Progress on E-Fuels: a real alternative to EVs

A ways to go, but this is encouraging. Looking at the whole life cycle, it's potentially as green or even greener than battery electric. Plus much less disruptive. Fingers crossed this becomes a market-feasible alternative to EVs, keeping our 4Runners going for decades to come...

porsche-efuel-water-car-fuel-chile-production

 

It’s good that energy research is continuing. But that had me wondering, just what is this eFuel?

Well, it’s synthetic methanol which is converted to gasoline then blended with other gasoline and can be burned in current ICE vehicles. Maybe it will eventually be cost effective to stretch gasoline supplies. Currently it’s costing about $10 per liter.
https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news...ic-fuel-could-save-the-combustion-engine.html

 

I don't think it's blended into regular gas, but rather converted to regular gas? I understood the end result to be basically carbon neutral, so long as the energy used to manufacture it was from renewables. If it requires regular gas then yes it's less exciting. Still potentially helpful, but not the radical green alternative to EVs that I was thinking.

The article mentions the expectation of an 85% CO2 reduction "well to wheel," which presumably accounts for all the CO2 necessarily released during both manufacturing and transportation of the new fuel. I'm not sure what the net CO2 reduction is for EVs when you factor all that in, but I'm guessing it's not much better.

Anyway, as folks know I'm not at all anti-EV. I think they have a ton of advantages over ICE. Just thinking it would be great if you could get similar environmental benefits for ICE going forward.

 

If EVs were less expensive and readily available I’d get one as a second car. Right now the low end Tesla model 3 is 50K.
I’m hoping as more EVs are on the road there’s less of a demand for gasoline, cost will stay low, and there will be plenty for my 4R for a long time.

 

Battery is not so green.

 

Whatever happened to fuel cell vehicles? Those seemed like they were going to be the next big thing to happen to the automobile 20 years ago.

You would think plug-in hybrids would be WAY more popular. Why haven't more car companies jumped on this?

 

Nteresting, but unfortunately that article had no details at all on the actual process. Easy to find however:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel

looks like they are making a synthetic crude by using renewable sources electricity to split hydrogen from water and then combine with captured CO2 and refined into a hydrocarbon. Seems reasonable on paper but the hurdle is likely going to be scaling it and making it cost effective.

2 major problems:

#1, Storing the hydrogen on the vehicle is complicated. Hard to make ultra high pressure hydrogen very safe without extremely heavy containment, and then no matter what you do it leaks…. Badly. Remember even NASA never figured out how to make a leak proof hydrogen tank for the space shuttle.

#2 The cheapest way to make all the needed hydrogen is cracking natural gas.. and if you re going to do that it’s more economical to just burn the gas directly. Hydrogen via electrolysis uses more energy than you get out of it- which may be a scaling problem for the eFuel idea as well.



Note that I have nothing against EVs and green energy, just being realistic…

 

I thought some Fuel Cell vehicles literally had you pouring water into the "fuel" tank. Was that not the case?

 

I’ve seen that. You pour plain water into the tank then a billion nano hamsters chew it into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, poop the hydrogen ones into the fuel cell chamber to produce electricity while the oxygen ones float into the cabin, augmenting the hvac system. Or something like that?

 

The opposite. Water comes out of it.

Fuel cells are basically the reverse process of electrolysis. Electrolysis puts electricity and water IN, and you get hydrogen and oxygen out. Fuel cell, takes the hydrogen and oxygen in, and you get water and electricity OUT.

The net is that hydrogen fuel cell is really just an alternative conversion/transport medium to batteries for getting the electricity from source to the cars motor. It has some benefits like avoiding the long recharge times and weight of batteries, but comes with its own safety issues and high loss rates through leakage - hydrogen is the smallest atom in existence so building something leakproof is near impossible ( which is why hydrogen fueled rockets like the shuttle have to be hooked up to the fueling lines right up until minutes prior to liftoff).. It’s also not very green unless the electric source is solar/wind.

 

There’s a growing crop of good and affordable EVs. Here’s one example (or two depending on how you count it).

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2023-chevrolet-bolt-euv-first-test-review/

There are some good looking cheaper options from Korea too.

Me, I may wait for the next jump in battery tech and more progress on charging station availability. But I don’t think it will be all that long. If I could add a third car now it might well be an EV. (If I could add a fourth it might be a muscle car with basic resto-mod, like maybe a 69 Camaro. Carbs too — as few electronics as poss )

 

My two cents - man-made climate change (man-made global warming) isn't provable.

 

Agreed 100%, yet this is hardly discussed I don't get it.

 

I’ll try and find the article, but there was one written recently that they have found out the earth warms and cools to keep itself in a certain range. It’s the reason life has flourished on it for so long.

found it
https://news.mit.edu/2022/earth-stabilizing-temperature-1116

 

I thought this article was interesting. It's all about efficiency...

https://www.motortrend.com/features/truth-about-electric-cars-ad-why-you-are-being-lied-to/

 

I wonder how long something like Toyota’s fuel cell car can hold on to the hydrogen in it’s tanks? https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2022/

Having a published leakage rate would be kind of important for an owner, especially if it isn’t used everyday. Not being able store energy (due to leakage) has it’s drawbacks, but a Hyd fuel cell vehicle could be useful if it’s drawbacks are understood.

The reason I like the idea of hydrogen is because of geothermal energy. Wouldn’t it be possible to tap into hotspots all around the world? That would give huge access to energy. Crack as much water as you can…then ship the hydrogen all around?

If hydrogen is too hard to handle, is it possible to use hydrogen to synthesize it into methane? You could capture a bunch of Carbon and put it right back into energy. I would think careful use of the geothermal energy surrounding Yellowstone park could be enough to create enough fuel for the US.

Then again, we could also accidentally suck all the heat out and end up sinking the whole region lol.

 

Shipping hydrogen around the world brings to mind this image.

 

Wish I could like this more than once.

 

but it’s hard to argue we haven’t had our impact.

 

Dunno. Look at suaveflooder’s link.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/earth-stabilizing-temperature-1116

 

It's brought up all the damn time, and it doesn't change the fact that a step in the right direction is still a step in the right direction even if it's not a 100% solution to every problem.

 

I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to get a Nissan Sakura. It's tiny, practical for short distances, roughly $15,000 (though that may have gone up some since the last time I saw that figure), and would be perfect for going to work or parking in parking lots that the 4Runner makes my sphincter pucker. It would be a glorious complement to my 4Runner. But do they sell it in the USA? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

 

Excerpt:
“Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.”

There’s been some pretty big oscillations over those 100,000 year cycles.
And “habitable range” doesn’t mean a comfy range for us humans. It just means some sort of life survived those extremes.

 

Yes, and the big oscillations support what I’m saying, that man-made climate change isn’t provable. According to scientists, we’ve had major climate swings for millions of years, naturally. Today someone claims there’s a one or two tenths of a degree average change over a period of a couple centuries at most, it gets labeled as man-made climate change, and billions believe it and act on it, without proof. But we haven’t had the ability to accurately measure global temps for very long at all, much less compare them accurately to one another and to the history of climate in general.

 

It still doesn’t make it easy to say humans have not had an impact on this planet and had an impact on this. I’m believe the earth has cycles, and we are impacting those, how much, I don’t have the expertise to even remotely say how much.
But from the article,
“There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.

I’d rather be doing the things that reduce the chance of needing the stabilizing feedback.

 

Science isn't very good at proving something, but it is excellent at disproving things. So while science can't conclusively prove that man-made climate change is real, it can look at the null hypothesis (that increases in carbon dioxide will not cause warming) and refute it.

Here are a few key facts:

-CO2 is a greenhouse gas

-Since the Industrial revolution, CO2 levels have increased 40% in the atmosphere

-Physics tells us that a doubling of our atmospheres CO2 will increase the surface temperature by 1.2*C


With these 3 simple facts, the null hypothesis is disproven.


What CAN be argued is how the climate will react to this increase in CO2 since the Earth's climate is very complex and some feedback loops are not known with a degree of certainty (this is where the MIT article comes in).


What most deniers do is use the uncertainty in the feedback loops as proof that man-made climate change isn't real, and that's bullshit.

 

I'm honestly curious - you mention the Industrial Revolution (from around 1760 to about 1820–1840). How were worldwide CO2 levels being measured then? I'm thinking it would have been difficult to get an accurate measurement of atmospheric CO2, but maybe there were instruments measuring this accurately back then that I'm unaware of.

 

I think it’s looking at stuff like glaciers and even possibly trees and stuff.

 

They can measure air trapped in ice cores.

 

Ok.