Fuel for Legacy Vehicles in a “Carbon-free” Environment

Electric vehicles will not solve our emissions problem: there are over a billion petroleum driven vehicles, and they will not go away any time soon. Additionally, people have a current investment, and while billionaires might throw away their vehicles, most ordinary people will not change unless they can sell what they have, which in turn means someone else is using it. This suggests the combustion motor is not yet finished, and the CO2emissions will continue for a long time yet. That gives us a rather awkward problem, and as noted in the previous posts on global warming, there is no quick fix. One of the more obvious contributions could be biofuels. Yes, you still burn carbon, but the carbon came from the atmosphere. There will also be processing energy, but often that can come from the byproducts of the process. At this point I should add a caveat: I have spent quite a bit of my professional life researching this route so perhaps I have a degree of bias.

The first point is that it will be wrong to take grain and make alcohol for fuel, other than as a way of getting rid of spare or spoiled grain. The world will also have a food shortage, especially if the sea levels start rising, because much of the most productive land is low-lying. If we want to grow biomass, we need an area of land roughly equivalent to the area used for food production, and that land is not there. There are wastelands, but they tend to be non-productive. However, that does not mean we cannot grow biomass for fuel; it merely states there is nowhere nearly enough. Again, there is no single fix.

What you get depends critically on how you do it, and what your biomass is. Of the various processes, I prefer hydrothermal processing, which involves heating the biomass in water up to supercritical temperatures with some additional conditions. In effect, this greatly accelerates the processes that formed oil naturally. Corresponding pyrolysis will break down plastics, and in general high quality fuel is obtainable. The organic fraction of municipal refuse could also be used to make fuel, and in my ebook “Biofuel” I calculated that refuse could produce roughly seven litres per week per person. Not huge, but still a contribution, and it helps solve the landfill problem. However, the best options that I can think of include macroalgae and microalgae. Macroalgae would have to be cultivated, but in the 1970s the US navy carried out an exercise that grew macroalgae on “submerged rafts” in the open Pacific, with nutrients from the sea floor brought up from wind and wave action. Currently there is work being carried out growing microalgae in tanks, etc, in various parts of the world. In principle, microalgae could be grown in the open ocean, if we knew how to harvest it.

I was involved in one project that used microalgae grown in sewage treatment plants. Here there should have been a double benefit – sewage has to be treated so the ponds are already there, and the process cleans up the nitrogen and phosphate that would otherwise be dumped into the sea, thus polluting it. The process could also use sewage sludge, and the phosphate, in principle, was recoverable. A downside was that the system would need more area than the average treatment plant because the residence time is somewhat longer than the current time, which seems designed to remove the worst of the oxygen demand then chuck everything out to sea, or wherever. This process went nowhere; the venture needed to refinance and unfortunately they left it too late, namely shortly after the Lehman collapse.

From the technical point of view, this hydrothermal technology is rather immature. What you get can critically depend on exactly how you do it. You end up with a thick brown fluid, from which you can obtain a number of products. Your petrol fraction is generally light aromatics, with a research octane number (RON) of about 140, and the diesel fraction can have a cetane number approaching 100 (because the main components are straight chain C15 or C17 saturated hydrocarbons. Cetane is the C16 equivalent.) These are superb fuels, however while current motors would run very well on them, they are not optimal.

We can consider ethanol as an example. It has an RON somewhere in the vicinity of 120 – 130. People say ethanol is not much of a fuel because its energy content is significantly lower than hydrocarbons, and that is correct, but energy is not the whole story because efficiency also counts. The average petrol motor is rather inefficient and most of the energy comes out as heat. The work you can get out depends on the change of pressure times volume, so the efficiency can be significantly improved by increasing the compression ratio. However, if the compression is too great, you get pre-ignition. The modern motor is designed to run well with an octane number of about 91, with some a bit higher. That is because they are designed to use the most of the distillate from crude oil. Another advantage of ethanol is you can blend in some water with it, which absorbs heat and dramatically increases the pressure. So ethanol and oxygenates can be used.

So the story with biofuels is very similar to the problems with electric vehicles; the best options badly need more research and development. At present, it looks as if they will not get it in time. Once you have your process, it usually takes at least ten years to get a demonstration plant operating. Not a good thought, is it?

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Non-Battery Powered Electric Vehicles

If vehicles always drive on a given route, power can be provided externally. Trams and trains have done this for a long time, and it is also possible to embed an electric power source into roads and power vehicles by induction. My personal view is commercial interests will make this latter option rather untenable. So while external power canreplace quite a bit of fossil fuel consumption, self-contained portable sources are required.

In the previous posts, I have argued that transport cannot be totally filled by battery powered electric vehicles because there is insufficient material available to make the batteries, and it will not be very economically viable to own a recharging site for long distance driving. The obvious alternative is the fuel cell. The battery works by supplying electricity that separates ions and converts them to a form that can recombine the ions later, and hence supply electricity. The alternative is to simply provide the materials that will generate the ions and make the electricity. This is the fuel cell, and effectively you burn something, but instead of making heat, you generate electric current. The simplest such fuel cells include the conversion of hydrogen with air to water. To run this sort of vehicle, you would refill your hydrogen tank in much the same way you refill a CNG powered car with methane. There are various arguments about how safe that is. If you have ever worked with hydrogen, you will know it leaks faster than any other gas, and it explodes with a wide range of air mixtures, but on the other hand it also diffuses away faster. Since the product is water (also a greenhouse gas, but one that is quickly cycled away, thanks to rain, etc) this seems to solve everything. Once again, the range would not be very large because cylinders can only hold so much gas. On the other hand, work has been going on to lock the hydrogen into another form. One such form is ammonia. You could actually run a spark ignition motor on ammonia (but not what you buy at a store, which is 2 – 5% ammonia in water), but it also has considerable potential for a fuel cell. However, someone would still have to develop the fuel cell. The problem here is that fuel cells need a lot more work before they are satisfactory, and while the fuel refilling could be like the current service station, there may be serious compatibility problems and big changes would be required to suppliers’ stations.

Another problem is the fuel still has to be made. Hydrogen can be made by electrolysing water, but you are back to the electricity requirements noted for batteries. The other way we get hydrogen is to steam reform oil (or natural gas) and we are back to the same problem of making CO2. There is, of course, no problem if we have nuclear energy, but otherwise the energy issues of the previous post apply, and we may need even more electricity because with an additional intermediate, we have to allow for inefficiencies.

As it happens, hydrogen will also run spark ignition engines. As a fuel, it has problems, including a rather high air to fuel ratio (a minimum of 34/1, although because it runs well lean, it can be as high as 180/1) and because hydrogen is a gas, it occupies more volume prior to ignition. High-pressure fuel injection can overcome this. However there is also the danger of pre-ignition or backfires if there are hot spots. Another problem might include hydrogen getting by the rings into the crankcase, where ignition, if it were to occur, could be a real problem. My personal view is, if you are going to use hydrogen you are better off using it for a fuel cell, mainly because it is over three times more efficient, and in theory could approach five times more efficient. You should aim to get the most work out of your hydrogen.

A range of other fuel cells are potentially available, most of them “burning” metal in air to make the electricity. This has a big advantage because air is available everywhere so you do not need to compress it. In my novel Red Gold, set on Mars, I suggested an aluminium chlorine fuel cell. The reason for this was: there is no significant free oxygen in the thin Martian atmosphere; the method I suggested for refining metals, etc. would make a lot of aluminium and chlorine anyway; chlorine happens to be a liquid at Martian temperatures so no pressure vessels would be required; aluminium/air would not work because aluminium forms an oxide surface that stops it from oxidising, but no such protection is present with chlorine; aluminium gives up three electrons (lithium only 1) so it is theoretically more energy dense; finally, aluminium ions move very sluggishly in oxygenated solutions, but not so if chlorine is the underpinning negative ion. That, of course, would not be appropriate for Earth as the last thing you want would be chlorine escaping.

This leaves us with a problem. In principle, fuel cells can ease the battery problem, especially for heavy equipment, but a lot of work has to be done to ensure it is potentially a solution. Then you have to decide on what sort of fuel cells, which in turn depends on how you are going to make the fuel. We have to balance convenience for the user with convenience for the supplier. We would like to make the fewest changes possible, but that may not be possible. One advantage of the fuel cell is that the materials limitations noted for batteries probably do not apply to fuel cells, but that may be simply because we have not developed the cells properly yet, so we have yet to find the limitations. The simplest approach is to embark on research and development programs to solve this problem. It was quite remarkable how quickly nuclear bombs were developed once we got started. We could solve the technical problems, given urgency to be accepted by the politicians. But they do not seem to want to solve this now. There is no easy answer here.

Where will the Energy for Electric Vehicles come from?

In the previous post, I looked at the issues involved with replacing all motor vehicles with electric vehicles, and noted that is impossible with what we know now because the necessary materials are just not there. Of course there may be new battery technology developed, but there is another issue: from whence the energy? From international energy statistics, petroleum liquids have the equivalent energy of 53 trillion kWh. Since the electric vehicle is more efficient we can divide that number by about three, so we need almost 18 trillion kWh. (The issue is more complicated by whether we are trying to replace petroleum or solve the transport issue, since some petroleum products are used for heating, but for simplicity I am going to stick with that figure.) If we were going to do that by solar energy, the sunlight gives according to Wikipedia, on average about 3.5 – 7 kWh/m²per day. That needs about five trillion square meters devoted to solar energy to replace petroleum products. The Earth’s area is 510 trillion square meters, so we need about 1% of the surface area devoted solely to this, if the cells are 100% efficient. The highest efficiencies so far (Data from NREL) come from four junctions, gallium arsenide, and a concentrator where 46.6% has been reached. For single junction cells using gallium arsenide, we get 35% efficiency, while silicon cells have reached 27.6%. If silicon, we need 4% of the world’s area.

It is, of course, a bit worse than this because 70% of the world’s surface is ocean, and we can eliminate the polar regions, and we can eliminate the farmland, and we should eliminate the wild-life habitats, and we can probably assume that places like the Sahara or the Himalayas are not available and anyway would be too dusty, too windy, too snowy. Solar energy drops efficiency quite dramatically if the collectors get covered in dust or snow. So, before we get all enthusiastic about solar, note that while it can contribute, equally there are problems. One issue that is seldom mentioned is how we find the materials to make such a huge number of panels. In this context, the world supply of gallium is 180 tonne/a, so basically we should be back to silicon, which is one of the most plentiful elements. (In one of my novels I made a lot of someone finding a source of gallium otherwise overlooked. I feel good about that!). We don’t know how critical element supply would be because currently there is a lot of development work going on on solar conversion and we cannot tell what we will find. The final problem is that latitude also plays a part; in southern England we would be struggling to get the bottom of the range listed above on a sunny day, and of course there are many cloudy days. Accordingly, assuming we do not put the collectors on floats, the required area is starting to get up to 10% of the land area, including highly unsuitable land. We just cannot do it.

That does not mean solar in of no use. One place to put solar panels is on the roof of your house. Superficially, if every motorist did this, the problem is solved, apart from the long-distance driving, at least in the low latitude areas. The difficulty here is that the sun shines in the day, when the commuter uses his car. The energy could be stored, but we have just doubled the battery requirements, and they were already out of hand. You could sell to the power to the grid, and buy power back at night, and there is merit in this as it helps with daylight loads, except that the power companies have to make money, and of course, the greatest normal power requirements are in winter at the beginning and end of the day, when solar is not contributing. So yes, solar power can help, but it is not a single fix. Also, peak power loads are a problem. If the company needs capacity for that, where does it come from? Right now, burning gas or coal. If your electric vehicle is purchased to save the environment from greenhouse gas emission, that is pointless if extra power has to be generated from coal or oil.

My personal view on this is that while renewables are going to be helpful, if we want to stop emitting carbon dioxide when making energy, we have to go partially either nuclear or thermonuclear. My personal preference is for fusion reactors, but we do not know how to make them yet. The main problem with fission reactors is the disposal of waste, and the potential for making materials for bombs. We can get around that if we restrict ourselves to thorium reactors, because the products, while still radioactive, decay much more quickly, and finally you cannot make a thorium bomb. Another benefit of thorium reactors is they cannot get the runaway problems as seen at Chernobyl and Fukushima; they really are very much safer. The problem now is we have not developed thorium fission reactors because everyone uses uranium to make plutonium for bombs.

Even if we manage to get sufficient electricity, the next problem is transmission of this huge increase in electricity. In most countries, the major transmission lines will not take it, and would have to be replaced or supplemented. Not impossible, butat the cost of a lot of carbon dioxide being emitted in making the metals, and transferring them, because massive electric vehicles cannot precede the ability to shift electricity. Again, this is not a problem per se, but it is if we do not get organised quickly. The next problem is to get it to houses. “Slow charging” overnight is probably adequate, even for a tesla. If you can charge it fully in an hour at just over 40 amps, you should need only 3 amps overnight. Not difficult. However, the retail sale of electricity for vehicles travelling is not so easy. It is hard to put figures on this because I don’t know what the demand will be, but charging a vehicle for over an hour means no more than about ten vehicles per day per outlet. It is hard to make money out of that, so you need a lot of outlets. If you have a hundred outlets, you service a thousand cars, say, per day. Still not a lot of profit there and you need a parking lot and some excellent organization. You are also drawing 4,000 amps, so you need a fairly good power supply. Not an enticing proposition for investment.

The point I am trying to make here is that the problem is very large. We have built a monstrous infrastructure around oil, and in the normal circumstances, when we have to change, that industry would go slowly and another would slowly take its place. We don’t have that luxury if we want to save our coastal cities. Yes, everyone can “do their bit”, and that buys time if we all do it, but we also need some bigger help, in organization, research, development and money. It is time for the politicians to stop thinking about the next election, insulting the opposition, and start thinking about their country.

Climate Change: the Potential for Electric Vehicles

In my last post, I discussed the need for action over climate change. Suppose we decide to be more responsible, what can we do? There are several issues, but the main ones include is a solution fit for purpose, which includes will the general population see it as such and does it achieve a useful goal, and is it actually possible? To illustrate what I mean, consider the “easy option”: scrap motor cars and replace with electric vehicles. At first sight, that is easy and you will probably think there is no technological advance needed. Well, think again on both of those. Let’s put numbers on the problem: according to Wikipedia, the number of motor vehicles in the world is 1.015 billion.

Now, to consider the issue, “fit for purpose”, in New Zealand, anyway, and I suspect North America will be worse, people drive fairly long distances at least some of the time. One solution to that problem is to make people stop doing that. This is from the “sacrifices have to be made” school. As it happens, energy consumption probably will have to be reduced, but that does not mean that we need some politicians to say which form of energy consumption is forbidden to you. If people must use less, they should have a choice in what form they give it up.

There are two “niches” of electric vehicle, and as examples I shall pick on the Tesla and the Nissan Leaf. The Tesla currently claims a 400 km range (and intends to provide a 500 km range) per charge, while what you get from the Leaf is highly dependent on driving conditions, but it reaches a little over 100 km with average city driving. Basically, the Leaf would be great for someone wishing to commute daily, but not use it for distance driving. As an aside, the dependency on conditions will affect all such cars; we know about this aspect of the Leaf because there is more information available as more Leafs have been sold. The difference in range is simply because the Leaf’s battery is much smaller (198 cells compared with Tesla’s 7,104).

So why doesn’t the Leaf put in more cells? That is partly because of the problem of charging, and partly because of price and suitability for a chosen niche. A review of electric vehicles in our local paper brought up these facts. There are statements that the 400 k type car be charged at home overnight, “just like your mobile phone”. Well, not quite. While that sounds easy enough, where are you going to do it? Your home may have a garage, so maybe there. The mobile connector comes with adaptors that permit charging at 40 amps. Um, does your house have 40 amp rating to your garage, or maybe 50 amp to be on the safe side because you don’t want to accidentally throw the fuse and be walking to wherever next morning? Our reviewer found that to fully charge such a vehicle with 400 km range using his garage power rating took the best part of two days. Using a fast charger as available here, it took 75 minutes. Yes, you can charge these batteries relatively quickly if you can deliver the required current. The reason the Leaf has such a small battery capacity is so that it can be charged overnight with the average domestic power supply, and it can also be recharged while at work if the owner can “graze” on some power supply. Needless to say, once someone published figures like that, someone else challenged them, and pointed out that a steady 7 kW overnight would do it and “nearly two days” was wrong. Unfortunately, power itself is not the whole story because the current has to be rectified and voltage has to be kept to within a specific range. Apply an over-voltage, and different chemistry starts up in the battery that is not reversible, which means you greatly shorten your battery life.

There is some good news on batteries, though. The batteries do decay with time, and while details are not available, one estimate is that Tesla batteries should still be 90% effective after 8 years, which is quite respectable, while the Leaf claims its batteries should last ten years in a workable condition. Thus we have two types of vehicles: an expensive vehicle that can do anything a current vehicle can do on the open highway, provided there are adequate rapid charging sites. Here “adequate” takes on significance; refilling with petrol takes a few minutes and sometimes there is overcrowding. Will there be enough cables if it takes 75 minutes? How much will “site time” charge?

Then there is the question of how you use it. Do you carry big loads? Ferry lots of children? Go off road, or go camping? If so, the current electric vehicle is not for you. So the question then is, for those who see the electric vehicle as all you have to do to solve the transport problem, are they advocating no off-road activity, no camping, no serious loads? The answer is probably, yes. So, do we want to give up our lifestyle? If the answer is no. are there options? Of course not everyone wants to do those sort of things, so there will most certainly be quite sizable niches that can be filled with electric vehicles. Finally, there will be one further problem: the poorer people cannot afford new Teslas, or even new Leafs. They own second hand cars and cannot afford to simply throw that investment away. The liquid fuel transport economy will be with us for a lot longer yet.

The next question is, is it feasible to replace all cars with electric vehicles? For the purpose of analysis, I shall assume everyone wants a Tesla type driving capacity, as the next step is to put numbers on the problem. The battery weight is listed as 540 kg, which means to do the replacement, we would need something approaching half a billion tonne of batteries. That is not all lithium, but it includes “a small amount of cobalt and nickel”. If we interpret that as about 2% the weight each of the batteries, we need about ten million tonne of cobalt and nickel. World production of cobalt in 2017 was about 110,000 tonne, while nickel was over ten times this. Both metals, however, are fully used now, and the cobalt supply is deficient by about two orders of magnitude if all cobalt was devoted to electric vehicles. Unlikely. Oops! That is more than a small problem. It is not a problem right now because electric vehicles comprise only a very small fraction of the market, but it is insoluble. There is a strict limit on the possible supply of cobalt because as far as I know, there are no cobalt ores. Most cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a by-product of copper mining. There would also be a significant demand for copper. The Tesla has two motors, one of which is 300 kW, so considerable amount of copper would be used, but world production of copper is about 24,000 Mt annually, so that is not an immediate problem, but may be in the long term. The annual supply of graphite is 126,000 t. Given that there will be more graphite used than lithium, this is a serious problem, however there is no shortage of carbon; the problem is converting carbon to graphite. That is quite a subtle problem; as it happens I know how to get close to the required fraction of graphite, but as yet, not economically.

So there are technological problems. Maybe they are soluble, but doing so introduces another problem, as exemplified by finding an alternative to cobalt. Cobalt is needed to give the non-graphitic electrode enough strength that the battery will have adequate lifetimes with good charging rates. So that is probably non-negotiable. There are alternatives, but so far none match the current battery type used by Tesla. Further, to develop a new battery and test its lifetime over ten years takes: you guessed it; the last part alone takes ten years, assuming your first pick works. Therein lies the overall problem; politicians have wasted nearly 30 years on the basis that it was not urgent. However, technical development does take a long time. For that reason it is wrong to lazily say, electric vehicles, or some other solution, will solve the problem. They will most certainly help, but we have to back many more options.

Science and Climate Change

In the previous post, I questioned whether science is being carried out properly. You may well wonder, then, when this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a rather depressing report, and a rather awkward challenge: according to their report, the world needed to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C between now and 2050, and to do that, it needed to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, and net zero by 2050. Even then significant amounts of carbon have to be removed from the atmosphere. The first question is, then, is this real, and if so, why has the IPCC suddenly reduced the tolerable emissions? If their scientists previously predicted seriously lower requirements, why should these be considered better? There are two simple answers. The first is the lesser requirements were based on the assumption that nations would promptly reduce emissions. Most actually increased them. The second is more complicated.

The physics have been verified many times. However, predicting the effects is another matter. The qualitative effects are easily predicted, but to put numbers on them requires very complicated modelling. The planet is not an ideal object, and the calculation is best thought of as an estimate. What has probably happened is their modelling made a projection of what would happen, and they did this long enough ago that now that they can compare prediction with where we are now. That tells them how good the various constants they put into the model were. Such a comparison is somewhat difficult, but there are clear signs in our observations, and things are worse than we might hope for.

So, what are we going to do? Nothing dramatic is going to happen on 2040, or 2050. Change will be gradual, but its progress will be unstoppable unless very dramatic changes in our behaviour are made. The technical challenges here are immense. However, there are a number of important decisions to be taken because we are running short of time due to previous inaction. Do we want to defend what we have? Do we want to attempt to do it through sacrificing our life style, or do we want to attempt a more aggressive approach? Can we get sufficient agreement that anything we try will be properly implemented? Worst of all, do we know what our options are? Of these questions, I am convinced that through inaction, and in part the structural defects of academic science, the answer to the last question is no.

The original factor of required emissions reduction was set at 1990 as a reference point. What eventuated was that very few countries actually reduced any emissions, and most increased them. The few that did reduce them did that by closing coal-fired electricity generation and opted for burning natural gas. This really achieves little, and would have happened anyway. Europe did that, although France is a notable exception to this in that it has had significant nuclear power for a long time. Nuclear power has its problems, but carbon emissions are not one of them. The countries of the Soviet Union have also actually had emission reductions, although this is as much as anything due to the collapse of their economies as they made the rather stupid attempt to convert to “free market economics” which permitted a small number of oligarchs to cream the economy, sell off what they could, use what was usable, pay negligible wages and export their profits so they could purchase foreign football clubs. That reduced carbon emissions, but it is hardly a model to follow.

There is worse news. Most people by now have recognized that Donald Trump and the Republican party do not believe in global warming, while a number of other countries that are only beginning to industrialize want the right to emit their share of CO2 and are on a path to burn coal. Some equatorial countries are hell-bent on tearing down their rain forest, while warming in Siberia will release huge amounts of methane, which is about thirty times more potent than CO2. Further, if we are to totally change our way of life, we shall have to dismantle the energy-related infrastructure from the last fifty years or so (earlier material has probably already been retired) and replace it, which, at the very least will require billions of tonnes of carbon to make the required metals.

There will be some fairly predictable cries. Vegetarians will tell everyone to give up meat. Cyclists will tell everyone they should stop driving cars. In short, everyone will have ideas where someone else gives up whatever. One problem is that people tend to want to go for “the magic bullet”, the one fix to fix them all. Thus everyone should switch to driving electric vehicles. In the long term, yes, but you cannot take all those current vehicles off the road, and despite what some say, heavy trucks, major farm and construction equipment, and aircraft are going to run on hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future. People talk about hydrogen, but hydrogen currently requires massive steel bottles (unless you are NASA, or unless you can get hydrides to act reversibly). And, of course, there is a shortage of material to make enough batteries. Yes, electric vehicles, cycling, public transport and being a vegetarian are all noble contributions, but they are just that. Wind and solar power, together with some other sources, are highly desirable, but I suspect that something else, such as nuclear power must be adopted more aggressively. In this context, Germany closing down such reactors is not helpful either.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is not that easy either. There have been proposals to absorb it from the effluent gases of coal-fired power stations. Such scrubbing is not 100% efficient, but even if it were, it is not dealing with what is already there. My guess is, that can only be managed by plants in sufficient scale. While not extremely efficient, once going they look after themselves. Eventually you have to do something with the biomass, but restoring all the tropical rain forests would achieve something in the short term. My personal view is the best chances are to grow algae. The sea has a huge area and while we still have to learn how to do it, it is plausible, and the resultant biomass could be used to make biofuel.

No, it is not going to be easy. The real question is, can we be bothered trying to save what we have?

A Response to Climate Change, But Will it Work?

By now, if you have not heard that climate change is regarded as a problem, you must have been living under a flat rock. At least some of the politicians have recognized that this is a serious problem and they do what politicians do best: ban something. The current craze is to ban the manufacture of vehicles powered by liquid fuels in favour of electric vehicles, the electricity to be made from renewable resources. That sounds virtuous, but have they thought out the consequences?

The world consumption of petroleum for motor vehicles is in the order of 23,000 bbl/day. By my calculation, given some various conversion factors from the web, that requires approximately 1.6 GW of continuous extra electric consumption. In fact much more would be needed because the assumptions include 100% efficiency throughout. Note if you are relying on solar power, as many environmentalists want, you would need more than three times that amount because the sun does not shine at night, and worse, since this is to charge electric vehicles, which tend to be running in daytime, such electric energy would have to be stored for use at night. How do you store it?

The next problem is whether the grid could take that additional power. This is hardly an insurmountable problem, but I most definitely needs serious attention, and it would be more comforting if we thought the politicians had thought of this and were going to do something about it. Another argument is, since most cars would be charged at night, the normal grid could be used because there is significantly less consumption then. I think the peaks would still be a problem, and then we are back to where the power is coming from. Of course nuclear power, or even better, fusion power, would make production targets easily. But suppose, like New Zealand, you use hydro power? That is great for generating on demand, but each kWhr still requires the same amount of water availability. If the water is fully used now, and if you use this to charge at night, then you need some other source during the day.

The next problem for the politicians are the batteries, and this problem doubles if you use batteries to store electricity from solar to use at night. Currently, electric vehicles have ranges that are ideal for going to and from work each day, but not so ideal for long distance travel. The answer here is said to be “fast-charging” stops. The problem here is how do you get fast charging? The batteries have a fixed internal resistance, and you cannot do much about that. From Ohm’s law, given the resistance, the current flow, which is effectively the charge, can only be increased by increasing the voltage. At first sight you may think that is hardly a problem, but in fact there are two problems, both of which affect battery life. The first is, in general an overvoltage permits fresh electrochemistry to happen. Thus for the lithium ion battery you run the risk of what is called lithium plating. The lithium ions are supposed to go between what are called intercalation layers on the carbon anode, but if the current is too high, the ions cannot get in there quickly enough and they deposit outside, and cause irreversible damage. The second problem is too fast of charging causes heat to be generated, and that partially destroys the structural integrity of the electrodes.

The next problem is that batteries can be up to half the cost of the purely electric vehicle. Everybody claims battery prices are coming down, and they are. The lithium ion battery is about seven times cheaper than it was, but it will not necessarily get much cheaper because at present ingredients make up 70% of the cost. Ingredient prices are more likely to increase. Lithium is not particularly common, and a massive increase in production may be difficult. There are large deposits in Bolivia but as might be expected, there are other salts present in addition to the lithium salts. There is probably enough lithium but it has to be concentrated from brines and there are the salts you do not want that have to be disposed of, which reduces the “green-ness” of the exercise. Lithium prices can be assumed to go up significantly.

But the real elephant in the room is cobalt. Cobalt is not part of the chemistry of the battery, but it is necessary for the cathode. The battery works by shuttling lithium ions backwards and forwards between the cathode and anode. The cathode material needs to have the right structure to accommodate the ions, be stable so the ions can move in and out, have valence orbitals to accommodate the electron transfer, and the capacity to store as many lithium ions as possible. There are other materials that could replace cobalt, but cobalt is the only one where, when the lithium moves out, something does not move in to fill the spaces. Cobalt is essential for top performance. There are alternatives to use in current technology, but the cost is in poorer lifetimes, and there are alternative technologies, but nobody is sure they work. At present, a car needs somewhere between 7 – 20 kg of cobalt in its batteries, and as you reduce the cobalt content, you appear to reduce the life of the battery.

Cobalt is a problem because the current usage of cobalt in batteries is 48,000 t/a, while world production is about 100,000 t/a. The price is increasing rapidly as electric vehicles become more popular. At the beginning of 2017, a tonne of cobalt would cost $US 32,500; now it is at least $US 80,000. Over half the world’s production comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which may not be the most stable country, and worse, most of that 100,000 t/a comes as a byproduct from copper or nickel production. If there were to be a recession and the demand for stainless steel fell, then the production of cobalt would drop. The lithium ion batteries that would not be affected are the laptops and phones; they only need about 10 – 20 g of cobalt. Even worse, there are a lot of these batteries that currently are not being recycled.

In a previous post I noted there was not a single magic bullet to solve this problem. I stick to that opinion. We need a much broader approach than most of the politicians are considering. By broader, I do not mean the approach of denying we even have a problem.

This post is later than my usual, thanks to time demands approaching Easter, and I hope all my readers have a relaxing and pleasant Easter.

Scientific low points: (1)

A question that should be asked more often is, do scientists make mistakes? Of course they do. The good news, however, is that when it comes to measuring something, they tend to be meticulous, and published measurements are usually correct, or, if they matter, they are soon found out if they are wrong. There are a number of papers, of course, where the findings are complicated and not very important, and these could well go for a long time, be wrong, and nobody would know. The point is also, nobody would care.

On the other hand, are the interpretations of experimental work correct? History is littered with examples of where the interpretations that were popular at the time are now considered a little laughable. Once upon a time, and it really was a long time ago, I did a post doctoral fellowship at The University, Southampton, and towards the end of the year I was informed that I was required to write a light-hearted or amusing article for a journal that would come out next year. (I may have had one put over me in this respect because I did not see the other post docs doing much.) Anyway, I elected to comply, and wrote an article called Famous Fatuous Failures.

As it happened, this article hardly became famous, but it was something of a fatuous failure. The problem was, I finished writing it a little before I left the country, and an editor got hold of it. In those days you wrote with pen on paper, unless you owned a typewriter, but when you are travelling from country to country, you tend to travel light, and a typewriter is not light. Anyway, the editor decided my spelling of a two French scientists’ names (Berthollet and Berthelot) was terrible and it was “obviously” one scientist. The net result was there was a section where there was a bitter argument, with one of them arguing with himself. But leaving that aside, I had found that science was continually “correcting” itself, but not always correctly.

An example that many will have heard of is phlogiston. This was a weightless substance that metals and carbon gave off to air, and in one version, such phlogisticated air was attracted to and stuck to metals to form a calx. This theory got rubbished by Lavoisier, who showed that the so-called calxes were combinations of the metal with oxygen, which was part of the air. A great advance? That is debatable. The main contribution of Lavoisier was he invented the analytical balance, and he decided this was so accurate there would be nothing that was “weightless”. There was no weight for phlogiston therefore it did not exist. If you think of this, if you replace the word “phlogiston” with “electron” you have an essential description of the chemical ionic bond, and how do you weigh an electron? Of course there were other versions of the phlogiston theory, but getting rid of that version may we’ll have held chemistry back for quite some time.

Have we improved? I should add that many of my cited failures were in not recognizing, or even worse, not accepting truth when shown. There are numerous examples where past scientists almost got there, but then somehow found a reason to get it wrong. Does that happen now? Since 1970, apart from cosmic inflation, as far as I can tell there have been no substantially new theoretical advances, although of course there have been many extensions of previous work. However, that may merely mean that some new truths have been uncovered, but nobody believes them so we know nothing of them. However, there have been two serious bloopers.

The first was “cold fusion”. Martin Fleischmann, a world-leading electrochemist, and Stanley Pons decided that if deuterium was electrolyzed under appropriate conditions you could get nuclear fusion. They did a range of experiments with palladium electrodes, which would strongly adsorb the deuterium, and sometimes they got unexplained but significant temperature rises. Thus they claimed they got nuclear fusion at room temperature. They also claimed to get helium and neutrons. The problem with this experiment was that they themselves admitted that whatever it was only worked occasionally; at other times, the only heat generated corresponded to the electrical power input. Worse, even when it worked, it would be for only so long, and that electrode would never do it again, which is perhaps a sign that there was some sort of impurity in their palladium that gave the heat from some additional chemical reaction.

What happened next was nobody could repeat their results. The problem then was that being unable to repeat a result when it is erratic at best may mean very little, other than, perhaps, better electrodes did not have the impurity. Also, the heat they got raised the temperature of their solutions from thirty to fifty degrees Centigrade. That would mean that at best, very few actual nuclei fused. Eventually, it was decided that while something might have happened, it was not nuclear fusion because nobody could get the required neutrons. That in turn is not entirely logical. The problem is that fusion should not occur because there was no obvious way to overcome the Coulomb repulsion between nuclei, and it required palladium to do “something magic”. If in fact palladium could do that, it follows that the repulsion energy is not overcome by impact force. If there were some other way to overcome the repulsive force, there is no reason why the nuclei would not form 4He, because that is far more stable than 3He, and if so, there would be no neutrons. Of course I do not believe palladium would overcome that electrical repulsion, so there would be no fusion possible.

Interestingly, the chemists who did this experiment and believed it would work protected themselves with a safety shield of Perspex. The physicists decided it had no show, but they protected themselves with massive lead shielding. They knew what neutrons were. All in all, a rather sad ending to the career of a genuinely skillful electrochemist.

More to follow.