macpacheco
Member
Don't think electric vehicle will ever have an impact on fuel prices. IMHO we need to conserve fossil fuel for the other transportation sectors that are more difficult or impossible to electrify.
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There are solutions to all sectors, just not battery electric vehicles.
Bus, Truck, Rail = Hydrogen fuel cells
Air transportation = Use high temp nuclear power to make synthetic Jet Fuel
Industrial process heat (heavy consumer of natural gas) = High temp nuclear power
Large Ships (100 thousand tons and up) = Modular nuclear reactors
Notice that in every instance I mention nuclear, I'm not talking about current nuclear (95% of current nuclear is water cooled, solid fuel reactors), I am talking about molten salt reactors that offer much simpler operation with far better safety (fully passive safety instead of water cooled massively engineering safety).
We could also power Bus, Truck and Rail with synthetic diesel, but it seems nuclear made hydrogen is far more efficient than synthetic diesel. Hydrogen fuel cells achieve 70%+ efficiency and require far less energy to make, ICE Diesel achieve half as much efficiency while using much more nuclear heat to make.
BTW I don't believe in fuel cell cars, primarily because of the lack of a fueling infrastructure. A significant share of buses and trucks run through pre planned routes (less fueling stations needed) and could afford to have ultra high range (say 1500 miles and up), so it should be possible to migrate 50% of busses, trucks, locomotives (and small ships) to hydrogen with far less than a few thousand hydrogen refueling stations worldwide, while in order to migrate 50% of cars to hydrogen it would take tens of thousands of stations (plus all the hydrogen plumbing required).
I look forward to Tesla building at least 200k Model S+Model X and at least half a million Gen 3 cars. Then breaking one million cars / yr. Let assume for a second that Tesla sales stabilize at that point, assuming average 15 year lifetime for a Tesla (including battery and motor replacement) we could perhaps have 15 million cars on the road, compare that with a billion cars on the road by 2020 (we might have that much already). Still a drop in the bucket. We need Tesla, GM, Nissan, Toyota (Prius and FCV) and every other green fuel alternative to succeed in order to simply offset the growth of the middle class in China and India.
Its far more likely to invest on molten salt nuclear to produce synthetic natural gas in ultra high scale and incentivize the ICE fleet to convert to CNG. If USA and Europe offered a good tax break for new ICE cars become tetra fuel compatible (gasoline, ethanol, any mix of gasoline and ethanol or natural gas compatible, perhaps minus the Ethanol... Ethanol from Brazil sugar cane good, Ethanol from corn not a gain for the environment) the fleet could both help consume all the shale NG produced (half the emissions of a regular ICE). Brazil is already doing that. Around half of our new cars are tetraflex, and over 80% is trifuel (gasoline, ethanol and any mix of both). Just need to install the gas cylinder to fuel with CNG. Now if we could have a CNG Prius... That would push it close into total emissions from a Tesla when using the average emissions of the USA grid, at a fraction of the cost. This isn't an attempt to bash Tesla, I LOVE THEM, but we need to realize that even at US$ 40k for the Gen III, its far from the cost of a cheap entry level car (while a Gasoline/CNG hybrid doesn't need to cost more than US$ 3k than a regular ICE, including the gas tank).
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