This months Wired ran a really good article about Toyota’s new generation of hybrid vehicles. They are lower emissions, get better mile-age and have more power under the hood for acceleration than their previous generation. They will cost about the same, slightly more than a similarly equiped conventional engine car. The figures used in the article indicated that 60 mpg were possible, though you have to work at it (they went into all the ways people who own such vehicle ‘game’ the milage…sounded like fun to me :)). Certainly better than conventional vehicles, and they were saying that hybrid SUV’s, trucks, vans and even sports type cars are on the near horizon.
What I’d like to debate is the future direction of personal vehicles…both here in the US where we have some fairly unique driving requirements and throughout the world (especially up and coming nations like China who’s personal car ownership seems to be skyrocketting).
Are hybrids just stop gap technology (and even if so, should they be adopted en mass for the fuel savings and lower emissions they will give us today?)? WOuld it be wiser to push true alternative fuel vehicles instead? My understanding is, at least from what I’ve read lately, that hybrids are much more advanced and are in fact already in mass production (and even selling fairly well in some areas) than alternative fuel vehicles. It also seems that US companies are more in favor of true alternative fueled vehicles as an technology that will replace the standard combustion engine while Japanese companies seem to be embrassing more the hybrid model (though this isn’t to say that the US is ignoring hybrids and Japan other alternative fuels). I’m unsure where Europe or some of the other car manufacturing nations stand as far as this issue goes.
Well, the problem with alternative fuel vehicles is that there just isn’t any place to refuel them. There won’t be enough places to refuel them until there are enough of them on the road to make it profitable.
Hybrids are neat, but they’re not without their problems, with the biggest ones yet to arrive. They’re very complex and so long as their under warranty, their owners aren’t going to mind much about repairs (so long as their not excessive, which at least with the Japanese built ones doesn’t seem to be a problem), but when the warranty runs out, and their owners have to start paying for their own repairs, they’re going to look a lot less attractive. I think that they are, at best, a stop-gap technology of sorts. Once they get all the kinks worked out of hybrids (longevity issues, costs, etc.), you’ll see the technology migrate to alternative fueled vehicles. Reason being that people will like the idea of not having to stop and fill up every couple of days, and even if the replacement for gasolene is dirt cheap, they’ll want to be able to drive the same distance, or farther between fillups.
Certainly…which is why hybrids look so attractive. They use the existing infrastructure while alternative fuels will require either modifications to existing infrastructure (i.e. another ‘pump’ for hydrogen or whatever, a whole new distribution network for getting the fuel to the stations, etc), or maybe even an entirely new infrastructure. As long as oil prices aren’t TOO high hybrids look more attractive from this standpoint.
I got that same impression from reading the article and doing some spot research. They seem VERY complex, and at a guess will be maintenance nightmares, as I doubt many people will be able to do much work on them at home. I think they are a ‘stop-gap technology’ also, despite what the guy from Toyota says…something to perhaps get us through before real alternative powered vehicles are out along with whatever fuels them. For one thing, if we go hydrogen (which seems to be the top alternative from what I’ve seen), we’ll need more than simply new infrastructure to get the hydrogen to the pumps…we’ll need some way to extract hydrogen that is cost effective. Something like a new age of nuclear power in the US (or some other cheap power), otherwise the cost will simply be too high.
Well the hybrids are still build around the internal combustion engine, which is inefficient by design. Whenever you convert energy to heat, energy is always lost, and the IC engine burns fuel, converting chemical energy>heat>mechanical energy (plus waste heat).
Adding a electric counterpart will help out other losses, but the heart is still the inefficient IC engine. Also an electric battery system has it’s own inefficiencies.
The trick is to get past converting energy to heat, this is where hydrogen comes in. Hydrogen can be converted directly to electrical energy, which can drive a electric motor without a ‘heat’ step along the way. Now with hydrogen we do have the problem that this fuel must be manufactured and there is energy losses there, but it is a way that we will be pushing towards 100% efficiency, instead of maybe 40% (a guess, but it’s no where near 100%) that is the absolute max a IC engine will ever be capable of.
Any fuel you burn will have these innefficencies and as such, even if you burn H2, you will have about the same efficency as gasoline, so a hydrogen hybrid would be more efficent then a pure H2 IC engine.
The stop gap measure that Hybrids are filling is further eaking out more efficency of the IC engine.
Watching a program on alternative fuels I was struck by an unanswered question. One of the sources of hydrogen was going to be crude oil. Fine and dandy, that takes care of the hydro part, but what is to be the fate of the carbon? Are they planning to scrunch it all into tons of diamonds so it takes up less space? And won’t burning only part of the crude cause us to use existing stocks even faster?
As I pointed out above, the idea is not to burn H2, but to convert it directly to electricity via a fuel cell, which gives a higher potential efficency then burning.
Perhaps the greater efficency would offset the loss of carbon, which I’m sure will find some use and won’t be lost
I think dropzone’s point, though, is that if we extract hydrogen from crude oil, we’re using less of the oil then if it was just used as straight fuel (without taking out the hydrogen, like we do now), then won’t we go through the Earth’s oil reserves faster? I wonder that myself.
I think the thing is you’d be using hydrocarbons more efficiently if you converted it into hydrogen instead of burning it…so, you’d use less to get the same output of energy. Of course, there are other ways to make hydrogen than using crude oil also…all it takes is energy. If you had abundant energy (like, say from nuclear power) you could convert water into hydrogen after all…or you myriad other materials. Hell, you could use turkey guts or other waste to produce hydrocarbons…and hydrogen. All it takes is energy.
So, as another stop gap measure you could use oil certainly, as it would be more efficient to convert hydrocarbons into hydrogen (i.e. use less energy) than say water (or whatever else). At least thats how I understand the process. Maybe someone who knows more will wander in and give a better or more detailed explaination.
By this reasoning rust is also burning metal. Lets not spilt hairs on a tangent, the main point is that a fuel cell converts chemical to electrical energy, a IC engine converts electrical to heat to mechanical. The big difference it that heat step, which is inefficient by nature (IIRC the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
In theory conversion of energy from one form to another can be 100% efficient except if you convert from heat to another form which can’t come near 100%, more like 50% if you are lucky.
I’d assume the carbon is simply released into the atmosphere as CO[sub]2[/sub]. Did they specifically say this is not the case?
Most plans for hydrogen or electric cars seems to be:
[ul]
[li]Step 1: Convert automobiles into hydrogen/electricity, which will be generated by burning oil and coal for now.[/li][li]Step 2: Convert hydrogen/electricity production to some unnamed alternative energy source. This will be easy because you don’t have to convert all the vehicles on the road, just a few power stations or hydrogen factories.[/li][/ul]
Except Step 2 is always many years into the future.
Warning, the orifice talking here might be lower than you think.
Getting hydrogen from hydrocarbons like crude oil is a good stop gap measure in our list of stop gap measures.
As I understand it, a significant amount of hydrogen is produced in the refining of crude oil. Right now, most of that is just let go into the atmosphere since there isn’t a market for it.
Once we have the cars which can run on hydrogen, either by hydrogen combustion or fuel-cell driven electric motors, the first place to get the hydrogen is from this currently wasted source.
This will work while many people drive gasoline powered cars and some drive hydrogen cars.
Once the number of hydrogen cars rises (and the gas ones decline, presumably) there will need to be other sources of hydrogen, such as using nuclear, solar, wind or geothermal power to separate water molecules into hydrogen and water.
I’m converting my truck (83 diesel Isuzu) to run on recovered vegetable oil. I have all the parts I need and I’m getting ready to put it all together. Does that count as an “Alternative fuel”. For the record, most of Rudolf Diesel’s engines were powered by vegetable oil. That is after the engine run on powdered charcoal exploded.
I just came back from Brazil, and there are interesting developments down there. After years of decline, ethyl alcohol powered cars are making a big comeback. In addition, dual fuel cars (gasoline/alcohol) are very popular. The initial problem with alcohol-fueled cars has been overcome (the alcohol woukld not readily vaporize, leading to hard starting), direct injection of the alcohol solved this. Alcohol currently is around 30% cheaper than gasoline,and now powers around 40% of the Brazilian fleet-and this substitute benefits farmers because it gives them a market for their excess sugar production. We could do the same here-except that we would have to adjust our price supports for corn (the alcohol could be produced by fermentation of corn syrup).
Later, we could use coal to synthesize methyl alcohol-it’s an easier process than the Fischer-Tropsch process (to make gasoline).
As I say, alcohol is probably the easiest substitute fuel to power cars. The only caveat is:
-ramping up alcohol production would take time
-cars n very cold regions (Alaska, Minnesota) couldnot run on alcohol-it just doesn’t work well at extremely low temperatures.
However, this is a hellof a lot better than spending billions defending the House of saud!
When are going to be able to genetically engineered some little beastie to produce oil instead of alcohol as a waste product? It would make things so much easier, oil would just float on the surface and can be skimmed off, no distilling needed.
For environmental reasons if nothing else. I doubt we’ll be running out of oil anytime soon, but as it becomes more difficult to aquire it will become more expensive, ending the time of cheap energy. To my mind this could be a good thing, as alternative energy sources like nuclear coupled with hydrogen powered personal vehicles are much more environmentally friendly…even more so than hybrids which after all still produce emissions that are harmful to the environment.
