Daimler wants to mass produce fuel cell vehicles by 2012-2015:
Daimler fuel cell system development director Christian Mohrdieck told a conference in Stuttgart recently that by the 2012-2015 time frame they will be able mass-produce fuel cell cars on a cost competitive basis with other technologies. If so that would be put them only a couple of years behind General Motors, which expect to be able to do that by the end of this decade. So far Daimler has built over 100 fuel cell vehicles that have accumulated over 2.3 million miles of testing.
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Now there is just the pesky problems of producing and distributing all the hydrogen.
“Pesky”, indeed.
Once again, a limited test with a few or even (gasp!) 100 cars, no matter how many miles they rack up, proves nothing about the scalability of hydrogen fuel cells to an economy-wide solution. And it’s not just a matter of dollar cost (which is most definitely non-trivial when you’re talking about building out a massive, new infrastructure), but the additional burden of reducing economy-wide CO2 emissions. (Yes, it would be nice if we completely accounted for CO2 emissions in all energy costs, but I honestly don’t expect to see that happen in the US.)
The Peak Oil Issue — A Progress Report:
ASPO-USA’s 3rd annual World Oil Conference has now come and gone. The gathering was an unqualified success, so our thanks go to the organizers and volunteers who made the conference possible. About 525 people attended, probably the highest total so far for any peak oil conference held to date anywhere in the world. Any detailed post-mortem is necessarily incomplete. Perhaps it is more important to explore the significance of the conference in its larger context. Is there greater clarification of the peak oil issues? How is the world reacting to those issues?
In its narrow sense, the phrase “peak oil” refers to the zenith of global oil production, but the term now often refers to more general resource constraints on “business as usual” going forward. There are issues about coal, natural gas and other commodities. The connection between anthropogenic climate change and future resource availability is now being explored in greater depth as new data-driven analysis comes to light.
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Looking on the bright side, peak oil is not so much a fringe idea as it once was, and the internet is full of good writing on the subject. Major reports like those issued by the GAO and the NPC—who acknowledged the peak oil problem mostly by avoiding it, choosing instead to talk about poorly articulated “hard truths”—have addressed peak oil directly. Unfortunately, these reports also did not get nearly the attention they deserved, just as they did not fairly characterize the state of our knowledge about peak oil. On the other hand, the AAPG’s Hedberg Research Conference headed up by Nehring was held primarily to clarify our knowledge about the future oil supply and predict the peak or plateau of world production.So there is some progress to report in the 4th quarter of 2007, even if it does not warrant much optimism that most people are finally coming to grips with reality. Like many observers, Tom Whipple believes it will take a traumatic event to awaken the public to peak oil. On second thought, even the typical human response to crisis has attendant problems. A geopolitical upheaval will spawn explanations about the event itself, explanations that have nothing to do with our peak oil vulnerability. Similar explanations would be offered in the case of a severe economic downturn, mutatis mutandis. The upside is that both events would force us to consume less oil. The downside is that a severe interruption in oil production will engender great human suffering while the peak oil problem will remain unseen in the background.
Thus we understand the basic reasons that explain the underlying pessimism evident at ASPO-USA’s conference. The news is mostly bad but few are acknowledging these warning signs. It’s never easy to be the bearer of bad tidings. So we do the best we can at ASPO-USA, as exemplified by this year’s excellent conference. And we will try harder in the future. The rest of our fate is in God’s hands, or if you prefer, in the ineluctable workings of a Universe over which we ultimately have little control. Nature—including Human Nature—will win in the end, it always does. If it helps, take the Prozac.
Dave Cohen’s summary of the just-completed ASPO-USA conference. First rate stuff, even by his standards. Go read.
The PDF’s of the presentations are available here.
Hybrid or All-Electric? Car Makers Take Sides:
Big auto makers revving up efforts to electrify automobiles are taking shots at each others’ strategies, in a style more familiar to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than the auto industry’s usually circumspect leaders.
The argument surfacing among auto-industry leaders gathering for the Tokyo Motor Show this week is over whether it is time to skip past partial electrification of cars — represented by gasoline-electric hybrids such as the Toyota Prius — and push instead to revive the idea of an all-electric car.
On one side are Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Corp. Both have played down all-electric cars in favor of developing gasoline-electric hybrids, though they disagree on the best technology and how quickly it can be implemented.
On the other side are two allied car makers, France’s Renault SA and Japan’s Nissan Motor Co., as well as Honda Motor Co. The three have expressed skepticism about the economic wisdom of hybrids and are talking up all-electric cars.
Welcome to the protracted messiness as the economy responds to higher oil prices by “sorting itself out”, as economists are fond of saying.
One fundamental issue here that seems to have flown below almost everyone’s radar is what we should read into the fact that the car companies are having this discussion (or argument) at all. If they thought we were seeing a short-term spike in prices that would subside in six months or a year or two years, do you think they would be allocating this much of their resources to developing different automotive technologies? Of course they wouldn’t, which only proves that they now believe what the peak oil crazies (like, well, me) have been saying all along: This time it’s different and the age of cheap oil has ended. In other words, we’re seeing these companies do exactly what they feel is in their own best interest: Develop more oil-efficient vehicles, even at great cost, because that’s what the market will want for the foreseeable future.
The signs that many companies and governments “get” peak oil and recognize that we’re in a permanent oil crunch are all around us. Some of those signs are more pleasant than others, but they’re all there, nonetheless.
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October 24th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Good point regarding the HEV vs EV debate - the main point is the fact that they are having the debate at all.
Also we need to consider that these companies aren’t just supporting one or the other based on technology (or even the costs of those technologies).
Other important factors;
1) Market - in Japan and Europe, a limited range EV would probably appeal to more people than in the US, where people take longer road trips and are more likely to have long car commutes.
2) IP position - whether you support EV or HEV may depend significantly on what patents you have or don’t have
3) Battery technology - that’s really a BIG factor - if you believe in and have access to good/inexpensive battery technology, then there’s no reason not to go EV. If you’re worried about the delays, setbacks, safety, and high costs of new Li battery technology, then you stick with HEV and PHEV.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of those companies change their tune in the near future. (for example, VW has gone back and for on hybrids multiple times in the past couple of years)
But really, I don’t care what route specific companies go. There is no one solution. We need them all. Instead of arguing, they need to step up their production of whatever technologies they decide on. In the end, the average driver isn’t going to care about the details of the technology (only the early adopters like us do). In the end, it comes down to initial cost, MPG, reliability, and whether it fits your lifestyle (and image).
October 24th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I found an amazing presentation among the ASPO slides from Caltech’s Dave Rutledge, chairman of the engineering department. Now I’m a ‘Tech alum myself with an engineering degree and I have tremendous respect for the quality of the work they do (pardon my parochialism!). Caltech has actually been something of an outsider on the Peak Oil issue, pushing the concept long before it has reached the academic mainstream. My son graduated from Tech in 2005 and the president gave an address at the graduation ceremony emphasing that working on energy problems would be THE main challenge facing the new scientists and engineers before him, throughout their careers.
Anyway Rutledge has done some work on the interaction between climate change and peak oil, looking specifically at whether there is enough fossil fuel to sustain the more serious predictions of CO2 increases. His web page is at http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ where he’s got links to PowerPoint slides, a video, and supporting Excel spreadsheet data. You can also see the slides in PDF format from the ASPO web site at http://www.aspousa.org/proceedings/houston/presentations/Talk%20for%20ASPO%20from%20Dave%20Rutledge.pdf .
Rutledge uses a pretty conventional “pessimistic” Peak Oil analysis, discounting OPEC’s reserve increases, using Hubbert linearization to estimate world oil and gas reserves, and also finding that coal reserves are widely overstated. The net result of this analysis is that there is no way to achieve even the most limited of the IPCC forecasts for CO2 emissions. Rutledge finds that at most, CO2 will peak at a level of 460 PPM, a level which is lower than even the most optimistic (and/or authoritarian) “Greens” might hope to achieve in their wildest dreams. There simply is not enough fossil fuel to get any higher than this.
This will produce a temperature rise of 1.7 degrees C, not great but well below the apocalyptic predictions one often hears. And 0.3 degrees of this is due to coal and could be reduced if CO2 sequestration technology were phased in (much of that would have to be in China).
So this is a real good news/bad news situation. The good news is that climate change is not going to be a problem. The bad news is it’s because we’re going to have a real bad peak energy problem instead, an order of magnitude sooner. People have talked about preventing climate change and all the pain that would be involved, how it’s politically impossible; well guess what: we’re going to experience every bit of that pain, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It will be an involuntary imposition of climate change remediation measures, and it’s going to hurt.
The one bright spot is that he does see alternative energy, particularly solar and to a lesser degree wind, as capable of taking over, in the sense that there is enough energy there to satisfy our needs. The problem, which he doesn’t state clearly, is that there is no way to ramp up these alternatives fast enough, given his pessimistic projections on peaking of oil and natural gas. Solar has increased by a factor of 100 in 22 years, which is fast growth by anyone’s measure, but it still has to grow by maybe a factor of 1000 or more, plus we would have to convert our entire transportation infrastructure to run on batteries. There’s just no way we can make this changeover in time to compensate for the near-term oil and gas peak that Rutledge’s estimates imply.
Well, of course I am just singing the standard Peak Oil quasi-doomsday song here. Maybe it’s not exactly doomsday but it’s an economic challenge bad enough to make the Great Depression look barely noticeable. It’s not clear that Rutledge’s estimates will all hold, and he doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that new technologies will break out of his curves and allow greatly increased recovery of fossil fuels, beyond the incremental improvements we have seen so far. So I would not take his future as gospel, but it is definitely an interesting and credible data point.
October 24th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Hal: Thanks for pointing out that presentation. I’ll bubble it to the top of my “stuff to read from the ASPO Conference” list.
My knee jerk reaction (based on your description) is that the carbon output from the remaining use of fossil fuels (as opposed to the remaining fossil fuels) is probably the part of his analysis where he’s on the firmest footing. We have a pretty good to excellent idea of how much CO2 is in the air and how much we can expect to add via burning fossil fuels.
I’m less confident in the climate side of things, though. We’re seeing a ton of evidence now that the IPCC report was almost laughably optimistic, thanks to their inherent conservatism and our more general lack of understanding about the extent to which feedbacks like the albedo flip come into play. Like you, I’ve heard the infamous 2C number many times, but I’m no longer even confident that’s the true “red line”; because of feedbacks it could be less.
I’ll definitely give it a close read, though.