On Aug 22, 2014, at 10:58 AM, Dennis Miles via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> So the simple conclusion is electricity that Solar PV or wind turbine or > hydro generates is better used charging the BEV battery than the > complex process of manufacturing hydrocarbon. Not only that; the article did the math and concluded that you get more miles per cubic meter of Canadian tar sands by using it to power the grid than by refining it to gasoline. In other words, we're already straddling the pass between EROEI for ICE and BEV with petroleum. Long gone, after all, are the days when you had to be careful with a pickaxe in Texas lest you set off a gusher.... > The only reason for the proposal to use electricity for making liquid fuel is > profiteering from sale of fuel for ICE vehicles... That and power politics certainly play a very significant role...but, to be fair, there are huge and significant domains where batteries simply can't replace liquid hydrocarbons now or for the foreseeable future. Most especially, industrial agricultural equipment and long-haul transportation (including air, rail, and trucks). And...with rounding, 100% of today's personal transportation is powered by hydrocarbons. There're about a quarter million BEVs on the road in the States, and about a quarter BILlion cars all together. Even if every auto manufacturer stopped making petroleum-powered cars tomorrow and only ever again sold pure BEVs, it'd still be a couple decades before essentially the whole fleet was electrified. My point in raising the possibility of radical methods of generating hydrocarbon fuels wasn't to suggest that it's a good idea to do so, but rather to point out that that represents an upper bound to the profitability of mining petrochemicals. Depending on how fast wells continue to run dry, I'd expect the fleet to be mostly electric-powered before we start making hydrocarbon fuels from solar power and atmospheric CO2, leaving those hydrocarbon fuels mostly for those applications where batteries can't (yet) compete. But it's also a sign of what to expect in terms of inflation.... Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140822/77f6d429/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
