When Will Electric Cars Become Mainstream?

[nctnico]

There are also commercially available flow batteries being tried now, we'll just have to wait until there is some news about their performance.

POET-DSM seems to be near the target performance almost two years ago:
https://www.dsm.com/corporate/media/informationcenter-news/2017/02/2017-02-16-poet-dsm-plans-on-site-enzyme-manufacturing-facility-at-project-liberty.html

Yes but all they did was create something they call EZ Bale to increase production.  The are NOT the ones converting corn stover into bio-fuels.  You are citing production values of the American companies who are using the Dutch EZ Bale.

No. DSM is a world leading chemical company with a bio-chemistry department which has a department specialising in yeasts and enzymes. The latter are critical ingredients for making 3rd generation bio-fuel work. The EZ Bale is part of the logistics to get enough feedstock through the factory. In order to reach production volumes a lot of feedstock needs to be processed. Because the EZ Bale is likely a key component of keeping the manufacturing process up to speed it (ofcourse) has been patented so other manufacturers will need to pay royalties or at least the competition will need to come up with something different.

[DougSpindler]

There are also commercially available flow batteries being tried now, we'll just have to wait until there is some news about their performance.

POET-DSM seems to be near the target performance almost two years ago:
https://www.dsm.com/corporate/media/informationcenter-news/2017/02/2017-02-16-poet-dsm-plans-on-site-enzyme-manufacturing-facility-at-project-liberty.html

Yes but all they did was create something they call EZ Bale to increase production.  The are NOT the ones converting corn stover into bio-fuels.  You are citing production values of the American companies who are using the Dutch EZ Bale.

No. DSM is a world leading chemical company with a bio-chemistry department which has a department specialising in yeasts and enzymes. The latter are critical ingredients for making 3rd generation bio-fuel work. The EZ Bale is part of the logistics to get enough feedstock through the factory. In order to reach production volumes a lot of feedstock needs to be processed. Because the EZ Bale is likely a key component of keeping the manufacturing process up to speed it (ofcourse) has been patented so other manufacturers will need to pay royalties or at least the competition will need to come up with something different.

You think America doen’t have any chemical companies which specialize in yeast and enzymes?  Ever here of ADM or Monsanto?  Why did the Dutch come to America and not use the technology in their own country?

You need to re-read the documents you’ve posted about EZ Bale.  It has NOTHING to do with the speed of manufacturing.  It’s all about sorting and the sorting of the corn stover to increase yields.  The have graphs and charts showing how EZ Bale can (might) increase yields.

You need to read a bit more about Project Liberty.  What you are sharing with us is the positive marketing material on how bio-fules will save the world?  Appears you have a strong appetite for marketing silage.  Try looking at this with a clear head.

 
 

[apis]

Who cares if it is american or dutch? In sweden they have a pilot plant to convert cellulose from the forest industry, but there is no indication that it's working yet. Question is if they can make it work. It's the same with storage solutions, there are lots of hyped products that claim they can solve the worlds problems. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.

[free_electron]

Oh and also take into account that every kWh from your solar panels releases several tens of grams of CO2 into the atmosphere due to the manufacturing process.

but. to manufacture the panel they used a FIXED amount of Co2. So the longer i have the panel the smaller the amount of co2 per kw i pull out of it.

same with the car. the longer i drive it the smaller that fraction becomes.

[free_electron]

The EPA already did all the calculations, and the conventional ICE engine cars always lose, which should be no surprise, as their efficiency is quite low.

The big error in those calculations is that they don't include generation of the electricity. Electricity is a form of energy but not a energy source in itself. Fuel OTOH is a source of energy.

Nor do your numbers include the energy of extraction/refining/distribution of hydrocarbons; but then you have never been about comparing like for like.

Because that comparison is impossible to make. For example: You'd also have to factor in the CO2 emissions created during the building of the dam required to generate the electricity for your EV. However for mass produced items the price without taxes is a good indication. For mass production the energy (and thus CO2 emissions) it takes to make something (from ore to end product) will dominate the price.

lets also add the cost of drilling for oil ,refining it , the energy used for that. and the cost to nature in form of oil spills.

in other words : how many barrels of oil are needed to refine one barrel of oil ?

[DougSpindler]

The EPA already did all the calculations, and the conventional ICE engine cars always lose, which should be no surprise, as their efficiency is quite low.

The big error in those calculations is that they don't include generation of the electricity. Electricity is a form of energy but not a energy source in itself. Fuel OTOH is a source of energy.

Nor do your numbers include the energy of extraction/refining/distribution of hydrocarbons; but then you have never been about comparing like for like.

Because that comparison is impossible to make. For example: You'd also have to factor in the CO2 emissions created during the building of the dam required to generate the electricity for your EV. However for mass produced items the price without taxes is a good indication. For mass production the energy (and thus CO2 emissions) it takes to make something (from ore to end product) will dominate the price.

lets also add the cost of drilling for oil ,refining it , the energy used for that. and the cost to nature in form of oil spills.

in other words : how many barrels of oil are needed to refine one barrel of oil ?

You are asking a trick question...  THe answer is 0.   If it took more energy to drill, transport and refine crude oil we would not be doing it. 

[ahbushnell]

How do you convert waste plant material to bio fuel?
I know there are many ideas out there, but is there any factories doing this commercially? (please provide links if so).
Otherwise I don't see how that is any different than solar storage solutions (better batteries, etc).

See poet-dsm.com (the DSM part is Dutch) but there are other companies as well who have a working process.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/poet-dsm-project-liberty

How many liters/m^2 of bio fuel do they produce in a year?

From this link: https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/poet-dsm-project-liberty 20 to 25 million gallons. And I assume this is the goal for 2018 so we'll probably know how much they produced soon.

That doesn't answer the question.

Oh, I didn't see you wanted to know per surface area. This images says it all:

Very good.  Thanks
Assume 80 gal/acre
I drive 12,000 mi/year
Assume 25 mi/gallon
So that's 480 gal/year
So I need 6 acres of corn land.

I checked US Energy Information Admin for fuel consumption in the US
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10
Quote from the web site
"How much gasoline does the United States consume?
In 2017, about 142.98 billion gallons (or about 3.40 billion barrels1) of finished motor gasoline were consumed in the United States, a daily average of about 391.71 million gallons (or about 9.33 million barrels per day)."

So that is 1.8E9 acres of corn to produce this fuel based on 80 gal/acre. 

Now Wikepedia tells me that there are 9.6E7 acres of corn in production in the USA. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States

So the 96 million acres could produce 0.7% of the fuel for the us. 

That does not include aircraft or ships. 

[Kilrah]

It certainly takes more than 0, but not enough to detract from doing it anyway.

Refining seems to take about 2.5% of the inital crude oil's energy, numbers derived from what is referred to as a "large refinery" and are obviously better than a smaller one.

[nctnico]

Using corn residu is just the start. Look at how much land is used for agriculture in the US in total. Besides that the fuel consumption of cars in the US is quite high on average. A 50% reduction in fuel consumption is easely achievable if necessary. With reduction of fuel consumption and being able to use all agricultural leftovers you can get pretty close to covering all fuel requirements using bio-fuel. But even 50% would be a big win.

[DougSpindler]

Using corn residu is just the start. Look at how much land is used for agriculture in the US in total. Besides that the fuel consumption of cars in the US is quite high on average. A 50% reduction in fuel consumption is easely achievable if necessary. With reduction of fuel consumption and being able to use all agricultural leftovers you can get pretty close to covering all fuel requirements using bio-fuel. But even 50% would be a big win.

Dude if think Americans will drive less and conserve even 10% you are nuts or crazy!
If you read your EZ Bale document you will find they bales have to 45 miles away or less.  I take it up you have no clue how large the agricultural region is in the US. 

And even if we did what you think is a good idea it will provide just over 1% of the fuel needed in the use and leave us with no food.

You proposed solution, isn”t a solution at all.

[DougSpindler]

nctnico
Biofuels are made from palm oil. Here’s what farmers are doing to produce the palm oil.   
If anything I would think you would want to STOP the production of bio-fuels from palm oil.


Take a look
https://twitter.com/tictoc/status/1080209635196452864?s=20

And

https://youtu.be/LSumTLrJzdU

[nctnico]

nctnico
Biofuels are made from palm oil. Here’s what farmers are doing to produce the palm oil.   
If anything I would think you would want to STOP the production of bio-fuels from palm oil.

I agree and I never stated 1st and 2nd generation bio-fuels from palm oil are good! Actually the EU is about to ban palm-oil as a bio fuel which is a good thing. It will kick 3rd generation bio-fuels into gear.

And once more: 3rd generation bio fuels co-exist with food production. It may even save you. When fertilizer made from oil becomes very expensive the 3rd generation bio-fuels help to pay for the fertilizer so your food prices don't go through the roof!

[Marco]

The palm oil ban is just symbolism, they'll just use some other crop.

X-generation biofuel seem to me mostly propaganda, spend a couple million to do some research and 10x more on lobbyists to shovel that fact ... all just to pretend biofuels can some day be not a complete clusterfuck so the billions of subsidies keep rolling in. It plays to the neoliberal fallacy that only the market can do this. If we want X-generation biofuel, just spend public money directly on the research. No subsidies.

Public private partnerships only work in extremely ethical extremely cohesive societies ... not the fucking EU.

[DougSpindler]

The palm oil ban is just symbolism, they'll just use some other crop.

X-generation biofuel seem to me mostly propaganda, spend a couple million to do some research and 10x more on lobbyists to shovel that fact ... all just to pretend biofuels can some day be not a complete clusterfuck so the billions of subsidies keep rolling in.

It plays to the neoliberal fallacy that only the market can do this. If we want X-generation biofuel, just spend public money on the research. No subsidies.

Exactly! 

And we have seen a huge setback in biofuels made from microorganisms.  For reasons we don’t understand the microorganisms will produce small quantities of biofuel, but when we try and scale up they refuse.

Much better to invest time, money and researchers on next gen nuclear,  with next gen nuclear biofuels will just be one of those things we tried and failed at.

[Marco]

Bio-fuel is a very hard problem regardless of what you grow ... because compared to soil and fresh water, any other medium to grow anything on is orders of magnitude worse.

Bioreactors have massive material requirements. Open pools in the desert need to get lots of fresh water for it from somewhere (can't use salt water, because eventually you'd have a 100% saturated brine and even the hardiest organisms won't grow in that). Open pools on land where there is plenty of fresh water, might as well skip the pool and use the land. Ocean have lousy nutrient density and no way to contain any fertilizer.

If you have a 250 micrometer flexible solar cell which costs next to nothing you can throw it in the desert and have some robot occasionally brush the sand off it ... with biofuel it doesn't work that way.

PS. crop waste is nice and all, but it would provide only a tiny contribution ... let the market figure out if it can make that profitable, not worth spending public money on.

[DougSpindler]

Bio-fuel is a very hard problem regardless of what you grow ... because compared to soil and fresh water, any other medium to grow anything on is orders of magnitude worse.

Bioreactors have massive material requirements. Open pools in the desert need to get lots of fresh water for it from somewhere (can't use salt water, because eventually you'd have a 100% saturated brine and even the hardiest organisms won't grow in that). Open pools on land where there is plenty of fresh water, might as well skip the pool and use the land. Ocean have lousy nutrient density and no way to contain any fertilizer.

If you have a 250 micrometer flexible solar cell which costs next to nothing you can throw it in the desert and have some robot occasionally brush the sand off it ... with biofuel it doesn't work that way.

PS. crop waste is nice and all, but it would provide only a tiny contribution ... let the market figure out if it can make that profitable, not worth spending public money on.

Original poster was saying bio-fuels is working well in Brazil, which it is.  Then he went on to say a Dutch company is working on it as well.  Didn't sound like it would because sugar cane which is what's being used in Brazil would not grow in most of Europe.  Original poster kept insisting it's working.  Then when we looked at what the Dutch company is doing has to do with corn and not in Europe but in the United States.  Then the Dutch company isn't even doing bio-fuels. what they are doing is something called EZ Bail which sorts the corn stover to get higher yields as the American companies create bio-fuels from the stover.  The original poster stated he did the calculations and stated it could be used to fuel our cars.  But he never provided the calcualtions.  A responeder did offer the calcuations and bio-fuels might be able to supply Europe and the United States with just under 1% per year.  Then the original poster though we all conservered we would reduce usage by 50%.  To that the only responce would be fat chanace. 

, 

[Marco]

It works in Brazil because they have a massive amount of rainforest to convert into farmland. Here in Europe we just use sunflower oil, the bio-diesel is obviously not competitive with fossil fuel. The point of not promoting more destruction of nature is to use some "dead" resource though, so deserts or oceans ... and that's just not going to work AFAICS. I think it's likely we'll be able to fill large parts of a desert with PV, but not with bioreactors. Growing stuff in the ocean has too little yield.

[coppice]

Here in Europe we just use sunflower oil, the bio-diesel is obviously not competitive with fossil fuel.

Sunflower oil is expensive, but the cheapest vegetable cooking oil costs less than diesel in most European countries. When oil prices peaked some time ago cooking oil cost less than heating oil, which usually carries less taxation than diesel. Cooking oil will burn just fine to heat homes. It will power most diesel cars without modification, although the engine needs some tweaking to optimise its performance with cooking oil.

I am not suggesting we could power our economy with cooking oil. We couldn't scale up production to the point where that would work. However, I do find the low relative cost of something that takes considerable agriculture and processing to produce as a primary crop quite interesting.

[nctnico]

Bio-fuel is a very hard problem regardless of what you grow ... because compared to soil and fresh water, any other medium to grow anything on is orders of magnitude worse.

Bioreactors have massive material requirements. Open pools in the desert need to get lots of fresh water for it from somewhere (can't use salt water, because eventually you'd have a 100% saturated brine and even the hardiest organisms won't grow in that). Open pools on land where there is plenty of fresh water, might as well skip the pool and use the land. Ocean have lousy nutrient density and no way to contain any fertilizer.

If you have a 250 micrometer flexible solar cell which costs next to nothing you can throw it in the desert and have some robot occasionally brush the sand off it ... with biofuel it doesn't work that way.

PS. crop waste is nice and all, but it would provide only a tiny contribution ... let the market figure out if it can make that profitable, not worth spending public money on.

Original poster was saying bio-fuels is working well in Brazil, which it is.  Then he went on to say a Dutch company is working on it as well.  Didn't sound like it would because sugar cane which is what's being used in Brazil would not grow in most of Europe.  Original poster kept insisting it's working.  Then when we looked at what the Dutch company is doing has to do with corn and not in Europe but in the United States.  Then the Dutch company isn't even doing bio-fuels. what they are doing is something called EZ Bail which sorts the corn stover to get higher yields as the American companies create bio-fuels from the stover.  The original poster stated he did the calculations and stated it could be used to fuel our cars.  But he never provided the calcualtions.  A responeder did offer the calcuations and bio-fuels might be able to supply Europe and the United States with just under 1% per year.  Then the original poster though we all conservered we would reduce usage by 50%.  To that the only responce would be fat chanace. 

You really don't understand what you read  The above is all wrong!

[DougSpindler]

Bio-fuel is a very hard problem regardless of what you grow ... because compared to soil and fresh water, any other medium to grow anything on is orders of magnitude worse.

Bioreactors have massive material requirements. Open pools in the desert need to get lots of fresh water for it from somewhere (can't use salt water, because eventually you'd have a 100% saturated brine and even the hardiest organisms won't grow in that). Open pools on land where there is plenty of fresh water, might as well skip the pool and use the land. Ocean have lousy nutrient density and no way to contain any fertilizer.

If you have a 250 micrometer flexible solar cell which costs next to nothing you can throw it in the desert and have some robot occasionally brush the sand off it ... with biofuel it doesn't work that way.

PS. crop waste is nice and all, but it would provide only a tiny contribution ... let the market figure out if it can make that profitable, not worth spending public money on.

Original poster was saying bio-fuels is working well in Brazil, which it is.  Then he went on to say a Dutch company is working on it as well.  Didn't sound like it would because sugar cane which is what's being used in Brazil would not grow in most of Europe.  Original poster kept insisting it's working.  Then when we looked at what the Dutch company is doing has to do with corn and not in Europe but in the United States.  Then the Dutch company isn't even doing bio-fuels. what they are doing is something called EZ Bail which sorts the corn stover to get higher yields as the American companies create bio-fuels from the stover.  The original poster stated he did the calculations and stated it could be used to fuel our cars.  But he never provided the calcualtions.  A responeder did offer the calcuations and bio-fuels might be able to supply Europe and the United States with just under 1% per year.  Then the original poster though we all conservered we would reduce usage by 50%.  To that the only responce would be fat chanace. 

You really don't understand what you read  The above is all wrong!

nctnico not sure why you say we are not understanding what we are reading.  English is my native language so not sure why you would say I and the others are not understanding what we are reading.  With all due respect because of your post I have done a fair amount of research into the current state of bio-fuels reading research papers fom Perdue and Iowa State University.  Al you seem to provide is marketing material.  There are a number of documents on Project Liberty and the Dutch company’s EZ Bale system.

Have you read anything other than the marketing documents you have shared with us?

I think everyone is this forum has an open mind and is willing to learn if you provide credible documentation.  Problem is you have not done so.  You are making some incredible claims when it comes to bio-fuels all we are asking for is some credible documents which support your claims.  Marketing material just doen’t cut it.

Here is your open invitation to provide credible documentation to change our minds.

[f4eru]

ntcnico is a troll.

[nctnico]

Here is your open invitation to provide credible documentation to change our minds.

I'm sorry but there is no way to have a decent discussion with you. I tried to explain a few things (with references) several times and every time you get it wrong and/or make it look like I wrote things I never wrote. Enough is enough.

[DougSpindler]

Here is your open invitation to provide credible documentation to change our minds.

I'm sorry but there is no way to have a decent discussion with you. I tried to explain a few things (with references) several times and every time you get it wrong and/or make it look like I wrote things I never wrote. Enough is enough.

Why do you say I'me getting it wrong.  I'm just reading what what was in the links you posted and repeating what I read.  We've provided links for you and asked you questiosns which you have refused to answer.  In the links for the documents you've posted you appear to adding additional information that's not in the documents.  All we are doing is using Critial Thinking skills, you should do the same.

I invite you to re-read the documents you provided links to and you will see all the Dutch comapny is offering is a licence for EX Bale.  There is NOTHING in the documentation saying they are the ones converting bio-mass to bio-fuel.  That is somehting the American companies are doing and have been doing.

You seem to think cane sugar can grow in Europe as it does in Brazil.  If what you are saying is true there would have been no sugar/slave trade hundreds of years ago.

[DougSpindler]

Now that we know bio-fuels aren’t the solution one poster claimed, let’s get back to discussing EVs.

Here’s a really good comparison of BEV, Hybrid EV and Plug-in Hybrid EV. 
Interesting that a BEV is NOT cost effective but is enviromentlety and geopolitically more effective.
I think this is a very fair comparison of the EEVs and the considerations one needs to consider when buying one.

https://youtu.be/5RDQj276EhI

[Kjelt]

Waiting time for new ordered EVs have exceeded one year in our country.
Reason: huge shortage of batteries with the manufacturers.

I wonder what will happen if the battery has an issue and needs replacement.
A waiting time of one year?