No, there may be a point being missed here, but that point concerns the BATTERIES needed for the scheme mentioned below. They are expensive. I drove a converted LeCar for 3 years and used up a set of 16 lead acid deep cell batteries ($1700) in 12,000 miles = >$0.14/mile. $4 gasoline in a 32 mpg similar sized engined car is <$0.12/mile. If batteries were not limited in range or cost per mile, we would all drive Leaf type cars and plug them in the garage.
Modern lithium car batteries are equally problematic. $4000+ replacement every 80,000 miles is $0.05/mile. The real trouble is source of lithium supply for scale up, given existing high (and rapidly increasing) electronics demand : "To achieve required cuts in oil consumption, a significant percentage of the world automobile fleet of 1 billion vehicles will be electrified in the next decade. Ultimately all production, currently 60 Million vehicles per year, will have to be replaced with highly electrified vehicles - PHEVs and BEVs. Analysis of Lithium's geological resource base shows that there are insufficient economically recoverable Lithium resources available to sustain Electrified Vehicle manufacture in the volumes required, based solely on LiIon batteries. Depletion rates would exceed current oil depletion rates and switch dependency from one diminishing resource to another. Concentration of supply would create new geopolitical tensions, not reduce them." http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/EVRsrch.htm and read the full report and Conclusions (4.4) at http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/Lithium_Microscope.pdf The market will decide best which resource to use for which transportation application, but I believe that the internal combustion engine will have nearly all of it for a big number of decades, cold fusion notwithstanding. Cold fusion will replace so many heat applications currently assigned to oil and gas, that natural gas prices will remain low, and with oil demand also lowered, its pricing should stay stable (political/cartel pressures aside,) further encouraging the internal combustion transportation engine as the low price logical choice. Furthermore, the increasing CO2 in the air acts as an aerial fertilizer (often CO2 is the limiting factor in agriculture, especially in low rainfall areas,) steadily increasing crop yields and reducing world hunger and starvation, allowing a higher planet population. ----- Original Message ----- From: Jed Rothwell To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, January 09, 2012 2:49 PM Subject: Re: [Vo]:Transportation energy Jay Caplan <uniqueprodu...@comcast.net> wrote: A quick cursory search shows the coal to liquid route to be less expensive than current oil and, of course, S Africa has been forced on this route for decades :"...Estimates of the cost of producing liquid fuels from coal suggest that domestic U.S. production of fuel from coal becomes cost-competitive with oil priced at around $35 per barrel . . . You are missing the point. You could make the cost of liquid fuel zero ($0.00) but cold fusion would still be cheaper. As I said, you still need fueling stations, trucks distributing the fuel, and people manning the gas stations. The minimum cost for that overhead is approximately $0.50 per gallon. A person driving a liquid fuel car would have to pay that overhead cost. A cold fusion car would have zero overhead cost. So even taking into account the premium you pay for the more complicated motor, it would be cheaper, except perhaps for a few people who drive only a little, like 15 miles a week. Also -- as I pointed out -- the cold fusion motor would soon be cheaper, as the technology matures. Two reasons: 1. No pollution control, gas tank, muffler, or catalytic converter needed. 2. Thermoelectric chips will be used across a much wider range of applications than a gasoline motor, so the cost per watt will fall lower than today's gasoline motor. - Jed
