Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/17/2008 8:57:32 PM PDT by kiriath_jearim
Conventional biofuels like rapeseed oil and ethanol are ecologically problematic and threaten food supplies. Now a Germany company says it has the solution: an advanced fuel made from wood and other non-food biomass.
The facility is fairly small. And even if all goes smoothly, its production will also be fairly modest -- just 13,500 metric tons of diesel fuel a year as compared with Germany's annual consumption of 30 million tons. Still, this tiny refinery in the eastern German town of Freiberg has managed to attract a number of highly prominent visitors, including the CEOs and leading researchers of both Mercedes and Volkswagen.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Ping.
Pretty soon we’ll do what the ancient Easter Islanders did—strip everything and die of starvation.
Maybe we out to try using the stuff found in and under the ground instead of scraping the earth bare and using up all of the food resources for fuel.
great - denuded watersheds next
“Maybe we out to try using the stuff found in and under the ground instead of scraping the earth bare and using up all of the food resources for fuel.”
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I think that electric car technology should be researched and developed with all the scientific rigor possible. And I don’t mean the cutsie little hybrid types, either. Battery technology can be developed using self-charging batteries that are portable and long-lasting. We can develop similar things if Western society puts its collective scientific and engineering mind to it.
I thought the tree-huggers told us we couldn’t cut trees down. Only Bad People cut trees down.
I’m so sick of this crap.
If the pattern holds, they will support just about any technology that remains impractical enough to be “alternative”. But should the technology end up actually helping the mass of mankind (inevitably also helping some enterprising folks acquire an “unfair” amount of wealth) it will not be “alternative” anymore, and they will find some excuse to loathe it.
Well, electricity storage is the holy grail. Anyone who comes up with a solution that stores a lot of electricity safely, cheaply, quickly, and without a lot of weight, and with quick charging and discharging would be a billionaire several times over. That has been true for at least thirty or forty years.
So far, not even close despite the substantial incentives and the large amounts of private and government money that have gone into research. Improvements have been very slow and very incremental. So in answer to your question, we have been putting our mind to it for many years now and so far, haven't gotten much in return.
That gives you an idea of how substantial the problem is.
Good grief! Why fool around with making bio-fuels from a resource that takes YEARS to grow. Look into fuels made from switchgrass and kudzu, two plants that grow at phenomenal rates, and seem to grow almost anywhere.
The solution is trivial. Standardize the batteries, and make them replaceable, just like the ones on a cordless drill.
Say your car had four or six batteries. Your "gas gauge" tells you how many are charged, how many are discharged, and the status of the working one. You roll into a battery replacement station and they take out the discharged ones and install fresh ones. You keep the working one, until it is fully discharged. You can purchase as many charged ones as you like.
It is just like bottles with a deposit -- you only have to pay for recharging the battery -- you get a credit for your old one.
Now if you absolutely want to, you can put a charging station in your home, but the whole point here is that you don't need fast charging if you have fast replacement.
That solves one of the problems. Except that my wife won't move big ol' batteries each morning in and out of an engine compartment.
There are still two states where you always get full-service gas, and if you are old enough, that used to be the standard.
I was envisioning something like a gas jockey, but with a specialized fork lift.
Plus, the batteries don’t go in the engine compartment. They would be analogous to a gas tank. Suppose they went in the back of the car, low down, under the trunk.
“I thought the tree-huggers told us we couldn’t cut trees down.”
Oh, they meant it. Deep down they want everyone on foot or public transportation living cheek-to-jowl in the cities.
Much more egalitarian and easier to control that way.
Except for “inner-party members” of course.
However, I don't think that battery swapping is the solution for private vehicles on road trips.
One of the main problems is that batteries (all types) lose a fraction of their capacity, every charge/discharge cycle. Therefore, in practice, the battery packs would be anything but standardized. Some would be good for (say) 150 miles — while others would only be good for 100 miles. That could leave a lot of drivers stranded between battery-swaping stations.
I recognize this. By standardized, I mean same size, terminal arrangement, and mounting.
The battery in my computer costs ~$100, and tells me how many times it has been cycled, and its current absolute charge (watt-hours, not percent). I would expect no less of a car battery. It might add $5 - $10 to the cost of the battery. You would only pay for the watt-hours you actually get, the price would not be the same for every battery.
The real problem with cars with only one battery is that we expect to start out with it fully charged every morning. This is the equivalent of filling your gas tank every day whether you need to or not. Having multiple batteries which are only used one at a time, with automatic switching, allows the equivalent of buying $10 worth of gas if that is all you can afford today. Not quite as subdivideable as gasoline, but a whole lot closer than one battery.
You should look at the Chevy Volt and the use of A123 systems batteries.
http://www.a123systems.com/#/home/cordless
The cells from A123 last about 10 times longer than standard lithium ion and they don’t flame out either. You can buy them now in a DeWalt power tools and other things.
The Volt will go 40 miles with no gas and then a generator kicks in and you can go 260 miles more.
At 50 to 60 MPG!
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