Yes. That is a serious concern that all the hype about CO2 sidelines. Although, we’ve been good about passing laws to address it, so our cars are not as bad now, and artifically-produced fuel I figure could be very clean.
So what is the efficiency of that, exactly? You don’t often hear of nuclear-made fuel as a transportation solution, but that could be for political reasons.
Gasoline is one, especially valuable, component of petroleum. Oil-based power plants exist, and charging battery-powered cars from them would certainly be much cheaper money-wise (as any advocate of battery-powered cars would point out). I think CO2-wise, it’d be about the same, more or less. Maybe a bit more efficient. Someone can perhaps be more exact (though probably it’s hard to calculate). But there’s another advantage of generating energy in fossil-fuel power plants: we can scrub their exhausts in a way that’s impossible for cars.
The money spent on importing oil also gets recirculated in the economies of those countries importing the oil. There’s a very good explanation of that, but people don’t get it anyway so I won’t bother. The only thing you might say is importing oil raises the prices of other imports.
Because if you spend a dollar on arab oil or indian programmers, that dollar eventually gets spent back on our economy. “What about the time the dollar’s not here?” Well, that would cause deflation which the Fed prevents by printing more money, so we don’t see the deflation. “What if they just keep the dollars because they love dollars?” Ok, maybe the dollar is special, but imagine the scenario for any other country whose currency doesn’t get hoarded. “What if we just keep spending without waiting for dollars to return?” Then due to floating exchange rates all foreign things become more expensive until we can’t afford them anymore (meanwhile, all our goods become cheaper for foreigners to buy). The dollars must come back.
There may be subtle effects of spending our money abroad (both negative and positive). For example, bad things happen if the in-out flows change shape and velocity (oil shocks, etc.) and good things happen from the act of exporting (the best goods for the lower prices get exported, and that improves competition across the economy.) But largely, the dollars we spend abroad return to be spent on our economy and that’s what everyone has to remember.
That depends. In this scenario, petroleum is being used as an energy storage medium, not as an energy source, and modern electric car batteries still aren’t as good as gasoline engines in terms of output and endurance. Same goes with many other applications; modern batteries aren’t up to the job.
If there aren’t products to buy with petro dollars then industries or government bonds are purchased which means the money continues to flow overseas. We are paying people to buy us up.
But gasoline engines are only ~20-25% efficient these days. Even if you had a 100% efficient method of reversing the combustion process, you are losing a lot of energy when you are actually burning the gasoline. Electric motors are very efficient (over 85% for sizes that would be used in automotive use). Let’s look at the processes on the whole:
Petroleum as storage medium 1 kJ power -> 1kJ fuel (100% efficient process) -> 0.25 kJ work (25% efficient gasoline engine) or 0.4 kJ work (40% efficient diesel engine)
Electric vehicle 1 kJ power -> 0.8 kJ to battery (20% transmission/charging losses, probably higher than it actually would be) -> 0.68 kJ work (85% efficient electric motor)
And that is with an impossible process for creating the gasoline in the first place - if there was a process that was even 50% efficient I would be impressed. Thus, we can see that electric vehicles would be a much better use for our electricity than to create gasoline from an efficiency perspective. So the issue is really that current battery technology isn’t up to snuff. However, 55% of miles driven in the US are in the city, and in the “medium term” I expect battery technology to be sufficient to meet the needs of city driving (in the form of plug-in hybrids). On top of that, the 55% of city miles driven currently use over 55% of the fuel.
The arguments for or against this hypothetical are similar to those for/against hydrogen, except with hydrogen you don’t have existing infrastructure and technology in place like you do for petroleum products.
You also don’t have the density storage of energy with hydrogen.
The problem with battery cars is that they limit the utility of a vehicle whereas a diesel does not. And if you solve the battery density problem there will still be the high cost of the batteries. It’s great that people do X amount of driving on a daily basis but if they need X+Y milieage then it takes a hybrid to cover that gap and you still don’t have the full utility of a diesel and have added considerable cost to the vehicle. Less cost equals more people driving efficient cars.
And it’s not just cars that should be viewed in this scenario. Trucks represent a tremendous amount of fuel used and they cannot be replaced with hybrid technology. Any changes in national energy policy should include the fuel used by trucks.
I don’t understand why it isn’t. The idea behind your post seems to be what would happen if gasoline were a cheap, renewable resource not dependent on the Middle East, and that is what biofuels are trying to buy us.
It would be silly to burn gasoline to power electric plants which would charge car batteries.
If you’re going to use electric cars, the economics of electrical generation aren’t going to change. It’s still cheaper to run coal-fired plants than petroleum-fired plants.
If we want to convert to electrical vehicles there’s no need to keep importing petroleum.
As for the economics of producing cheap synthetic gasoline, well, the problem with cheap synthetic fuel is that most of the cost of the fuel comes from the energy to run the plant. If you have dirt-cheap electricity, then you can produce cheap synthetic hydrocarbons. But if you have dirt-cheap electricity, then why not produce electric cars that are recharged by that same dirt-cheap electricity?
If you’ve got cheap electrical energy you can use it to produce all sorts of products that you can use to power cars–hydrogen, synthetic hydrocarbons, batteries, compressed air, whatever. But this isn’t really “cheap oil”, it’s cheap electricity that can be transformed into different storage media.
Well the difference is that biofuels use solar energy specifically for the conversion of CO2 + H20 into biomass (then you can use any power source to turn the biomass into fuel), while in a direct method you can use any power source to create the fuel, so in that sense they are different. However, my point was that they are conceptually similar from a carbon neutrality and fuel independence standpoint.
Actually I’d say electric motors are better than combustion engines (from an efficiency perspective, at least), but petroleum products work better than batteries (from an energy storage perspective). The balance of which is the dominating factor (energy conversion vs. energy storage) is what will determine whether we will move towards “electric vehicles” vs. “electrically producing fuel”. My personal opinion is that with plug-in hybrids, we will be moving mostly towards using electricity directly (primarily offsetting city-driving fuel use), with electrically producing fuel not coming into play until we need to start replacing non-city driving petroleum use.
I see the electric as useful for city driving but it lacks the distance of a hybrid or the towing capacity of a diesel. Dollar for dollar diesels engines and biodiesel technology will put more cars on the road. I would love a turbo diesel Focus wagon. Give me 150 hp and 250 lbs of torque with 45 mpg. It would be fun to drive, economical and useful. I’m there. Put a bow on it.
I agree increasing the prevalence of diesel is definitely a good thing, though what’s to prevent both from happening? A quick Google news search seemed to indicate that Volvo, Volkswagen, Nissan, BMW, Toyota, Mercedes, and probably more are looking into plug-in diesel hybrids. Certainly it’s not impossible to both increase the prevalence of cheaper, diesel only cars, AND plug-in hybrids (of both gasoline and diesel varieties)?
Honda bowed out of the US diesel market when they pulled their 2010 Accord. When you look at the ROI of a hybrid it is very dependent on the price per gallon of gas as to whether the extra cost will be recovered. it’s a completely different story with diesel hybrids. The difference in cost will never match the gains made because diesels are already producing hybrid level efficiencies. Currently gas powered hybrids are using an Atkinson Cycle engine which means a stand-alone engine and not something pulled off the shelf. It would take something radical in diesel technology to make it useful for hybrids.
With that said, I give you an example of a rotary Atkinson engine that could theoretically burn diesel. Check out the animation in the upper right. I have no clue where it’s at in the way of engineering but here’s a site from a company called White Smoke. You can find an example of the prototype moving through the cycles.