# Loss of ICE engine fuel infrastructure **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 2, 2020, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776 "2020-01-02T13:16:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/41 "2020-01-03T19:19:20Z")
> [@Corry\_El](#): > > It’s probably more of an excess than that now. Car tanks take only a couple of minutes to fill, 8-9 gpm perhaps avg pump rate (10 gpm the legal max generally in US) and teens gallons a fill. Of course there’s overhead of setting things up, but there is for charging too. > > The pee stop and a little shopping gets you to the 5-10 minutes, but charging time is more like 40 minutes to 80% or something like that. To feel EV is a transparently easy way to travel by road you’ve got to psyche yourself into it. Which some people do and maybe a large % of people eventually will, but objectively it’s really not. OTOH of course on trips within car’s radius with home charger it could more reasonably be viewed as no more or even slightly less hassle than fueling an ICE car. > > Swappable battery is an idea, which had failed in attempted commercialization, by Better Place > [Why Better Place failed with swappable batteries—and your cars might just use them one day](https://qz.com/88871/better-place-shai-agassi-swappable-electric-car-batteries/) > But might succeed at some point. > > More likely IMO EV’s just aren’t going to be a really huge thing in the US for a very long time without a big step up in public policies to bribe and/or force people to buy them. Which might also happen. Anyway, ICE cars dropping to a small % of the market is highly speculative and getting way ahead of ourselves as an issue to closely examine in the US IMO. It’s among the big constellation of decades forward energy, climate and related stuff you simply cannot predict with a useful degree of precision, despite many people’s tendency to think they can just read up on ‘expert’ opinion then know what’s going to happen. Peak oil, etc, not actually predictable. I actually think if someone can devise a carbon neutral fuel that doesn’t take more energy to produce than it provides (the historic issue with ethanol), that would be the real game-changer. Not only would it dramatically slash CO2 emissions if it was widely adopted, but it would be a fine feedstock to other chemical processes as well, and if some sort of clean energy was to become common, then it’s conceivable, although maybe not likely, that we could actually go in reverse with something like that, and use it to actually sequester carbon in the form of long lasting durable plastic and dump it in a mine somewhere. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/42 "2020-01-03T19:35:51Z")
I wonder if a towable battery pack will end up being the way that long trips are handled. The vast majority of the time, you don’t need to swap the battery, so building that capability into the normal car/battery is a big cost for a rarely used thing. And a towable battery pack could be compatible with multiple different vehicles without having them all have to use exactly the same size battery. Just standardize on some electrical characteristics, a tow hitch, and a plug. > [@bump](#): > > if someone can devise a carbon neutral fuel that doesn’t take more energy to produce than it provides That seems thermodynamically challenging. ---
**Author:** ![Oredigger77](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/oredigger77/32/3181_2.png) [@Oredigger77](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oredigger77)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/43 "2020-01-03T19:57:58Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > That seems thermodynamically challenging. Not really. Ethanol is just another term for solar power. The trick is growing and refining it which isn’t relevant to it’s energy content. It takes about 1,500,000 BTU to distill 70 gallons of ethanol, that ethanol contains 5,327,000 BTU. The trick then becomes getting down the ancillary fuel usage both in farming and in the processing (cooling, milling, pumps, and grain separation) below 4 mmbtu. Using not intensive agriculture is the easiest way but then you need more land devoted to the process. Biodiesel is another way to get the btu out put up since methanol is another primary output of ethanol refineries mixing it with the produced corn oil and sourced potassium hydroxide can really make plant more profitable. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/44 "2020-01-03T20:00:07Z")
> [@mixdenny](#): > > I spend a lot of time identifying rural aerial photos from the 1960s through the 1990s. I would say that gas stations have the highest attrition rate of any similar sized business. We are down to probably 25-30% of what once existed. I can point to many area crossroads that used to have 2 or 3 stations and now have none. Brand loyalty used to be very high so every company had to be represented in a fairly small area. Between 1994 and 2013 25% of total gas stations in the US closed, but the amount of gas produced as gone up by close to 33%, and the number of pumps at a typical station has gone up. Total gas produced in the us : ttps://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=wgfupus2&f=W ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/45 "2020-01-03T20:09:30Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Probably an idea ahead of its time somewhat, especially in Better Place’s case. > > Right now, it takes somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to completely fill a car’s gas tank from nearly empty, giving roughly 400 miles of range. > > EVs are going to need to have similar charging performance eventually- if you could charge your EV in the time it takes for you to go into the gas station, pee, get a snack/drink and check-out, you’re in the right ballpark. But if you do all that, and STILL need to wait another 20 minutes for your car to be fully charged, that’s not going to be popular. That’s why I think swappable batteries will end up being an option in the future. Yeah, current Tesla EVs take 40 minutes for an 80% charge according to published numbers, and that’s on a smaller range than a gas car, and also includes a big range drop if driving above 65 or in cold weather. AFAIK no one but Tesla has a major fast charging infrastructure to use. The long charging also has a compounding effect during busy travel times; Tesla drivers in CA experienced hours long waits for charging over Thanksgiving this year, and that’s in one of the areas with the best developed charging infrastructure. There is experimental battery tech that will do a complete charge in 10 minutes and still maintain a reasonable lifetime (2500 charging cycles), which would eliminate the charging time issue entirely. > **[More Teslas on the Road Meant Hours-Long Supercharger Lines Over Thanksgiving](https://www.thedrive.com/news/31274/more-teslas-on-the-road-meant-hours-long-supercharger-lines-over-thanksgiving)** > > The busiest travel weekend of the year was an interesting test for Tesla's fast-charging network. > **[New Experimental EV Battery Design Can Charge in Just 10 Minutes](https://www.extremetech.com/cars/301364-new-experimental-ev-battery-design-can-charge-in-just-10-minutes)** > > Researchers from Penn State University say it may be possible to design electric vehicle batteries that charge in as little as 10 minutes. The key, apparently, is to turn up the heat. ---
**Author:** ![RioRico](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f04885/32.png) [@RioRico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RioRico)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2020, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776/46 "2020-01-03T21:22:46Z")
Range extenders are available for EVs. They’re usually little ICEs (or sometimes fuel cell units) spinning generators, mounted on trailers - IOW, drag-along hybrids. Swapping drop-in batteries? A Tesla 7’s battery pack weighs upwards of a half-ton and isn’t readily accessible AFAIK. Energy density must be MUCH greater for drop-ins to be feasible. Or batteries must be swapped from underneath. I doubt that will be cheap. The one, the only, Nicola Tesla designed a global wireless power transmission system, with giant towers broadcasting juice. That may be needed before EVs go mainstream. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loss-of-ice-engine-fuel-infrastructure/845776.md?page=2)