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Researching combustion fuels seems like a little bit of a dead end at this point. (Also, what the fuck, this is a chlorine compound, as perihelions points out.

Researching combustion fuels seems like a little bit of a dead end at this point. (Also, what the fuck, this is a chlorine compound, as perihelions points out. WTAF.)

iagooar 3y ago
Why do you think that combustion fuels are a dead end?
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Because the only actual problem in EVs is making a better battery. They solve a bunch of other problems. Far fewer moving parts, better packaging, massive gains in pure energy efficiency, no smog, a direction for Zero emissions. The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. It's a dead end in almost every situation. Additionally, this has none of the gains that are actually desired, they want efficiency and less emissions. Not chlorine gas. Edit: To be clear, I'm talking about Gasoline ICE applications in the context of this article, which is far more narrow than all of combustion. Most ICE applications that are not ground transport are Diesel, which is not applicable to this. This is not applicable to jet fuel. Most small engines (lawn care) are rapidly being replaced with electric power as well.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Air transport is different than ground transport in that mass matters much more. Therefore, the higher energy density your power system has, the better. Last I checked, batteries are still far behind fossil fuels here. From ecological perspective, mid-term, it makes sense to use renewable power source and captured carbon to synthesize fuel for airplanes to burn. That's properly carbon-neutral, with gasoline being effectively a high-density battery in liquid form.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      My angle was entirely on ground transportation issues. As for aircraft, this is only really a thought for small piston airplanes, which is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things and might be solvable with solid state batteries. I would also note that engine development in private planes is...well..basically stagnant. I don't think this has any real application in jet/turbo prop aircraft.
      - chongli 3y ago
        One of the biggest advantages of combustion fuels for aircraft is that they lose weight as they’re consumed. Batteries don’t do that, so you’re stuck hauling the dead weight of all the drained cells for the entire trip. Airlines optimize to such an extent that they include only the fuel needed to reach a destination, including a safety margin, so on short-haul flights the tanks are mostly empty at takeoff. I think electric planes could be made to work fairly well for those short flights because the batteries could be kept small. But for long flights the deadweight is going to be a huge problem!
        HansHamster 3y ago
        > Airlines optimize to such an extent that they include only the fuel needed to reach a destination, including a safety margin, so on short-haul flights the tanks are mostly empty at takeoff. And on the other hand, planes on long flights are so heavy due to the additional fuel that they can not land early without getting rid of the excess weight first or risk structural damage or worse.This usually means dumping the fuel or burning it off in a holding pattern.
        TylerE 3y ago
        And smaller aircraft often have nearly zero useful load with full fuel. So if you want to actually carry something, you’re going to only filling up, say, half way. (The reason they do this is to have a useful ferry range when empty).
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Passenger vehicles are not the only use in society of combustion. The edge cases matter. Combustion fuels are going to be with us for awhile, even after automobiles and heavy industry mostly migrate.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      My angle was informed by the idea that this is only really applicable to gasoline fuel. Diesel and Jet fuel is not really changed by this. (Jet fuel because electrolysis at this scale requires heavy batteries or power draw.) To that end, the actual amount of gasoline edge cases get really small. Almost all small engines (lawn care, etc) are EoL due to better battery options. Motorcycles are an interesting use case but this likely requires too much electrical power to make sense. Once you get past all of that, the actual edge cases are tiny and nowhere in this report does it actually cover the impacts on efficiency or the fact that it makes chlorine gas.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        Obviously perchlorate, etc, isn't great. I don't know whether this invention will find any use. Applications of liquid fuels which are remote, in high fire-risk environments, don't lend themselves to other safety countermeasures during fueling, and don't lend themselves to electrification are tiny portions of the energy market, but still could be quite noticeable in absolute terms. But that's not why I answered you. I answered in the way I did because you responded to a question "why do you think combustion fuels are a dead-end?". Even if we take the absolute best path for climate and get lucky on some aspects of battery and electrification economics, we're still going to be burning significant quantities of fuels for the next 100 years. They will be markets in significant decline, but still huge.
        agloe_dreams 3y ago
        I did not make the first comment above that so I read it a little differently, but the point, in this context, stands. Gasoline combustion, in the context of the article, is a dead end.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    You're only talking about consumer cars. There will always be a range of other vehicles that will benefit from fuel better than batteries.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      The only exception of note is private small aircraft. Most commercial uses of an engine(Trucks, boats, etc) are Diesel, which is not a fire risk. Almost all small engines are rapidly being replaced with electric powertrains.
  - vardump 3y ago
    > Because the only actual problem in EVS is making a better battery. The only actual problem is making a boatload of current batteries. Technology is good enough as it is. Of course it'll still improve over time.
    - tianreyma 3y ago
      > Technology is good enough as it is. Unless you have to travel long distances regularly, can't charge at home, or haul heavy things like a boat/camper/trailer/etc
    - r00fus 3y ago
      Better batteries will improve current uses (phones/laptops/cars) but unlock future ones (aircraft, naval, satellites).
  - throwaway167 3y ago
    ~20% of final energy consumption comes from electricity [1], that's 80% that doesn't. Electric cars driven by green sources whose production create no emissions are a very very small part of the global energy mix. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021/final-consumption https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      That's a brutally flawed thought process. 1. Electric vehicles use 1/4 or less the energy of gasoline vehicles for the same result. If 75% of cars were EVs, your angle of cars would be "EVs only use 18%!". 2. Just because current state is mostly gas does not mean that we do not intend to change this. The current limitation is a propagation issue. EV cars for example are getting cheaper...but fewer people can own new cars anyways, it's going to take time. 3. Heating is a major use of energy and much of the world is behind on better solutions such as heat pumps.
      - throwaway167 3y ago
        Please check the link. It's total global energy consumption, of which cars are a very small part of the mix, of which electric are most useful at displacing pollution from cities to production facilities, not reducing it. Just stop driving so much. Replacing use of car A for car B doesn't address the underlying problem of needing a car, it's like hitting 'favourite' on Facebook for a feel good cause and believing you've made a difference.
        agloe_dreams 3y ago
        I checked the link, my point stands and your explanation makes basically zero impact on anything here. This invention is only applicable to gasoline. Nothing in that link is applicable. Additionally, an EV powered by coal emits less emissions than a gasoline car. That is a fact, additionally, it enables a world where you replace the coal plant with zero emission options. Additionally, while I fully agree with your angle...in a city...much of the world does not actually work like that. You tell someone in Montana to stop using a car and they will ask for you to build a shrink ray. Saying' Stop using a car' is exactly the same as hitting like on FB for a social cause: It doesn't change reality of people needing to be at work, have food, or live life. The world isn't a happy imaginary place where 'Oh, just walk/take a bike/public transport!' works. It only works if it is better than the car. That is true in NYC and SF, that is not true between them.
  - carapace 3y ago
    > Because the only actual problem in EVS is making a better battery. Well that and tire particulate pollution. And the bugs that get killed by windshields and grills. And the people who get killed and maimed by collisions. And the conversion of useful space to roads and parking lots. And the disposal of the batteries so they don't catch fire. And getting the raw materials for the batteries without messing things up more.
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      EV have nothing to do with almost all of the items you mentioned and the last two are fully covered under 'better battery'. A Gasoline vehicle does the same things. I get your point, in urban environments they are absolutely relevant and should be pushed for. I fully think NYC would be better without cars. In the rural areas...they are basically unsolvable in any short term less than 30 years. That's just reality.
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        Minor quibble: because of their increased mass for an equivalent-sized vehicle, factors such as tire-wear and impact effects are greater for EVs. That's a fairly minor point relative to the emissions picture, which is most significant. But nonzero.
      - carapace 3y ago
        Cars cause problems, making them electric solves one problem but creates several more and does nothing to alleviate the others. In re: better batteries, we have to ask, "Better for whom?" Tesla has already spun off another for-profit corporation to make money charging people to dispose of their batteries. More exploitive mineral extraction methods are typically cheaper than doing it right. Etc.
  - anon25783 3y ago
    > The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. I really hope you're right, because the internal combustion engine directly causes a substantial portion of climate change. It is not so obvious to me that it's on the way out, because petroleum companies have a vested interest in it.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      Petroleum companies and the even bigger oil companies are also working hard on diversifying though; the petrol companies can (are?) investing in charging infrastructure, hydrogen, etc, and the oil magnates are buying up and investing in real estate and related projects in huge quantities.
      - deeviant 3y ago
        Working hard... may be overstating it. The thing they are working the hardest, for sure, is keeping their money fountain (petrochemicals) running as long as possible. Diversifying or other future thinking, is far down the list. (As measured by investment allocations)
    - tzs 3y ago
      It is also possible that ICE engines will remain but burning climate neutral fuel. One of the approaches people are working on for carbon capture is to use CO2 from the atmosphere to make synthetic fossil fuels. The reason fossil fuels are bad when it comes to climate change is that they are taking carbon that was sequestered long ago and putting it back into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels that are made from carbon recently removed from the atmosphere are just putting that carbon back, so cause no net change in CO2 levels. They still have the same problem with putting things like sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and various other things into the atmosphere, so it would be best to someday move completely away from them, but that is massively less urgent than reducing CO2 emissions. They don't make those other things worse and could make reducing CO2 much less disruptive so would be a win if they ever get to the point where they can be produced economically in sufficient quantity.
  - bratbag 3y ago
    If that edit is true, then why did you reply to a question asking why combustion fuels in general are dead?
    - agloe_dreams 3y ago
      I replied to comments to add nuance but I read it not in general, just in the context of this article. My original text was about ground transportation but the nuance is that almost all Gas use is in ground transportation or small planes and small planes are the only real exception and even that has nuance. None of my comments disagree with original take that was focused on ground transportation. The world is not black and white. EVs only ground transport problem can be battery development while there also being a number of other things happening in other uses of fuel that also change things.
  - p0w3n3d 3y ago
    You think that all new vehicles will be EV, I think that this will be only a temporary hype, and will fade in 10-15 years or so. Time will tekl
  - sobriquet9 3y ago
    Not the only problem. Internal combustion engines use oxygen from the air, so vehicles do not have to carry it. The reduction in mass is substantial, and directly translates to less tire and road wear. EVs carry all their chemistry all the time.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      And the batteries which don't actually gain mass as they discharge. "Metal-air batteries", or a "metal-air electrochemical cell", as Wikipedia prefers to call it, rely on atmospheric oxygen as the cathode which is bound to the battery during discharge, increasing total mass. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemical_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemi...>
- DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
  Because they are of the delusional class that thinks the end of ICE engines is coming in the next few years.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Come 2035 no traditional OEM will sell you an ICE car anymore as they stopped making them.
    - bhdlr 3y ago
      Consumer grade vehicles and industrial vehicles are very different things Combustion engines will be around for the next 100 years, even if human society mostly collapsed
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Ground based? Doubt it, it will either be batteries or hydrogen (in case of long-haul trucks, but even those are getting viable battery powered alternatives). Sea-going? Already more difficult, and definitely beyond 2035, but there are alternatibes as well (hydrogen being one of those). Which leaves aircraft, there, at the moment, it seems SAF is the way to go as batteries are simoly to heavy to be used on transcontinental flights, not to mention that there aren'tvthat much commercial, battery-powered planes existing right now.
perihelions 3y ago
If you missed my comment edit, it's a lot less clear than I initially thought. Per Derek Lowe's blogpost, the ClO_x species supposedly don't migrate into the vapor phase. They're a component of the liquid fuel, but wouldn't necessarily end up in the exhaust. - "...This mixture spontaneously ignites under the decomposition conditions, but it does not thermally decompose the underlying liquid. Meanwhile, at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-safely https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-saf...
- amluto 3y ago
  None of the credible end products are good, though. Perchlorate itself is at least somewhat toxic. Chlorate and chlorite are, too, and efforts are made to reduce the amount in drinking water. Chloride is relatively innocuous (people need quite a bit to be healthy), although it’s not great when it gets on metals due to corrosion issues. Bit chloride doesn’t exist by itself — it needs to be balanced by a positive charge somewhere. So that leaves HCl? Hydrogen chloride gas is fairly nasty. The best outcome I can think of for automotive use is to carry around a bunch of calcium carbonate, AdBlue style, and try to arrange for the end products to be CaCl and CO2, and to declare that this is somehow a good thing because the cars all emit a steady drip drip drip of deicing fluid.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    The point is there's supposedly *no* chlorine-containing species in the exhaust. They stay behind in the liquid phase, in a sort of "catalytic" role. - "at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase"
    - phyzome 3y ago
      If truly none of it ends up the gas, that's cool. But I don't quite believe it, because it's happening in the context of combustion. Maybe if you route the vapor away from the liquid before burning it? There are other questions: What's the toxicity in a spill? What does refilling look like? It's an interesting piece of work, no doubt, but this is nothing that looks production-ready. I don't have access to the original paper (even through SciHub) and it might answer some of these questions.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Combustion engines are still the only viable option for long-range, large-scale heavier-than-air flight, for marine transport (on oceans, and most lakes, rivers, and canals), for many mobile power operations ranging from handheld tools to remote power generation, and for much overland heavy cargo transport (trucks, much rail). Some of those can be electrified, but there are likely always to be exceptions in which that is not possible. Electrification is most viable where usage is heavy. Tracked vehicles electrify more easily than road-based ones (though yes, trolley busses are in fact A Thing). Canal traffic can be electrified through use of onshore "mules" (electrified traction), though passing and overtaking become concerns. River and lake traffic is less suited to this (again, possible in cases but not entirety). High-latitude sites as in Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada, and Antarctica cannot rely on solar power, and would require either a fuel-based or nuclear-based generating capacity. (McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast had a nuclear plant, that didn't go so well.) Mind that not all of these uses have a high demand for low-flammability fuels, which applies most specifically to aircraft. But all tend to rely strongly on fuel-based energy systems, and substituting for those is exceedingly challenging. The alternatives are effectively: - Continue use of fossil-based hydrocarbon fuels. - Find an alternative non-fossil hydrocarbon fuel analogue. There's been interesting work, and commercial industrial creation, of synfuels dating to the 1940s, though that was coal-to-oil conversion in Germany and South Africa. Generating fuels from CO2 sourced from seawater or the atmosphere has been researched since the 1970s at M.I.T. and the U.S. Naval Research Lab (USNRL), with technical proof but to date no commercial success. Google's X Labs attempted commercialisation under Project Foghorn, but failed on economics: <https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ https://x.company/projects/foghorn/> (I've reasons to argue that it's the economics of fossil fuels, not synfuels, which is principally to blame here.) (Biofuels are often suggested. The problem here is that the net likely capacity is at best a small fraction of present fossil fuel usage. We might feed 5--10%, with the upper bound being highly optimistic, but we're not going to replace 100% of present fossil fuel usage, let alone the future growth required to bring under-developed regions of the world to even a small fraction of industrialised nations' consumption. - Substitute non-combustion energy plants. To date that's nuclear, which ... has its own challenges. For larger fixed-site locations, that's possibly viable, though there are numerous cautionary tales to heed. For mobile applications such as rail or marine transport, the compounded risks of already probable accidents make this highly unattractive. - Substitute renewables. The prospect of resuming sailing ships for international sea cargo is floated, though cost and scale of ships would likely be impacted (rising and falling, respectively) tremendously. - Drastically curtail or cease such activities. One of the realities of economics is that as expressed costs change, so too do activities in which those costs are incurred. The fossil fuel age has made transportation unbelievably inexpensive compared to pre-industrial times. It's possible that we'll see considerable back-sliding on both personal and cargo transportation as fuel costs rise. This will of course profoundly re-shape the world, in much the way that cheap transportation re-shaped in our recent past.

Researching combustion fuels seems like a little bit of a dead end at this point. (Also, what the fuck, this is a chlorine compound, as perihelions points out. WTAF.)

iagooar 3y ago

Why do you think that combustion fuels are a dead end?

agloe_dreams 3y ago
Because the only actual problem in EVs is making a better battery. They solve a bunch of other problems. Far fewer moving parts, better packaging, massive gains in pure energy efficiency, no smog, a direction for Zero emissions. The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. It's a dead end in almost every situation. Additionally, this has none of the gains that are actually desired, they want efficiency and less emissions. Not chlorine gas. Edit: To be clear, I'm talking about Gasoline ICE applications in the context of this article, which is far more narrow than all of combustion. Most ICE applications that are not ground transport are Diesel, which is not applicable to this. This is not applicable to jet fuel. Most small engines (lawn care) are rapidly being replaced with electric power as well.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Air transport is different than ground transport in that mass matters much more. Therefore, the higher energy density your power system has, the better. Last I checked, batteries are still far behind fossil fuels here. From ecological perspective, mid-term, it makes sense to use renewable power source and captured carbon to synthesize fuel for airplanes to burn. That's properly carbon-neutral, with gasoline being effectively a high-density battery in liquid form.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    My angle was entirely on ground transportation issues. As for aircraft, this is only really a thought for small piston airplanes, which is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things and might be solvable with solid state batteries. I would also note that engine development in private planes is...well..basically stagnant. I don't think this has any real application in jet/turbo prop aircraft.
    - chongli 3y ago
      One of the biggest advantages of combustion fuels for aircraft is that they lose weight as they’re consumed. Batteries don’t do that, so you’re stuck hauling the dead weight of all the drained cells for the entire trip. Airlines optimize to such an extent that they include only the fuel needed to reach a destination, including a safety margin, so on short-haul flights the tanks are mostly empty at takeoff. I think electric planes could be made to work fairly well for those short flights because the batteries could be kept small. But for long flights the deadweight is going to be a huge problem!
      - HansHamster 3y ago
        > Airlines optimize to such an extent that they include only the fuel needed to reach a destination, including a safety margin, so on short-haul flights the tanks are mostly empty at takeoff. And on the other hand, planes on long flights are so heavy due to the additional fuel that they can not land early without getting rid of the excess weight first or risk structural damage or worse.This usually means dumping the fuel or burning it off in a holding pattern.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        And smaller aircraft often have nearly zero useful load with full fuel. So if you want to actually carry something, you’re going to only filling up, say, half way. (The reason they do this is to have a useful ferry range when empty).
- mlyle 3y ago
  Passenger vehicles are not the only use in society of combustion. The edge cases matter. Combustion fuels are going to be with us for awhile, even after automobiles and heavy industry mostly migrate.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    My angle was informed by the idea that this is only really applicable to gasoline fuel. Diesel and Jet fuel is not really changed by this. (Jet fuel because electrolysis at this scale requires heavy batteries or power draw.) To that end, the actual amount of gasoline edge cases get really small. Almost all small engines (lawn care, etc) are EoL due to better battery options. Motorcycles are an interesting use case but this likely requires too much electrical power to make sense. Once you get past all of that, the actual edge cases are tiny and nowhere in this report does it actually cover the impacts on efficiency or the fact that it makes chlorine gas.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Obviously perchlorate, etc, isn't great. I don't know whether this invention will find any use. Applications of liquid fuels which are remote, in high fire-risk environments, don't lend themselves to other safety countermeasures during fueling, and don't lend themselves to electrification are tiny portions of the energy market, but still could be quite noticeable in absolute terms. But that's not why I answered you. I answered in the way I did because you responded to a question "why do you think combustion fuels are a dead-end?". Even if we take the absolute best path for climate and get lucky on some aspects of battery and electrification economics, we're still going to be burning significant quantities of fuels for the next 100 years. They will be markets in significant decline, but still huge.
      - agloe_dreams 3y ago
        I did not make the first comment above that so I read it a little differently, but the point, in this context, stands. Gasoline combustion, in the context of the article, is a dead end.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  You're only talking about consumer cars. There will always be a range of other vehicles that will benefit from fuel better than batteries.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    The only exception of note is private small aircraft. Most commercial uses of an engine(Trucks, boats, etc) are Diesel, which is not a fire risk. Almost all small engines are rapidly being replaced with electric powertrains.
- vardump 3y ago
  > Because the only actual problem in EVS is making a better battery. The only actual problem is making a boatload of current batteries. Technology is good enough as it is. Of course it'll still improve over time.
  - tianreyma 3y ago
    > Technology is good enough as it is. Unless you have to travel long distances regularly, can't charge at home, or haul heavy things like a boat/camper/trailer/etc
  - r00fus 3y ago
    Better batteries will improve current uses (phones/laptops/cars) but unlock future ones (aircraft, naval, satellites).
- throwaway167 3y ago
  ~20% of final energy consumption comes from electricity [1], that's 80% that doesn't. Electric cars driven by green sources whose production create no emissions are a very very small part of the global energy mix. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021/final-consumption https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    That's a brutally flawed thought process. 1. Electric vehicles use 1/4 or less the energy of gasoline vehicles for the same result. If 75% of cars were EVs, your angle of cars would be "EVs only use 18%!". 2. Just because current state is mostly gas does not mean that we do not intend to change this. The current limitation is a propagation issue. EV cars for example are getting cheaper...but fewer people can own new cars anyways, it's going to take time. 3. Heating is a major use of energy and much of the world is behind on better solutions such as heat pumps.
    - throwaway167 3y ago
      Please check the link. It's total global energy consumption, of which cars are a very small part of the mix, of which electric are most useful at displacing pollution from cities to production facilities, not reducing it. Just stop driving so much. Replacing use of car A for car B doesn't address the underlying problem of needing a car, it's like hitting 'favourite' on Facebook for a feel good cause and believing you've made a difference.
      - agloe_dreams 3y ago
        I checked the link, my point stands and your explanation makes basically zero impact on anything here. This invention is only applicable to gasoline. Nothing in that link is applicable. Additionally, an EV powered by coal emits less emissions than a gasoline car. That is a fact, additionally, it enables a world where you replace the coal plant with zero emission options. Additionally, while I fully agree with your angle...in a city...much of the world does not actually work like that. You tell someone in Montana to stop using a car and they will ask for you to build a shrink ray. Saying' Stop using a car' is exactly the same as hitting like on FB for a social cause: It doesn't change reality of people needing to be at work, have food, or live life. The world isn't a happy imaginary place where 'Oh, just walk/take a bike/public transport!' works. It only works if it is better than the car. That is true in NYC and SF, that is not true between them.
- carapace 3y ago
  > Because the only actual problem in EVS is making a better battery. Well that and tire particulate pollution. And the bugs that get killed by windshields and grills. And the people who get killed and maimed by collisions. And the conversion of useful space to roads and parking lots. And the disposal of the batteries so they don't catch fire. And getting the raw materials for the batteries without messing things up more.
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    EV have nothing to do with almost all of the items you mentioned and the last two are fully covered under 'better battery'. A Gasoline vehicle does the same things. I get your point, in urban environments they are absolutely relevant and should be pushed for. I fully think NYC would be better without cars. In the rural areas...they are basically unsolvable in any short term less than 30 years. That's just reality.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Minor quibble: because of their increased mass for an equivalent-sized vehicle, factors such as tire-wear and impact effects are greater for EVs. That's a fairly minor point relative to the emissions picture, which is most significant. But nonzero.
    - carapace 3y ago
      Cars cause problems, making them electric solves one problem but creates several more and does nothing to alleviate the others. In re: better batteries, we have to ask, "Better for whom?" Tesla has already spun off another for-profit corporation to make money charging people to dispose of their batteries. More exploitive mineral extraction methods are typically cheaper than doing it right. Etc.
- anon25783 3y ago
  > The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. I really hope you're right, because the internal combustion engine directly causes a substantial portion of climate change. It is not so obvious to me that it's on the way out, because petroleum companies have a vested interest in it.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Petroleum companies and the even bigger oil companies are also working hard on diversifying though; the petrol companies can (are?) investing in charging infrastructure, hydrogen, etc, and the oil magnates are buying up and investing in real estate and related projects in huge quantities.
    - deeviant 3y ago
      Working hard... may be overstating it. The thing they are working the hardest, for sure, is keeping their money fountain (petrochemicals) running as long as possible. Diversifying or other future thinking, is far down the list. (As measured by investment allocations)
  - tzs 3y ago
    It is also possible that ICE engines will remain but burning climate neutral fuel. One of the approaches people are working on for carbon capture is to use CO2 from the atmosphere to make synthetic fossil fuels. The reason fossil fuels are bad when it comes to climate change is that they are taking carbon that was sequestered long ago and putting it back into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels that are made from carbon recently removed from the atmosphere are just putting that carbon back, so cause no net change in CO2 levels. They still have the same problem with putting things like sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and various other things into the atmosphere, so it would be best to someday move completely away from them, but that is massively less urgent than reducing CO2 emissions. They don't make those other things worse and could make reducing CO2 much less disruptive so would be a win if they ever get to the point where they can be produced economically in sufficient quantity.
- bratbag 3y ago
  If that edit is true, then why did you reply to a question asking why combustion fuels in general are dead?
  - agloe_dreams 3y ago
    I replied to comments to add nuance but I read it not in general, just in the context of this article. My original text was about ground transportation but the nuance is that almost all Gas use is in ground transportation or small planes and small planes are the only real exception and even that has nuance. None of my comments disagree with original take that was focused on ground transportation. The world is not black and white. EVs only ground transport problem can be battery development while there also being a number of other things happening in other uses of fuel that also change things.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago
  You think that all new vehicles will be EV, I think that this will be only a temporary hype, and will fade in 10-15 years or so. Time will tekl
- sobriquet9 3y ago
  Not the only problem. Internal combustion engines use oxygen from the air, so vehicles do not have to carry it. The reduction in mass is substantial, and directly translates to less tire and road wear. EVs carry all their chemistry all the time.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    And the batteries which don't actually gain mass as they discharge. "Metal-air batteries", or a "metal-air electrochemical cell", as Wikipedia prefers to call it, rely on atmospheric oxygen as the cathode which is bound to the battery during discharge, increasing total mass. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemical_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemi...>
DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
Because they are of the delusional class that thinks the end of ICE engines is coming in the next few years.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Come 2035 no traditional OEM will sell you an ICE car anymore as they stopped making them.
  - bhdlr 3y ago
    Consumer grade vehicles and industrial vehicles are very different things Combustion engines will be around for the next 100 years, even if human society mostly collapsed
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Ground based? Doubt it, it will either be batteries or hydrogen (in case of long-haul trucks, but even those are getting viable battery powered alternatives). Sea-going? Already more difficult, and definitely beyond 2035, but there are alternatibes as well (hydrogen being one of those). Which leaves aircraft, there, at the moment, it seems SAF is the way to go as batteries are simoly to heavy to be used on transcontinental flights, not to mention that there aren'tvthat much commercial, battery-powered planes existing right now.

perihelions 3y ago

If you missed my comment edit, it's a lot less clear than I initially thought. Per Derek Lowe's blogpost, the ClO_x species supposedly don't migrate into the vapor phase. They're a component of the liquid fuel, but wouldn't necessarily end up in the exhaust. - "...This mixture spontaneously ignites under the decomposition conditions, but it does not thermally decompose the underlying liquid. Meanwhile, at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-safely https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-saf...

amluto 3y ago
None of the credible end products are good, though. Perchlorate itself is at least somewhat toxic. Chlorate and chlorite are, too, and efforts are made to reduce the amount in drinking water. Chloride is relatively innocuous (people need quite a bit to be healthy), although it’s not great when it gets on metals due to corrosion issues. Bit chloride doesn’t exist by itself — it needs to be balanced by a positive charge somewhere. So that leaves HCl? Hydrogen chloride gas is fairly nasty. The best outcome I can think of for automotive use is to carry around a bunch of calcium carbonate, AdBlue style, and try to arrange for the end products to be CaCl and CO2, and to declare that this is somehow a good thing because the cars all emit a steady drip drip drip of deicing fluid.
- perihelions 3y ago
  The point is there's supposedly *no* chlorine-containing species in the exhaust. They stay behind in the liquid phase, in a sort of "catalytic" role. - "at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase"
  - phyzome 3y ago
    If truly none of it ends up the gas, that's cool. But I don't quite believe it, because it's happening in the context of combustion. Maybe if you route the vapor away from the liquid before burning it? There are other questions: What's the toxicity in a spill? What does refilling look like? It's an interesting piece of work, no doubt, but this is nothing that looks production-ready. I don't have access to the original paper (even through SciHub) and it might answer some of these questions.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Combustion engines are still the only viable option for long-range, large-scale heavier-than-air flight, for marine transport (on oceans, and most lakes, rivers, and canals), for many mobile power operations ranging from handheld tools to remote power generation, and for much overland heavy cargo transport (trucks, much rail). Some of those can be electrified, but there are likely always to be exceptions in which that is not possible. Electrification is most viable where usage is heavy. Tracked vehicles electrify more easily than road-based ones (though yes, trolley busses are in fact A Thing). Canal traffic can be electrified through use of onshore "mules" (electrified traction), though passing and overtaking become concerns. River and lake traffic is less suited to this (again, possible in cases but not entirety). High-latitude sites as in Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada, and Antarctica cannot rely on solar power, and would require either a fuel-based or nuclear-based generating capacity. (McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast had a nuclear plant, that didn't go so well.) Mind that not all of these uses have a high demand for low-flammability fuels, which applies most specifically to aircraft. But all tend to rely strongly on fuel-based energy systems, and substituting for those is exceedingly challenging. The alternatives are effectively: - Continue use of fossil-based hydrocarbon fuels. - Find an alternative non-fossil hydrocarbon fuel analogue. There's been interesting work, and commercial industrial creation, of synfuels dating to the 1940s, though that was coal-to-oil conversion in Germany and South Africa. Generating fuels from CO2 sourced from seawater or the atmosphere has been researched since the 1970s at M.I.T. and the U.S. Naval Research Lab (USNRL), with technical proof but to date no commercial success. Google's X Labs attempted commercialisation under Project Foghorn, but failed on economics: <https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ https://x.company/projects/foghorn/> (I've reasons to argue that it's the economics of fossil fuels, not synfuels, which is principally to blame here.) (Biofuels are often suggested. The problem here is that the net likely capacity is at best a small fraction of present fossil fuel usage. We might feed 5--10%, with the upper bound being highly optimistic, but we're not going to replace 100% of present fossil fuel usage, let alone the future growth required to bring under-developed regions of the world to even a small fraction of industrialised nations' consumption. - Substitute non-combustion energy plants. To date that's nuclear, which ... has its own challenges. For larger fixed-site locations, that's possibly viable, though there are numerous cautionary tales to heed. For mobile applications such as rail or marine transport, the compounded risks of already probable accidents make this highly unattractive. - Substitute renewables. The prospect of resuming sailing ships for international sea cargo is floated, though cost and scale of ships would likely be impacted (rising and falling, respectively) tremendously. - Drastically curtail or cease such activities. One of the realities of economics is that as expressed costs change, so too do activities in which those costs are incurred. The fossil fuel age has made transportation unbelievably inexpensive compared to pre-industrial times. It's possible that we'll see considerable back-sliding on both personal and cargo transportation as fuel costs rise. This will of course profoundly re-shape the world, in much the way that cheap transportation re-shaped in our recent past.