Josh the Aspie’s Blog

There are many different kinds of technology designed to reduce our reliance on foreign oil or to decrease pollution some of the most promising are:

• Hybrid Gas / Electric
• Hydrogen
• Ethanol / E85
• Pure Electric
• Natural Gas

Hybrids

Hybrids present actual fuel savings as compared to current gas engines, depending on how they are designed. Some use 4 individual motors in the wheel wells which are driven by electricity. This electricity is created by the engine. This is currently the technology used to highly increase efficiency in the rail industry, as this is one of the most efficient drive transmissions available.

Another fuel saving measure that hybrids can provide is generating and storing electricity through breaking, reducing wasted energy from breaking as it is in conventional vehicles.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles don’t currently have the infrastructure available for people to use the cars extensively, but it may be on it’s way.

Last I read about it there was a hydrogen production plant called Freedom Field being planned at the international airport in Rockford, Illinois. For those not familiar, the Rockford-Chicago International airport is the airport where plains are flagged to from Chicago due to poor weather, or overflow. In addition, this is the airport used by UPS for it’s mid-west (and main) air hub.

The airport is planning on fueling the majority of it’s on-site vehicles such as service vehicles, baggage transport, people movers, etc with on-site generated hydrogen. This hydrogen plant produces it’s hydrogen from water, producing hydrogen and oxygen, through a process called electrolysis. Some of you may remember me discussing electrolysis and hybrid cars in a previous article.

What’s more, this hydrogen is produced through the use of solar power. This is a great way to leverage this type of sustainable energy supply. Solar power can’t run all night, and has limited effectiveness on cloudy days. You also can’t store sunlight in a bottle. However it can produce fuel like hydrogen, which can be stored.

If enough of these stations are put in place at the location of businesses that will use them on site, and also allow travelers to buy fuel at their location, this infrastructure can form it’s self. Because hydrogen fuel cars combine oxygen, and hydrogen to form water, there would be little pollution from these engines other than humidity.

Ethanol

As for Ethanol and the mixture known as E85 (85% Ethanol), many people I have talked to have said that ethanol costs more in energy to produce than it imparts into our system. This is of course always true that a transfer between energy types will have some form of energy loss, however the much this energy comes from our sun.

If we neglect this and only focus on energy which is specifically devoted by humans to it’s growing, Corn Ethanol has an estimated output to input ratio of 1.34. This is taking into account growing, harvesting, and transporting the corn, as well as distilling it into alcohol.

Corn ethanol also has other byproducts, as does distilling gas from oil, such as corn based plastics, a type of product we will need if we are ever to go without oil, which to my knowledge has yet to be produced by any of our other energy sources.

Further, the energy we put into production could conceivably be done using renewable energy and using resources we have more of locally (coal, biomass, etc). There are also other, more efficient products that can be turned into ethanol, such as sugar beets and sugar cane.

Another objection raised by commenter on my post about Oil Drilling in ANWR has been the potential impact on food prices, as more farm land would be devoted to the production of corn for ethanol. Currently the United States government subsidizes corn in huge amounts. This is in part in an attempt to keep the price of staple foods low enough that any working American can afford the price of that food, thus preventing starvation. Anyone on welfare can afford that as well.

Another problem this seeks to solve is the huge variability in production of an individual field based on the weather. We never want to experience a famine, so we need to make sure we produce enough food. Part of how we do this is by encouraging farmers to plant more than they other wise would through farm subsidies.

We are currently working on World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations where other countries want us to remove these subsidies in order to reduce price fixing on the world market. If we eliminate these farm subsidies, we may face other domestic problems such as under production leading to higher prices, or over production leading to prices so low that farmers go out of business (thus leading to under production and higher prices).

Still, there is only so much land available for the production of plant matter.

Another problem with Ethanol is that it only contains about 66% of the energy that gasoline does.

On the other hand, Ethanol (and gas with ethanol in it) has a higher octane rating, which means that the fuel can be compressed more before it spontaneously combusts during the compression phase and damages the engine in a process called “knocking.”

This higher octane rating is required for engines with higher compression rates, known as high performance engines. These high performance engines increase the amount of power derived from the same fuel, but lower octane fuels can cause damage to these engines. Unfortunately flex-fuel vehicles which can use both gas and E85 cannot take advantage of this higher compression.

Pure Electric

Pure electric cars require some form of continually deriving energy for use, or some method of storing energy for use. For an electric car to be feasible we would need vast advancements in solar power cells, batteries, or a combination there of. In any case it is unlikely that people would be able to use cars based on solar energy for long distance transportation any time in the foreseeable future, but commuter vehicles may become more feasible soon.

Natural Gas

Natural gas is a clean alternative to petroleum based vehicles, and there are existing cars on the market which run on natural gas, most of which are sold to government agencies, due to the lack of natural gas refueling stations in most areas. However, Honda has now produced a home refueling unit.

Unfortunately, natural gas based vehicles only have public refueling stations in California and new York, you can only get about 200 miles per fill, and there is little trunk space. This clean alternative simply isn’t an option for long distance travel, only for commuter vehicles.

Problems With Some Technology

As for technology solving problems related to fuel, there are also problems which technology has caused, for example: Most of the octane increasing additives in our gasoline, and the sulfur output of diesel fuel are both hazardous to our health and environment. The process of doing additional refining on diesel fuel has begun, which will likely increase cost and might decrease power.

In addition, many of the pollution reducing measures in a car such as the Catalytic Converter and the Muffler also reduce the horsepower the car has available. These pollution reducing devices increase the back-pressure with which the engine has to deal. Some of the horse power goes to fighting back pressure, thus reducing the amount of energy our gasoline is able impart to driving the vehicle forward. This then reduces fuel efficiency, and increases the output of carbon dioxide per mile traveled.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.