With oil poised to go higher at any moment (the current crisis extends into Iran? A deepening chill with Venezuela?
Mexico runs dry? Take your pick.), American automakers have responded by... designing new large SUVs. It's hard to blame them. Despite the rising costs of fuel, statistics out last week show that the average MPG grew from 21 MPG in 2005 to.... 21 MPG in 2006.
As Jerome a Paris has detailed in his series of diaries, there's little to no capacity for expansion on the production end of the oil pipe, and an ever greater demand sucking at the other end. You couldn't ask for a better formula for demonstrating the effects of supply and demand on prices. Forget "price gouging." That's only a distraction. Oil prices are going to go up, and there's next to nothing any president or congress can do to prevent it.
So... what then? Do we have to sit and take it on the chin? Just exactly what are the options? How will you get to work five years from now? How about ten?
Telephones, Trains, and Sprawl, etc.
Before I get to the car stuff, let me say what this diary is not about: it's not about fixing sprawl. It's not about concentrating living areas near working areas, rezoning land use, or funneling people toward public transport. All those things are good, all those things are necessary, and all those things will have to happen if we're to survive. But all those things also have consequences that are hard to think through. The fact is that for at least the last sixty years, we have structured our society in ways that encouraged people to spread out. We've subsidized sprawl to the tune of trillions of dollars, and encouraged it with everything from education policies to popular culture.
Reversing the deleterious effects of sprawl is a project so costly, so complex, so daunting in scale, that it even a plan as detailed and wide-ranging as Energize America only lightly touches on the subject. Is fixing this problem essential to our long term survival? Absolutely. But wrapped up in this are pervasive issues ranging from the "frontier spirit" to good old American racism. I'm not going to solve it in this diary.
This diary is about cars and what makes them go.
Future Fuel
When people start discussing the future of transportation, the problem is generally boiled down to one of fuel. Gasoline? Diesel? Biodiesel? Ethanol? Hydrogen? Dilithium crystals? Each of these has been proposed (okay, maybe the dilithium proposal only shows up if you talk about cars at a Trek conventions), and each comes with its own list of pluses and minuses.
While wind energy, solar, and new forms of hydro all offer at least partial solutions to getting more power onto our electric grid, when it comes to cars, we're talking portable energy -- and that's a different breed of cat. Strapping a windmill on the roof of your car is not a good way to generate power (so you can stop that wind-powered Ford Fiesta conversion you were working on right now). To power a car, energy has to come in a form that's light enough and compact enough to reasonably be carried along.
Oil-based fuels, such as gasoline, fit that requirement well. With well over 100,000 BTUs stored in a single gallon, they do an admirable job of providing a lot of go in a small space. So admirable, that for a hundred years there have been few real efforts to look elsewhere for automotive power. Now that we're forced to face the looming end of the oil age, finding alternatives with the same mix of high power to volume is turning out to be a tougher nut than many might assume.
Here's a quick run down of things we might use to push metal down all those highways we've built.
The Portable Power Rainbow |
Oil-Based | Oil - Biofuel Blends | Biofuels | Fuel / Electric Hybrids | Electric |
Gasoline | E85 | E100 (Ethanol) | Plug-in Hybrid | Batteries |
Diesel | BioBlend B20 | Biodiesel | Plug-in Diesel Hybrid | Hydrogen |
Over in the red zone are the oil-based fuels we know and guzzle so much of today. You might also put natural gas in this category. It's not oil-based, but it is a fossil fuel with increasing demands biting into a limited supply, and there are a few vehicles designed to work on various forms of compressed gas. Note that this red zone includes all current hybrid cars, even my beloved Prius (which took a huge smack in this nose this week when an SUV shredded a tire and flung the steel-belted mess right at me).
In the slightly less oily orange zone are the blended fuels, generally some mix of oil and either bio-diesel or ethanol. Light biofuel blends are spreading across the country. Those of you just encountering that "all grades contain at least 10% ethanol" sticker on your gas pumps might be interested to know that us hayseeds in the Midwest have faced that mix for the better part of a decade. We've already gone through all the goobers who were convinced that their precious mechanical pal could not run on anything less than 105% pure petrol. They were wrong. Of course, at the high end of this scale, where you find fuels like E85 (85% Ethanol) and bio-diesel mixes above 50%, you may have to steer clear. Many new vehicles can burn these fuels, but there are some problems. Notably, ethanol is a powerful solvent, so if you have plastic components in your fuel system, anything above E15 is a no-no. Biodiesel tends to gel at a higher temperature than its petroleum-based namesake, so those with diesel vehicles in northern climes may need to steer clear of high blends in cold weather (or put on a twin fuel system).
The pure bio yellow stripe finally sheds the oil pump altogether. Bio-diesel can from a number of sources, including cottonseed, rapeseed, and soybeans. Future sources may include various types of algae. In any case, if you have a diesel car, depending on the model, you can likely burn pure bio-diesel with little or no changes -- so long as you take care of that pesky cold weather issue (many areas that offer B100 switch to B20 in the winter). Ethanol is produced in the United States mostly from corn, though there is growing interest in cellulose-based ethanol. Most gasoline powered cars that are "flex-fuel" capable can also burn pure ethanol, but with only about 2/3 the BTU of gas and considerably different combustion characteristics, plus that pesky dissolving all the plastic bits aspect, filling your take with ethanol is definitely pushing the limits of your car's fuel-management computer if you're not approved for this stuff.
The hybrids occupying the green band of the fuel rainbow are not those you can drive out of a dealer's showroom today. These are plug-in hybrids, able to get some of their power from the electrical grid. Typically, a plug in hybrid uses batteries on trips of up to 20 miles (on some prototypes, up to 50 miles), then uses fuel (either petroleum or bio-fuels) for longer hauls. There are kits available for modifying some existing models into plug-in hybrids (including a couple for the Prius), but the cost of these kits is currently above $10,000.
Finally, over in the blue stripe are cars that draw all of their power from the electrical grid. They may store that power using various kinds of batteries, ultra-capacitors, fuel cells, or some mix of the above. They might also tackle the storage problem in some unexpected ways. Also shown in this band are cars powered by hydrogen. However, there are several places where hydrogen could come into play.
Okay, now that we know the options, let's investigate what advances can be hand from each "color" of solution.
Petroleum Products: Keep on Keepin' On
One of the moves we can take is to simply keep burning what we've done, but to do it better. Current generation internal combustion engines are only about 30% efficient. That is, less than 1/3 of the energy in the fuel consumed is available to move the vehicle forward.
In 2005, the DOE funded 12 programs aimed at improving engine efficiency by as much as 50% (meaning that the resulting engines would be around 45% efficient). The focus of much of this research is on something called Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI), which promises to be more efficient in converting fuel to power, and at the same time significantly reduce pollution.
HCCI is an attractive idea to automakers. Potentially, they could get engines that produced more power from less fuel, with vehicle complexity remaining overall about the same. Vehicles that now get 20MPG could get 30 with just an engine swap. Vehicles getting 30 MPG would get 45 with an equivalent HCCI engine. For an industry reluctant to take on major changes, HCCI holds out the promise of doing the same thing, making the same models, and getting a big boost in fuel economy.
Unfortunately, HCCI is still in the research stage, and working out how to control the low-temperature combustions to get the promised gains in efficiency appears to be extraordinarily difficult. Besides, doing a better job on burning gasoline is obviously a stop-gap to a long term solution. It's not clear that HCCI engines will make it to the market in time to even play a role.
On the diesel side of the oil-based equations, the three highest mileage vehicles in the US that are not hybrids, are diesels. Not only can you pick up a 40 MPG diesel Jetta or Beetle today, but overseas there are a variety of diesel passenger cars that do even better. Small diesel hatchbacks are a staple of European highways, many of them with mileage that would daunt even a Prius. European drivers have their choices of many vehicles that exceed the mileage available in the US, but these vehicles have one thing in common: they're not massive SUVs.
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Audi A2 | Mercedes A200 | Smart ForFour |
Small European Diesels |
There's nothing magic about it, smaller cars with a lighter weight are more fuel-sipping than their larger cousins.. While research on more efficient engines could yield progress in five to ten years, buying smaller cars would yield a boost in mileage right now. Unfortunately, the evidence that Americans are actually moving toward smaller vehicles is hard to find. There was a sudden, though sadly temporary, trend toward more efficient cars during the oil shocks of the seventies, but today's data indicates that Americans are still buying large vehicles right into the face of rising gas prices.
Oddly, one good sign is that Americans are starting to buy more large sedans -- the largest, heaviest, highest horsepower sedans on average. Ever. Why is this good? Because there's some evidence that the people moving into these sedans are swapping down from even less efficient SUVs. If Americans can be lured down the path toward smaller vehicles, we could very rapidly reduce the fuel consumption with vehicles already on hand. There is no technology that can match the immediate effects gained by moving to smaller vehicles.
There's more reason to hope that things are on the road to improvement when it comes to reducing the sheer size of our transportation. Across the country, motorcycle and scooter sales have skyrocketed as more people drop not only a lot of steel, but two wheels from their commuting vehicles. And Japanese automakers are starting to bring over their "B-Size" vehicles, just one up from the smallest they offer. That's why this season has brought a number of new models, like Honda's Fit and the Toyota Yaris.
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Honda Fit | Toyota Yaris |
Recently, Daimler-Chrysler has taken the next step, officially bringing in the Smart ForTwo "city car" that had previously been imported by green car company, Zap (which continues to offer the Smart along with several other interesting vehicles). The Smart car is so small, it can park nose in to a parallel parking space.
Should DC's experiment in bringing the SMART to America prove successful, we might get lucky enough to see some of the really spiffy vehicles that have yet to make it past the concept car stage, like VW's GX3 wonder trike.
Give Me a Side of Fries, and a Tank of Fuel, To Go
If you had to point at one trend that's happening immediately, it's the rise in bio-fuels, both ethanol and bio-diesel. Why? Because plants to create these fuels are easily scalable, and small operations can be built with a relatively small capital investment. Combine that with the high price of oil, mandates to use E10 for purposes of reducing pollution, and subsidies of various sorts, and you get a bio-fuel boom. Production and shipping capacity of bio-fuels is growing rapidly, and you have cities like Portland mandating that all fuel sold there contain bio-fuels. Is it any wonder that IPOs of new bio-fuel companies are among the brightest starts on Wall Street and that new plants are opening almost daily?
There are so many disputes about the relative effectiveness of bio-fuel, and ethanol in particular, that it's hard to keep all the arguments straight. Should we include the energy cost of the tractor when calculating what it costs to make that corn? What about the cost of the food that the workers eat while they're working at the factory to make the tractor? This kind of ever-expansive argument is largely beside the point. The question is whether bio-fuels provide a reasonable alternative to packing energy into a small space, and on that front they seem almost as good as petroleum.
Could we replace all our oil with bio-fuels? Well... maybe. But it would be an extraordinary effort. A fifty-fifty mix of bio-diesel and ethanol would require putting three times the productive farm land in Iowa toward nothing but the production of fuel just to match what we currently import. Make it five Iowas to solve the whole problem. Trouble is, that much farm land is not readily available. There's also the little nit of figuring out what we eat while every scrap of land is busy working for our gas tanks.
Naturally, if we combine bio-fuels with the two hoped for goals in regular cars -- more efficient engines and lighter weight vehicles -- we can shrink the requisite greenspace. Brazil, which generates ethanol from sugar cane, has been systematically raising the amount of ethanol in their fuel supply, and Brazilian manufacturers have been adding small flex-fuel vehicles that can run on anything from E0 to E100. Zap is bringing at least one of these vehicles to US consumers next year.
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Obvio 828 |
Combine vehicles like this with the small diesels already on roads around the world, and you have a good idea of one component of our highways over the next decade.
By the way, for those of you just starting to see the little "Contains up to 10% Ethanol" stickers on your gas pumps: Fear Not. We Mid-Westerners have been consuming the stuff for a decade now with no ill effects. When your neighbor starts thinking that E10 killed his Hummer, just nod and smile, all the same sort of stories circulated here when the stuff was first introduced.
A Little of this, a Lot of Go
For more than a decade, UC David professor Andy Frank has been preaching the Gospel of Frankenstein cars. Frank took old ideas, tossed them in a blender, pitched out a lot of complicating factors, and produced the modern idea of a plug-in hybrid.
Unlike a regular hybrid, a plug-in hybrid carries enough battery power for at least a moderate trip, driving the car on pure electric engines. Only when the vehicle has to go beyond the battery range does the gas engine kick in. Even then, in some of these models, the gas engine doesn't drive the wheels, it only serves to make more juice for the electric motors. Basically, the system overcomes the limited storage currently available in batteries by carrying a reserve of hydrocarbon power. This allows the car to run on grid-electricity in short trips, and still make it possible to have that family road vacation.
Professor Frank's experiments have shown from the beginning that this kind of design is very practical, but until recently it was hard to get any auto manufacturer interested. Even companies like Toyota, who were leading the way with "normal" hybrids, have been reluctant to come into this area. The biggest concern is that, having spent a lot of ad dollars teaching consumers that hybrids don't have to be plugged in, they would be muddying the waters with a car that could be plugged in.
While automakers dither, after market companies are jumping into the fray. At least two companies are already out there offering plug-in conversion kits for the Prius. Unfortunately, right now a Hymotion or eDrive conversion will set you back over $10,000, but that price is expected to be cut in half over the next couple of years. It's even possible that a plug-in hybrid made along Frank's designs could cost considerably less than the more complex hybrids on the market today.
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A Toyota Prius grows a plug thanks to Hymotion's aftermarket conversion kit |
With mileage equivalent to well over 120 MPG, putting a significant percentage of plug-in hybrids on the road would have a huge impact on oil consumption. Better yet, plug-in hybrids can be paired with bio-fuels. We might really be able to grow all our fuel, if that fuel was going into vehicles that needed less than 1/6th of what they're now carrying.
With both foreign and domestic manufacturers looking into plug-in hybrids, it's a decent bet some of these vehicles will start to come onto the market in three to five years. When they do, they're going to make a tremendous impact.
Like a Bolt of Lightning
It was hard to miss the introduction of the Tesla Motors new roadster. The car is beautiful, fast, and compared too other cars in the luxury sports car category, not even too expensive (despite the fact that it literally cost as much as my house).
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Tesla Electric Roadster |
The Roadster is a sign of how mature electric vehicles are becoming, and how -- even if the big three seem more than reluctant to dent their traditional partnership with big oil -- many players are getting involved. AutoblogGreen has a nice interview with the head of the Tesla in which many of the issues are discussed. At the other end of the EV scale, companies like Zap are involved again in selling several varieties of those "neighborhood cars" that don't have the oomph to get out on the highway.
So when are we going to see an electric car for the rest of us that isn't too expensive, too slow, or about to be hustled off to the crusher by an oil-centric car company? Real Soon Now. Smart is introducing an electric version of their vehicle that can do 70MPH and has a 70 mile range -- plenty for most commutes (though there are no current plans for the US). California-based Phoenix is estimating that their new trucks will go 85MPH, have a range above 100 miles, and recharge in only 10 minutes thanks to new nano-tech batteries. Tesla hopes that sales of their high-end sports car will fund the manufacture of a much less expensive consumer model with similar range.
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Smart EV | Pheonix Retro EV |
Still think totally electric cars are impractical? What if I told you a major manufacturer was going to offer a small SUV that had 120 mile range, went 80 MPH, and sold for around $30,000 after tax incentives. Interested? Unfortunately, that's a description of the Toyota RAV4 EV which Toyota made in limited numbers from 1998 till 2003. If you're after one at this point, you'll have to pay as much as $70,000 to drag down one on eBay (but hey, at least Toyota didn't crush them all).
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2003 Toyota RAV4 EV |
Vehicles like the Toyota and the Tesla show that electric vehicles are certainly possible. Advances in batteries, like those used in the Smart and the Phoenix, show that these vehicles re becoming more and more practical. There are electric vehicles now being made in China, India, Canada -- the area is exploding. It's a safe bet that even if the major manufacturers don't step into this area, EVs will be a common sight on the highways by the end of the decade.
Finally, there's the possibility that we won't store our energy in batteries, or in complex hydrocarbons, but in tanks of that most simple of elements, hydrogen. I've listed hydrogen under electric, but the truth is hydrogen might potentially come from any number of sources. Much of current hydrogen production comes from the reduction of fossil fuels like natural gas or coal. It can be created directly by cracking water into its component elements -- a tactic which might allow home production. There are also schemes to produce hydrogen using everything from trash to trees. Hopefully, one of these methods will be more efficient than current methods, because for all the harping over ethanol costs, hydrogen looks far worse at the moment. It's unclear just how the "hydrogen economy" is going to work out. Manufacturers are working past problems with storage and with fuel cell costs, but there's still a daunting infrastructure issue looming. Despite the number of test vehicles being put on the road as demos, and despite many more major manufacturers showing off hydrogen vehicles than EVs, it seems unlikely that hydrogen will play a significant role in the next decade.
Thanks for hanging in there
The limits on diary size prevent me getting to everyhing I wanted to talk about, but it's probably good that something puts a limit on my rambling. Of course, if we start running around in plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, we're going to need more power on the electric grid, but that's a subject for another diary. So go over to Energize America and bone up for that discussion.
For more information on transportation options, visit:
Energize America (Draft 5)
Green Car Congress
AutoblogGreen
Originally posted on Political Cortex