Automakers working on next generation of engines

I wonder about the energy and environmental costs of making batteries.

DAS

In a word, energy density. Today's batteries just don't store enough energy per pound and per cubic foot to make all electric cars viable.

Matt

"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote

I hate to break it to you that there are parts of the world with far more expensive fuel (due to higher taxes) and the streets are crawling with cars.

I hate to break it to you but you lack the understanding of economics to understand this issue.

Economies of scale are real, but would still exist more or less as today if production was say one-tenth of today's output. There would simply be fewer models made, and fewer options offered.

2 reasons a) energy density and b) where and when the energy is produced is often not where and when it is needed for consumption. Hydrogen is portable and storable, especially in huge quantities, which is how it would be handled in a global hydrogen economy.

Dave Gower, retired economist.

Man - if just introducing hydrogen power can draw so much attention think of the discussions on using cold fusion as a alternate power source! :-)

Even though there is some "tongue-in-cheek" in these offerings everyone must remember - it was not that long ago that the things we use in our everyday lives were considered science fiction fantasty not that long ago.

No, this isn't why fuel cells are under development.

Fuel cells are under development primariarly because a fuel-cell driven vehicle is in effect an electric car driven by a battery that has a 5 minute "recharge" time.

And the Hydrogen economy is under development primariarly because hydrogen answers the energy storage question.

With traditional electric cars, even if they solve the weight and power problems with batteries (and NiMH has got a lot closer to doing this) the fundamental limiting thing with them is that there is a recharge time lasting in many hours.

And even if you could build a battery that had an 'instant' recharge time, the power required to do it in a few minutes - thousands of amps - isn't available from a standard residential 200-amp 220v power service.

The residential power service is what limits recharge times on vehicle batteries. And this assumes a world in which everyone has a garage with an electrical outlet in it that could deliver high power service. (ie: a typical electric dryer outlet)

The advantage of a fuel cell - which can after all be made to burn many other kinds of fuel than Hydrogen - is that you can pull your electric car into a gas station and in 5 minutes have your battery "recharged" ie: refilled with fuel.

In actuality a hydrogen-driven vehicle IN TOTO is more inefficient and more expensive than just an electric car. Think of it this way - if a hydrogen economy ever gets going, and hydrogen becomes cheaper than using electricity from the wall, then people would just go buy generators and put them in their garage, (a 50 KW generator that uses a Chevy 350 V8 and runs off Natural Gas only costs about $10K and will easily fit in a garage - and you can also use the waste heat to heat your home) and buy cheap hydrogen and generate their own electricity - f*ck the electric company.

With a pure electric car, you generate the electricity at a power plant and transmit it and store it in the car in a battery, when the car moves the electricity goes from the battery to the motors.

With a fuel-cell car you generate the electricity at a power plant and transmit it to a hydrogen manufacturing facility where hydrogen is made, you then carry the hydrogen to the vehicle where it's burned in a fuel cell the electricity from the fuel cell goes to the motors.

Both cars have 2 conversions of power after the initial generation, the hydro car has one from electricity to hydrogen, the other from hydrogen back to electricity. The electric car has one from electricity to chemical energy, then back from chemical energy to electricity.

The key point though is that the fuel cell conversions are much more inefficient than battery conversions.

Battery conversions for a sample lead-acid battery are on the order of

80-90%. See:

Fuel cell conversions are more like 30% - unless you use the produced heat for cogeneration, which in a car is not going to be feasible. See:

Sure, a fuel cell is more efficient than an internal combustion engine - but a battery is much more efficient than either of them.

Everytime you convert power you lose a lot in efficiency. The tradeoff with fuel cell cars is you get worse efficiency in exchange for convenience. And the tradeoff with the hydrogen economy is that you get the ability to store energy - ie: produced hydrogen - instead of having to use it right when it is produced - like electricity.

No, but I don't know the percentage/ppm of a gasoline engine either. In any case, an EGR valve works the same way in a hydrogen-driven engine as in a gasoline-driven engine.

There is an existing, well known answer for NOx production for either type of engine so there's no point in arguing that one engine design is better than the other merely based on percentage of NOx, since in actual production both engines would have emissions controls on them that limited NOx.

The point is that people like you who are advocating the hydrogen approach (or seeming to) don't apparently understand the big picture - which is that you cannot get something for nothing, and energy is needed for creating hydrogen or electricity or alcohol. Since just about all energy in the world originates from the Sun, that means collecting, transporting, and storing energy from sunlight.

One of the big reasons that the current energy consumption of fossil fuels works today in the modern world is because most of the work of collecting was done 100 million years ago, and because that collected energy is currently sitting in nice convenient pools of liquid underground, it answers the storage problem, and because it's a liquid, it tremendously cheapens the transportation cost. As a result, for us humans now, we only have to pay a small percentage of the cost of this energy - we don't have to do squat for collecting it or storing it long term. (just pay each other for it)

When the time comes that the fossil fuels run out, and we really do have to switch over to another fuel source, we will now have to pay the cost of collecting it and storing it, in addition to transporting it (which is what we actually pay now)

This is going to significantly, permanently, raise the cost of fueling a vehicle and may put private ownership of vehicles out of the reach of the average person. It may be that the increased efficiencies of an electric vehicle may save enough money so that an electric car may possibly be affordable to a family, while a hydrogen vehicle would not.

The summary problem is one of generation, always has been. Consider that in this country if the bulk of our power generation was not dependent on burning oil or coal, but was something cheap like hydropower or wind, and electric costs were a tenth of what they are today, everyone would think that an electric vehicle would be the obvious solution - because it would be so cheap to operate.

Even if by some misguided reason we do end up going down the hydrogen track, since that's going to require copious amounts of power, we still have to answer the power generation problem. So, either route - electric or hydro - since power generation is a requirement for both, we should solve this problem first.

Ted

You probably are referring to Japan. Let's see now, shall we examine the percentage of vehicle ownership there? 50% of population vs the US 75% of population. How about average income of those owners - about 30% higher than US averages. Perhaps you haven't seen the following:

Fact of it is that the reason Japan is 'crawling with cars' as you put it, is because they don't have as much road space. It has nothing to do with the ability of people to afford cars. In fact, vehicle ownership is LESS in Japan than in the US precisely because it's so expensive to own a car. There's a lot more people in Japan that ride the bus or the train.

And a lot fewer companies producing them. Enter market monopolization, and enter higher prices.

Automakers make very little on each vehicle produced (compared to products put out by other industries) and so high volume is critical to maintaining the prices. Sure - as you point out, raw production costs are the same until you drop below a certain point - but long before that, the automakers will have had to raise prices to maintain their cash flow.

Then answer where we get the energy to produce the hydrogen in the first place. Right now we don't have to do any work in collecting sunlight to make oil, which is portable and storable, as nature has done that for us. In a hydrogen economy we will have to do the work of collecting sunlight - which is going to raise costs.

Ted

People will adapt. The Model T automobile didn't have the power or the range of a modern automobile but it sold like hotcakes. If it's a question between being able to afford an electric car that has, say, half the range of a vehicle today, vs not being able to afford a hydrogen car that has the same range, people will buy the electric car.

Ted

Interesting commentary. Actually I am not one of those advocating hydrogen fuel; I am fairly agnostic about these things and aware that each type of fuel has pluses and minuses. What I am curious about is what the total lifecycle cost is of batteries.

A recent report in the UK, from a reputable source, apparently, concluded that the energy cost PER PERSON is lower in the car than in a train! My 'issue' is that evangelical advocates for a particular form of fuel (or transport) overlook total costs.

This extends into related matters. For example, nothing is worthwhile recycling other than aluminium containers. The rest should be incinerated. BUT it is difficult for local politicians to posit that -- who wants an incinerator down the road?

DAS

The current car battery industry boasts a 90% recycling rate.

A lot of people are very conscious about the environmental costs of batteries. Nobody wants lead or cadmium in the landfills. This will end up being handled the same way that a lot of these problems are handled. That is, $500-$1000 of the new car purchase price will be in effect a deposit on the battery. Toyota is doing this already with hybrids.

If the original purchaser drives their car until the wheels drop off, when it finally dies they can tow it to the dealership and have the battery removed then tow it to a wrecking yard and sell it for the scrap steel value.

If the original purchaser sells it, since the battery is going to be worth something even if the car itself is junk, this will insure that it's going to find it's way to a wrecking yard instead of just being dumped into a field somewhere.

Ted

That recycling rate is impressive but what about actually making a new battery? Energy cost?

DAS

What city will this be Ted? Being a life long New Yorker, many if not most people I know who even have a garage store junk in there. The car typically gets parked in the street. And if you have 2 or 3 cars, 2 or

3 cars get parked in the street. Will each owner run an extention cord to thier vehicles? No matter how nice the area, I would expect not to find my extention cord in the morning. And in some neighborhood you'll be extremely lucky if you can even park near your front door. I can't imagine what the solution would be if you lived in an apartment building. Short trips in the city here may be short distance wise but the stop and go cycling of the motor will kill the charge rapildy since it won't be a steady ride to your location but a series of stop and go. I imagine New York is not alone in this instance.

If this is the future of vehicles, horse and buggy will be more efficient. You can even use the horse poop to light a stinky fire when it dries.

The model T was still far better than the alternatives which were walking, biking or riding a horse. That analogy isn't even close to what we're discussing here. Today's all electric cars are a big step back from today's IC cars. Half the range is fine if you live in a city, but doesn't fly in Montana, Texas, etc.

Sure, if people have absolutely no other choice, they might buy all electric cars, but it will have to come to that first.

Matt

That really depends on the battery material and composition. Lead and Cadimum are nasty things in the environment and so battery handling for those batteries must be more expensive since you have to recycle them.

NiMH batteries however can be just thrown away, their materials have no environmental issues. An interesting discussion of them is here:

My guess though is that the manufacturers will recycle them anyhow as the materials are more expensive than plain lead.

I would agree with that, because the train doesen't run all of the time fully loaded. I would imagine if every train that ran was fully loaded, the cost per person would be different. If fuel costs rose and more people took the train and fewer took a car, the energy cost per person on the train would drop.

incinerated.

Not true, this depends greatly on a number of factors, source separation and quantity. Paper is definitely worth recycling. I remember being in cub scouts 25 years ago before curbside recycling was mandated and one of our fund raisers was paper drives, a few tons of newsprint, cleaned of garbage like string, paper bags, etc. was worth money that was definitely greater than the hauling costs. And before curbside recycling was mandated there were people making a few bucks driving around to business collecting cardboard boxes. White office wastepaper is also worth recycling, once again if you can train people not to throw colored paper into the recycling bins at the office.

Clear glass containers are also worth recycling if they are source separated from colored glass, and from clear plate glass. Glass containers melt at a lower temperature than plate glass and sand, thus it is cheaper to make clear glass containers out of recycled clear glass containers.

Steel for most purposes (ie: from the household) isn't worth it, the costs of collection outweigh the savings for most things, unless you have a lot of steel in one place (like a car)

Mixed glass, ie: green and brown glass, is generally not worth it. This should frankly be something addressed at the federal level, however. There is no reason to use brown glass for beer bottles, clear glass works just as well and indeed a lot of beer already comes in clear glass or cans anyway. It should be banned for packaging, like styrofoam is (at least in our area). Green glass is more of a problem because of the wine industry, wine in a clear wine bottle would almost certainly look much less appetizing (who wants to buy a clear bottle of liquid you are supposed to drink that is the color of urine?) and the wine industry would probably suffer sales as a result. They also don't put wine in aluminum cans, at least, not anything that your going to get someone to pay $100 a bottle for.

If the household waste stream was clean garbage - paper, food, etc. - no problem. But with people throwing the household chemicals (like batteries) into the waste stream that they do, an incinerator puts out a lot of nasty heavy metals and costs more than just dumping it into a sealed landfill.

The thing is though that a lot of the hauling costs of recyclables you have to pay anyway. The garbage hauler hauls the same weight of material off from your house whether he's taking one garbage can or one garbage can plus a smaller box of recyclables like glass and paper. If you can get the people to source-separate the recyclables so the garbage hauler has the two containers to deal with, then the costs are the same to the garbage hauler in fuel.

We have curbside recycling here and there's wide participation. Before we had it, a typical garbage hauler might be able to so, say, 100 houses before his truck was full and they had to send another one out.

Now the garbage company sends 2 trucks out, the first is the garbage truck and the second is the recyclables truck. The garbage truck now does perhaps 200 houses. So the end cost to the garbage hauler is the same, and the advantage is that back at the garbage haulers place he gets enough quantity of recyclables that it makes it worth while for someone to come buy them from him.

As a point of fact the garbage haulers do just this - they sell the recyclables they collect to companies that come buy them. Even mixed glass goes as the general agreement with the glass haulers is that if they have unused space on their truck, they will take the green/brown glass for free. And my understanding is that the glass haulers get a large enough quantity of green/brown mixed that it makes it worth while for the people that make reflective paint to send someone out to take the green/brown mixed for free from the glass haulers.

You see this illustrates the problems of trying to determine stuff like total lifecycle cost on batteries. What people that do this try to do is calculate stuff like "it costs X dollars to move Y pounds so dealing with recycling lead acid batteries must cost Z." What this ignores is that in real life, a lot of the lifecycle costs are intermixed with other costs, which makes them cheaper.

Ted

Let's see, standard retail markeup is 400%.

So a car battery that has a list of $100 probably cost the retailer $25 from the battery manufacturer.

Assuming the manufacturer takes 50% (got to pay for R&D as well as adminstrative costs) the cost to manufacture the battery is probably around $12. Assume raw material costs is about 50% again, we get an energy cost of perhaps $6? At current fuel prices that should give you an energy cost in barrels of oil, or whatever other standard you want to use.

Ted

There was a huge amount of real world data and observation on the GM EV1 that refutes everything that you have brought up. No, the stop and go cycling of the motor didn't kill the charge. No, the power grid in California didn't melt down as a result of charging them. There's a number of websites on that vehicle out there, and many testimonials from people who leased them. Read what the actual owners of these cars had to say for answers about junk in garages, etc.

The only reason the EV1 isn't sold today is that the cost of manufacture was too high for the volume sold. Once again, it was the economies of scale in action. If GM had been able to place 4 times the number of EV1s that they did, they would still be making them.

All this is old tired arguments that the EV1 study was designed to test to see if they held water. They didn't. Fundamentally, what the project boiled down to is that the simple reason electric cars aren't feasible in the United States is the same reason that passenger car Diesels aren't feasible in the United States. It's because the population here is too suspicious of any fundamental change to vehicle technology to embrace it with enough volume to make the economies of scale be able to produce it work out. It has nothing to do with what people CAN do and everything with what they have been CONDITIONED to think.

Ted

Not true. The Arab world didn't fundamentally hate the United States until 2 things happened - the first was our alliance with Britian and how Britian trashed the Arab world after WW1, and the second was the creation of Israel which the UN did largely as a response to what Germany did to the Jews.

WW1 was not started by the Arab world and they didn't ask us to come into their countries and try to get them to take sides, and Britian's conduct towards the Arabs after the WW1 was totally reprehensible.

And the Arabs wern't gassing Jews by the millions in gas chambers, it was Europe that did that, and it was a dirty trick for the UN to pull the land grab that it did to create Israel, it has had no precident before or since in international law.

If roles had been reversed and the Arab world had come in and redrawn all state and country boundaries in North America, and then later come in and booted all white people out of California and gave it back to the Indians, we would be pretty upset as well. We very probably would be initiating the same kind of guerilla actions against them that they are doing to us.

And even today, the US could still eventually settle the peace with the Arab world, if we only forced Israel to start doing what we and the UN have repeatedly demanded that it do - which is quit dumping settlers into the West Bank, and meaningfully negotiate with the Arab world, reach peace accords and abide by their promises.

Israel spys on the United States and violates agreements with us and everyone else repeatedly, yet has never suffered economic sanctions, or a cutoff of military aid, or even a threat to sever diplomatic relations. It is like the neighbor that lets their dog continually come and crap in your yard and dig up your flowers, and when they see you watching them while they watch their dog do all this, all they do is say "bad dog, bad dog" and do nothing to get up and actually grab the cur and drag it away.

While it is plainly obvious that violence never solves anything with these kinds of problems, whether it's the neighbors dog (for if you poison the dog they will just buy another one and the same thing will happen) or whether it's in the West Bank, the facts of the matter are that the Arab world has resorted to violence out of sheer frustration. They have tried talking over and over and over, and nothing was done. The fact that you think the argument is over oil and not over Jerusalem, is a pefect example of how useless all the talking has been, as it's a textbook example of how horrible the government has been about explaining the real facts of the terrorist problem.

If there wasn't a drop of oil in the Mid East, the collapse of the World Trade Center by the terrorists would still have occurred.

Ted

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FROM DAS: I read your post further down about the estimated USD 6 energy cost. I need to ponder that. (I was thinking about the total cost of smelting the ores etc, but maybe you have given a simple, effective indicator.)

I have retained a copy of the Cobasys battery article as it's a good explanation of how they work, but it does not, understandably, discuss the cost of making and disposal/recycling.

My underlying point is, I suppose, about displaced enery consumption. Electric trains are often considered wonderfully environmentally friendly, whilst it is overlooked that you need, in most cases, regular power stations using oil or gas, to produce the electricity in prodigious quantities. Only a few regions, such as Switzerland, are blessed with truly environmentally friendly power sources such as water (hydroelectric). Same with electric cars. You need to make the batteries and, even if they are, after all, quite cheap in energy and environmental terms, you still need to build vast numbers of electricity generating stations to run them...

FROM DAS: Precisely. We can forget about the 'ifs' of fully laden trains all the time. I have been on trains with standing room only, but these only run on main routes and it doesn't occur throughout the day or throughout the year. Even in the US I was on a well-patronised train, namely from Philly to DC, and then from DC to NYC, but I am sure that's an exception, too. (I.e. it's a main route.)

In principle you are right about shifts to trains if cars become less available, but in a free society this is a pipe dream. In the ex-COMECON countries there is still a quite high utilisation of trains, stemming from the days of when it was very difficult for individuals to own cars (for a variety of reasons) and when ticket prices were kept artifically low. But, I suggest, this is falling as more and more people buy cars. The fact is that the automobile is one of the most important (if not THE most important factor) in the free movement of individuals (hats off to Henry Ford here). You can see that despite the high fuel taxes in Europe and other places sales of cars continue to rise in most years. It has been calculated in the UK that even if only 10 percent of freight were moved to rail from the road, it would DOUBLE the freight train requirement, and there is no way anybody is going to invest in such infrastructure unless there were coercion or other factors at play. Rail transport for freight is only of limited economic value because of its inflexibility, so it's good, for example, for the long-distance transport of coal, but useless for the movement of 1000 computers being sent to 100 wholesalers in 20 different parts of the country.

Even in Germany, where any significant company had a railhead, use has declined dramatically...

I am a great fan of rail travel, but not at the expense of economic reality.

FROM DAS: This is I dispute. These days paper recycling is a 'political' act done to salve people's consciences. A few years ago in the UK a major newspaper tried paying people GBP 5 for every ton (or was it per 100 kg?) of paper but the campaign failed as they could not sell it on for a profit. Yes, our local council also collects paper as well as other items, but it would be simpler and cheaper to incinerate it.

Try buying writing paper made from recycled paper. It's not as good and costs more.

The only way to make paper recycling economically viable is not introduce market distortions, such as taxes on landfills and other ways of handling.

FROM DAS: To many 'ifs'. Forget about 'training'. Even if 99 out of a 100 get it right, just one sheet of coloured paper ruins the batch...

Here in Britain we are always exhorted not to chuck our Yellow Pages directories into the paper recycling bins (because of the yellow paper), but how many take heed? Paper is paper, right?

FROM DAS: Even more so here. One brown bottle in a batch of 100 uncoloured ones is enough to rion the lot.

[..........]

FROM DAS: I don't get it. White wine (urine coloured?) is always sold in uncoloured bottles.

FROM DAS: Modern scrubbers easily take care of noxious gases, just like out of car exhausts.

FROM DAS: We have versions of this in the UK, the exact format depending on the Local Authority (municipality). It does not detract from my general contention that incinerators would be the most efficient solution (you can also use the heat output for heating, done in some places in Europe). For things other than aluminium only distortions help, one of these being the (political) difficulty of building incinerators.

As regards glass, the raw material is infinitely available, and I have seen the energy balance.

Try speaking to people in the recycling and incineration business. [............]

1) Only the US oil companies which were 'nationalised' in Saudi Arabia, Iran...

2) A view, but a slightly simplified one...

DAS