NYISO (New York Independent System Operator has released Alternate Route: Electrifying the Transportation Sector: Potential Impacts of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles on New York State’s Electricity System [17 page, 277KB PDF]. From the executive summary:

Plug-in Electric Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) represent a new stage in the evolution of hybrid electric vehicles in which the electric “plug” for charging batteries has the potential to supplement the “pump.” Several automobile manufacturers have announced plans to introduce PHEVs. President Barack Obama has called for new programs to support PHEV development and deployment. In New York State, Governor David Paterson has announced the creation of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY BEST). The Consortium, one of the first of its kind in the nation, will focus on the development and manufacturing of advanced and affordable battery technologies for the purpose of advancing the PHEV industry here in New York. General Electric also announced a new initiative for the development of advanced batteries, with manufacturing facilities expected to be built in New York State.

The timing and magnitude of potential electric load from PHEVs will be determined by several key factors. These include consumer acceptance of PHEVs, the advancement of battery storage technologies, and the availability/location of PHEV-charging infrastructure. Two studies, one by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and another conducted jointly by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concluded that incremental load for PHEVs in New York would be in the range of 7,000-8,000 gigawatt-hours per year (GWH/yr)by 2030.

PHEV load can also migrate and occur intermittently, as PHEV-charging opportunities (as an electric load) expand beyond the owner’s home and depend on travel schedules. If charging patterns are managed properly, PHEVs with loads in the range predicted by these studies could be served by the existing New York bulk power system. The migratory nature of this load, however, does require further analysis to fully assess the impact of PHEV load on local electric distribution systems.

If the charging pattern of PHEVs is not managed effectively, loads of this size could require significant additional generation capacity. Rate design to encourage off-peak charging, coupled with time-of-use rates, and Smart Grid/Advanced Metering Initiatives, would facilitate favorable charging behavior. Advanced communication protocols between the recharging location and an evolving Smart Grid could also facilitate effective management of charging patterns.

We all know that Americans waste a lot of gasoline because of congestion. Well, this is one of those times when what we all know is actually true:

The Texas Transportation Institute studies congestion in 85 urban areas throughout the United States each year. According to their latest study, the amount of fuel wasted due to congestion grew to 74 gallons per traveler in 2002, a total of 5.7 billion gallons of fuel.

That’s 5.7 billion gallons of gasoline that we could have simply poured on the ground and burned, for all the benefit we got from it. And the cost, aside from dollars, was huge: About 51 million metric tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere, from just the one year (2002) in question, CO2 we’ll be dealing with for many decades. If anything, I would expect that the congestion problem has become worse in the US since 2002, even if it’s dropped a bit since entering the current recession.

See the data for the above graph here.

This time around, Graph of the Week focuses on one of those things “everyone” knows that ain’t necessarily so–the fact that Americans drive hideously long distances to their jobs.

The graph, courtesy of US Dept. of Energy and the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, shows that 58% of the trips to work are 10 miles or less:

The page for the above graph, along with a table of the data, is here.

A few points I feel compelled to make:

• The data is from 2001. I suspect there’s more recent data on this floating around out there, somewhere, but I haven’t tried to track it down. I doubt things have changed much in the intervening eight years; even in a mobile society like the US, I wouldn’t expect such a broad measure to shift radically when it depends on broad patterns of employment and living arrangements.
• The graph measure miles per “trip”, which I think is one-way, but I wouldn’t make any bar bets on this data without verifying that detail.
• The reason so many people have this notion of Americans driving 100 miles a day just to get to and from their place of work is attributable to our friends in the media. Every time the price of gasoline gets “high” they do the inevitable filler pieces showing people gassing up their vehicle and grumbling about the price, which often enough turns to the issue of just how far the person drives just to get to work–and whaddaya know, it’s really far! Honestly, I wish they would interview someone with a Prius (or a Scion xA driving, home working hypermiler, like me). But I guess that wouldn’t make nearly as “interesting” a narrative.

You can quote numbers all day about how much oil the US uses and for which purposes, but few things drive the point home like the graph below. This shows US oil consumption for just transportation (broken out by mode), with a line plot of domestic production, revealing a humongous gap and explaining why so many peak oil adherents are so freaked out.

The description from the graph’s page:

In 1989 the transportation sector petroleum consumption surpassed U.S. petroleum production for the first time, creating a gap that must be met with imports of petroleum. By the year 2030, transportation petroleum consumption is expected to grow to nearly 17 million barrels per day; at that time, the gap between U.S. production and transportation consumption will be 3.7 million barrels per day.

The graph’s caption:

Note: The U.S. Production has two lines after 2005. The solid line is conventional sources of petroleum. The dashed line adds in other inputs — ethanol, liquids from coal, and liquids from biomass. The sharp increase in values between 2006 and 2007 are caused by the data change from historical to projected values.

The graph’s page has a table of the data, but it doesn’t break out those “other inputs”, which seem to be particularly loaded with assumptions. (”Liquids from coal”???) The sources cited for the data are “Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 27, and EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009, December 2008″.

One of the responses I always hear from the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I bet I can stump the energy geek with something he hasn’t thought of!” crowd when I mention PHEVs and EVs is something along the lines of, “But what if you recharge the battery with electricity made from coal???”

The answer, as you can see below, is that you still reduce CO2 emissions a lot, even in that worst-case scenario.

The description of the graph from the source page (linked below):

Estimates from the GREET model (see Argonne National Laboratory’s information on GREET) show that passenger car PHEV10s produce about 29% fewer carbon emissions than a conventional vehicle, when plugged into an outlet connected to the typical U.S. grid. Even when PHEV10s are charged using power generated completely from coal, carbon emissions are about 25% less than those of a conventional vehicle. The use of light truck PHEV10s reduces emissions by 28% when charged on a typical grid and 23% when charged on power generated from coal. The carbon reductions are greater as the length the vehicle can travel on electricity increases.

(As you’ve probably guessed, a PHEV10 is a PHEV with a 10-mile battery range, etc. “Typical grid” electricity is defined as “50.9% coal; 20.1% nuclear; 16.7% natural gas; 11.0% renewable energy; and 1.3% petroleum”.)

See this page for the tables of data used in the graph.

This week’s Graphs of the Week come from the US Dept. of Energy’s energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, and they address a pretty basic fact of American transportation: The mix of cars vs. light trucks in new vehicle sales, and who’s driving them. (”Light trucks” is a term of art meaning pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs. Add your own rude comment here about how “light” some SUVs are.)

The first graph is sales, Vehicle Technologies Program: Fact #553: January 12, 2009 Market Share of New Cars vs. Light Trucks:

There’s not a whole lot to say about this one. The trends underlying these curves are pretty obvious, and I expect them to really kick into overdrive in the next few years as fewer people buy trucks simply because they want one. The era of trucks being used in the US for other than business and institutional purposes is quickly coming to a close.

You can find the index of this year’s EERE Facts of the Week here.

The second graph is use of pickup trucks, Vehicle Technologies Program: Fact #409: January 30, 2006 Personal vs. Business Use of Pickup Trucks:

See the page linked above for the numbers, but you’re reading this right–over 90% of light pickup truck use and over 80% of medium duty pickup use are for personal reasons. (Note that this is just pickup trucks, meaning a subset of all light trucks, and therefore excludes minivans and SUVs.)

We need to use a lot less oil and emit a lot less CO2. I doubt anyone who regularly reads this site would seriously debate those assertions. As we see so often, the truly interesting issues arise only in the follow-up questions: What do we cut? Who has to make which lifestyle changes (and, in some cases, sacrifices)? Who bears which monetary costs? And, most important of all, who gets to answer those first three questions?

All of this came to mind when I read a couple of items that flowed through my news feeds in the last couple of days…

Courant.com: Some Still Swear By Gas Guzzlers, But For How Long?:

Whether I’m launching onto I-84 or passing a truck on Route 44, I want to hear a sound — not a buzz or a whine, but a throaty snarl that speaks of power and survival.

Like many Americans, I need a car with spirit and heft, and if it has some elegance or attitude in the fender lines, so much the better.

Events, however, are conspiring to end this long affair.

Rising fuel prices, the recession, federally mandated fuel economy hikes and smart growth are combining to scrap the vigorous, often chunky vehicles that take our cheeseburger-loving behinds down the road. It won’t be long until we’re all skittering along in identical pods, spurting puffs of mist from our hydrogen-fueled mini motors; or worse, moving under our own puny power.

So I say, let’s enjoy these final years of gas-guzzling joy. Get under the oil tap this Memorial Day weekend and swill.

Speaking as an ex-motor head, a guy who owned sports cars and a 100+ HP motorcycle, someone who lived and breathed 0-to-60 times, 60-to-0 braking distances, lateral G-force ratings, etc., and thought it was my moral duty to exercise all of a speedometer’s range while wallowing in the adrenaline rush of eyeball-flattening acceleration, I have to admit that I went through a list of reactions upon reading this.

My knee jerk reaction: Get over it. The age of mindless, thoughtless consumption is over. Even here in the historically myopic and selfish US we’re (finally!) exiting adolescence and becoming acutely aware of how much our actions affect each other, and therefore ourselves. Poor baby–you have to give up your bloody hobby as part of our joint effort to avoid the twin horrors of peak oil and climate chaos!

After a few moments of contemplation, I realized I was making the same idiotic and infuriating mistake that so many others make: I’m imposing my own values (as they exist today) on others, dismissing the viewpoint of the people I’m passing judgment on, and confusing strategy and tactics.

I’ll come back to these points below, but let me flesh out the pattern a bit with the other article I read, Cultural Trends Examiner: Indy 500 continues to waste fuel: Another car race with no awareness of recession or peak oil:

The Indy 500 happens at this time ever year regardless of the price or scarcity of gasoline. It’s pushing $3 per gallon, and it was near $5 per gallon last year. Still, these folks continue to blow off valuable energy as if there is an endless supply. They no longer use gasoline but have replaced it with ethanol, the plant-based fuel that is now causing us to grow corn and sugar for fuel rather than feeding the 25,000 who will die of starvation today. Experts say that the energy required to fill one SUV tank could feed a single person for an entire year.

And we still haven’t even included the waste from the fuel used by people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to attend and watch cars drive fast around and around and around. I thought that we were deep into a recession, and that people were having trouble with the basics of life. We’ve been asked to limit our use of oil and combine out trips to save fuel, but these racers just keep driving nowhere. And people come out to watch and cheer as long as they make lots of noise and crash every so often. How about a real technology race of electric, sustainable energy vehicles?

That does not seem to be the interest of such big sports events. People are still attending and making a big deal about this type of “competition,” which is really nothing more than lots of fat cat corporate types getting “we the people” to get excited about overpaid “athletes” creating a spectacle. It’s just big money using more big money to attract money from unconscious people (mostly guys).

The majority of people who have the great seats are corporate executives whose tickets are bought by the company, many of which are being supported by U.S. government funds. That big corporation may be receiving bail out money from us (”we the people” American taxpayers), but they still “invest” in taking themselves and their clients to these big sporting events.

Since I try very hard to stick to the numbers in such discussions, let me point out that the amount of fuel used every year in the US during these races plus everything burned to get the drivers, their huge support teams, the cars and other equipment, and all those spectators to a race is certainly an impressive number, in absolute terms, but a truly insignificant one in terms of the overall US liquids fuels consumption. I won’t bother doing the research needed to ballpark the number; consider it an exercise left for the reader. Nor will I address the issue of who is buying those expensive tickets, which borders on class warfare and is therefore irrelevant.

The problem with this view of Indy and car racing in general is that it views the whole operation via a specific set of values and imposes a moral judgment on those who see the world differently.[1]

But wait, I can hear people typing into their angry e-mail already, isn’t it absolutely true that if we gave up a lot of completely unnecessary activities, like holding and attending many professional sporting events, that we would forgo a lot of CO2 emissions and effectively leave a lot of oil in the ground? Wouldn’t that benefit us all? Of course it would, and I’ll sign up for that view just as soon as someone gives me a list we can all agree on of which things are truly “unnecessary”. You might think the first writer’s obsession with all things automotive, or my obsession with lacrosse, are inexcusable luxuries. But taking those “unnecessary” things away from people like us (and your favorite things away from you, I dare say) would have a huge impact on our lives, even if they don’t provide food, clothing, shelter, or medical care.

So, we’re at a stalemate, and we should do nothing, and race right off the edge of that quickly approaching cliff, right? Of course not. What we should do is take the approach that I keep preaching governments should adopt: Set the strategy (reduce CO2 emissions, reduce petroleum dependency), but don’t pick winners and losers. In the case of government subsidies, that usually means not selecting one technology over another for support. In the case of our individual lives and how we view the actions of others, that means leaving moral judgments for more appropriate circumstances, like how we view issues of prisoner torture or war in general, aside and focusing on the big goals.

That’s a nice sentiment (I hear you typing), but in the real world the government has to favor some solutions over others, even before our quaint panorama is warped almost beyond recognition by the absurdities of politics. Witness the recent changes in funding for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Yucca Mountain, the ongoing PTC (production tax credit) for renewables, the endless support for corn-based ethanol, and the subsidies for nuclear power, including insurance, which would be all but impossible to acquire without government help. Until we have a reasonable price on CO2 emissions, then I think we have little choice but to employ technology-specific government support, especially where it’s critical to providing the stable, investment-friendly environment that’s critical in building a large enough industry for building and maintaining wind turbines and solar power in its various forms, for example.

I’m more convinced than ever that the solution on the climate portion of our shared nightmare is a well run (note the emphasis) cap and trade system for CO2 emissions and most other forms of environmental impact. Set the overall limit and let the market and individuals decide how they want to divide it up, with no subsidies for anyone aside from R&D funding. If some entity wants to horde its CO2 emissions allotment, in effect, and then blow it all on attending a couple of races or lacrosse games or NFL games or science fiction conventions or yacht races or whatever “unnecessary”, legal pursuit you can name, then that’s fine, and it matters not the least whether the entity is an individual, a university, a government office, an NGO, or a corporation. The grand goal–get CO2 emissions down to X tons/year–is still met, and that’s all that matters. Moral judgments should be as irrelevant to us as they are to the atmosphere, which draws no distinction between CO2 emitted for a “good reason” vs. that emitted for something “unnecessary”.

Peak oil is a far more problematic issue, as trying to get people focused on a hard and fast limit–the US has to reduce its oil consumption to Y million barrels/day next year–simply because the education process is so much further behind that for climate chaos. I know and have spoken with quite a few mainstream consumers and voters who have more or less accepted the conclusion that climate chaos is very real problem, one we have to address as soon as possible and much more vigorously than we have to date. And yet a large portion of these people (80%?) don’t realize we’re facing a second ticking time bomb in our world oil supply. Almost any attempt to talk to them about it futile, regardless of the approach (and I’ve tried everything short of puppet shows). Part of this is, I think, crisis exhaustion. Between all the aspects of the economic mess we’re living through plus all the enviros hammering at them over CO2 emissions, they simply don’t have the mental and emotional bandwidth to deal with yet another Big, Scary Thing. As a result, they think that “there’s plenty of oil” to be had, and there is no deadline approaching. Of course there is a deadline–the amount of oil in the ground and the amount of CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere without triggering a climate catastrophe are both reality-imposed limits, whether or not we choose to see them as such.

Put another way, this is a plea for us to stop and take the time to evaluate which issues do and don’t matter as the twin terrors of peak oil and climate chaos rush ever closer. We should focus all our resources on addressing the truly important ones as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then simply ignore the rest.

And as soon as I have a good definition of what’s “truly important”, I’ll let you know…

[1] I would say something here about the anti-suburbs fetish that’s so rampant in some corners of the blogosphere, but that would side track the entire discussion, so I’ll leave it for another day.

If there’s one thing people take away from this blog, I would hope it’s an appreciation for the perverse level of interaction between natural and man-made events, and therefore how easy it is to let simplistic assumptions lead us to horribly incorrect conclusions. I was in this frame of mind last night when I saw the report that NBC did on their nightly news broadcast about the new CAFE standards.

They talked about what the new requirements are, and then said that this will add $1,300 to the cost of every car by 2016 (without revealing the source of that estimate, as best I can remember). They said that the Administration says that the average driver will save about $2,800 on reduced fuel cost over the life of the vehicle, based on a price of $3.50/gallon.

I have no idea exactly what other assumptions went into that calculation, and I won’t waste my time and yours dissecting it. But $3.50/gallon for gasoline? In 2016? Seriously?

We have the IEA howling, yet again, about the coming oil crunch (”Downturn Sets Up Surge in Oil Prices“), and all those nasty predictions about peak oil being here or imminent, from the rank and file of the math and logic enabled (that’s us, dear readers) to Raymond James to Jeff Rubin. Assume for the moment that we haven’t yet peaked, and that Chris Skrebowski’s prediction of a 2011 peak will still prove to be accurate, investment-triggered crunch notwithstanding, then what do you think the price of oil, and therefore the price of gasoline, will do five years post-peak? It’s possible that we’ll be using oil at a low enough level that we’ll still be trundling along on the undulating plateau of world oil production, meaning we won’t yet have encountered true supply constraints because we’ll still be eating into excess capacity.

Right now, it doesn’t look like that will happen; even a moderate worldwide economic recovery in 2010 is likely to re-start the growth in oil demand in China and India, which should swamp out any conservation in other countries. Add to that dynamic the fallout from the current plummeting investment in oil field development, and the scene is set for supply constraints, significantly higher prices, and any talk of $3.50/gallon gasoline in the US in 2016 sounding terribly quaint.

Which begs the question: Are the new CAFE rules a major advancement in the greening of America, or will they prove to be much ado about nothing? I’ve been pondering this since the news broke, and I think I’ve finally come down on the side of much ado about nothing. I think they represent a very hollow victory; yes, sanity has prevailed, and the US government is finally acting like the adults are in charge, which is always a good thing. But what real effect will they have? Right now, it seems none at all, as the price of gasoline will provide more than enough incentive to move consumers to more efficient vehicles well before 2016.

One can make the argument that before consumers can buy those cars the car companies have to design and build them. Higher CAFE standards for 2016 put into place now will indeed provide the regulatory certainty that people are talking about (a non-trivial detail), but I’m not at all convinced that they will accelerate the development and availability of more fuel efficient cars. With the steady drumbeat of announcements from various car companies about PHEVs, EVs, diesels, etc., it seems that even the most reluctant companies have finally Received The Message.

I think the bottom line is that events are largely locked into place for the next few years on the oil front, barring any unforeseen above ground event, like an inconveniently placed/timed hurricane or war, and we’re headed for gratuitously interesting times.

At least that’s how I assume things will work out…

VCT meaning, of course, a voluntary carbon tax. The intent is to focus on those cases when people voluntarily pay more than they have to for some good or service in order to lower their carbon emissions. It’s expressed in monetary units per unit of CO2, as in dollar per metric ton of CO2 avoided.

For example, my wife and I live in New York State, where we can select our electricity supplier. In the Rochester area, we can choose from about 8 or 10 different options (as best I can remember), one of which is a “100% green” provider that buys all of its electrons from wind farms and small hydro. That’s the one we use (big surprise), at a cost penalty of about 0.6 cents/kWh. We use about 400 kWh of electricity per month, so we’re paying an additional $2.40/month, averaged over a year.

How much CO2 are we avoiding, though? That’s a little tough to say, as we have a nuclear plant nearby, plus this part of NY gets a lot of hydro power from Niagara Falls, but NY also gets an unusually high portion of its electricity from oil burning plants. For the sake of example, I’ll assume that our normal electricity supply would have 25% of the US average CO2 emissions/kWh, which works out to 0.335 pounds/kWh. For our 400 kWh/month consumption, that saves 134 pounds of CO2/month, or 0.06 metric tons/month. Our VCT is therefore $40/metric ton of CO2 avoided.

You can do similar a calculation for buying a hybrid car, assuming that the price of gasoline is low enough that your miles driven/year won’t save enough on fuel costs to make up for the higher initial purchase price (and also taking into account the higher residual value of the vehicle, tax breaks, etc.).[1]

With any such calculation, if the combination of inputs yields a net cash savings, then your VCT is negative, and you’re making money by avoiding CO2 emissions. If those savings get large enough (as they are for CFLs, for example), then we’re in that golden zone where even the people who think global climate change refers to the changing of seasons will start to take action.

So, one might well ask, what is the point of this little exercise?

First, I think this is a valuable way to look at personal consumption, as it lets even those individual consumers on a tight budget determine how best to shift their consumption patterns to achieve the most good. If you live in an area that predominantly gets its electricity supply from cola plants, but your have the option of paying that extra 0.6 cents/kWh for green electrons, then avoiding that 2.095 pounds CO2/kWh means your VCT is a mere $6/metric ton. If you don’t drive much, then you might well conclude that buying a hybrid car works out to a much higher VCT, and is therefore a much lower priority.[2]

A problem here is that we don’t always have the information we need to make lower-CO2 buying decisions. How many products on the shelf of your local store have CO2 labels on them? I know that this kind of labeling has been on at least some food products in the UK for a while, something I would love to see take root in the US. This is going to be a major stumbling block as transition from our habits of business as usual/mindless consumption to a broader awareness of the ramifications of our actions and mindful consumption. Once again, we’ll be living measured lives on a managed planet.

Second, I think VCT is also a useful metric for assessing our own personal commitment to taking action. If you’re absolutely convinced that climate chaos is real and very serious, and you think that we need to put a price on carbon emissions, then how much are you doing (read: paying) in your daily life to combat it? Writing a blog, forwarding e-mailed articles to your friends, and making the obligatory snide comments about Hummers are all little more than window dressing, even if the last one makes you feel particularly superior. It’s long past time to get in the game to whatever level of commitment each of us can afford.[3]

[1] The case of a hybrid car is particularly nasty, since it requires you to guess about two of the critical inputs: The price of gasoline throughout the in-service life of the car, as well as the price you’ll get for it at trade-in/sale time. My personal view is that we likely won’t see too much of a gasoline price run-up in the US this year (barring any of the usual unforeseen circumstances), but that starting in mid-2010 or later, things could get gratuitously interesting as the world continues to pull out of this mother of all recessions and we start to feel the impact of peak oil and the results of the current drop in oil field exploration and development. The residual value of a hybrid is even thornier. If gasoline prices somehow stay low, then in six years, say, you could find not much of a premium on your trade-in. If gasoline prices are “high”, you could get a pretty decent premium. If they’re “very high” and car companies have been rolling out ever greater numbers of PHEVs and EVs, then you might see no premium at all (or a negative one) for your gas guzzling Prius or Insight.

[2] And you might conclude that the best option is to do what I did in 2003: Buy a small, very efficient non-hybrid car at a much lower price and employ mild hypermiling to stretch your gasoline consumption even further. Then you wouldn’t really care about fluctuations in the resale value (because of the low initial price), and you could pour some of that money you didn’t pay for the car into better home insulation, more efficient appliances, or some other energy- and CO2-saving alternatives.

[3] I’m not dismissing the efforts of people in local environmental groups who do things like give presentations about climate change and teach others about the problem and what to do about it. Those efforts have a very low VCT. Divide the combined one-time labor value of the volunteers by the total CO2 savings they trigger in their audience, and I bet that in most cases you get a vanishingly small VCT coupled with a very respectable CO2 savings.

My post yesterday on the drop in hydrogen fuel cell funding by the US government (Hydrogen: Happy trails time?) is getting a lot of hits over on The Energy Collective, and there were a couple of comments by Garry Golden that deserve a more thoughtful reply than a quick comment. So I’m taking the slightly unusual step of replying at length here and then posting a link to my response on TEC (which will likely run this post).

As I write this, Garry has made two comments, and I’ll quote from them and respond to each. I’m going to make my best good-faith effort to be true to the spirit of his comments; any mischaracterization is solely my fault and accidental, and I apologize in advance.

Lou, No flaming intended here- no personal attack intended- as I know how these conversation descend quickly. But these types of posts frustrate me to no end. Too much Joseph Romm’s paradigm-bound speak here that puts all things hydrogen into the ‘freak’ camp. And hints of attempts to characterize all people who speak reasonably about the potential of hydrogen as wackos. I grow tired of this from Romm - especially when the Case for Plugins is weak and completely aligned with all the challenges of H2. Hard to store, ‘not a fuel’, carbon footprint depends on how you produce, it.

Just to be clear: I certainly don’t put the pro-HFC people in the freak or wackos camps. I reserve those for the Apocalypticons and Cornucopians.

I disagree that the case for plug-ins is “completely aligned with the challenges” of HFCVs. Even ignoring things like the Tesla (which I consider to be little more than a techno parlor trick, thanks to the price), real world EVs and PHEVs will be on the market in the US from major manufacturers in one to two years. And those will be units for sale, not on a lease (like the Honda FCX, which is an enormous per vehicle money loser). That says all we need to know about PHEVs and EVs making it over the first major market hurdle, i.e. mass produced at affordable (which is not to say cheap) prices, and HFCVs not being there yet.

The only thing keeping PHEVs and EVs from selling like crazy right now to at least a certain segment of the US population (more on this below) is the price of the batteries. We know how to do everything else in the car, and at an affordable price. We know how to make the batteries physically perform, too, but not at a low enough price.

HFCVs face more hurdles. They need better fuel cells and better on board H2 storage, both at dramatically better prices than anything we have right now, before we even get to the refueling infrastructure.

As for refueling, there are only two ways to make mass quantities of hydrogen. We can reform it from natural gas, which creates a lot of CO2 we then have to either sequester or release into the air, neither of which is a good answer. Or we can use electrolysis to make it from water, which takes a lot of electricity. However we make it, we then have to compress, distribute, and dispense the hydrogen, all steps that take more energy. I know I’m long past the point of sounding like a broken record, but I think that any serious discussion of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel has to start with Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF]. He goes into quite a bit of detail on the energy losses for both EVs and HFCVs from the original flow of green electrons all the way to the wheel, and calculates that EVs get exactly three times the number of miles per unit of green electricity as an HFCV fueled via electrolysis.

In my opinion, that’s a showstopper. Assume that we can get the entire hydrogen infrastructure for free, plus we can make and sell the vehicles for the same price as an EV or PHEV. We’re still stuck with the exceedingly nasty problem of climate chaos and how we clean up our electricity supply (which we’d have to do no matter what happens with the transportation sector if we’re to get to an 80% CO2 emissions reduction by 2050). That means we’ll need to get as much out of every green kWh as possible, whether it’s fueling a data center or a car or municipal street lighting. And that’s where the factor of three becomes a back breaker.

Whether you or I or anyone else is tired of worrying about how we fuel the production of hydrogen is irrelevant. (And for the record I am quite tired of worrying about the seemingly endless interdependencies we run into when talking about energy and environmental issues in the context of economics and (ugh!) politics.) Unless someone can come up with a zero or nearly zero CO2 source of hydrogen that makes the entire grid-to-wheels system as efficient as PHEVs or EVs, HFCVs won’t be able to compete.

Infrastructure costs for plug ins? How much will it cost to build wall sockets for our vehicle fleet? Are we really betting on ‘plug ins’ as the solution. Which automaker has stated this as the final end state platform? None that I have recorded. We are the beginning of electrification and hydrogen has a role in delivering electrons. At the end of the day next generation electric propulsion systems will integrate batteries, fuel cells and capacitors. Not one device is likely to provide the right size, cost, performance, et al for vehicle applications.

To make use of a few million PHEVs or EVs right now we need precisely zero infrastructure investment in the US. As I’ve pointed out many times on this site, there’s a huge market for 100 to 150 mile/charge EVs in the form of the Nth car in a two (or more) car household. We will certainly see a diversification of transportation solutions, as you point out, but saying that there’s a high infrastructure cost for getting PHEVs and EVs into the game just isn’t true, just as we shouldn’t assume the cost of a coast-to-coast hydrogen infrastructure is a prerequisite for HFCVs, something I said in my original post.

Why does hydrogen necessarily have a role in delivering electrons? We can make the technology work, and might, with a lot of hard work and some luck, be able to drive the vehicle cost down enough to be affordable. But that doesn’t mean it’s a worthwhile option in the long run. That’s like arguing that corn-based ethanol should be a major component of our liquid fuels sector because we make a lot of it today. As my wife is fond of reminding me, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. (Don’t ask.)

First, yes there is an electric grid. But those sockets were/are built for appliances in homes, not vehicles. (They weren’t even built for mobile devices- hence the headaches of finding a recharge plug in airports or cafes) Access to wall sockets is overstated. I live in Brooklyn and actually don’t have a garage. And if we took a snapshot right now of all the world’s parked vehicles- how many would be within 10 feet of a socket (upgraded or not)? I can see EVs for managed fleets– but not the mass market. This is one of my great frustrations is that people assume we can just bring on EVs without spending money on infrastructure. Startup darling Better Place and Shai Agassi have demonstrated that car companies and govts (local/national) do want a viable infrastructure before they invest in EVs. Better Place is estimating that the Bay Area alone (stations/switch out stations) will cost $1 billion. Then run estimates BP has priced for Israel, Denmark, Australia and Hawaii. It’s not free. EV grid access is not ubiquitous. And (again, not trying to flame or get emotional) but how can we have this conversation without statement of reality. The grid was not built for roadside assistance.

Again, this is putting an artificially high barrier in front of PHEVs and EVs. And adding recharging outlets in places like airports, hotels, parking decks, business and university parking lots, etc. can happen in a piecemeal fashion much easier than can adding hydrogen refueling capacity. Once plug-in vehicles are on the road in appreciable numbers, many organizations will find they have an incentive to provide their visitors or employees with recharging facilities. Some will be free (employee benefits), some will be discounted or subsidized (airports and government offices), and some will be full grid price plus a markup (whoever can get away with it). And don’t underestimate the value of quick charging, as I first wrote about in March of 2008 (The revolution is in the second plug). That allows the centralization of recharging stations and a much cheaper infrastructure build out, while still allowing those with easy access to an overnight plug to exploit that option, as well.

2) In terms of EVs and batteries pulling ahead of H2 Fuel cells- I don’t see it. We are in Year 0 or Year 1 of the EV age. There are no commercially viable product lines out there. Just a handful of promising platforms. But there is no declared winner in electric propulsion support systems. I think EV advocates miss the challenges of moving vehicles- and pricing out costs of batteries over next 5 to 10 years as fuel cells (via membrane price reduction) offer a more competitive and higher performance system. We are early on in a multi-decade long transition- and I cannot say that batteries have ‘won’. Not at all. It’s just that the combustion engine has lost. And we can all celebrate that!!! H2 (solid state storage via MOFs, hydrides is actually progressing nicely. And nanostructured catalysts to produce H2 via reforming or low temp electrolysis are moving forward.

Of course there are no winners, and I would certainly not claim that there are what I would consider widely available and successful PHEVs and EVs on the market as I type this. But for the reasons I’ve mentioned above, I think they’re far closer to being ready for prime time than HFCVs, and will ultimately out-compete them. I don’t know what the technologies you mention will deliver in the future, but again, we can’t escape two realities: Whatever we come up with has to result in a mainstreamable grid-to-wheels system that matches plug-ins for efficient use of our scarce green electricity supply and also puts us on a track for the scale of greenhouse gas reductions we need. If that happens and hydrogen turns out to be a major part of the answer, then great! I’ll be the most obnoxious, relentless supported of HFCVs one could imagine, simply because the demonstrated facts would demand it. I don’t have any skin in the game regarding which mixture of solutions works for us, I just want us to find at least one combination that can provide the functionality we want and at a bearable price in terms of dollars and environmental impact.

Last week the blogosphere was chattering about the two papers in Nature that addressed the issue of how much of the world’s remaining fossil fuels humanity could burn before we triggered an unacceptable level of climate change. In writing about those articles (It’s Crunch Time), I said:

Casting the situation as a limit on how much of the remaining fossil fuels we can burn in a given time window strikes me as extremely useful. I don’t mean to suggest that legislators and deniers around the world will suddenly slap themselves in the forehead and exclaim, “Oh! Now I get it! Let’s get to work!” But it does seem like a much more approachable way to frame the limits to our behavior than is talking about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. (I’m assuming that the math all works out, and that the authors used reasonable, mainstream estimates for the recoverable reserves of fossil fuels.)

I remember quite clearly thinking how much that news felt like the study I’ve mentioned so many times, Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF], that does a thorough analysis of the efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell car vs. an EV.

We now have what feels like another article that seems to ring true in the same unmistakable way, this time concerning biofuels, as described in Green Car Congress: Study Finds Bioelectricity Better Option Than Liquid Biofuels for Transportation Output and GHG Emissions:

A new life cycle assessment comparing the performance of bioelectricity and ethanol from a variety of pathways with respect to transportation kilometers and GHG offsets achieved per unit area of biofuels cropland concludes that bioelectricity used to charge a battery electric vehicle outperforms ethanol for a combustion engine across a range of feedstocks, conversion technologies, and vehicle classes.

The study by University of California, Merced, Assistant Professor Elliott Campbell along with Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and David Lobell of Stanford University, found that bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol. A paper on the work appeared in the 8 May issue of the journal Science.

The authors point out their study looked at only two criteria, kilometers travelled and greenhouse gas offsets, but did not examine the performance of electricity and ethanol for other policy-relevant criteria such as water consumption, air pollution or economic costs.

…

The net transportation output per hectare is larger for the bioelectricity case. With BEVs and ICVs of similar size, one can travel farther on biomass grown on a hectare of land when it is converted to electricity than when it is converted to ethanol…For this case, the gross transportation output per hectare is 85% greater for bioelectricity than cellulosic ethanol. This is largely due to fact that the small SUV BEV has an electric motor that is 3.1 times as efficient as the internal combustion engine of the small SUV ICV for highway driving.

—Campbell et al. (2009)

See GCC’s article for more results from the paper, which is not generally available to the public, as well as the university’s press release.

Just to take a blatant guess, I would say that the economic cost (see below) would have to be less for the bioelectricity case; once the crop is harvested (which has to be done no matter its intended use), I can’t imagine that transporting the crop to an electricity plant and burning it would cost more than converting it into ethanol and then transporting the ethanol to a gas station.

Water use might be a more problematic situation; converting the biomass into ethanol takes some water, but so does cooling the thermoelectric generator that burns biomass in the bioelectricity case.

I think we need at least one more study on this.

Related articles:

• Scientific American: What Is The Best Way to Turn Plants into Energy?
• Technology Review: Biofuels vs. Biomass Electricity

Of course, work on biomass to liquid technologies won’t end once word of this study spreads, nor should it, given how early we are in the transition away from petroleum based vehicle fuels. One big breakthrough hit the news feeds just yesterday, Biofuels Digest: Breakthrough at Mascoma holds potential for 60 percent drop in production cost of cellulosic ethanol; ‘golden dream’ of CBP is closer than thought:

In Massachusetts, Mascoma will announce later this morning a breakthrough that is reducing the cost of cellulosic ethanol production by up to 60 percent in lab tests.

The breakthrough relates to consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) - a transformational technology which the DOE/USDA 2006 Roadmap called “the ultimate low-cost configuration for cellulose hydrolysis and fermentation,” and which reduces or eliminates the need for added enzymes to process pretreated lignocellulose into ethanol.

Mascoma is reporting that, in the lab, based on multiple runs with reduced enzyme requirements, it is seeing normalized per gallon operating costs in March at just under 40 percent of the June 2008 baseline.

Assuming this 60% cost reduction is real, it’s a tremendous advance, although it wouldn’t seem to address the basic point of the study quoted above and “field to wheels” efficiency.

Are we finally seeing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles heading off into the general direction of the sunset? Possibly, although I wouldn’t bet my keyboard on it.

WSJ: Running on Empty: Obama Budget Cuts Funding for Hydrogen Car:

President Obama’s proposed 2010 budget calls for cutting funding for a program at the Department of Energy that carries out research on hydrogen technology for vehicles by roughly 60%, or $100 million, as part of an effort to shift to technologies “with more immediate promise.”

The administration’s proposal illustrates how much has changed in Washington and the wider world of vehicle research in recent years. Six years ago, President Bush called for new federal funding for research into how to produce and distribute hydrogen and then store it in tanks so it can be used in fuel-cell-powered cars.

…

Because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and using it to power cars would be so clean, proponents have often described it as the Holy Grail of alternative fuels.

But lately, enthusiasm among auto makers and politicians has been shifting away from hydrogen toward electric vehicles. One reason: the enormous projected cost of developing an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations. The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, said last year that the total cost of deploying a national hydrogen network could be as high as $200 billion, including $55 billion in government aid through 2023. And that amount, the council said, would be enough to put only two million hydrogen cars on the road - a small fraction of the total U.S. vehicle population of about 300 million cars and trucks.

Here we go again. First we have the “hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe” idiocy, which just might be the the all-time best example of a true but totally irrelevant energy factoid. Then we have the “cost of the infrastructure” canard. Ouch.

On the abundance of hydrogen: Of course it’s abundant. It’s also in places and forms that make it very inconvenient (read: expensive) to use as a motor vehicle fuel. This is why you so often hear people say that hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier. You have to consume a lot of electricity (and possibly natural gas, if you go that route instead of electrolysis) just to make the hydrogen, and then you have to consume quite a bit more electricity to compress it for storage in a fueling station and on board the vehicle. You put a lot of energy in to get energy out, about three times the amount of energy per mile driven that you would need to charge a battery in an EV. Think of the hydrogen fueling infrastructure as an inefficient and very complex way to recharge a battery in the vehicle.

Without belaboring the point for the Nth time, let me point out that hydrogen as a transportation fuel has several very high hurdles to get over, and the refueling infrastructure is not high on the list.

“But wait!”, I can imagine people saying, “wouldn’t it cost A Lot Of Money to build even a minimal hydrogen refueling system from coast to coast in the US???” Of course it would, but that’s not what any rational person would consider doing, at least initially. You could build out a refueling infrastructure at a much lower ratio of stations to population, compared to gasoline stations, simply because there would be so many fewer HFC vehicles on the road for years. As the vehicles sold, companies like our friends who provide us with gasoline would leap at the chance to add hydrogen dispensing facilities to some of their existing stations so they could sell us another form of fuel.

The immediate economic hurdle for HFC vehicles is the cost of the vehicles themselves, assuming you can come up with a design that provides enough range per tank, has no performance issues at high and low temperatures, has an acceptable longevity for the fuel cell, etc. Yes, with more R&D and the proper invocation of the ghost of Adam Smith to endow your project with the proper economies of scale savings, you just might be able to get the price below, say, $100,000 for a Civic-size car in the next 10 years. Maybe.

Beyond that gigantic hurdle there’s the climate chaos factor I’ve mentioned countless times. If we’re really struggling to make an 80% reduction in our CO2 emissions by 2050 (and make no mistake, it will be a struggle), then we won’t have the luxury of consuming three times as much clean electricity per mile in an HFC vehicle as we would an EV. As we electrify transportation, imagine having to build three times as many nuclear power plant, wind turbines, concentrating solar power plants, etc. to support that sector of the economy. We’ll be hard pressed to find an affordable combination of conservation and clean electricity generation to make our CO2 reduction goals as it is, without this huge burden being added to our to-do list.

Is this really the end of the HFC vehicle nonsense? I doubt it. Even though the current administration is moving in the right direction, they won’t be in power forever. Before we know it, whether it’s in 2012 or 2016 or whenever, the US will elect a president much more like George W. Bush than Barack Obama, and we’ll see enough policy reversals to give any observer whiplash.[1] I only hope that PHEV/EV technology is advanced enough and has demonstrated enough market success that even a profoundly disappointing, stupefyingly weird selection by the voters at large would not resurrect HFC vehicles.

[1] If you think I’m being overly cynical or skeptical, consider recent US elections history, particularly the dual nightmares of 2000 and 2004, from which we’re still trying to awake, and convince me I’m wrong.

BusinessWeek: Car-Scrapping Plans: Germany’s Lessons:

The global auto industry may be facing its worst crisis ever, but you’d never know it at Ford Motor’s factory in Cologne. There, workers are putting in extra shifts on weekends to cope with demand for the compact Fiesta. In fact, Ford (F) sales have been booming in Germany. Customers have placed orders for 68,500 Fiestas, Ka subcompacts, and midsize Fusions in the four months to April, more than triple the year-earlier figure.

Thanks for this gravity-defying performance go—at least in part—to the German government’s so-called environment bonus, which Germans prefer to call the Abwrackprämie, or “wreck rebate.”

The program, launched in January and renewed in March, is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s most visible economic stimulus measure. It pays $3,320 to people who scrap a car that’s at least nine years old and buy a new car instead. The scheme has more than offset the effects of the global downturn on domestic auto sales, preserved factory jobs, and encouraged people to replace gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing clunkers with the latest engine technology.

…

But the rebate also has some major downsides. Retailers, for example, have complained bitterly that the program sucks spending from other categories. German retail sales fell 1.5% in March—the third monthly decline in a row—a decline that retail industry groups blame partly on incentives to buy cars rather than other goods.

The rebate also is expensive. Nominally it will cost $6.6 billion if Germans take full advantage of the program. The real cost is harder to figure. Increased sales will boost sales tax revenues, and the state will avoid the cost of unemployment benefits for workers who might have lost their jobs. On the negative side of the balance sheet, the program will kill jobs in other parts of the economy, for example auto repair shops or used-car dealers. A study by the Halle Economic Institute, a major think tank, estimates that the net burden on the German government budget will be $3.5 billion.

And you thought public policy involving the economy and energy would be simple… why, exactly?

Monbiot.com: How Much Should We Leave in the Ground?:

The two papers on carbon emissions published in Nature last week were ground-breaking: they show us how much carbon dioxide we can produce if we’re to have a reasonable chance of preventing two degrees of global warming. It’s a completely different approach from the UN’s and national governments’. They set targets for reductions by a certain date but have nothing to say about the total amount of carbon we can release.

One of the papers, by Myles Allen and others(1), suggests that we can burn, at most, another 400-500 billion tonnes of carbon at any time between now and the extinction of humanity if we want to avoid two degrees of warming. The other, by Malte Meinshausen and others(2), suggests that producing 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2000-2050 would give us a 25% chance of exceeding two degrees. That’s a lot less than Allen’s estimate, as one tonne of carbon produces 3.667 tonnes of CO2 when it’s burnt: 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 arises from 273 billion tonnes of carbon.

…

Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity.

Or, using Meinshausen’s figure, we can burn only 33% between now and 2050. Sorry - 33% minus however much we have burnt between 2000 and today.

So the question which arises is this: which fossil fuel reserves will we decide not to extract and burn? There is, as I have argued before(9), no point in seeking to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels unless we also seek to reduce their production. Yet, apart from the members of OPEC (who do it only to shore up the price), no government is attempting to limit the amount of fuel extracted. Far from it; they all pursue the same strategy as the United Kingdom: to “maximise economic recovery”(10).

The test of all governments’ commitment to stopping climate breakdown is this: whether they are prepared to impose a limit on the use of the reserves already discovered, and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

George Monbiot gets his geek on breaks out his calculator. Worth reading.

One thing to keep in mind is how hard it is to pin down world oil reserves, a point Monbiot acknowledges. He uses a figure of 162 billion tons (not, not barrels), which is almost exactly what BP last published in their yearly energy stats compendium. The problem is that as we approach and pass peak oil and see some dramatic and sustained price rises, the incentives to find ways to improve the recovery rate for existing wells (typically about 33% today) or go after very expensive fields (like those in ultra deep water locations) will rise considerably. Oil is probably the most susceptible of the fossil fuels to this effect of resources being a function of market price.

I don’t quite get his point about distinguishing between leaving the evil stuff in the ground instead of not using it. If consumers greatly slow their use of fossil fuels, I guarantee that producers will stop mining or pumping them. (For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about how there’s 100 million barrels of oil sitting in tankers at sea, waiting for a customer, as if that’s a tremendous amount. It’s about 1.2 days of world consumption, so I’m not impressed.)

FT.com: US carbon cap-and-trade - more data on its effects:

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has become the latest organisation to wade into the murky waters of the Waxman-Markey bill, the proposed legislation that would introduce a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide in the US.

The Pew Center’s analysis suggests that the impact of a cap-and-trade programme on energy-intensive manufacturers would be small. The analysts based their study on an examination of historical trends among energy-intensive manufacturing industries, using 20 years of data on 400 energy-intensive subsectors.

They found that energy-intensive manufacturing industries would on average lose only 1 per cent of their annual production to imports, if a carbon price of $15 per tonne was assumed, and if there was no carbon price in other countries.

(That $15 figure comes from projections of the carbon price under Waxman-Markey produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.)

Such a small impact could easily be addressed through policies targeted to energy-intensive sectors, the authors of the report said, including straightforward compensation or more complex border adjustment measures (tariffs) for imported energy-intensive goods.

In all candor, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of the impact of a price of carbon on various parts of the US economy. I’m reasonably sure that $15/ton won’t be nearly enough to trigger the cuts we’ll need by 2050, but it’s probably a good start. The key point, as I’ve argued before, is that no one knows in advance how a given amount of reduction in CO2 emissions maps to a market price, which is one reason why we should control the level of emissions (via a cap) and let the evolving market decide on the price (via trade).

Green Car Congress: Study Finds That Plankton Blooms Do Not Send Atmospheric Carbon to the Deep Ocean; Weakens Iron Fertilization as Geo-Engineering Approach:

Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.

The results weaken the applicability of the simplest version of the Iron Hypothesis as a geo-engineering approach to climate change. Iron Hypothesis adherents suggest global warming can be slowed or even reversed by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus. The Southern Ocean is one of the most important such regions.

Oops.

Translation: This lesson in the hubris of geoengineering was brought to you by reality. Remember–if it’s not Reality, it just ain’t real!

People just now seem to be waking up to the fact that, golly gee, the Intertubes run on electrons, and it uses a lot of them.

Two related articles:

guardian.co.uk: Web providers must limit internet’s carbon footprint, say experts

New Scientist: Unknown web: Is the net hurting the environment?

The one thing to keep in mind is that what matters is not merely the cost of the Internet but what we get for it. For example, how many errands do I have to avoid by doing online banking or shopping before I completely offset the carbon footprint of all the Internet resources I use in the process? I’m guessing it’s a very favorable ratio; even several errands bundled together in a single 20 mile trip in my Scion xA would seem to emit far more CO2 than hours of online activity.

Another issue is that a large portion of the Internet infrastructure was built with little attention to electricity consumption. The benefit of adding Internet capacity is (or is perceived to be) high, while the price of electricity is relatively low, so we’ll only feel pressure to make it more efficient as we run up against limits of electricity supply or funding.

Finally, the big issue with data center electricity consumption is cooling. I’ve seen figures that estimate that for ever watt of power spent on running hardware another 1.5 watts is used in cooling it. This means that lower-temp chips and drives could do a lot to reduce data center energy consumption, far more than just the their own power consumption figures might suggest.

Some recent news items have me pondering questions with not so obvious, at least to me, answers.

Green Car Congress tells us that GM’s 2010 Chevrolet Equinox will be rated at 22 MPG city, 32 MPG highway. Note that this is not a hybrid, but just a plain old gasoline engine (POGE) vehicle. It just happens to have been the beneficiary of a lot of attention in the efficiency department, which GCC details.

How do we interpret this news, assuming GM’s fuel efficiency tests stand up? Is it too little, too late–we’re perilously close to peak oil and we desperately need to make dramatic reductions in our CO2 emissions, so what the heck good is an SUV, even if it gets, for that class of vehicle, very good mileage? Transportation accounts for large portions of both the US’s oil consumption (69%) and our CO2 emissions from energy use (34%), so we have to make big cuts there. We can’t afford to keep driving in a business as usual fashion and make deeper changes in other areas; the numbers just won’t allow it.

I’m not even sure ow to interpret this even focusing on just GM. Is it proof that “they could have done this years ago”? Is it a sign that GM still doesn’t realize what needs to be done to save itself and help the US and the world? Or is it merely a nasty reality that GM has to give the public at least some of the kind of vehicles they want (spurred on by years of very expensive advertising, of course) if they want to push enough sheet metal to stay alive?

ASPO Netherlands has issued a report on the interplay between climate change and peak oil. You can read a summary and discussion, plus get a link to the 56-page report here. The report’s summary (emphasis added):

Climate change and scarcity of conventional oil interact in a number of important ways. Rising oil prices make it increasingly interesting to develop unconventional petroleum resources, with a clear impact on CO2 emissions. Conversely, accelerating climate change will impact both positively and negatively on oil production. After studying the available data, we draw the following conclusions.
Conventional oil production will peak some time during the coming decade, probably between 2012 and 2017, at a level of 90-95 million barrels per day. After a short, three to six year production plateau production will start to decline, thanks to a combination of geological (underground) and economic (above-ground) factors.

Growth in unconventional oil production will be too slow to postpone the peak in world oil supply beyond the 2020s. This holds even if current efforts in developing unconventional oil are doubled, in order to achieve an output of 22 million barrels per day in 2030. This makes a very large gap between worldwide oil demand and oil production inevitable. In this context, ‘unconventional’ oil resources means tar sands, oil shales, extra-heavy crude oil and synthetic oil from coal and natural gas.

The substantially higher CO2 emissions associated with unconventional oil compared with conventional oil are such that even if total oil production decreases from 96 million barrels per day in 2016 to 73 million in 2030, growth of unconventional production to 22 million barrels per day will mean scarcely any decrease in total CO2 emissions from oil. In such a scenario the share of unconventional sources in total production will rise from 4% in 2008 to 30% in 2030.

A failure to anticipate the peak in worldwide oil production will inevitably lead to a major dilemma. Either policies on the CO2 emissions associated with oil production are relaxed in order to make more oil available, to limit economic and social problems; or a strong commitment is made to limiting unconventional oil as part of a climate policy that will lead to less oil becoming available . To escape this dilemma requires robust policies promoting alternative energy sources that can help compensate for the decline in conventional oil output.

In the IPCC’s most recent oil production scenarios, prepared in 2000, the dynamics of this dilemma do not emerge very clearly at all, as no distinction is made between easily produced conventional oil and difficult to produce unconventional oil. In IPCC production modelling it is assumed that the declining quality of the fossil fuels recovered will have no influence on production levels of those fuels. Technical limits on production as well as constraints on external inputs like water and energy are left out of the equation, even though these are limiting factors in the scaling up of unconventional sources. This means that actual CO2 emissions of oil will differ significantly from the picture to emerge from the IPCC scenarios.

Climate change will also lead to a higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, leading in turn to higher insurance costs and other forms of cost inflation on oil production. Because of rising seawater temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes are expected to grow in intensity. The impact of this on oil production will depend very much on hurricane tracks, which are notoriously erratic, but will probably be very high. The production cost of oil in this region, which is of major importance for the United States, rose from $50 per barrel in 2003-2005 to $70 per barrel in 2004-2006.

The Arctic icecap is melting ever faster and by the summer of 2017 there will probably no longer be any sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The often quoted claim that 25% of the world’s remaining oil reserves are to be found in the Arctic is false. A report by Wood Mackenzie and Fugro Robertson, the most in-depth study to date, cites a figure of 50 billion barrels of oil, permitting production of only 2-3 million barrels per day around 2030. Most fossil fuel resources in the Arctic are natural gas. Mackenzie and Robertson anticipate reserves of 180 billion barrels oil-equivalent, of which 70% in Russian territorial waters.

Even with the sea ice melting in the Arctic summer, oil production in these waters will present an extreme challenge. Melting ice will not only remove obstacles but also create them, in the form of icebergs and thawing of the permafrost. The latter not only threatens existing infrastructure, but also makes new infrastructure all the more expensive. The number of days that ice roads can be used to reach faraway production units is already decreasing fast, as roads, buildings and pipelines suffer damage due to melting foundations. The future effects of thawing permafrost are hard to quantify, however, due to a historical lack of pertinent data.

This is a battle I’ve fought many times with environmentalists who think that “peak oil is a good thing because it will force us to reduce our CO2 emissions”. That’s a dangerously simplistic view of how economies and politics work, which leads me to my questions: Why is this concept so hard to grasp? Is it simply that the hard core environmentalists don’t know much about energy issues beyond “coal sucks” (and it does) and “we need to drive a lot less” (and we do, at least when doing so means we’re adding to our net CO2 emissions)?[1] Or do they, like many of the peak oil aware crowd, only have the emotional and mental capacity to deal with one gigantic problem at a time? And what does that say about our chances to deal with these growing crises and all their attendant knock-on horrors?

And finally, there’s this issue of shifting heat in the atmosphere. I’ve asked this question before on other sites, and I never seem to get a good answer, possibly because I’m not explaining it properly.

As I understand the situation, we have two unchallenged phenomena going on at once:

First, the polar regions, particularly in the north, are warming much faster than the planet overall. This is causing no end of consternation about melting permafrost regions, like most of Siberia, releasing massive amounts of CO2 and/or methane and kicking off a gigantic feedback effect. We’re also seeing things like a terrifyingly high portion of the Arctic sea ice being single year, thin ice, as well as the continued breakup and melt of glaciers. We keep hearing about some small-US-state-size chunk of Antarctica breaking up, complete with satellite photos.

Second, we’ve seen a slowdown in the ever-upward march of global temperatures. This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the unusually quiet sunspot cycle we’re in. But is it connected to what’s happening at the poles?

Assuming that the measurements of the planet’s temperature are reasonably averaged, then a shift in heat from non-polar to polar regions would be a wash, regardless of the mechanism in volved (likely changing ocean currents or weather patterns).[2] But when one of these state-size glaciers breaks up and floats off into the ocean, that creates millions or billions of tons of ice that will melt far quicker than it would have as a monolithic block; it’s exposed to warmer conditions as it floats even slightly toward the equator, and it has a vastly higher ratio of surface area to volume. So, what effect does accelerating the melting of that much ice have on the temperature of the polar regions’ air and water? Remember, it takes a lot more heat to force ice to melt than it does to raise the temperature of ice just a little.[3] Even if you assume that these fragmenting glaciers have an average temperature of just below freezing (which I suspect isn’t true), and that post melting they are water just above freezing (ditto), then it still takes a tremendous amount of heat energy–pulled from the immediate environment–to fuel the phase change of that much ice into water.

But the poles aren’t getting colder because of this effect, they’re actually getting noticeably warmer.

So what the heck is going on? Is this phase change effect having a measurable impact? And if so, how much additional warming are we being spared because of it?

[1] Don’t think for a nanosecond that I’m letting the peak oil camp off the hook. Many of them are just as convinced that climate chaos isn’t a big deal, we can deal with it later, and peak oil is the only issue with true urgency.

[2] Yes, the exact distribution of the heat in the atmosphere has non-trivial consequences; I’m talking strictly about measurement of that heat on a planet-wide basis.

[3] It’s been eons since my high school chemistry, so I had to look it up. According to the first diagram on this page, it takes about 80 calories to turn 1 gram of ice at 0 degrees C into 1 gram of water at 0 degrees C, about 80 times more energy than is needed to raise one gram of ice one degree C.

One of the things I stress whenever I in casual conversations or presentations is that motor vehicles are right on the cusp of a period of whiplash-inducing change. As you can imagine, I strongly agree with an article posted the other day by Newsweek, Why Traditional Hybrid Cars Are Becoming Obsolete:

To most of us, Toyota’s snazzy Prius hybrid still seems like the cutting edge of cool, the latest and greatest technology in cars. But nine years after the Prius was introduced in the United States, some are calling it obsolete. “The hybrid is yesterday’s technology,” says San Francisco Mayor and recently announced California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom. To be sure, Newsom has a political ax to grind—he’s trying to lure electric-car makers to the Bay Area, which already is home to Tesla Motors, maker of a sexy electric roadster, and Better Place, another startup focused on greentech transportation. But Newsom has a point. A new generation of carmakers is shunning the traditional hybrid format in favor of pure electric powertrains (driven completely by batteries) or “plug-in hybrids.” Indeed, the auto industry is being disrupted by rapid waves of new technology, a phenomenon that feels normal for the folks in Silicon Valley but is perhaps unfamiliar for the folks in Detroit. “We are on the cusp of a period of technical innovation like the automobile industry has never seen,” says Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, the largest U.S. auto retailer. “There will be more change in the next five to 10 years than there was in the last 100.”

When I talk to a group about such things, I tell them that cars are about to change more in the next decade than telephones (including, but not limited to, cell phones) have in the last decade.[1][2] Hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs; gasoline, ethanol, diesel, biodiesel; spark ignition, diesel, HCCI, turbo charged, supercharged; nickel-metal hydride; lithium ion, something else. The choices will be staggering.

It won’t stay this way, of course. Pretty quickly the competing technologies will sort themselves out, and most of those options will disappear, a few in as little as one car generation (four to six years). In some cases that will leave owners with a real problem when it comes time to trade in or sell their vehicle that’s perceived as being based on a werid, failed technology. This is one reason why I bought my Scion xA in 2003; I wanted something that would get acceptable mileage but without a large dollar investment. I’m pretty confident in my ability to analyze technology trends, but only a fool would make an unnecessarily large bet in the approaching automotive maelstrom.

Right now, my hunch is that we’re headed for a mix of EVs and PHEVs with various size battery packs. The PHEVs will use the most flexible on board engine technology that’s mainstreamble, such as a “will burn almost anything” HCCI that can take gasoline, ethanol biodiesel, etc. I expect to see car companies offering a larger battery pack on new vehicles and as a post-purchase upgrade. The economic model and product line experimentation won’t be as dramatic as the technological changes, but it will be just as important.

So, fasten your seat belt, things are just about to get interesting.

[1] Credit for this choice of analogy goes to my wife. When preparing for a presentation some time back, I was going to draw a parallel to TV’s and the rise of HD, but she thought phones would be more accessible, since only the TV geeks really get all the change that product category has seen. Yet more proof that I married better than she did.

[2] At the presentation mentioned in the prior note, I noticed a cluster of college students sitting (of course) in the back of the room. I addressed them directly and told them that once upon a time many years ago, a telephone was this big plastic thing that sat on a desk. You picked up part of it to communicate, and that part was attached to the base with a wire(!), and the base was attached to the wall with another wire(!!!). Astonishingly enough, the telephone didn’t take pictures, it didn’t record sound or play your music, it didn’t make or play movies, you couldn’t text with it, it didn’t have a clock, and it had one ring tone that went “RING RING RING”. All you could do was talk to people in far-off places, and we, simple folk that we were, thought that was cool.

San Diego Unveils Algae Coalition To Advance “Green Gold” Research:

They call it “green gold,” and its proponents are betting that the light, sweet crude oil that can be extracted from farm-cultivated algae will help the world to cut its dependence upon dirty and increasingly expensive gasoline and diesel fuels that are extracted from fossil fuels.

And, on Tuesday, San Diego — which envisions itself as the green equivalent of the traditional oil industry’s Houston — unveiled a “broad-scale research effort” to turn that dream into a reality.

Though no dollar figures for financial support were discussed during Tuesday’s press event on the UC San Diego campus, the research effort will build upon the creation earlier this year of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology. The center was created to facilitate green fuels research being conducted by 272 scientists at UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and other San Diego universities, research organizations and for-profit companies.

…

“By sharing and facilitating the interactions of these multiple researchers through this center, we hope to make sustainable algae-based fuel production and carbon-dioxide abatement a reality within the next five to 10 years,” Fox said. “This consortium will strengthen our ability to obtain grants and attract resources to the area. Algal biofuels will allow us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other economies, and will provide opportunities for a new economy and workforce.”

…

Algal researchers believe that cultivated algae will become an economically viable alternative to large-scale production of such resource-intensive plants as corn and cellulosic crops (including trees, non-edible parts of plants and grasses). Both corn and cellulosic crops require substantial amounts of fertile land, fresh water and petroleum-based fertilizer.

What’s more, the end product from corn and cellulosic crops — ethanol — is a lower-energy fuel than the algal hydrocarbons that can be converted directly into gasoline or diesel fuel that, proponents maintain, can be delivered to service stations through the existing refinery infrastructure.

Algae can also be used to produce hydrogen or biomass, which can then be turned into methane. Proponents also note that production of 140 billion gallons of algae-derived fuels would yield about one trillion pounds of protein that could be used to feed livestock, chickens or fish. The production process, they add, can “eat up” such environmental contaminants as wastewater.

I suspect this will be far from the last such effort to be launched in the next year or so. Obviously there’s a huge interest in developing a viable[1] biofuels technology, but there’s more to it than that. I think there’s a growing realization of how difficult (or impossible) it will be to solve the problems of other biofuels, problems that severely curtail their ability to be a broad-based petroleum replacement.

Corn ethanol simply can’t scale up to anywhere near the needed volume without devastating impacts on food production. Switching to cellulosic ethanol made from non-food crops (genetically modified poplars, switchgrass, etc.) still incurs costs associated with planting, harvesting, and transporting the biomass. And any ethanol product has distribution and usage challenges for a US-wide rollout.

Similarly, biodiesel from soybeans is still limited by being a harvested plant.

Right now, algae biodiesel seems to be the best biofuel option, and that will likely translate into a lot more startup activity–investment and government grant money, consortia, and private/public partnerships.

The next few years could be very interesting on this front, to say the least.

See also:

• It’s algae time, baby
• Late night thoughts on I-90, somewhere east of Rochester

[1] In this case, “viable” means scalable, price competitive, and without unacceptable environmental and food competition side effects.

The other night, my wife and I went to see the Rochester Greywolves play their first game of the season on the Onondaga Reservation, near Syracuse. Being the team photographer (as I was last year), I had to be there, even though it was an 8:30PM start time out of town.

Driving home on a very dark I-90 after the game, with spectacular lightning ahead of us and to our right nearly the entire way, I had some time and the right environment to ponder some things. Few experiences are more conducive to navel staring than the unshakable feeling that you’re not just driving on a dark highway but falling through the night and being pulled ever faster by the gravity of some immense and distant object just beyond the reach of your headlights. One can only wonder how many people have received speeding tickets because of that phenomenon.

What to make of the “BYD battery”? The Chinese company is claiming a 400 km (250 mile) range using this battery in a small sedan, and a quick charge capability that can bring it up to 50% (200 km/120 mile range) in only 10 minutes. As impressive as this sounds, it is also supposedly based on “ferrous ion, which is cheap, plentiful and green. If it turns out to be as functional as the Chinese company claims, it could be the breakthrough needed to finally bring electric cars into the mainstream.” The company will soon be selling a PHEV, ala the Volt, using this battery technology with a 100 km (62 mile) electron range for $22,000.

Breakthrough, indeed. Even assuming a fair amount of marketing fudge factor in BYD’s claims, if the actual performance is reasonably close to those specs, it’s almost impossible to overestimate the impact this could have. Imagine a Scion xD-sized EV with these batteries that provided a battery range of “only” 200 miles (slightly reduced from the above figures), the option to slow charge overnight from a standard wall socket or quick charge in 10 minutes from a beefier connection, and a price of around $25,000 to $27,000. Think American drivers would line up around the block to buy something like that, knowing they would never have to deal with the price of gasoline or any of the other maintenance joys of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine? I’d bet my keyboard that a major manufacturer selling such a car would be hard pressed to keep up with demand. (And don’t underestimate the value of this dual charging option, as I pointed out in March of last year in The revolution is in the second plug.)

And what about biodiesel? I wrote about this the other day (It’s algae time, baby), but consider what it would do to the conventional wisdom, especially as it’s manifested in online discussions, where so much of conventional wisdom is formed these days. Nothing makes the economist haters lose their minds quicker than one of my fellow dismal scientists making some ridiculously broad and naive statement about how “the market will find a solution”, “something always comes along, given a large enough financial incentive”, etc. Straddling the fence, as I do, between the economics camp and the reality-endowed camp, I can see both sides of this fight. In fact, “something” in one form or another has come along quite often, and even taking into account the immense challenges involved in finding a technical solution to peak oil (and one which also addresses climate chaos), is it out of the question to say that our ingenuity, spurred by an enormous, looming threat, would once again find a solution and send the doomers sulking back to their Y2k bunkers? No, it isn’t.

But the doomers have just as solid an argument. The hurdles to “solving” this problem are breathtaking, and the potential impact of not pulling a techno-rabbit out of our hat this time are gruesome.[1] Sitting back and saying “relax, it will be OK” is just as ridiculous and useless a response to peak oil as is jumping up and down and screaming about how it will be The End Of The World As We Know It. If anything, it’s worse, because it’s counterproductive to convince people the situation is hopeless.

Which brings me back to biodiesel, especially the varieties made from naturally occurring or gengineered microbes. Imagine that three to five years from now we have several technologies for making microbe diesel that work in the lab and in small field tests, but they’re still a bit finicky and expensive to scale up and roll out. The companies pushing them are all wrestling for market share and government backing, and online factions have lined up behind different contenders. Then an article hits the world’s RSS feeds that some university or corporation has figured how to make microbe diesel at an insanely low price, perhaps $1/retail gallon, via a process and formula that scales beautifully. Investors pile in, money supporting some or nearly all of the contenders evaporates, a pilot facility is built, and it works. Sure, there are some minor glitches, but those are ironed out in short order and suddenly the questions become: How quickly can we build out this technology and start pouring the resulting fuel into the tanks of long distance trucks? How quickly can we start building diesel cars in places like the US where they’re still scarce?

What would happen then to the consensus view of our situation? I suspect it would play out like this:

The Cornucopians would smugly predict that they always knew “something” would come along, and point to this Uber Microbe Diesel as “proof that the market works”, “oil really is a renewable resource”, etc. This would be an absurd piece of spin; the market does not always provide, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that such a solution would emerge. Anyone claiming that they “knew” it would happen would be lying. The truth is that they had faith in the market and they guessed right. (We see this syndrome all the time. One any given day you can find very reasoned, detailed arguments for the economy or the stock market doing practically anything you can imagine. And a few years from now the few who scored a win in this Prognosticator’s Lottery will reap a sizable and unwarranted public relations reward. Right now, I’m sick to death of hearing from the hucksters talking about how they predicted “exactly” our current economic mess years ago.)

The Apocalypticons (Peak Oil Chapter) would be just as insufferable, as they would argue endlessly that the Uber Microbe Diesel was not, in fact, as good as it seemed, even as new plants were being built at breakneck speed and OPEC ministers were screaming in agony at the thought of no one wanting their oil. Consider this doomer persistence a replay of the Y2k fanatics refusing to give up even after 1/1/2000 and continuing to argue that the big collapse of the banking system or electricity grid or who knows what could still happen–right up to the time when even they saw the absurdity of their claims and they had no choice but to give up, take down their tent, and move their traveling act to the next most promising and appealing carnival site, peak oil[2] or bird flue or an immense meteor strike or the attempts by the New World Order to take over the planet or an obsession with day trading or who knows what.

If this microbe diesel scenario plays out as I’ve speculated[3], I think the most accurate thing we could say is: We got lucky. We were lucky in that we weren’t fatally distracted by CNG or hydrogen or corn-based ethanol or any of the other absurdities currently sucking up too much of our time and resources. We were lucky that the right team of scientists not only managed to find the magic solution, but did so just in time.

Taking the broader view of the BYD battery and microbe diesel, I’m worried that even wildly positive results would send too many people the wrong signal. The conspiracy theorists, the people who decades ago were convinced that “the government and the oil companies” had a “300 MPG carburetor” that they were keeping from the public, would consider the timing far too convenient to be coincidental; they would point to it endlessly as evidence that the technology had existed all along, likely with the assistance of little green men in Area 51. The Apocalypticons would move on, but with ever more determination to “prove to the world” that the next thing they latch onto would be the real threat to humanity, and this time they’d be right, damn it. The Cornucopians would be the most damaging, as they would manage to convince an ever greater portion of policymakers that there never was a threat or that it was real but, as always, the all seeing, all knowing, infinitely kind and loving market provided a solution.

In other words, extreme events often act as an amplifier for pre-existing tendencies, which in this case would be a very bad thing, simply because these are far from the last challenges we’ll face. If there’s one thing I can barely discern off in the distance during lightning flashes late at night on I-90, it’s the uncertainties and unforeseen events that still lurk in the shadows, just waiting for their time to become the next big threat we have to deal with as we lead our measured life on a managed planet.

[1] I’m talking here about the period not just post peak, but also after the initial round of relatively easy oil consumption reductions–a.k.a. the low hanging fruit so many people, most notably here in the US, are so reluctant to pick. We will experience peak oil in stages, the first post-peak one being an oil squeeze when we can still make relatively comfortable changes to reduce our consumption. After that comes the time when things get more than a little “interesting”, the oil crush.

[2] For those of you who are new to this site, let me make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of both Y2k and peak oil. Y2k was a very real and very serious threat. It was defused thanks to the work of many first rate project managers and programmers. The hoopla about it was nothing more or less than a severe misreading of our response to the situation, not the situation itself. Peak oil, as I’ve said countless times here, is a real, imminent, and immense problem. Because of the different nature of peak oil it will be much harder to deal with than was Y2k; we can’t simply throw a lot of money and resources at it to get us past a magic date and then largely forget about it.

[3] And I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the most likely scenario over the next five to ten years, assuming you allow me about the same latitude afforded a Chinese car company’s marketing department.

Seriously, I just have to ask–are the CNG vehicle and hydrogen fuel cell people having a contest to see which group can drive me insane first? Just when I think one of them (most recently the CNG camp) has pegged the absurdity needle with their claims about how vastly cleaner CNG is for use in vehicles and now lawn equipment(!?), all the while ignoring CO2 emissions, the hydrogen people leap back into the lead with something like the following, as reported by Green Car Congress.

Automakers Still Targeting Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles for Long Term Sustainable Mobility:

Despite the current enthusiasm for electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) will be an important component of the vehicle mix in 2050, according to panelists from Nissan, Toyota and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in a conference session at the SAE 2009 World Congress in Detroit.

Dr. Kev Adjemian, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Manager - Fuel Cell Laboratory, Nissan; Justin Ward, Advanced Powertrain Program Manager, Toyota; and Keith Wipke, Senior Engineer, NREL all agreed that the future would see a mix of the different types of vehicles out of necessity. Tailpipe GHG emissions need to be reduced by 70% by 2050 to maintain a 550 ppm concentration according to Nissan’s calculations, Adjemian said. (Nissan bases its assessment on the AR3 analysis from the UN IPCCC.) Adjemian also noted that neither EVs or FCVs would be able to contribute to that required reduction unless the electricity or the hydrogen was sourced from renewables.

Adjemian said that Nissan’s powertrain roadmap in the short term is focused on the expansion of highly efficient internal combustion engines, with the mid- and long-term bringing expansion of its EV efforts and maintaining the competitive advantage of its core electric power trains. By 2050, Adjemian sees an approximately equal mix of ICE, HEV/PHEVs, and fuel cell vehicles.

Justin Ward said that Toyota sees market opportunity for small EVs, but that according to Toyota’s latest calculations, the fuel cell hybrid vehicle has the advantage in well-to-wheel efficiency even now.

With natural gas as the feedstock for hydrogen and power generation, Toyota currently calculates 40% WTW efficiency for a fuel cell vehicle; 33% for an EV; 34% for a hybrid (Prius); and 19% for an internal combustion engine.

Before I flip into full-bore Exorcist mode, let me start by saying there’s one part of this vision that I definitely agree with: We’re looking at a future where personal transportation is fueled by a mix of technologies and sources. Right now, we essentially have a monoculture, with almost all transportation fueled by petroleum (or petroleum substitutes, like ethanol and biodiesel). You can argue whether the split here in the US–gasoline in cars and diesel in large trucks–means it’s not truly a monoculture, but in any case it’s very close.

I fully expect to see something like a mix of EVs with increasingly longer effective ranges[1] and PHEVs/HEVs running on biofuels (most likely algae-derived biodiesel).

Why no CNG or hydrogen vehicles?

CNG vehicles reduce CO2 emissions by a negligible percent, far less than we’ll need as we respond to climate chaos. Many of us constantly highlight the problems caused by things like coal plants historically not having to pay a price for the CO2 they emit, and that’s a valid point. But it applies just as well to CNG vehicles: They’re popular now because CNG is cheaper per mile than gasoline, and the car companies and other interests pushing them are doing a brilliant job of bragging about how much “cleaner” they are than gasoline powered vehicles in terms of NOx emissions, particulate matter, etc., while never mentioning the monster under the bed, CO2 emissions.

And in this respect, I have to wonder what our friends from the car companies are thinking. 550ppm of CO2 is the goal and not 450 or even 350, which is increasingly looking like the “right” answer? Tailpipe emissions have to be reduced, and not total life cycle emissions? Talk about two examples of playing tennis without a net. They’re basing their efficiency assumptions on hydrogen reformed from natural gas? And tying us to dependency for a critical service (transportation) to yet another fossil fuel, and then having to deal with yet another CO2 source, is a good idea why, exactly?

If you assume that climate chaos is a real and serious problem, which our friends claim to believe, even if they’re making some insanely convenient assumptions, then we will need all the green electricity for end use by consumers we can find. We will continue to build out wind and solar (and possibly geothermal, wave, and tidal) at a fast clip, but we’ll still be very hard pressed to replace any significant portion of our coal and natural gas generation in just a few decades. As a result, we’ll need to use the green electricity we do have as efficiently as possible. That means either you find a way to do CCS with the emissions from hydrogen reforming from natural gas (which would minimize the electricity input to the process, albeit at a hefty energy and money cost to do the CCS), or you make the hydrogen via electrolysis and consume three times as much per mile driven as you would in fueling an EV.

Surely you must be wondering if I’m getting to the point in this post where I recommend, for perhaps the 9 millionth time, that you read Ulf Bossel’s “E21″ paper, Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? [PDF]? Yes, I am, and yes, you should read it, if only to see how he arrives at a much higher efficiency for EVs (69%) than the 33% reported above by our friends.

CNG and hydrogen as motor vehicle fuels are both dangerous wastes of money and time and intellectual capital. I’m confident they will be abandoned eventually, but nowhere near soon enough.

[1] By “effective ranges” I mean that the localized rise of things like battery swap and quick charge filling stations will let drivers in some areas make much more use of EVs than the average driver. These islands of support would likely grow over time and even merge in places like the US Northeast or anywhere else population centers are relatively close to each other. If there happens to be a good EV support infrastructure in the Rochester area, for example, then I would not only be able to drive my Electron 5000 farther, but I would be able to buy one with a smaller battery pack, possibly knocking thousands of dollars off the initial purchase price.

A couple of articles just popped up over on Scientific American that touch on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about: Biodiesel from algae.

The thing that put me on this particular line of thought is the movie Fuel, which I viewed recently. While I could argue with some of the details in Fuel, I don’t want to fall into orbit around nitpicking and risk ignoring the big picture: Go. See. It. It’s one of those rare environmental documentaries that merges more than a little passion with a conspicuous amount of skill in storytelling. Sadly, many documentaries I see that deal with energy and environmental issues are either so boring that only the hard core “members of the club” will sit through them or so dumbed down and saturated with overly cute graphics that they seem to be aimed at middle schoolers, not adults.

Fuel takes nearly two hours to tell its story, but it’s time very well spent. We get Henry Ford and his ethanol cars, Rudolf Diesel and his peanut oil, Jimmy Carter and his solar panels, war for oil, a huge dollop of biodiesel, some straight talk about the pros and cons of biofuels, the Veggie Van, a list of things you can do now (during the closing credits, no less), Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and, of course, algae-based biodiesel. It’s all presented by Josh Tickell, with some moving and not the least bit self-indulgent biographical information thrown in. It’s one of those films that brought a tear to my eye in some places and made me want to dash out and save the world in others. As busy as I am with a gargantuan reading and viewing list, I fully expect to watch this one several times, which could be the highest praise I could give any two-hour documentary.

Once again: Go. See. It.

But, back to those SciAm articles and biodiesel, starting with The Next Generation of Biofuels:

They’re not talking about ethanol from corn, however, which has already proved wasteful and environmentally damaging. Instead eyes are on a handful of high-tech labs around the U.S. that are perfecting ways to make the equivalent of gasoline and diesel from the lowest life-forms on the totem pole: yeast, algae and bacteria. The challenge is to make enough of these fuels economically and in a form compatible with today’s vehicles.

Once the next generation of biofuels becomes available, you could swing by the local energy station and fill up on a liquid that is virtually identical to gasoline. It would be made by U.S. companies, not shipped from the Middle East. And even though biofuels release carbon dioxide when they are burned, the organisms they are made from draw an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air—making biofuels essentially carbon-neutral.

…

Other scientists argue that fermentation is not the best way to make fuel. Venter believes his more forward-thinking approach will prevail. The “most exciting” biofuel, he says, will be made from microbes that, when exposed to sunlight, consume carbon dioxide and turn it into energy directly—the equivalent of upgrading to a direct airline flight from one that had a long stopover. The idea might sound too good to be true, but Venter, who is known for his restless ambition, says it is possible.

The earth’s energy comes from the sun. An hour’s worth of sunlight holds enough power to meet a year’s worth of human energy needs. But less than a tenth of 1 percent of that energy is captured by plants. Venter and other scientists are experimenting with photosynthetic microbes such as algae and cyanobacteria (sometimes referred to as blue-green algae). Not only do these microbes remove carbon dioxide from the air, they also grow quickly—some forms double in just 12 hours, whereas grasses and other large plants can take weeks or months to do so. Photosynthetic microbes also store plenty of fat, which forms the basis for fuel. Biologist Willem Vermaas of Arizona State University recently engineered cyanobacteria to accumulate up to half their dry weight in fat; just by opening up the cells, he can harvest the stored fats and convert them, in a few simple steps, into biofuel. Some plants, such as soybeans, also store fats and can be used as fuel sources, but Bruce Rittmann, Vermaas’s colleague at Arizona State, argues that photosynthetic microbes produce nearly 250 times more fat per acre.

…

So which kind of microbe will save the earth? Samir Kaul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, a San Francisco Bay Area venture capital firm that backs start-ups pursuing both approaches, says the companies that survive will be the ones whose fuels can compete with oil at $40 a barrel. Venter agrees: “I think that’s going to end up being the biggest challenge: Can we build these really large facilities and do it in a cost-effective, environmentally friendly way?” It’s a high-stakes game, and even the scientists are hedging their bets; some of Venter’s projects involve cellulosic biofuels, similar to what Keasling is doing. And despite Rittmann’s allegiance to cyanobacteria, he is also working with other microbes.

Clearly I don’t care whether the bug we use is algae of bacteria or who knows what, as long as we get there. And right now, it seems that we’re a lot closer to making fuel from microbes not just work, but work economically, than we are in making cellulosic ethanol viable on a large scale. And I think the break-even goal should be quite a bit higher than $40/barrel for crude oil. With peak oil likely just a couple of years away, plus the all but certain arrival of some kind of carbon pricing (which wouldn’t apply to biodiesel or biogasoline, given their carbon neutrality), I think a much more realistic target is at least $75 per barrel, and would quickly become a moot point if oil flies past that point.

Microbes-to-liquid fuels (MTL) is quickly shaping up to be a critical technology, for the following reasons:

• It uses both land and water very sparingly.
• It has far less impact on food production than corn or soybeans or similar crops.
• It’s grown in large clear tubes, so there’s no need for farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. and their attendant fuel use.
• It presents a surprisingly easy transition path (in terms of both economics and politics) from what we’re doing today to using these new fuels on a large scale. Even if you assume that can’t figure out how to make biogasoline right away and have to start off with “only” biodiesel, that still allows even the US, where diesel cars are very rare, to shift a good portion of its transportation fuel consumption (very roughly 25%) to a non-petroleum-based fuel at zero conversion cost for the consumer. (And if we do impose a price on carbon, biodiesel could prove to be noticeably cheaper than the petroleum variant, giving vehicle owners a further incentive to buy diesel vehicles.) This technology would work extremely well in a PHEV platform, like the Volt or the 12-mile battery range 2010 PHEV Prius.
• It could be (and likely will be) hugely important in dealing with both peak oil and climate chaos.

Think for a moment or three about the timing of this development and how well it meshes with everything we’re doing today and the changes we need to make, and it’s almost impossible not to develop a sudden warm feeling for pond scum. Unless, of course, you have a vested interest in exporting oil or seeing a collapse of modern civilization through climate chaos and/or peak oil, in which case it’s not good news at all.

The other SciAm article, is Corn Ethanol Will Not Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which presents yet more evidence that the future will be fueled with something other than food-based ethanol.

Things continue to develop on the EV front, with some fascinating news coming from Detroit Electric, a company I had barely heard of. Let me take a minute or three to quote from and deconstruct their announcement from March 30th (emphasis added):

Detroit Electric to produce and market full line of innovative Pure Electric vehicles in US, UK, EU and China beginning 2010

KUALA LUMPUR, March 30, 2009: Detroit Electric Holdings Ltd and PROTON Holdings Berhad today announced a strategic partnership to mass produce Pure Electric Vehicles. Detroit Electric will integrate its patented electric drive systems into the vehicles.

…

“Today’s agreement with Proton will put Detroit Electric on the fast track to bring a full line of innovative, practical and affordable pure electric vehicles to the global market,” said Albert Lam, Detroit Electric’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We chose Proton due to its state-of-the-art production facility, commitment to research and development, cost efficiency, and stable, high-quality workforce.”

By 2012, Detroit Electric plans to sell more than 270,000 Pure Electric Vehicles in Europe, UK, China and the United States. The vehicles will be priced between USD 23,000 and USD 26,000 for the city range model and between USD 28,000 and USD 33,000 for the extended range model. Styling changes will distinguish Detroit Electric’s vehicles from Proton’s existing line-up.

The vehicles will be based on Detroit Electric’s unique, patented electric drive system that greatly reduces the electric motor’s size and weight. The underlying Magnetic Flux Motor Technology and well-proven Lithium Polymer Battery Technology allow pure electric vehicles to achieve a single-charge range of 180km (111 miles) for the city range model and 325km (200 miles) for the extended range model.

…

On the current global downturn in automotive markets, Lam expressed confidence that Pure Electric Vehicles will attract a diverse base of consumers despite the tightening credit market, lowered consumer confidence, unstable oil prices and stricter fuel economy regulations.

“Our target audience are those who purchase practical and affordable vehicles. This makes our products fit the pockets of a very wide audience – from professionals and executives, to mothers, students and small business owners.”

I think this is interesting, on several fronts.

• As the title of the release says, these cars are headed for the US, EU, UK, and China, all in 2010. Even assuming the usual public relations fudge factor/production slips, that’s still good news for those of us eager to drive on electrons and not ancient algae.
• Notice that they’ll be marketing two basic models that differ in their battery size/driving range per charge. This is something that I’ve been talking about for a long time, and I expect other companies to follow suit. It makes no sense to offer a car to the public with only a single choice for something as basic as the battery range.
• Similarly, I expect to see car manufacturers (or third party companies) offering replacement or add-on batteries for even greater range. Upgrading an EV’s battery pack is vastly easier than is changing the engine or transmission in a gasoline engine car, so I expect a lot of entrepreneurs to leap into this market, even more than the number of places that are already converting Priuses to PHEVs.
• Taking that upgrade notion even further, I would expect to see some after market conversions using quick-recharge batteries. Quick recharge capability dramatically extends the car’s effective drive range, meaning at least some drivers will be willing to trade off the standard battery pack for a slightly more expensive, quick recharge version that might have only 75 to 80% of the single-charge driving range. As correspondent JD pointed out, quick recharge packs would require a broadband electrical outlet and not the dial up level of power most of us have in our homes, but I would expect a lot of people would be willing to pay an electrician to add a 220 volt outlet to their garage.
• Notice the vehicle pricing in the release. If Detroit Electric can sell a 111-mile range EV in the US in 2010 for $23,000, you can bet that larger companies with more economies of scale leverage can do it, too. At that price, the EV revolution will kick into overdrive quicker than you can say, “Holy Thomas Edison!”
• Notice what the pricing says about the battery cost. Assuming the vehicle gets about 5 miles/kWh, then the extra 89 miles of driving range (plus some other minor, unrelated goodies, I’d guess) will cost $5,000, or an additional 17.8 kWh of battery capacity for about $280/kWh. Based on other prices I’ve seen quoted for vehicle-scale battery packs, this is pretty aggressive, and it says a lot about the expected decline in the cost of batteries.
• I don’t know how well Detroit Electric will succeed in the US. My gut feeling is that they’ll be overrun by EVs from Nissan and Mitsubishi, and possibly some surprise late entries from Toyota and Honda.
• Somebody remind me again why anyone is excited about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?
• I’ve been telling people for years that we’re headed for an explosion of change and options in cars that will rival what we saw with the arrival of HDTV’s and cell phones and other mobile devices. That sound you hear in the background, the one that’s vaguely reminiscent of the “going to warp speed” effect from Star Trek movies and TV shows, isn’t entirely your imagination; it’s the entire US (and world) transportation sector beginning to change itself.