.
You keep switching back and forth on whether we’re talking about mineral diesel or biodiesel. If the former, we’re talking about a minor decrease in CO2 emissions - not only are you overstating the mpg increase, you’re ignoring the fact that burning a gallon of diesel emits more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. I’ll concede that diesels emit slightly less CO2 per mile driven than comparable gasoline engines, but that’s it - you get a minor efficiency bump, once, and then that’s it. You will never again be able to wring any further CO2 decreases out of the personal transportation sector again.
If that latter, you’re failing to acknowledge that cost-competitive biodiesel isn’t a guaranteed, turn-key technology. And even if we generate it the way you’ve advocated (capturing CO2 from coal-burning power plants), we’re still locking ourselves into a dependency on burning fossil fuels, when our best science tells us we need to be looking at 80%, 90%, or 100% decreases over 1990 emissions levels this century. We’re not going to get there burning coal to make biodiesel.
Electric cars, on the other hand, can get us there. The game changer isn’t that 2010 Chevrolet Volts will single-handedly do it. The game changer is that Volts and Leafs (Leaves?) start creating a market for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles as well as for batteries. That drives innovation, which drives technological improvement. Eventually, in say, 2040, we have all-electric cars that get 200 miles-per-charge, and fast-charging or battery swapping technology which is widely deployed and can get you back to a full charge in, say 5 minutes. We won’t even need plug-in hybrids like the Volt any more - they’ll be a bridge technology that had already served the purpose. Meanwhile, we continue to invest in wind, solar, and nuclear (as well as in developing the niche technologies like geothermal and tidal) so that emissions associated with electricity production are greatly reduced. That’s how we get to a point in the second half of the century where we’re well below 1990 CO2 emissions levels - not betting on mineral diesel or biodiesel as a side effect from coal burning.
Is it guaranteed to play out like that? No, certainly not. But the only way diesels get us there is with biodiesel generated without the benefit of a cloud of coal exhaust. I’m not against exploring that direction, and even having the US government chip in a little funding to explore the science that way, but I don’t want all my eggs in that basket.