Will Improving Gas Mileage Now Help or Hurt the “Green” Movement in the Long Term?
I believe that improving energy efficiency is the “low hanging fruit” in this energy crisis - and obviously should be the first step in any reasonable plan to fix the way we power civilization.
I attended an Energy Freedom Conference last weekend in Chicago with the idea that energy conservation (esp. fuel conservation thru eco-driving techniques learned using websites like FuelClinic.com ) is a key component to helping solve our problems.
I was surprised by the several attendees I talked with who believe improved fuel efficiency was not to our long-term best interest, saying it may help to reduce prices but at the same time would reduce the public’s interest (and long-term investment) in actually fixing the problem with alternative fuels, etc…
I’m curious what others here think - does energy conservation work to our advantage, or does it actually hurt the green movement in the long term by reducing investment?
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Turning Oil into Salt
I’m home from the Energy Freedom Summit in Chicago with so much material and information that it’ll take me weeks to digest, understand, summarize, and disseminate it to you. Let me start with a “sound-bite” sized summary of the theme of the conference…
Once was a time when nations went to war over salt. Seriously.
Until the 19th century salt was a strategic commodity much like oil is today. Salt was required to preserve meat - and preserved meat was required to allow armies to march. Salt was required for societies to grow beyond traditional collectives, and salt was required to store, transport, and sell meat that could not be consumed immediately. Wars were indeed fought over salt, and those nations with large salt reserves had tremendous political and economic prosperity - and power over those who needed their salt - much like countries with oil do today.
So, what happened to change the world, and strip salt of it’s strategic importance?
New technologies were invented which made salt unnecessary for food preservation. The invention of electricity, refrigeration, canning, and other preservative technologies forever changed the world, and salt became just another freely traded commodity like we are accustomed to today.
You can still preserve your meats with salt if you wanted to, but most choose to refrigerate it.
Today we find ourselves in a 19th-century dilemma again, where oil has replaced salt as a global strategic commodity, and where the trade in this commodity is tightly controlled in order to weild political and economic power.
Oil’s strategic value stems from it’s monopoly in the transportation sector. This monopoly gives the petrocrats that control OPEC and the bulk of world oil reserves unacceptable power over the global economy.
How exactly can we “turn oil into salt”. The answer is surprisingly simple and familiar - by using technology to provide fuel choice thru Flex Fuel Vehicles (FFV) and plug-in hybrid w/ FFV engines or new 100% electric vehicles (EV).
“Future-Proof” Flex Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) keep to a liquid-fuels based technology that is no different from the norm today. The element of “choice” is created by allowing drivers to decide what type of fuel to consume, with options ranging from straight gasoline (no change from existing habits) to a variety of blends of alcohol/gasoline like E25, E85, M50. FFV technology does not restrict auto manufactures in any way - they can make any variety of vehicle they’d want, from scooters to Hummers.
Plug-in Hybrids w/ FFV engines (similar to the Prius Plug-In) move the hybrid technology forward by decoupling the vehicle from the gasoline pump. With a plug-in hybrid, you can choose to recharge your car using your residential electricity. For distances greater than your battery capacity, your hybrid will switch to using it’s FFV engine, where you’ll have the same fuel options of non-hybrid FFV’s.
Electric Vehicles (EVs) (like these from an auto show earlier this year) are quite different and have no engine and require no liquid fuels on board. Instead they have bigger and better batteries and electric motor(s) which meet commuting needs of most Americans, and are recharged at home or at specialized recharging stations around town. This option allows a “no-oil” choice, as your car is recharged by the power grid. (The power grid is of course fueled somehow, in the U.S. usually natural gas, hydro-electric, coal or nuclear.)
At this point, when there are a variety of ways to power your vehicle, gasoline will have to compete with other forms of fuel that are not completely controlled by “big-oil”. As in Brazil, market forces will control costs and create a vigorous new-energy economy. Consumers decide what fuel to buy, based on a variety of reasons they get to determine.
When consumers have a choice and a real alternative to replace 100% gasoline, oil will no longer be a strategic commodity and it will be forced to be valued competitively, just like salt.
Energy Freedom Summit - First Impressions
Today and tomorrow I’m in Chicago attending the Energy Freedom Summit, organized by the Set America Free Coalition. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this summit, not knowing much about the organization until just two months ago.
My first impression after today’s panels; I’m impressed with the knowledge, experience, focus and pace of this organization - they have a laser-lock on what they intend to do, and are efficient in getting the message out as powerfully as possible.
The panels are impressive leaders in their fields, from geo-political security experts to plug-in hybrid magazine editors. I’m taking many notes.
The attendees are an ambitious and eclectic group of people from a variety of backgrounds who are interested in understanding and solving the current energy crisis. Authors, government officials past and present, entrepreneurs, concerned citizens fill the conference hall - about 150 in all.
I’ve met several authors, a frog farmer, a history professor, a few lawyers, and several “regular joes” who are attending in an effort to ”do something” about this problem.
I’m not yet sure where I fit in here, but I keep talking to people, and am learning quite a lot.
(Update 10/27/08 - I’m home from Chicago, with enough new information to fill this blog for weeks. I’m currently writing a few entries, and will begin posting them as they are completed.)
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Algae to Fuel
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Prototype Generators Run on Garbage
There are two prototype garbage-chewing generators helping power Camp Victory in Iraq. They’ve been in operation since early May, and run on a pseudo-propane that is created by burning plastics and fermenting food wastes.
It still requires some diesel fuel, but only 5% of a conventional powerplant, and allows the military to save fuel, reduce the need to transport fuel, reduce the amount of garbage that needs to be disposed of, and reduces risks to troops and contractors by reducing the frequency of convoys trucking fuel and garbage around Baghdad.
About 50 percent of the diesel that the military burns in Iraq is devoted to transporting more fuel. And about half of that gets poured into generators and stoves. Which is not just a huge waste of time, money, and effort. It’s also a security issue. “Those convoys that carry fuel are also known as targets,” Army biotech scientist Dr. James Valdes tells a group of bloggers. “So our logic was that at a forward operating base, could we use the garbage to make fuel and thereby get rid of the garbage and help to keep the convoys off the streets.”
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Ethanol and the law of unintended consequences
Fuel or folly?
Cinnamon Stillwell
Wednesday, April 2, 2008In the pantheon of well-intentioned governmental policies gone awry, massive ethanol biofuel production may go down as one of the biggest blunders in history. An unholy alliance of environmentalists, agribusiness, biofuel corporations and politicians has been touting ethanol as the cure to all our environmental ills, when in fact it may be doing more harm than good. An array of unintended consequences is wreaking havoc on the economy, food production and, perhaps most ironically, the environment.
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150 MPG (Equivalent): XH-150 and XH250 Hybrids
At the Detroit 2008 Car show… Details over at Autobloggreen…
AFS Trinity Power Corporation is displaying a new hybrid SUV (actually a converted Saturn Vue) that gets more than 150 mpge thanks to something AFS calls the Extreme Hybrid (XH). The SUV recently achieved “more than 150 miles per gallon of gasoline based on the EPA Combined Urban/Highway Driving Cycle with 6 days per week of 40 miles per day in all electric mode and one day at 100 miles with assistance of the gas engine.” The test reportedly returned mpge numbers of around 170, but AFS wants to use 150 so as not to leave people disappointed if they drive more aggressively or under different circumstances than the test was run in.
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Air Force Secretary to DARPA: Free Us from the Oil Cartels
From DANGER ROOM -
Developing an alternative to today’s petroleum-based fuels would obviously translate to big cost savings for the military, but according to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, it would have a geo-political advantage as well. Speaking today at the DARPA conference here in Anaheim, Wynne told the audience to “think of the withdrawal of leverage it [alternative fuels] would bring from petty dictators or cartels.”
If anyone can do it, DARPA can.
As the largest consumer of oil in the federal government, the Air Force has an obvious interest in alternative fuels. Every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Air Force another $600 million, according to Wynne. The Air Force is also thinking about worst-case scenarios. “In the event of another war, those costs could double again,” Wynne told the audience here. The question, he says, is “how to hedge your bet,” both against the rising cost of petroleum as well as a disruption in supply.
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PopSci: More Pond Scum
In the July issue of Popular Science, an article related to the previous post about Algae-based Bio-Diesel. Requiring only (an exact balance) of sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water - the search is on for the most productive variety of algae.
Algae has some important advantages over other oil-producing crops, like canola and soybeans. It can be grown in almost any enclosed space, it multiplies like gangbusters, and it requires very few inputs to flourish—mainly just sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. “Because algae has a high surface-area-to-volume ratio, it can absorb nutrients very quickly,” Sears says. “Its small size is what makes it mighty.”
There are plans to use the pollutant carbon dioxide of various industrial process as the “food” for large algae farms, growing algae while “absorbing” the pollutant at the same time.
The proof is in the numbers. About 140 billion gallons of biodiesel would be needed every year to replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. It would take nearly three billion acres of fertile land to produce that amount with soybeans, and more than one billion acres to produce it with canola. Unfortunately, there are only 434 million acres of cropland in the entire country, and we probably want to reserve some of that to grow food. But because of its ability to propagate almost virally in a small space, algae could do the job in just 95 million acres of land. What’s more, it doesn’t need fertile soil to thrive. It grows in ponds, bags or tanks that can be just as easily set up in the desert—or next to a carbon-dioxide-spewing power plant—as in the country’s breadbasket.
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Aviation Bio-Fuel Being Evaluated in New Zeland
Reportedly the worlds-first project under consideration by an airline.
Air New Zealand and airliner manufacturer Boeing are secretly working with Blenheim-based biofuel developer Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation to create the world’s first environmentally friendly aviation fuel, made of wild algae.
If the project pans out the small and relatively new New Zealand company could lead the world in environmentally sustainable aviation fuel.
It’s understood Air NZ is undertaking risk analysis. If everything stacks up it will make an aircraft available on the Tasman to test the biofuel…
Basically, it’s pond scum.
…The fuel is essentially derived from bacterial pond scum created through the photosynthesis of sunlight and carbon dioxide on nutrient-rich water sources such as sewage ponds.
Air NZ would most likely test the fuel on one engine while normal aviation fuel would drive the other engine. Fuel is held in cells on the aircraft that can be directed to a specific engine…
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Key to Modern Life: Energy Ignorance
A good (long) article about a group of people who are eeking out a living in the wilderness of North Carolina, attempting to create a sustainable lifestyle where they live peacefully off the grid, and as efficiently as possible… What follows are some of my favorite bits from this comprehensive article.
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, November 19, 2006;…THE KEY TO MODERN LIFE IS STRATEGIC IGNORANCE. There are so many things we don’t know about our lives and that, frankly, we don’t want to know. We don’t know much about the basic things that sustain us. We are clueless “end users” in elaborate industrial supply lines. Energy comes from distant power plants and oil refineries and pipelines and electrical grids, but we don’t think about them when we flick on a light or turn the key in the ignition. We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand…
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Next X PRIZE= High-efficiency automobiles that people will actually buy!
Part of the reason I’m developing this FuelClinic.com application is because I’m tired of waiting for things to change. While I believe that I can help people use what they already have in more efficent ways, I also know that I can’t reach as many people as I would like. So the announcement that the next big X PRIZE will be focusing on developing commercially viable high-efficiency automobiles is very exciting.
Why an Automotive X PRIZE?
- Because today’s oil consumption is not sustainable - our current use of oil endangers our health, our economy, and the political and social stability of the world.
- Because 40% of world oil output fuels the automotive industry - and, in the U.S., 65% of oil consumption is in the transportation sector.
- Because automotive emissions contribute significantly to global climate change.
- Because there are no mainstream consumer choices for clean, super-efficient vehicles that meet market needs for price, size, capability, image, safety and performance.
- Because the automotive industry is stalled - legislation, regulation, labor issues, manufacturing costs, legacy costs, franchise laws, obsolete technology, consumer attitudes, and many other factors have combined to block breakthroughs.
- Because increases in engine efficiency have been “spent” on increased vehicle power, acceleration, and weight, rather than on increased fuel economy.
- Because we believe there is great opportunity for technological change.
Goals of the PrizeOur goal is to stimulate automotive technology, manufacturing and marketing breakthroughs that:
- Radically reduce oil consumption and harmful emissions
- Result in a new generation of super-efficient and desirable mainstream vehicles that people want to buy
Funny how a giant cash reward has a way of motivating people to come up with great inventions…
