Automakers working on next generation of engines

Isn't that why fuel cells are under development?

I wasn't discussing the merits of carrying the fuels, just querying how
nitrogen oxides arise from the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen.

Do you know what percentage/ppm of NOx is produced, especially compared with
a petrol (gasoline) engine?

DAS

 

I wonder about the energy and environmental costs of making batteries.

DAS

 

In a word, energy density. Today's batteries just don't store enough
energy per pound and per cubic foot to make all electric cars viable.

Matt

 

I hate to break it to you that there are parts of the world with far more
expensive fuel (due to higher taxes) and the streets are crawling with cars.

I hate to break it to you but you lack the understanding of economics to
understand this issue.

Economies of scale are real, but would still exist more or less as today if
production was say one-tenth of today's output. There would simply be fewer
models made, and fewer options offered.

2 reasons a) energy density and b) where and when the energy is produced is
often not where and when it is needed for consumption. Hydrogen is portable
and storable, especially in huge quantities, which is how it would be
handled in a global hydrogen economy.

Dave Gower, retired economist.

 

No, this isn't why fuel cells are under development.

Fuel cells are under development primariarly because a fuel-cell driven
vehicle is in effect an electric car driven by a battery that has a 5 minute
"recharge" time.

And the Hydrogen economy is under development primariarly because
hydrogen answers the energy storage question.

With traditional electric cars, even if they solve the weight and power
problems with batteries (and NiMH has got a lot closer to doing this)
the fundamental limiting thing with them is that there is a recharge time
lasting in many hours.

And even if you could build a battery that had an 'instant' recharge time,
the power required to do it in a few minutes - thousands of amps - isn't
available from a standard residential 200-amp 220v power service.

The residential power service is what limits recharge times on vehicle
batteries. And this assumes a world in which everyone has a garage
with an electrical outlet in it that could deliver high power service.
(ie: a typical electric dryer outlet)

The advantage of a fuel cell - which can after all be made to burn many
other kinds of fuel than Hydrogen - is that you can pull your electric
car into a gas station and in 5 minutes have your battery "recharged" ie:
refilled with fuel.

In actuality a hydrogen-driven vehicle IN TOTO is more inefficient and
more expensive than just an electric car. Think of it this way - if a
hydrogen
economy ever gets going, and hydrogen becomes cheaper than using
electricity from the wall, then people would just go buy generators and
put them in their garage, (a 50 KW generator that uses a Chevy 350 V8
and runs off Natural Gas only costs about $10K and will easily fit in a
garage - and you can also use the waste heat to heat your home) and
buy cheap hydrogen and generate their own electricity - **** the electric
company.

With a pure electric car, you generate the electricity at a power plant and
transmit it and store it in the car in a battery, when the car moves the
electricity goes from the battery to the motors.

With a fuel-cell car you generate the electricity at a power plant
and transmit it to a hydrogen manufacturing facility where hydrogen is
made, you then carry the hydrogen to the vehicle where it's burned
in a fuel cell the electricity from the fuel cell goes to the motors.

Both cars have 2 conversions of power after the initial generation,
the hydro car has one from electricity to hydrogen, the other from
hydrogen back to electricity. The electric car has one from electricity
to chemical energy, then back from chemical energy to electricity.

The key point though is that the fuel cell conversions are much more
inefficient than battery conversions.

Battery conversions for a sample lead-acid battery are on the order of
80-90%. See:

http://www.sandia.gov/pv/docs/PDF/batpapsteve.pdf

Fuel cell conversions are more like 30% - unless you use the produced
heat for cogeneration, which in a car is not going to be feasible. See:

http://www.fuelcellstore.com/information/benefits_of_fuel_cells.html

Sure, a fuel cell is more efficient than an internal combustion engine - but
a battery is much more efficient than either of them.

Everytime you convert power you lose a lot in efficiency. The tradeoff with
fuel cell cars is you get worse efficiency in exchange for convenience. And
the tradeoff with the hydrogen economy is that you get the ability to store
energy - ie: produced hydrogen - instead of having to use it right when it
is
produced - like electricity.

No, but I don't know the percentage/ppm of a gasoline engine either. In any
case,
an EGR valve works the same way in a hydrogen-driven engine as in a
gasoline-driven
engine.

There is an existing, well known answer for NOx production for either type
of
engine so there's no point in arguing that one engine design is better than
the other
merely based on percentage of NOx, since in actual production both engines
would
have emissions controls on them that limited NOx.

The point is that people like you who are advocating the hydrogen approach
(or seeming to) don't apparently understand the big picture - which is that
you
cannot get something for nothing, and energy is needed for creating hydrogen
or
electricity or alcohol. Since just about all energy in the world originates
from the
Sun, that means collecting, transporting, and storing energy from sunlight.

One of the big reasons that the current energy consumption of fossil fuels
works today in the modern world is because most of the work of collecting
was done 100 million years ago, and because that collected energy is
currently
sitting in nice convenient pools of liquid underground, it answers the
storage
problem, and because it's a liquid, it tremendously cheapens the
transportation
cost. As a result, for us humans now, we only have to pay a small
percentage of
the cost of this energy - we don't have to do squat for collecting it or
storing it
long term. (just pay each other for it)

When the time comes that the fossil fuels run out, and we really do have to
switch over to another fuel source, we will now have to pay the cost of
collecting it and storing it, in addition to transporting it (which is what
we
actually pay now)

This is going to significantly, permanently, raise the cost of fueling a
vehicle
and may put private ownership of vehicles out of the reach of the average
person. It may be that the increased efficiencies of an electric vehicle
may
save enough money so that an electric car may possibly be affordable to a
family, while a hydrogen vehicle would not.

The summary problem is one of generation, always has been. Consider that
in this country if the bulk of our power generation was not dependent on
burning oil or coal, but was something cheap like hydropower or wind, and
electric costs were a tenth of what they are today, everyone would think
that
an electric vehicle would be the obvious solution - because it would be so
cheap to operate.

Even if by some misguided reason we do end up going down the hydrogen
track, since that's going to require copious amounts of power, we still have
to
answer the power generation problem. So, either route - electric or hydro -
since power generation is a requirement for both, we should solve this
problem
first.

Ted

 

cars.

You probably are referring to Japan. Let's see now, shall we examine the
percentage of vehicle ownership there? 50% of population vs the US 75%
of population. How about average income of those owners - about 30%
higher than US averages. Perhaps you haven't seen the following:

http://www.corning.com/environmenta...control_technology_magazine/images/chart5.pdf

Fact of it is that the reason Japan is 'crawling with cars' as you put it,
is
because they don't have as much road space. It has nothing to do with
the ability of people to afford cars. In fact, vehicle ownership is LESS in
Japan than in the US precisely because it's so expensive to own a car.
There's a lot more people in Japan that ride the bus or the train.

And a lot fewer companies producing them. Enter market monopolization, and
enter higher prices.

Automakers make very little on each vehicle produced (compared to products
put out by other industries) and so high volume is critical to maintaining
the
prices. Sure - as you point out, raw production costs are the same until
you
drop below a certain point - but long before that, the automakers will have
had to raise prices to maintain their cash flow.

Then answer where we get the energy to produce the hydrogen in the
first place. Right now we don't have to do any work in collecting sunlight
to make oil, which is portable and storable, as nature has done that for
us. In a hydrogen economy we will have to do the work of collecting
sunlight - which is going to raise costs.

Ted

 

People will adapt. The Model T automobile didn't have the power or
the range of a modern automobile but it sold like hotcakes. If it's a
question between being able to afford an electric car that has, say,
half the range of a vehicle today, vs not being able to afford a hydrogen
car that has the same range, people will buy the electric car.

Ted

 

Interesting commentary. Actually I am not one of those advocating hydrogen
fuel; I am fairly agnostic about these things and aware that each type of
fuel has pluses and minuses. What I am curious about is what the total
lifecycle cost is of batteries.

A recent report in the UK, from a reputable source, apparently, concluded
that the energy cost PER PERSON is lower in the car than in a train! My
'issue' is that evangelical advocates for a particular form of fuel (or
transport) overlook total costs.

This extends into related matters. For example, nothing is worthwhile
recycling other than aluminium containers. The rest should be incinerated.
BUT it is difficult for local politicians to posit that -- who wants an
incinerator down the road?

DAS

 

The current car battery industry boasts a 90% recycling rate.

A lot of people are very conscious about the environmental costs of
batteries. Nobody
wants lead or cadmium in the landfills. This will end up being handled the
same way
that a lot of these problems are handled. That is, $500-$1000 of the new
car
purchase price will be in effect a deposit on the battery. Toyota is doing
this already
with hybrids.

If the original purchaser drives their car until the wheels drop off, when
it finally dies
they can tow it to the dealership and have the battery removed then tow it
to a
wrecking yard and sell it for the scrap steel value.

If the original purchaser sells it, since the battery is going to be worth
something
even if the car itself is junk, this will insure that it's going to find
it's way to a
wrecking yard instead of just being dumped into a field somewhere.

Ted

 

That recycling rate is impressive but what about actually making a new
battery? Energy cost?

DAS

 

The sheer size of our population is why we have to be entangled
in Middle East affairs to keep the oil flowing. That involvement is
the direct cause of anti-U.S. terrorism.

We're living in luxury compared to the rest of history, with our
indoor plumbing, convenient and reliable water and food supplies,
push-button heating and air-conditioning, ready-made clothing,
cheap transportation, and great variety of entertainment.

Why do we have to be so greedy regarding longevity?


=========================
"Endeavor to persevere"
=========================

 

What city will this be Ted? Being a life long New Yorker, many if not
most people I know who even have a garage store junk in there. The car
typically gets parked in the street. And if you have 2 or 3 cars, 2 or
3 cars get parked in the street. Will each owner run an extention cord
to thier vehicles? No matter how nice the area, I would expect not to
find my extention cord in the morning. And in some neighborhood you'll
be extremely lucky if you can even park near your front door. I can't
imagine what the solution would be if you lived in an apartment
building. Short trips in the city here may be short distance wise but
the stop and go cycling of the motor will kill the charge rapildy
since it won't be a steady ride to your location but a series of stop
and go. I imagine New York is not alone in this instance.

If this is the future of vehicles, horse and buggy will be more
efficient. You can even use the horse poop to light a stinky fire when
it dries.

 

The model T was still far better than the alternatives which were
walking, biking or riding a horse. That analogy isn't even close to
what we're discussing here. Today's all electric cars are a big step
back from today's IC cars. Half the range is fine if you live in a
city, but doesn't fly in Montana, Texas, etc.

Sure, if people have absolutely no other choice, they might buy all
electric cars, but it will have to come to that first.


Matt

 

That really depends on the battery material and composition. Lead and
Cadimum are nasty things in the environment and so battery handling
for those batteries must be more expensive since you have to recycle them.

NiMH batteries however can be just thrown away, their materials have no
environmental issues. An interesting discussion of them is here:

http://www.cobasys.com/pdf/tutorial/inside_nimh_battery_technology.pdf

My guess though is that the manufacturers will recycle them anyhow as
the materials are more expensive than plain lead.

I would agree with that, because the train doesen't run all of the time
fully loaded. I would imagine if every train that ran was fully loaded,
the cost per person would be different. If fuel costs rose and more
people took the train and fewer took a car, the energy cost per person
on the train would drop.

incinerated.

Not true, this depends greatly on a number of factors, source separation
and quantity. Paper is definitely worth recycling. I remember being in cub
scouts 25 years ago before curbside recycling was mandated and one of our
fund raisers
was paper drives, a few tons of newsprint, cleaned of garbage like string,
paper bags, etc. was worth money that was definitely greater than the
hauling costs. And before curbside recycling was mandated there were
people making a few bucks driving around to business collecting cardboard
boxes. White office wastepaper is also worth recycling, once again if you
can train people not to throw colored paper into the recycling bins at
the office.

Clear glass containers are also worth recycling if they are source separated
from colored glass, and from clear plate glass. Glass containers melt at a
lower temperature than plate glass and sand, thus it is cheaper to make
clear glass containers out of recycled clear glass containers.

Steel for most purposes (ie: from the household) isn't worth it, the costs
of
collection outweigh the savings for most things, unless you have a lot of
steel in one place (like a car)

Mixed glass, ie: green and brown glass, is generally not worth it. This
should
frankly be something addressed at the federal level, however. There is no
reason to use brown glass for beer bottles, clear glass works just as well
and
indeed a lot of beer already comes in clear glass or cans anyway. It should
be banned for packaging, like styrofoam is (at least in our area). Green
glass is
more of a problem because of the wine industry, wine in a clear wine bottle
would almost certainly look much less appetizing (who wants to buy a clear
bottle of liquid you are supposed to drink that is the color of urine?) and
the wine industry would probably suffer sales as a result. They also don't
put wine in aluminum cans, at least, not anything that your going to get
someone to pay $100 a bottle for.

If the household waste stream was clean garbage - paper, food, etc. -
no problem. But with people throwing the household chemicals (like
batteries) into the waste stream that they do, an incinerator puts out
a lot of nasty heavy metals and costs more than just dumping it into
a sealed landfill.

The thing is though that a lot of the hauling costs of recyclables you
have to pay anyway. The garbage hauler hauls the same weight of
material off from your house whether he's taking one garbage can
or one garbage can plus a smaller box of recyclables like glass
and paper. If you can get the people to source-separate the recyclables
so the garbage hauler has the two containers to deal with, then
the costs are the same to the garbage hauler in fuel.

We have curbside recycling here and there's wide participation. Before
we had it, a typical garbage hauler might be able to so, say, 100 houses
before his truck was full and they had to send another one out.

Now the garbage company sends 2 trucks out, the first is the garbage
truck and the second is the recyclables truck. The garbage truck now
does perhaps 200 houses. So the end cost to the garbage hauler is
the same, and the advantage is that back at the garbage haulers place
he gets enough quantity of recyclables that it makes it worth while
for someone to come buy them from him.

As a point of fact the garbage haulers do just this - they sell the
recyclables
they collect to companies that come buy them. Even mixed glass goes as
the general agreement with the glass haulers is that if they have unused
space
on their truck, they will take the green/brown glass for free. And my
understanding
is that the glass haulers get a large enough quantity of green/brown mixed
that
it makes it worth while for the people that make reflective paint to send
someone out to take the green/brown mixed for free from the glass haulers.

You see this illustrates the problems of trying to determine stuff like
total
lifecycle cost on batteries. What people that do this try to do is
calculate
stuff like "it costs X dollars to move Y pounds so dealing with recycling
lead acid batteries must cost Z." What this ignores is that in real life, a
lot of the lifecycle costs are intermixed with other costs, which makes them
cheaper.

Ted

 

Let's see, standard retail markeup is 400%.

So a car battery that has a list of $100 probably cost the retailer $25 from
the
battery manufacturer.

Assuming the manufacturer takes 50% (got to pay for R&D as well as
adminstrative
costs) the cost to manufacture the battery is probably around $12. Assume
raw
material costs is about 50% again, we get an energy cost of perhaps $6? At
current fuel prices that should give you an energy cost in barrels of oil,
or
whatever other standard you want to use.

Ted

 

There was a huge amount of real world data and observation on the
GM EV1 that refutes everything that you have brought up. No, the
stop and go cycling of the motor didn't kill the charge. No, the power
grid in California didn't melt down as a result of charging them. There's
a number of websites on that vehicle out there, and many testimonials
from people who leased them. Read what the actual owners of these
cars had to say for answers about junk in garages, etc.

The only reason the EV1 isn't sold today is that the cost of manufacture
was too high for the volume sold. Once again, it was the economies of
scale in action. If GM had been able to place 4 times the number of
EV1s that they did, they would still be making them.

All this is old tired arguments that the EV1 study was designed to test
to see if they held water. They didn't. Fundamentally, what the project
boiled down to is that the simple reason electric cars aren't feasible in
the United States is the same reason that passenger car Diesels aren't
feasible
in the United States. It's because the population here is too suspicious
of any fundamental change to vehicle technology to embrace it with enough
volume to make the economies of scale be able to produce it work out. It
has
nothing to do with what people CAN do and everything with what they
have been CONDITIONED to think.

Ted

 

Not true. The Arab world didn't fundamentally hate the United States
until 2 things happened - the first was our alliance with Britian and
how Britian trashed the Arab world after WW1, and the second was
the creation of Israel which the UN did largely as a response to
what Germany did to the Jews.

WW1 was not started by the Arab world and they didn't ask us
to come into their countries and try to get them to take sides, and
Britian's conduct towards the Arabs after the WW1 was totally
reprehensible.

And the Arabs wern't gassing Jews by the millions in gas chambers,
it was Europe that did that, and it was a dirty trick for the UN to
pull the land grab that it did to create Israel, it has had no precident
before or since in international law.

If roles had been reversed and the Arab world had come in and
redrawn all state and country boundaries in North America, and
then later come in and booted all white people out of California
and gave it back to the Indians, we would be pretty upset as well.
We very probably would be initiating the same kind of guerilla actions
against them that they are doing to us.

And even today, the US could still eventually settle the peace with
the Arab world, if we only forced Israel to start doing what
we and the UN have repeatedly demanded that it do - which is
quit dumping settlers into the West Bank, and meaningfully negotiate
with the Arab world, reach peace accords and abide by their
promises.

Israel spys on the United States and violates agreements with us
and everyone else repeatedly, yet has never suffered economic
sanctions, or a cutoff of military aid, or even a threat to sever
diplomatic relations. It is like the neighbor that lets their dog
continually come and crap in your yard and dig up your flowers,
and when they see you watching them while they watch their dog
do all this, all they do is say "bad dog, bad dog" and do nothing
to get up and actually grab the cur and drag it away.

While it is plainly obvious that violence never solves anything with
these kinds of problems, whether it's the neighbors dog (for if you
poison the dog they will just buy another one and the same thing
will happen) or whether it's in the West Bank, the facts of the
matter are that the Arab world has resorted to violence out of
sheer frustration. They have tried talking over and over and over,
and nothing was done. The fact that you think the argument is
over oil and not over Jerusalem, is a pefect example of how useless
all the talking has been, as it's a textbook example of how horrible
the government has been about explaining the real facts of the
terrorist problem.

If there wasn't a drop of oil in the Mid East, the collapse of the
World Trade Center by the terrorists would still have occurred.

Ted

 

---

FROM DAS: I read your post further down about the estimated USD 6 energy
cost. I need to ponder that. (I was thinking about the total cost of
smelting the ores etc, but maybe you have given a simple, effective
indicator.)

I have retained a copy of the Cobasys battery article as it's a good
explanation of how they work, but it does not, understandably, discuss the
cost of making and disposal/recycling.

My underlying point is, I suppose, about displaced enery consumption.
Electric trains are often considered wonderfully environmentally friendly,
whilst it is overlooked that you need, in most cases, regular power stations
using oil or gas, to produce the electricity in prodigious quantities. Only
a few regions, such as Switzerland, are blessed with truly environmentally
friendly power sources such as water (hydroelectric).
Same with electric cars. You need to make the batteries and, even if they
are, after all, quite cheap in energy and environmental terms, you still
need to build vast numbers of electricity generating stations to run them...

FROM DAS: Precisely. We can forget about the 'ifs' of fully laden trains
all the time. I have been on trains with standing room only, but these only
run on main routes and it doesn't occur throughout the day or throughout the
year. Even in the US I was on a well-patronised train, namely from Philly
to DC, and then from DC to NYC, but I am sure that's an exception, too.
(I.e. it's a main route.)

In principle you are right about shifts to trains if cars become less
available, but in a free society this is a pipe dream. In the ex-COMECON
countries there is still a quite high utilisation of trains, stemming from
the days of when it was very difficult for individuals to own cars (for a
variety of reasons) and when ticket prices were kept artifically low. But,
I suggest, this is falling as more and more people buy cars. The fact is
that the automobile is one of the most important (if not THE most important
factor) in the free movement of individuals (hats off to Henry Ford here).
You can see that despite the high fuel taxes in Europe and other places
sales of cars continue to rise in most years.
It has been calculated in the UK that even if only 10 percent of freight
were moved to rail from the road, it would DOUBLE the freight train
requirement, and there is no way anybody is going to invest in such
infrastructure unless there were coercion or other factors at play. Rail
transport for freight is only of limited economic value because of its
inflexibility, so it's good, for example, for the long-distance transport of
coal, but useless for the movement of 1000 computers being sent to 100
wholesalers in 20 different parts of the country.

Even in Germany, where any significant company had a railhead, use has
declined dramatically...

I am a great fan of rail travel, but not at the expense of economic reality.

FROM DAS: This is I dispute. These days paper recycling is a 'political'
act done to salve people's consciences. A few years ago in the UK a major
newspaper tried paying people GBP 5 for every ton (or was it per 100 kg?) of
paper but the campaign failed as they could not sell it on for a profit.
Yes, our local council also collects paper as well as other items, but it
would be simpler and cheaper to incinerate it.

Try buying writing paper made from recycled paper. It's not as good and
costs more.

The only way to make paper recycling economically viable is not introduce
market distortions, such as taxes on landfills and other ways of handling.

FROM DAS: To many 'ifs'. Forget about 'training'. Even if 99 out of a 100
get it right, just one sheet of coloured paper ruins the batch...

Here in Britain we are always exhorted not to chuck our Yellow Pages
directories into the paper recycling bins (because of the yellow paper), but
how many take heed? Paper is paper, right?

FROM DAS: Even more so here. One brown bottle in a batch of 100 uncoloured
ones is enough to rion the lot.

FROM DAS: I don't get it. White wine (urine coloured?) is always sold in
uncoloured bottles.

FROM DAS: Modern scrubbers easily take care of noxious gases, just like out
of car exhausts.

FROM DAS: We have versions of this in the UK, the exact format depending on
the Local Authority (municipality). It does not detract from my general
contention that incinerators would be the most efficient solution (you can
also use the heat output for heating, done in some places in Europe). For
things other than aluminium only distortions help, one of these being the
(political) difficulty of building incinerators.

As regards glass, the raw material is infinitely available, and I have seen
the energy balance.

Try speaking to people in the recycling and incineration business.
[............]

 

1) Only the US oil companies which were 'nationalised' in Saudi Arabia,
Iran...

2) A view, but a slightly simplified one...

DAS
--
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[.......]

 

And I thought it was because GM had previously introduced some pretty
terrible diesel engines which people remember, and because now there is
still no US-wide availability of low-sulfur fuel which allows the
introduction of modern diesel engines.

DAS