4 ms·

Or the fuel used by ECU engines gets created from the CO2 in the air and carbon neutral energy. Seems easier to achieve than replacing all cars with low range m

by ascar 7y ago

Or the fuel used by ECU engines gets created from the CO2 in the air and carbon neutral energy. Seems easier to achieve than replacing all cars with low range models that need a charging spot at home. And the EV also only make a difference, if they use carbon free energy. It's more efficient to power your car with oil directly than to burn the oil for electricity and then power your car with that. Imho EV's are a much overstated solution to a much deeper problem. EV's make little difference, if we are still running coal, gas and oil power plants to generate the electricity. It's just that our cars are a more visible problem in every day life. If we had an abundance of carbon neutral energy and make fossil oil more expensive (e.g. through taxes) than renewable burnables, ICU engines would be our smallest problem.

adrianN 7y ago
While it's possible to create fuel from thin air and electricity, the energy efficiency is abysmal compared to electric cars. We likely don't have enough room for wind turbines and solar panels to do it at scale.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Ignoring climate change for a second and looking at things from a public health perspective, electric vehicles give you much cleaner air, even if you don't generate the electricity with carbon neutral tech. We should be converting vehicles to electric anyway, as vehicle fumes kill a hell of a lot of people. Large utility generation is far more efficient than small combustion engines and it is much easier to scrub the exhaust.
llukas 7y ago
> It's more efficient to power your car with oil directly than to burn the oil for electricity and then power your car with that. Please run numbers and you may be surprised.
- ascar 7y ago
  I was actually surprised by most sources I found online. But all top hits on Google start off at the charger and ignore any efficiency losses for generating the electricity in the first place. Some even acknowledge that fact in text, but still avoid calculations. If we go from 46.4 MJ/kg energy in 1 liter of gasoline and apply the usual density of about 0.75kg/l, that's 34.8MJ/kg. At 3.6 MJ per kwH that's ~9.7kwH/l. A modern car uses about 6l gasoline per 100km, so 60kwH per 100km. A Tesla Model S uses about 20kwH per 100km. So a modern ICE car is about 1/3 as efficient as a Tesla Model S. But if we go from my argument, that we currently still burn oil to provide more electricity and adding more energy consumers to the network only delays the reduction of burning fossil fuels for electricity, we need to take into account the efficiency of fossil power plants. An oil power plant runs at about 45% efficiency. Lets ignore transport and charging losses, as transporting gasoline isn't exactly free either. That takes the Tesla up to 45 kwH/100km. So that's actually still a 25% efficiency gain towards the ICE car, which I didn't expect. To get the full picture however, we would have to add the 65.000kwH of energy used to build a 100kwH battery pack (upscaled based on [1]). A (estimated) 10kg steel gasoline tank takes maybe 200kwH of energy to manufacture (based on 50GJ/1000kg of steel and some adds for other stuff that needs to be done). Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude on the steel tank, that's still an energy difference worth north of 100.000km (i.e. more than most cars travel in their lifetime or another at least 50% effiency loss for the EV). I still wonder if the 25% efficiency gain outweights the cost of the battery production and the cost of adding a large scale charging network to support the broad adoption of electricle vehicles. Or, to rephrase my original argument, if we are better off taking the additional ~50% efficiency loss in converting energy to fuels and focus on expanding our carbon neutral energy production, shutting of fossil power plants and investing more in fusion energy so that might become a reality and we can create an abundance of energy to work with. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316884465_Manufacturing_energy_analysis_of_lithium_ion_battery_pack_for_electric_vehicles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316884465_Manufactu...
  - llukas 7y ago
    Tesla Model 3 is roughly 15kwh per 100km. See this [1] for discussion of gasoline production - even more unexpected and complicated to tally. We are already getting EV emitting less CO2 each year, see here [2]. With wind/solar (+batteries) getting even more wins over coal due to price drops, this process will only accelerate — no need to wait for fusion. [1] https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol... [2] https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electric-vehicles-continue-to-get-cleaner https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...
hokkos 7y ago
This startup is in France with a 44gCO2eq/kWh electricity using 6gCO2eq/kWh nuclear electricity. Here EV emit 80% less than desiel car when you consider their whole life cycle.
- ascar 7y ago
  My understanding could definitely be off here, but according to the official EU energy report (2018 report, 2016 numbers) [1] France is still consuming about 45% of fossil fuels, while whole Europe is around 70%. Further the energy network is connected throughout Europe and nuclear is great at providing base capacity, but not easy to scale up quickly and at least Germany is completely exiting nuclear fission. That's why we're using coal/gas/oil power plants for that. So, when we are adding additional energy consumption to the network in the form of (many) EV, it will not charge with nuclear power, but more likely that we need to burn fossil fuel to keep the network up. [1] https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/99fc30eb-c06d-11e8-9893-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-77059768 https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...

by ascar 7y ago

adrianN 7y ago

While it's possible to create fuel from thin air and electricity, the energy efficiency is abysmal compared to electric cars. We likely don't have enough room for wind turbines and solar panels to do it at scale.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

Ignoring climate change for a second and looking at things from a public health perspective, electric vehicles give you much cleaner air, even if you don't generate the electricity with carbon neutral tech. We should be converting vehicles to electric anyway, as vehicle fumes kill a hell of a lot of people. Large utility generation is far more efficient than small combustion engines and it is much easier to scrub the exhaust.

llukas 7y ago

> It's more efficient to power your car with oil directly than to burn the oil for electricity and then power your car with that. Please run numbers and you may be surprised.

ascar 7y ago
I was actually surprised by most sources I found online. But all top hits on Google start off at the charger and ignore any efficiency losses for generating the electricity in the first place. Some even acknowledge that fact in text, but still avoid calculations. If we go from 46.4 MJ/kg energy in 1 liter of gasoline and apply the usual density of about 0.75kg/l, that's 34.8MJ/kg. At 3.6 MJ per kwH that's ~9.7kwH/l. A modern car uses about 6l gasoline per 100km, so 60kwH per 100km. A Tesla Model S uses about 20kwH per 100km. So a modern ICE car is about 1/3 as efficient as a Tesla Model S. But if we go from my argument, that we currently still burn oil to provide more electricity and adding more energy consumers to the network only delays the reduction of burning fossil fuels for electricity, we need to take into account the efficiency of fossil power plants. An oil power plant runs at about 45% efficiency. Lets ignore transport and charging losses, as transporting gasoline isn't exactly free either. That takes the Tesla up to 45 kwH/100km. So that's actually still a 25% efficiency gain towards the ICE car, which I didn't expect. To get the full picture however, we would have to add the 65.000kwH of energy used to build a 100kwH battery pack (upscaled based on [1]). A (estimated) 10kg steel gasoline tank takes maybe 200kwH of energy to manufacture (based on 50GJ/1000kg of steel and some adds for other stuff that needs to be done). Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude on the steel tank, that's still an energy difference worth north of 100.000km (i.e. more than most cars travel in their lifetime or another at least 50% effiency loss for the EV). I still wonder if the 25% efficiency gain outweights the cost of the battery production and the cost of adding a large scale charging network to support the broad adoption of electricle vehicles. Or, to rephrase my original argument, if we are better off taking the additional ~50% efficiency loss in converting energy to fuels and focus on expanding our carbon neutral energy production, shutting of fossil power plants and investing more in fusion energy so that might become a reality and we can create an abundance of energy to work with. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316884465_Manufacturing_energy_analysis_of_lithium_ion_battery_pack_for_electric_vehicles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316884465_Manufactu...
- llukas 7y ago
  Tesla Model 3 is roughly 15kwh per 100km. See this [1] for discussion of gasoline production - even more unexpected and complicated to tally. We are already getting EV emitting less CO2 each year, see here [2]. With wind/solar (+batteries) getting even more wins over coal due to price drops, this process will only accelerate — no need to wait for fusion. [1] https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol... [2] https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electric-vehicles-continue-to-get-cleaner https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...

hokkos 7y ago

This startup is in France with a 44gCO2eq/kWh electricity using 6gCO2eq/kWh nuclear electricity. Here EV emit 80% less than desiel car when you consider their whole life cycle.

ascar 7y ago
My understanding could definitely be off here, but according to the official EU energy report (2018 report, 2016 numbers) [1] France is still consuming about 45% of fossil fuels, while whole Europe is around 70%. Further the energy network is connected throughout Europe and nuclear is great at providing base capacity, but not easy to scale up quickly and at least Germany is completely exiting nuclear fission. That's why we're using coal/gas/oil power plants for that. So, when we are adding additional energy consumption to the network in the form of (many) EV, it will not charge with nuclear power, but more likely that we need to burn fossil fuel to keep the network up. [1] https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/99fc30eb-c06d-11e8-9893-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-77059768 https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publi...