Fill the water with human or animal waste products, add sunlight, and you've just specified the feedstuffs for algal biodiesel. Yields of up to 100,000 US gallons per acre have been suggested, although even the more conservative and probably more realistic estimates of 10,000 US gallons per acre compares very well with 100 gallons per acre from oilseed rape or 500 gallons from oil palm. The land it uses does not need to be fertile, the algae purify the waste and it can be turned into fertiliser after the oil has been extracted. The main problem is that it currently costs about $800 a barrel to produce in the lab.
No the process I was told about was to synthesis dimethyl ether IIRC, the carbon from biomass because of it's relative purity but coal is a more abundant possibility. I suspect ether is a good diesel fuel.
Indeed. Up here we stay snow-covered for 5 months of the year with windchill temps down to -60F, but at the other end of the country it can be insanely warm for significant parts of the year. The diversity is pretty huge.
I think in terms of area it works out almost exactly 100 times the size of the UK. The state I'm in is pretty comparable to the size of the UK, actually - 225,000sqkm vs. about 244,000sqkm I think, and it's about average size.
JOOI, do they typically have any way of conveying "miles left" in a similar way that an IC engine has some form of fuel gauge?
How are supplies of lithium holding up, anyway? Is there an abundance, or is it one of those things that'll be seen as in short supply if everyone starts driving electric vehicles?
They also quote Kwh in the battery, which is the 'tank' size. Petrol cars also quote range, which is generally the maximum.
No reason they shouldn't. There isn't as much in a lithium battery as there is in an engine and gearbox power train.
I've seen the price of the small stuff come down by a factor of three since I started playing with them.
And they probably are most of the cost of the car. The motors are simple enough, and the controller gear is very integratable: The power FETS are expensive again because no one else is using that exact volts and amps combo, but again, if the cars take off, the prices will come down.
They were merley teh intersection of a falling trechnology price with a risinmg disposable income price: At a given point they became 'affordab;lle' and profitable. Thats magic combination gives a cashflow that can be used to develop.,
In each case a particular piece of technology made trhem suddenly very viable. In te case of teh motor car, it qwqasd a gaspoline or disel engine. We had had steanm and electric, but they didnt really work - too fussy.
In the case of television, it was the opening up of higher frequency bands that could carry the signal - largely down to better valve technology, and the development of the CRT,and the vidicon both of which really first were used in radar and test environments. Color telly simply meanss colour cameras and multi-phosphor tubes and the shadow mask.
Personal computers were entirely driven by large scale integration, that came out of guided missile integrated circuits, through early digital logic and culminated in the microprocessor.
For electric cars today, the key areas are the advance of the lithium battery, driven by the mobile appliance market and the use of sophisticated electronics and regenerative braking to squeeze the last mile out of the packs. Those are now juts reaching the crossover into being available enough, reliable enough and cheap enough that they can compete - nearly - with an IC car, and especially so if tax breaks and carbon taxes are applied to the electric and the IC respectively.
No, lithium is just good enough. It been invented all right, it needs development to get slightly better energy density (currently about 50% of theoretical energy/weight) and to tune the cell characteristics to a high charge moderate discharge ratio, and to remove some of the more volatile and inflammable electrolytes currently in use.
You can get one or two of those right currently, but not all three together.
It will be. That's like saying that an Altair 8080 computer kit would never be more than a hobbyists curiosity toy, which it was, till things like CP/M and MSDOS came along, and we never looked back..
Its been about 25 years from the first hobby computer, to a piece of kit that a 1970s computer person would have died for, fora couple of hundred quid. A day's wages, if that.
Leccy cars are coming allright. Juts a bit more time on the batteries..
They are in the model aircraft arena. I've seen them go from specialised =
to commodity in 5 years or so. The knowledge of how to do it exists at=20 smaller power levels. Scaling up is actually not a huge exercise. We are =
already pushing 5-7bhp stuff around the skies..not cheap, but not=20 impossibly expensive either.
It is just good enough. I've done the calculations. Yes. you end up with =
a battery that weighs about the same as what it replaces - engines=20 gearboxes transmissions starter motors starter batteries exhaust systems =
alternators radiators oil coolers and the like. And a range in the=20
150-300 mile sort of order.
BUT what you get, with electricity in a power station at 40-50% not in=20 a car at 20% fuel to wheel, better use of even fossil fuels, especially=20 with regen braking. Its good enough for te scvhool run, and for goinmg to Tescos, espoacilly =
if youy have off road parkling at your house, so you can leave it=20 permanently on charge. It may not be good enough to take the kids to the =
south of France, but as a second car, its looking ideal IF we can get=20 that 50Kwh battery made out of laptop cells at =C2=A328,000 down to a 100= Kwh=20 battery custom designed for fast charging and priced at around =C2=A36-80=
And if we can squeeze to 400 miles range and a recharge time sub 5=20 minutes, then its there for any car journey. That's pushing it, but its=20 technically possible.
And where are all this human and animal waste products to come from? food perhaps? and where is the energy in that food to come from? arable land perhaps, at 0.1% efficiency...and then we take out most of the energy when we eat it and metabolise it?;
I'm sorry, you cannot generate more energy per acre than the incident sunlight falling on it and 100,000 gallons per acre with no specified time period is meaningless.
Well then you are burning fossil coal again aren't you?
Unless you can synthesize from CO2, its all a bit pointless. Might as well just burn the coal.
I think there are catalytic reactions tha will drop hydrocarbons out of steam and carbon dioxide, but I am not sure what pressure and temperature they need.
We are better at cracking than polymerising mainly ;-)
'According to the Handbook of Lithium and Natural Calcium, "Lithium is a comparatively rare element, although it is found in many rocks and some brines, but always in very low concentrations. There are a fairly large number of both lithium mineral and brine deposits but only comparatively a few of them are of actual or potential commercial value. Many are very small, others are too low in grade." The most important deposit of lithium is in the Salar de Uyuni area of Bolivia, which holds half of the world's reserves. The lithium reserves are estimated at 30 million tonnes in 2015.'
From Wiki article on Lithium - which accords with what they were saying on Radio 4 the other week.
Tesla don't quote the kWh of the battery - at least not in the basic spec. And I don't know of any official figures for petrol cars ranges. You could of course calculate it yourself from the official MPG figures. And the problem is nothing like that exists for electric cars hence the extravagant claims. Until someone like Autocar is allowed to do a full test on one I'll take them with a pinch of salt. We probably all know that they only managed 24 mpg over 500 mixed driving miles with a Prius - whereas the claims were more like 60.
Rather more than in a petrol tank, though, and *that's* the comparison. Electric cars still need a drivetrain.
Possibly - but then the Tesla wasn't the first to use LiON batteries.
So it's said. Hasn't happened with any so far.
So you don't need these things with an electric car? OK - so make a diesel one without them and get superb MPG...
It is a source of nutrients, rather than an important source of energy.
Sorry, I should have said those are annual yields and, while sunlight is the least cost option for algal oil and the one used to prove the technology in the 1970s and 1980s, high density bioreactors will work just as well with artificial light powered by nuclear reactors.
Figures have been produced by one of the companies involved in the development that, even using the proven, if inefficient, open pond production system, algal oil could produce the entire vehicle fuel needs of the USA with ponds covering one tenth the area of the Sonora desert. Obviously, that is only an illustration as they require a lot more water than would be available in a desert.
However, the main value of algal oil at the moment is to annoy greenies who believe in the peak oil myth and predict the imminent demise of the motor car with the prospect of an unlimited supply of oil in the future, in a process that purifies waste and produces useful fertiliser.
If the market demand for Lithium increases then it will become economic to extract. Look at the oil sands of Alsaka/Canada, they weren't consider economic to extract not that long ago...
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