Batteries or Biodiesel or Both?
I spend a lot of time researching and thinking about our transportation infrastructure. The fact is we Middle Americans have built kind of an ugly world. A world for cars, spread out wide and covered with pavement.
Throughout most of human history the vast majority of mankind had to walk everywhere it went, all the time. I think our bodies miss walking on some basic level.
The good news is that people have begun to talk about urban sprawl like it’s a bad thing, and to talk about food miles, and to talk about the positives of walkable neighborhoods. Maybe we can avoid paving over more of the earth as we move forward, and maybe we can walk a tiny bit more than we do now.
But we are where we are, and we move into the future from this point forward. We cannot go back and unmake our cities and start over. It is prohibitively expensive and difficult to do so. It’s not going to happen.
Which means we need the means to get around the sprawl in which we live. We can bicycle whenever possible, but cars, buses, scooters, trucks, and airplanes will still be needed to move us and our stuff from place to place.
But our cars, buses, scooters, trucks, and airplanes don’t have to be powered by oil, foreign or domestic. They can be powered in a number of different ways, including compressed air and hydrogen fuel cells. Still, the most likely ways we’ll power our non-human-powered conveyances are batteries and biodiesel.
I’ve written before about the potential of emission-free electric cars. If charged by wind power at night then emission free they will truly be. That’s darned exciting.
There’s still going to be a need, though, to carry people and objects farther than an electric car’s 40 mile (or maybe even 200 mile) charge will go. And that’s where biodiesel comes in.
There are a lot of exciting ways to produce biodiesel. Palm oil is one of the cheapest ways. But one of the most exciting ways - to me, personally - is algae.
Algae has the singular advantage of not taking up land that we would otherwise use for food production. It has the further advantage of being able to draw down CO2, which algae needs as a feedstock. Another feedstock for algae biodiesel production is wastewater. The water that goes down our toilets and drains can be used as a link in a chain that can fuel our long-distance transport needs, while drawing down CO2! How cool is that?
Of course, none of this is as easy as it sounds, but compared to electric cars, biodiesel starts to look easy.
Biodiesel isn't simple either, mind you. But the battery issue begins to seem insurmountable after a while. Biodiesel appears to be just a matter of ongoing tweaking to produce better results.
Biodiesel isn’t emission-free, but it does have the potential to be net zero emission. That is, if the process of creating biodiesel draws down as much CO2 as we put into the atmosphere by burningthe biodiesel then we’ve reached a net zero emission solution. Still, I'd rather not emit the CO2 and other pollutants in the first place. All things being equal, I'll take true zero emission over net zero emission.
The big problem, then is that I don’t know where to invest my money. Should I invest in batteries, and vote for the daily electric world I want to see? Or should I invest in biodiesel - possibly algae produced biodiesel - and vote for the solution that appears to cause the fewest changes to our infrastructure?
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind the 40 mile charge that limits the range of a lot of electric cars, as it would suit my needs and maybe cause some urban shrinkage.(Urban shrinkage is a great name for a caucasian rap act that sucks.)
I'd still want to be able to rent a biodiesel car on the occasional long weekend, though, and drive a bit outside of my electric zone.
The good news is that we can vote for both.
Now if I can only find publicly traded companies that operate in these areas, that appear to be on the forefront of the technology, and that have good fundamentals.
I'll let you know when I do.
3 comments:
So what about, literally, both?
The idea of a (bio)diesel-electric hybrid certainly sounds good. After all, high-efficiency turbodiesels (like my 2001 VW Golf) already get great mileage, and a hybrid would just be gravy on top of that, right?
Well, as it turns out, not exactly. See, the reason a gas-electric hybrid like the Toyota Prius works so well is that it eliminates the gas engine at the lowest speeds. Come to a full stop, and the engine shuts off. Start up, and it's the electric motor that gets you moving, with the gas engine kicking in when you reach a certain speed. On the interstate, though, it's the engine doing all the work.
The reason for this division of labor is that it plays to each powertrain's strengths. Electric motors produce 100% of their torque output as soon as you turn them on -- effectively at 1 RPM. Gas engines, on the other hand, sometimes have to rev to several thousand RPMs before they reach full torque output.
(Primer: As the old saying goes, horsepower sells cars but torque wins drag races. Torque, or twisting power, is what gives you the kick-in-the-pants sensation during acceleration. The more torque available at low RPMs, the quicker you get off the line. Tons of low-end torque, as it's called, are also what make big pickups good at towing, because you need that strength right away to get your load moving.)
However, one of the advantages diesel engines have over gasoline engines is that they produce much more torque at lower RPMs. That's why tractor-trailer trucks are diesels, and so many "heavy duty" pick-up trucks are, too. Because diesel engines ignite their air-fuel mixture with pressure rather than spark plugs, they utilize bigger, heavier components (pistons, crankshafts, flywheels) than comparable gas engines, and all that moving metal imparts a great deal of energy, which is translated into torque at the driveshaft.
Thus, if you throw an electric motor in with a high-efficiency diesel engine, the gains are likely to be minimal, because where the electric motor does far better than the gasoline engine at low vehicle speeds, it is only going to offer a marginal advantage to my Golf TDI.
That's not to say there is NO application for a diesel-electric hybrid. Take locomotive engines, for example. Those big freight trains are pulled by diesel locomotives, but the engines aren't moving the wheels like in a vehicle. Instead, they are power plants that are providing current for electric motors, which do the actual work. It's possible that such a model would work for a short-distance electric commuter car (small, highly efficient diesel engine charges the batteries when they run down), or at the far end of the scale with heavy haulers like semis (the highway equivalent of a train, after all). However, I'm not an engineer, so I don't know how practical those ideas are.
Me, I'm sticking with my turbodiesel, which delivers better gas mileage and better power than a comparable gas engine of the same size.
An important thing to note - a major source of biodiesel is the sludge from fast-food deep-fryers. Areas that have banned trans-fats have also largely tanked the local bio-d market.
Six days without Huckleberry... fading fast... can't hold on... much... longer.... *gasp*ACK!!!
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