Turbo Diesel Registry
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1489666
110 110 www.turbodieselregister.com www.turbodieselregister.com TDR 119 TDR 119 CONVERTING ALL HUMAN ACTIVITY TO RENEWABLE ENERGY Public discussion of the problem of global warming tends to present it as just a matter of replacing our fossil-fuel-powered autos and light trucks with Energizer Bunny battery-electric vehicles and we're done. Cities and states beat the drum for this simplified future by passing pointless laws banning the sale of internal combustion (IC) powered vehicles after 2030, or 2035 at the latest, and politicians speak of 50% of the US vehicle fleet being electric-powered by 2030. Making such windy declarations costs nothing. The speaker is hailed as a visionary of the human future and the whole effect is that the job is mostly done already. However, using the figures available to me, I discover that capitalizing just this small part of the shift away from fossil fuels (leaving aside commercial and military aviation, ocean shipping, the manufacture of concrete and metals, heavy trucking, the railroads, and the needs of residential and commercial heating and cooling) is going to require a great deal of money – of the order of half the annual US gross national product. Because the figures tell us that the average car in the fleet is 12 years old, we know that a great many US motorists can afford only used vehicles. How will they come up with the approximately $66,000 that we are told is the average price of recently-sold electrics? More hand-waving is the result – the idea being that "Economies of scale will rapidly bring down the price of electrics," and that "Soon there will be used car lots filled with attractive used electrics at low prices all Americans will be able to afford." In other words, no one will be inconvenienced and our pleasant lives can carry on unchanged. In other words, no one will be inconvenienced and our pleasant lives can carry on unchanged. And in any case we are told that electrics, because their motors contain only one moving part (the rotor) will last "practically forever." Presumably economies of scale have already brought down the price of IC-powered cars, yet the price of new ones remains high enough to exclude many buyers. This economic hand-waving may arise from the fact that US lawmakers tend to be millionaires, and in a famous incident one fairly recent president had to admit that he had no idea what a quart of milk cost. In his economically sheltered life, such questions did not arise: "We have people for that." Again, using information from reputable sources, I find that if by magic (possibly ET's glowing finger?) all cars and light trucks in the US became electric today, the electric power they would consume in traveling the same distance as their IC equivalents would require a 44% increase in annual electricity generation. That, too, will have a capital cost and will take time to build. Because the day-to-day operation of nuclear powerplants produces little emission of carbon dioxide, former opponents of nuclear power ("How can we securely store high-level nuclear waste for 100,000 years?") have become ardent supporters. Yet the construction of such plants requires many years of activity other than actual construction – it is the permitting process. Will investors come forward to fund projects that may not generate income during their lifetimes? Now attracting attention is the idea of separating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, compressing and refrigerating it into a cold liquid and pumping it into worked-out mines to be stored forever. A Canadian company has a process which it says can do this for $100 per ton. They suggest that we can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide content from the present 415 parts per million (ppm) to the 280 ppm considered desirable (because it is from the atmosphere that green plants take the carbon they need to synthesize carbohydrates) by operating their process on a scale consuming 10% of all world energy for the next 500 years. Governments have zero experience with 500 year programs, typically supporting policies only so long as they remain useful to the reelection process. Remember the "millions of green jobs" that were confidently expected to pop into existence in the US? Saudi leaders, known for being serious people, recently announced that beginning in 2027 Aramco (Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company) will operate a carbon capture-and-storage facility at Jubail on their east coast. Designed to remove ten million tons of carbon per year, it is expected to have stored 48 million tons by 2035. Purists dismiss this because it does nothing to stop further emissions of carbon dioxide (and itself consumed energy). To see the world energy situation, here are the 2021 figures, in both terawatt-hours and as percentages of the total. Most notable in these numbers is the smallness of those for the renewables - wind and solar. Thought Provoking Discussions with Automotive/Motorcycle Journalist Kevin Cameron