Even as electric vehicles gain in popularity, we’re told again and again that internal combustion engines aren’t going away. While that may be true, it would still be nice to kick our addiction to gasoline. Pollution, international turmoil and energy insecurity are getting a bit tiresome. It’s good news, then that Navigant Research is predicting a decline in the amount of gasoline we use.
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CEO Elon Musk stated at the annual shareholder meeting last month that he was confident that Tesla would be able to roll out vehicles that could take the user from the highway entrance to the highway exit without touching any controls.
GreenCarReports.com
Some vehicles have complex, protracted development histories–and it looks like the Infiniti LE electric luxury sedan may be one of them. Following a period in which its development was suspended by Infiniti’s then-CEO Johan de Nysschen (who most recently heads Cadillac), the LE is now back on Infiniti’s product plan
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have come up with a magic ingredient that may improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries by a factor of three. It’s common beach sand.
The electric car depends on batteries, and before EVs become a large chunk of our automotive fleet, there are probably going to be some changes.
Right now, Elon Musk is betting he can produce millions of small lithium-ion batteries not much bigger than the ones you put in your flashlight and string them together to power a $35,000 Tesla Model E over a range of 200 miles at speeds of up to 70-80 mph. The Model E also will also need an infrastructure of roadside “filling stations” and home chargers, although the best superchargers still take more than 20 minutes to achieve 80 percent capacity.
But there is another way to store electricity, long familiar to the designers of electrical circuits. It’s the capacitor, a device that stores a small current by static electricity rather than a chemical reaction. Capacitors sit in all of your electrical devices, from radio circuits to the most sophisticated laptops, and are essential to providing the steady electric current needed to run such electronics. But what if the concept of capacitors could be scaled up to the point where they could help power something as big as an electric vehicle? Granted, it’s a long, long way from the 1.5-volt capacitor in your iPad and powering a 4,500-pound Tesla along the Interstate, but researchers are out there probing and are already thinking in terms of a breakthrough.
Right now there’s a huge separation between the things that batteries can do and the things that capacitors can do. In a way they are complementary — the strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other. But researchers are working toward a convergence — or perhaps just a way of using them in tandem.
A battery employs chemistry by splitting ions in the electrolyte so that the negative ones gather on the cathode and the positive on the anode, building up a voltage potential. When they are connected externally an electric current flows. Batteries have a lot of energy density. They can store electricity up into the megawatt range and release a flow of electricity over long periods of time. The process can also be reversed, but, because the reaction is (once again) chemical, it can take a long time.
Capacitors store electrons as static electricity. A thundercloud is a great big capacitor with zillions of electrons clinging to the almost infinite surface area of individual raindrops. And as everyone knows, this huge stored capacity can be released in a “bolt of lightening.” Capacitors can be recharged almost instantly but also they release their energy almost instantly, rather than the even flow of a battery. One of their major uses is in flash photography. But their capacity for storing power is also limited. On a pound-for-pound basis, the best capacitors can only store one-fifth to one-tenth the equivalent of a chemical battery. On the other hand, batteries can start to wear out after five years, while supercapacitors last at least three times as long.
Back in the 1950s, engineers at General Electric, and later at Standard Oil, invented what have come to be called “supercapacitors.” Basically, a supercapacitor changes the surface material and adds another layer of insulating dielectric in order to increase storage capacity. Surface area is the key and engineers discovered that powdery, activated charcoal vastly increased the capacity of the storage plates. Dielectrics were also reduced to ultra-thin layers of carbon, paper or plastic, since the closer the plates can be brought together, the more intense the charge. Since then they have begun experimenting with graphene and other advanced materials that may be able to increase surface area by orders of magnitude. All of this means that much more electricity can be stored in a much smaller space.
But the problem of low energy density remains. Even supercapacitors can only operate at about 2.5 volts, which means they must be strung together in series in vast numbers in order to reach voltage levels required to power something like an electric car. This creates problems in maintaining voltage balance. Still, some supercapacitors are already being employed in gas-electric hybrids and electric buses in order to store the power siphoned off from braking.
Researchers in the field now see some possibility for convergence. Most exhilarating is the idea that the frame of the car itself could be transformed into a supercapacitor. Last month, researchers from Vanderbilt University published an online paper entitled, “A Multifunctional Load-Bearing Solid-State Supercapacitor,” in which they suggested that load-bearing materials such as the chassis of a car or even the walls of your house could be transformed into supercapacitors to store massive amounts of electricity on-site. Combined with advances in evening the flow of electrons from supercapacitors, this opens up whole new avenues of approach to the electric car.
All of these developments are a long way off, of course. Still, supercapacitors support the possibility of pulling out of your driveway in the morning and returning at night in your EV without needing to gas up with foreign oil at your nearest filling station.
Last week in Houston, Secretary of Energy Dr. Ernest Moniz told CERA Conference attendees that storage batteries may be the next big energy breakthrough. “It’s pretty dramatic,” he said. “The research is moving very, very fast.”
Indeed, if you’re looking for “energy breakthroughs” on the Internet these days, most of the hits are likely to turn up something new about “flow batteries,” “ten times the storage capacity,” or some new cathode material that dramatically improves the performance of lithium-ion batteries.
So where do we stand in this energy revolution now, and what are the possibilities that any of these breakthroughs are likely to lead to real improvements in our attempts to wean ourselves off traditional energy resources like fossil fuels?
A good place to start is “Next Generation Electrical Energy Storage: Beyond Lithium Ion Batteries,” a panel put together for last February’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. Three experts – Haresh Kamath; of the Electric Power Research Institute, Mark Mathias; of General Motors, and Jeff Chamberlain; of Argonne National Laboratory – discussed the latest developments in the industry.
All three panelists agreed that battery research is progressing along two separate tracks:
1) lithium-ion batteries that power most consumer electronic devices are now being scaled up for electric vehicles; and
2) larger and more durable conventional batteries for the storage of grid-scale electricity.
Despite whatever hopes Elon Musk may have that his new “Gigafactory” will be able to address both of these markets at the same time, that does not seem likely. “Lithium-ion just doesn’t have the durability that we’re looking for in the utility industry,” Kamath of EPRI told the audience. He continued:
I was doing cable research one time and we had a model for a product that would last 40 years. The utilities looked at it and said, `Could you try for 60 or 80?’ The utilities are looking for things that last a long, long time.’ said Kamath.
“There’s a lot of experimenting going on,” Kamath added, “but everything that is on the grid right now is a demonstration. No one has yet come up with a sustainable business model.”
With electric cars, on the other hand, the challenge will be in equipping batteries with enough energy density so that their weight does not load down the vehicle to the point of being counterproductive. “The standard measure is that you need 100 kilowatt-hours of power to drive a mid-sized vehicle 300 miles,” said Mathias, who works at GM’s electrical storage research and development project. He explained.
If you get up in the density range of 350 Watt-hours per kilogram, you can make it. But current batteries are operating at around 150 Wh/kg, which gives them a range of 125 miles. The best we can project is that they can achieve 225 Watt-hours per liter, which still leaves them short. (Mathias).
“Fuel cells operating on hydrogen actually do a much better job at this point,” he added. “They can now get us up in the 300-mile range. We regard them as electric vehicles as well. It’s just that you generate the electricity on board.”
Then there’s the matter of cost. Capital costs for lithium-ion batteries quickly rise into the $20,000 range. Fuel cells cost only $6,000 and gas-electric hybrids, $4,000. “The good news for EVs is that fuel costs are only about one-third that of gasoline,” said Mathias. “Over a span of 100,000 miles, a gasoline engine will cost you $10,000 in fuel. A hydrogen fuel cell vehicle will cost only $6,000 and a pure EV, $3,333.” Still, that’s a long time to wait and a long way from complete cost recovery.
Refueling time is also a bit of a problem. “When you pump gasoline into your car, you’re actually adding range at a rate of 150 miles per minute,” said Mathias. He went on to say:
With hydrogen fuel, it’s 100 miles-per-minute, which is acceptable. But even with the new 120-kW superchargers, you can only add mileage to an EV at a rate of 6 miles per minute. If you take a long- distance trip, you’re going to spend 20 percent of your time recharging. (Mathias)
Overall, Mathias was not overly optimistic about further improvements. “There’s not much on the horizon,” he concluded. He was more optimistic about hydrogen cars.
Chamberlain, of Argonne National Laboratory, is part of a $120 million program funded by the Department of Energy that is aimed at developing batteries with five times the current energy density at 1/5th the cost within five years. “That’s a very ambitious goal,” he told the audience, “but we feel that’s what’s needed to transform the transportation sector.” A long chain of national and university laboratories are involved in the project. Of course, government goals and mandates are just that – projections that may or may not come true. Steve Jobs was good at inspiring his cast to pursue seemingly impossible goals but the federal government does not always have the same success.
So far, the research has involved searching the periodic table for more candidates. “We’re not sure what we’re going to come up with,” said Chamberlain, elaborating:
We’ve decided that capacitors will never help us reach our goal. The charge dissipates too quickly. So we’re exploring other materials. It may involve a metallic anode and a suspended-particle cathode. If you move to magnesium or aluminum, you’re releasing two electrons instead of one. But zinc-air and lithium-air doesn’t get you there because they simply don’t have the power.” (Chamberlain)
Chamberlain said that a lot is already known about lithium-ion. “We may be able to get two times what we have now.” He had to agree with Mathias that no other significant developments are on the horizon right now.
Mathias warned against new reports that are constantly announcing progress at the material level. “We often realize right away that they’re not going to work,” he said. “It’s not worth the manufacturing dollars.
Overall, the takeaway from the panel was that Tesla has its work cut out for it. Progress on electric vehicles will be tough. The panelists agreed that natural gas vehicles make a lot of sense. “The problem is you don’t really solve the CO2 problem,” said Mathias. He did express confidence that battery research would eventually pay off in the end. “All this progress will eventually be harvested at the hybrid level,” he said. “It may not lead to pure electric level, but there is going to be a lot of improvement in hybrids.”
According to several well-known writers of blogs and columns, based on a recent study by North Carolina State University, EDV’s (electric cars, hybrids and plug ins) are not all they are cracked up to be. Because they may be powered by a coal or natural gas utilities, they spew pollutants, because hybrids may use gasoline, they emit ghg and other pollutants, because their production processes are “dirty,” they generate more pollutants than gasoline.
Electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles… EDVs ghg reduction will not make a big difference because the total number of vehicles in the U.S. only produces about 20 percent of all carbon emissions.”
I have seen higher numbers than stated by the writers concerning carbon emissions by cars and trucks fueled by gasoline. It is not clear whether the North Carolina study compared general supply chains to supply chain specifics. For example, EV engines use a proportionately large share of aluminum. Its mining probably emits more ghg than materials used in non evs. Yet, its use in cars, given its lighter weight, produces less emissions.
More relevant, perhaps, while recently there has been some retreat because of rising natural gas costs compared to coal costs, in the long term future, (perhaps aided by government regulations of carbon emissions,) conversion of coal based power generation to natural gas will again trend upward and lower the total ghg allocated to EDVs.
The bloggers and columnists as well as the North Carolina scholars seem to believe in the theory that if you build it they will come. Indeed, the most frequent comments on the models used in the study relate to one model, that is, a 42 percent EDV market share by 2050. It presumes a government cap on emissions. Apparently, according to this model, any ghg reductions caused by EDVs will soon be filled up by other emitters. According to the study’s author, Joseph DeCarolis, ( interviewed by Will Oremus, a critic of the paper in his article in Future Tense, Jan. 27), “It’s that there all this other stuff going on in this larger energy system that effects overall emissions.” I would add based on the study, DeCarolis presumes ghg emissions are fungible and equilibrium will result in 2050.
Diminishing the ghg importance of EDVs , more than three decades out, shifts issues and initiates arguments over whether or not government should have a tougher cap; whether or not other sectors of the economy will illustrate more or less ghg emissions; whether or not technological advancements focused on ghg reduction across the economy will remain almost static; whether or not businesses will accept ghg reduction as a must or as part of “conscientious capitalism” both to sustain profits and quality of life.
The continued development and increased sales of edvs are important to the nation’s long term effort to reduce ghg and other pollutants. But, until evs among edvs increase mileage per charge to remove owner fear of stalling out in either remote or congested places like freeways and until the price comes down and size increases for families with children, they will at best constitute a relatively small share of the new market for cars in the near future. Even if the total numbers of edvs significantly increase their proportion of new car sales, many years will pass before they, will collectively, play a major role in lessening the nation’s carbon footprint.
Perfectibility not perfection should be a legitimate goal for all of us concerned with the environment. Individuals and groups concerned with the economic and social health of the nation should drop their ideological bundling boards. (Some of us are old enough to remember the real origins of the bundling board. Because of a shortage of space in many homes, it was used to separate males and females who often slept together before they were married in revolutionary days. I am not sure it was abandoned because mores changed, houses got bigger or people got splinters. I have no videotapes!)
2014 should witness the development of a non-partisan,non- ideological coalition of environmental, business, non-profit, academic and government leaders to embrace the need for an effective transitional alternative fuel strategy for new and existing cars and EDVs. The embrace should respond to national and local objectives concerning the environment, the economy, and security and consumer well-being. A good place to start would be to extend the use of natural gas based fuels, including ethanol and methanol.
Simultaneously, the coalition should encourage Detroit to expand production of flex fuel cars and the nation to implement a large scale flex fuel conversion program for existing cars. Added to the coalition’s agenda should be development of a more open fuels market and support for intense research and development of EDV’s, particularly EVs. Hopefully, evs will soon be ready for prime time in the marketplace. Succinctly, we need both alternative fuels and evs.
You’ve seen them zipping around city streets or squeezed into some illegal-looking space between a normal car and a fire hydrant. At first you might have thought they were some kind of joke. Who would drive such a thing? But the new mini-electrics are catching on and may be on the way to revolutionizing urban driving.
There is now a whole menu of them – the Chevrolet Spark, the MINI E, the Toyota IQ, the Fiat 500. Oddly, many of them are available only in California. That seems like a mismatch because they’re obviously better suited for the densely populated cities of the Northeast than California freeways. But those are the vagaries of state incentives and government mandates.
Most of them have a highly limited range. 125 miles is good and some are as low as 75. (A regular gas-powered vehicle can go 400 miles on a full tank.) But they’re a niche model, obviously suited for running around town and finding a parking space in the vehicle-choked precincts of places like New York City. They can get up to the equivalent of 125 miles per gallon and with some newer accessories don’t take up to seven hours to recharge. Most important, they are getting down into a price range where they are accessible. Leasing prices are impressive (some of them are only available by lease) and with the incentives that the Golden State is offering, people in California can say they are getting a really good deal.
Here’ a list of some of the contenders:
Getting people to accept the proposition of driving around city streets in something that looks like it could be sold on the floor of FAO Schwarz, of course, is an entirely different matter. In test driving a city car for The New York Times, Jim Motavalli reports a neighbor commenting, “It’s adorable, but I’m afraid it would be crushed by a Suburban.” The idea of weaving in and out of traffic in what amounts to a tin can is certainly not for everyone. But electric vehicles have lots of torque at the lower end of the spectrum and can be easily maneuvered. Plus if nothing else, they are loaded with safety features.
To anyone familiar with the dense urban streets of Athens or Buenos Aires, city cars would be a familiar sight. And of course the more there are of them, the less dangerous driving becomes. The progress of mini-cars is slow but you’re seeing more and more of them. In the end, they may revolutionize urban driving.
The hydrogen car may be on the road to another comeback – again. At the annual auto show in Los Angeles last week, both Honda and Hyundai unveiled “concept cars” of hydrogen models they expect to be available by 2015. As a result, the automobile press has been filled with stories its revived prospects.
“For a long time, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles were seen as a tantalizing technology to help reduce society’s reliance on oil,” Brad Plumer wrote in the Washington Post. “But the vehicles themselves were seen as forbiddingly expensive. Not the pendulum may be swinging back.”
“Toyota made a decagon – the fuel-cell car is going to be a big part of our future,” wrote Bradley Berman in The New York Times, quoting Toyota spokesman John Hanson. “Today Toyota is not alone,” he continued. “Four other carmakers – General Motors, Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes-Benz – are also promising fuel-cell cars in the next few years.”
The prospect of an automobile running on hydrogen is indeed perpetually attractive. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. When combined with free oxygen in the atmosphere it “combusts” to produce H2O – water. There are no other “exhausts”. Thus hydrogen promises transportation absolutely clean of any air pollution. No global warming, either.
But it isn’t quite that simple. The question that always presents itself is, “Where do you get the hydrogen?” Although hydrogen may be the most common element on earth, all of it is tied up in chemical compounds, mostly methane and water. Accessing this hydrogen means freeing it up, which requires energy.
Most of our commercial hydrogen is made by “reforming” natural gas, which splits the carbon and hydrogen in methane to produce carbon dioxide and free hydrogen. That doesn’t help much with global warming. Another method is to split water through electrolysis. That is a much cleaner process but requires a considerable amount of electricity. Depending on what power source is used, this can produce zero or ample emissions. If it’s coal, the problem is made much worse. If it’s clean sources such as solar or nuclear, then there can be a strong advantage. In the 1930s, John Haldane proposed giant wind and solar farms that would generate hydrogen that could fuel all of society. Such facilities generating hydrogen for transportation would be a step toward such a utopia.
Even then, however, there are problems. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule and leaks out of everything. It is very difficult to transport. Joseph Romm, a disciple of alternative energy guru Amory Lovins, was appointed head of hydrogen car development program under President Bill Clinton and worked for two years on its development. In the end, he became very disillusioned and wrote a book entitled The Hype About Hydrogen, in which he argued that the idea really wasn’t practical. Romm is now one of the country’s premier global warming alarmists on ClimateProgress.org.
What has apparently brought hyfrohgen cars back to the forefront has been the substitution for platinum as the principal catalyst in the fuel cell process.
A fuel cell produces an electric current by stripping the electron off a hydrogen atom and running it around a barrier that is otherwise permeable to a naked proton. The proton and electron are reunited on the other side of the barrier, where they combine with free oxygen to form water. Until recently, platinum was the only substance that could fill this barrier function. This made fuel cells very expensive and raised the question of whether there was enough platinum in the world to manufacture fuel cells in mass production. But several platinum substitutes have now been found, making fuel cells considerably cheaper and more accessible.
Estimates are now that next year’s Hyundai and Honda FCVs will sell for about $34,000, which puts them in the range of electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and the Toyota Prius. (The Tesla, a luxury car, is priced in a much higher range,) The problem then becomes fueling. The FCV offers considerable advantages over the EV in that it has a range of 300 miles, comparing favorable to gasoline vehicles. It can also be refilled in a matter of minutes, like gasoline cars, whereas recharging an EVs can take anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours. But hydrogen refueling stations have not materialized, despite former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s promise of a “hydrogen highway.” At last count there were 1,350 EV recharging stations around the country but only ten hydrogen stations, eight of them In Southern California.
All this suggests that neither hydrogen cars or electric vehicles will be sweeping the country any time soon. Neither the Chevy Volt nor the Nissan Leaf have sold well and are not expected to do much better next year. If you read the press stories carefully, you soon realize that the reason the automakers are constantly cycling back and forth between electric and hydrogen cars is that they are trying to meet California’s requirements for low-emissions vehicles that will allow them to continue selling in the state. The problem, as always, is consumer resistance.. The automakers can manufacture all the hydrogen and electric cars they want but consumers are not always going to buy them, especially at their elevated price. So the manufacturers will end up dumping them on car rental agencies where they will sit on the back lots, as did the first generation of EVs.
There is, however, one type of alternative that succeeded handsomely in California and had widespread consumer acceptance, although it is completely forgotten today. That is methanol. In 2003, California had 15,000 cars running on blends of up to 85 percent methanol. Consumers were extremely happy and did not have to be dragooned into buying them. Refueling was easy since liquid methanol slots right into our current gas stations. Cars that run on methanol can be manufactured for the same price as cars that run on gasoline.
The experiment only ended because natural gas, the main feedstock for methanol, had become too expensive. In 2003, natural gas was selling as high as $11 per mBTU, making it more expensive than gasoline. That was before the fracking revolution. Today natural gas sells for less than $4 per mBTU and the industry is coping with a glut. Methanol, which is already produced in industrial quantities, could sell for $1 less than motorists are now paying for energy equivalent in gasoline. Moreover, methanol can be made from garbage and crop wastes and a variety of other sources that would reduce it’s carbon footprint.
Hydrogen and electric cars each have a future and it is good to see the auto companies keep experimenting with them. But each has impediments that are going to be difficult to overcome. Methanol, on the other hand, is a technology that could be implemented today at a price that not require subsidies. Even if it is only perceived as a “bridge” to some more favorable, low-carbon future, it is worth pursuing now.
In New York City politics they used to talk about the “three I’s” – the Irish, the Italians and the Israelis, which formed the major voting blocs. Today we can talk about the “two I’s” –two countries that are making significant progress in methanol as an alternative fuel – Iceland and Israel.
Iceland is by far the leader. The Icelanders are blessed with a string of volcanoes that bristle with geothermal energy. Tapping these vents, they are able to get 25 percent of their electricity from this natural, renewable source – the highest proportion of geothermal in the world. Drawing the other 75 percent from the island’s ample hydroelectric resources, you have a grid running entirely without fossil fuels.
But that’s just the beginning. Blessed with this amplitude of natural resources, the Icelanders have decided to turn it into an auto fuel as well. In 2011 a Reykjavik-based company called Carbon Recycling International set up a unique operation that will capture the small amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide emitted from geothermal vents and transforming that into an auto fuel as well.
The target ingredient is methanol, the simplest alcohol, made up of a single carbon, three hydrogens and a hydroxyl ion. Methanol is a liquid at room temperature and can be easily funneled into our existing gas-station infrastructure. Methanol burns with about 50 percent of the energy content of gasoline but has a higher octane rating so the real effect is about 66 percent. Methanol functions similarly to the corn ethanol that currently constitutes 10 percent of our gasoline.
Through a simple procedure, CRI takes the carbon dioxide exhaust from the 75 MW Orka geothermal plant and combines it with hydrogen to produce methanol. The hydrogen is obtained through the electrolysis of water, using electricity from the power plant. The outcome is 5 million gallons of methanol per year. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has not yet approved methanol as a gasoline additive but Iceland allows it to be mixed at a rate of 3 percent (although they also have some Fords running on 50 percent). Cars would actually run on 85 or 100 percent methanol – the Indianapolis 500 cars have done it since the 1960s – but government regulators in both countries are reluctant to give it a try (It would require replacing a few elements in the fuel line to avoid corrosion).
Iceland’s experiment has been so successful that the country has now decided to export the product to Europe. This year CRI has begun to send its “green methanol” to the continent to add to Europe’s gas tanks. The Icelanders advertise that the product adds no additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is because the carbon dioxide that is captured was already headed for the atmosphere. Instead it is burned in gasoline engines, also ending up in the atmosphere, but along the way it has replaced an equal amount of gasoline that would have produced its own carbon emissions.
Icelanders proclaim they are putting into effect what Nobel Prize Winning chemist George Olah called the “methanol economy.” In his 2009 book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy
At the same time, Olah is finding recognition in Israel as well. This month Olah and his University of Southern California colleague G.K. Surya Prakash became the first recipients of the Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels for Transportation, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bestowing the first-ever award. The Israelis are also looking for alternatives to gasoline in order to reach their proclaimed goal of reducing dependence on oil by 60 percent by 2025. With the discovery of new gas supplies in the eastern Mediterranean they are in a good position to apply Olah’s proposed technology in transforming natural gas into methanol for transportation.
Nor is Olah standing still. In an October op-ed contribution to the Wall Street Journal, he announced that he has developed a new technology that will allow large quantities of carbon dioxide from power plants to be transmuted into methanol so that carbon exhausts can be “recycled” just as the they are at Orka. The plan could make use of carbon exhausts in the U.S., perhaps rescuing the fading coal industry.
Iceland and Israel are already taking steps toward the vision of a methanol economy. Will Iowa and Illinois be next?
