this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.
And all of them are less efficient than the 2024 Prius Prime for our environment. (See my ACEEE citation from above). Literally all of them.
You're underestimating the efficiency of Prius, much like other EV fanbois. Prius is the most environmentally friendly vehicle today, even beyond small / efficient EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the GM Bolt.
The best vehicles for the environment is the Prius Prime PHEV, and #2 is Prius Hybrid. Other cars like Accord Hybrid, Camry Hybrid, and Corolla Hybrid are in the top 10.
EVs can win and seem to have significant advantages. But not enough to make the #1 slot. For EVs to win you need a relatively small battery pack (ex: 40kW-hr Leaf), and relatively lightweight. The Prius has a 800lb+ advantage over most EVs (most EVs, even small ones like Nissan Leaf, are 4000lb behemoths, far above the 3200lb Prius).
Yeah, EV Battery tech sucks today. Its still too heavy. Fortunately, 60% efficiency of large-scale Nat. Gas combination cycle plants magically gathers more energy than small ICE (like 40% Atkinson or 30% Otto Cycle engines), so EVs get some degree of advantage even when the grid remains highly Fossil Fuel based.
But you still have weight + mining + other dirty issues (rare-earth metals for significant magnets on those motors...) that add up to bad environmental effects.
It can't run on sunlight or fission, so that's a long term no-go.
Corn Ethanol is solar-powered, as all the CO2 was absorbed from the air as the corn grew thanks to photosynthesis, and is largely compatible with ICE engines actually. Ideally we use Switchgrass Ethanol in the long term, when we need bio-fuels to replace fossil fuels. But there's a lot of practical advantages to Carbon + Hydrogen bonds at the molecular level.
Switchgrass Ethanol is possible but not commercially viable yet though. And Corn Ethanol has downsides (farmland is worse for our environment than natural prairies).
There's also Hydrogen -> Syngas -> Kerosene, a process of electrification to Hydrogen + CO2 -> Fuel.
So you gotta keep your mind open to all the possibilities that science can provide, including chemistry.
In the U.S. alone, we'd need about 200 million acres of farm land to go from 10% ethanol to 100% ethanol. That's using corn and accounts for about 25% of the total farmland the U.S. has. And that's just the U.S. and only counts retail gas with the 10% mandate, - not industrial fuel use of diesel fuel use, which would increase it dramatically. It's not feasible to run the country on biomass , especially as climate change is going to make farm land less viable overall. Given that agriculture is already roughly a third of all carbon emissions, massively ramping up agriculture to replace fossil fuels doesn't really help overall.
On top of that, we need to start sequestering CO2. Moving it from the biomass into the air, even temporarily, keeps it in the air where we do not want it! The only viable long term solution is to move net amounts of carbon out of the air by all means possible, as well as minimizing all the other greenhouse gas produced (like methane). ICE engines cannot be a significant part of this future without ramping up clean energy use elsewhere to sequester more carbon than those fuels are contributing - which leads right back to solar and fission. (and wind, waves, geothermal etc of course).
Okay, recalculate using switchgrass. Corn is not the end-all be-all of biofuels. Switchgrass is the next step. After all, yall are pretending that "fusion" is on the table, so I'm allowed to pretend in magic future tech for my arguments as well.
And if we both are pretending in today's technology, then we have to remember that most EVs are run on coal+natural gas today and account for significant emissions of CO2.
Switchgrass is not "farmland", its the natural prairie / natural state of the USA's original land usage. Its significantly more efficient than farmland and will be resistant to future climate issues. The switchgrass refineries have been proven btw, its just a matter of investment today to bring Switchgrass biofuels to the mainstream.
Ok, so convert 25% of all U.S. farmland at a minimum to a completely new crop. That's sure to be carbon neutral 🙄. What should the other 7.7 ish billion humans do?
Burning things was always a bad plan, and continues to be a bad plan!
Switchgrass is the natural prairie grass of the USA. It's already growing, no conversions needed.
Seriously, look up this shit before making dumbass assumptions.
In fact, converting unnatural farmland back into natural grasslands would likely improve USAs environment.
I always find it hilarious how bad EV fanbois are when it comes to environmental issues, or the state of nature, plants and biology. An actual environmentalist would love the opportunity to return USA's farmlands back into natural prairies.
An Ethanol crop that doesn't need fertilizer, that grows in natural conditions of the USA and returns our damaging farmlands back to a more natural state? This is win/win/win for the environment in every aspect.
there would be nothing natural about it if you're cutting it all down and fertilizing it on a cycle, that's just agriculture.
yes, it would probably be less impactful than corn, but at the scale you're talking about, were shifting all the ethanol corn + all that land times 10 from whatever it's doing over to industrial scale farm land. that means making it flat, building machines, securing water sources (yet another resource we don't exactly have an overabundance of), scaling out the logistics of shipping and processing by 10X for a distributed fuel making infrastructure.
There's only ~ 2 billion acres of area in the U.S. and you want to use 10% of it for making fuel, and that's just for people who drive cars, not Trucking, not Trains, not Planes, not anything that runs on diesel. That's about a third of what we use for cattle, and cattle use land that's not good for growing anything at agricultural scale.
That much land could produce 2560 terrawatts from solar alone, and we can spread that out over existing land, like roofs, deserts, parking lots and roads, which would account for half the power the U.S. uses annually. So using less land we could increase U.S. power production by 50% (and doing that only with solar would probably be the least efficient way to do it). Cheap, clean, distributed power is far more useful than expensive distributed not clean fuel.
Biomass as a fuel can't scale. It does ZERO to help with our carbon problem, and it perpetuates current infrastructure that is actively killing everyone.
There's probably a case for replacing gas power plants with biomass powerplants that grow and process locally, cutting out all the transport logistics to increase efficiency while reducing overall carbon footprint, but in general burning things is a bad plan. Using small inefficient engines to burn things on demand everywhere is an even worse plan.
@nxdefiant @dragontamer clearing forest land for agriculture to feed ever increasing population does seems the baseline solution but then the argument pops up ... isn't knowledge of agriculture by we humans responsible for climate change and all the misery the human race is in?
All the more reason we should convert land back to native Switchgrass. A native plant that grew from Nevada to Maine that the pioneers / pilgrims saw 500+ years ago. Converting our harmful farmlands back into more natural-looking grasslands is going to improve our environment and ecology.
That's what makes this entire discussion so hilarious. I'm advocating for native plant species of this continent, and yall environmentalists are shitting on the idea. Because modern environmentalists are braindead and don't even think about the natural state of our country, its plantlife or other effects.
That's fine. So I'm just pointing out: switchgrass is an incredibly eco-friendly way forward. Even if we don't use it for biofuel, its already being used to restore marshlands and other areas. Switchgrass also has a carbon-capture profile similar to trees (!!!!), outperforming many other plants in terms of CO2 capture. One way or the other, the people who know better are planting switchgrass and improving our ecology, even if yall can't get behind the idea.
Pretty much. We have scientists looking into high density, multi level automated hydroponic crop production in order to stop relying on having enough sky and land for food. Using more land for biomass to produce fuel feels willfully evil at this point.
Nope, that's bullshit. Biomass is only co2-neutral if it grows on its own and is used up on the spot.
So while I pay an amount X for electricity to load a battery you are wiliing to pay 5 times as much for eFuels just to support your strange political views? That's in some way commendable...
Even an open mind can't cheat thermodynamics
Go figure out a better path of electrification of the large 737 airplanes.
Go on. I'm waiting. Kerosene is 100% compatible with airliners.
100% renewable electricity is a pipedream. The "mouth" of that graph is bullshit. Today we're still using coal + natural gas for the majority of the grid.
You're also ignoring the gross amounts of pollution that EV Batteries emit during production. H2 and ICE are made of far simpler, and more efficient, materials. You'll need substantial numbers of batteries to power the world at night as well (IE: an impossible number as no battery technology can handle daytime-charge vs nighttime usage of the USA).
You can't cheat impossibility. The assumptions of that graph are already impossible and you know it.
EDIT: The real advantages to H2 are multiple fold:
Hydrogen is energy storage. You can store H2 for months in various forms. Solar does not have any energy storage and needs to be factored separately.
Clean Hydrogen is needed to clean up our food supply. As you might know, our food supply relies upon ammonia / fertilizer made from fossil fuels right now. This isn't necessary, H2 -> Ammonia is a well known and well proven path, and seems to be the only way to electrify our nitrogen-fertilizer production.
If we are already mass producing clean H2 (for #2), then #1 becomes cheap, and then we might as well use it for transportation as well to help spur investments and consolidate resources.
Why would I when we were talkiong about cars? Sure, you will need some synthetic fuel for air travel. But if you want to pay the same sums to power your car, when you could do it for a fraction of that cost that's still stupid.
No, you can actually build batteries from very simple materials that are far more efficient that fuel production and then burning it (both times with a huge loss). Just because the world focussed on lithium-ion batteries in the last decades (because of small portable devices where energy density was key) and thus used what was already widely available for cars in the beginning, rare materials for car batteries are not actually a requirement.
That also a big nope. In reality solar and wind can power the world through the day, wind can power the world through the night. The only storage needed for a day/night cycle is a small fraction fo the prodcution. Just enough to shift parts of the production peaks at the afternoon and in the middle of the night ~5 hours forward to the consumption peaks in the evening and early morning.
And don't let me even start with how cheap you can produce massive batteries if you don't care for energy density at all because no one gives a fuck if the warehouse-sized installation for your town or city district is 20% bigger and a few tons heavier. Quite the opposite actually... Li-ion batteries nowadays are incredible bad for such a task. We accept their bad thermal properties in our smartphones and laptops, in cars it's already a drawback that prompted the development of other materials that are already serial produced. For fixed storage they would basically be a unneccessary fire hazard.
The real drawback of H2 availability. You lose energy to produce it. You lose more energy when you consume it. You will never see cheap H2 as the production is just too inefficient, so there will only be demand in sectors that simply cannot be electrified (air transport, some industries) as well as in chemical production as a raw material and for long-term seasonal storage.
Again... if you want to compete with high-energy demanding industries for the gas to power your car, that's your decision. Everyone else will use batteries for less than a ¼ of the cost. If your ICE is worth it for you, go for it. But don't pretend that the world will collectively decide to use a mode of transportation needing 4-5 times as much energy just for laughs and giggles.
You're ignoring that energy will literally be free for significant parts of the USA as we overdeploy solar panels.
The most expensive part of solar is storage (aka: batteries), and H2 storage is near infinite, as a cheap steel container can contain more-and-more hydrogen (liquefied hydrogen, pressurized hydrogen, etc. etc. Doesn't matter, its just steel and concrete to hold it all).
Between the costs of near-$0 storage and literally free energy as we overproduce, H2 plays a role in being long-term seasonal storage of power. No other "battery" technology has anything close to the chance of storing enough energy for days, weeks, or months like H2 does.
This isn't even theoretical. California's grid is so chock-full of solar panels that there are times where the 1-hour market goes negative, as in the price of electricity drops below $0 (you get paid to use energy). Its already happening, there's not enough storage in practice and solar panels must be overdeployed for them to be anywhere close to effective. There will be questions about how to actually store (and use) all the extra solar panels as we move forward.
H2 plants are one of the best solutions I've heard of for addressing this phenomenon. Store H2 in the summer (where we get excess 15-hour days), and use the H2 later in the winter months when the daylight times drop to 9-hours... depending on latitude of course. But any solar-based grid will have to deal with the fundamental problem of seasonal variations in energy... having far excess (aka: $0 / free) energy in the summer, and not enough in the winter.
H2 naturally smooths out this curve. We can overproduce electricity, send it to H2 plants and store H2 with the excess energy.