Mileage Increase Now Law

[jackc]

I ran across this today:

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush signed a major energy bill Wednesday that includes the first increase in auto fuel economy standards in 32 years.

Automakers will have to increase the efficiency of their vehicles by 40 percent to an industry average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

That compares to today's 25 miles per gallon when including passenger cars as well as SUVs and small trucks.

The legislation passed both the House and Senate by wide margins.

It also requires a six-fold increase in ethanol use, to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022.

"

To me, the time has come for this mandated increase in MPG. Don't get me wrong - I love what technology has been able to do for performance in recent years, but I believe that we have, for the most part, squandered the benefits that technology has brought for the sake of smiles. I personally find it absurd that my new six-cylinder GM sedan cannot deliver the same mileage that my 96 model GM six-cylinder coupe provided. We've got to get smarter about things on this front.

As for the increased ethanol mandate, I'm not on board with that. Its dumb to think that running food through our cars is going to benefit us. Has anybody else paid the checkout tab at the grocery store lately? Its getting tough...

[stsjoe]

Do we still pay farmers NOT to grow food?

[Ranger]

Seems rather counter productive (political) to me. Mandate better mileage and at the same time mandate the use of alcohol which produces less energy, thus lower mileage.

[Cadillac Jim]

Corn and wheat, the main sources for commercial ethanol (and Bourbon), aren't disadvantaged farm crops. What they do represent is food for livestock (have you priced corn-fed beef lately?), and commercial ethanol is one of the major raw materials for the chemical industry.

Remember the Russian wheat crisis? Eisenhower authorized emergency shipments of American wheat to the Russians as a humanitarian gesture. The Russians made ethanol out of it instead of food, and used that for rocket fuel and industrial uses like brake fluid.

[jackc]

Corn and wheat, the main sources for commercial ethanol (and Bourbon), aren't disadvantaged farm crops. What they do represent is food for livestock (have you priced corn-fed beef lately?

I'm with you on that! Beef, milk, cheese, cereal - around here, everything is getting pretty pricey these days.....

[Bruce Nunnally]

I would like to see the MPG of ethanol judged by the Mile per gallon of the gasoline portion of the ethanol fuel, so that a car that gets 20 mpg of E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gas) would be judged to get 20/15% = 133 MPG for score under the new CAFE rules.

The economic attraction of ethanol based fuels is that they are easily renewable.

Hydrogen would be my favorite fuel source, if we also can develop solar-powered home hydrogen fueling stations. Just add water and set it out in the yard and then fill up with hydrogen in the garage every night. Sign me up.

[TDK]

I was listenig to National Public Radio on the way home and one fact (per the talker) regarding vehicles got my attention.

Cars in the 1980's took an average of 14.5 seconds to reach 60mph. Cars now average 9 seconds to get to 60 mph.

I suppose less weight has a lot to do with it, but certainly more horsepower - and no doubt better fuel economy to boot.

THe speaker also noted that Automaker strategy memos from 15-years back to the present identified CAFE laws as their greatest challange to sales and to be defeated at all costs. Now that oil is what it is, and won't get cheaper, they are trying to re-package fuel economy as their very bestest idea yet! Typical Politics...

Bruce, I like your concept of home-brewed hydrogen. Unfortunatley, it will have to be idiot-proofed (read: delayed or outlawed) in this country where no one is responsible for using their own brains.

[Cadillac Jim]

I don't have references to cite here but I have read that the carbon footprint of a vehicle runing 85% ethanol is bigger than a comparable car (or the same car) burning 87 octane gas because (a) mechanized farming equipment burns gas and diesel oil, ( transport and processing of the grain burns gas and diesel oil, © the processing into ethanol burns energy in various forms and has emissions and waste, and (d) the car gets worse gas mileage.

As far as power, ethanol has less BTU per pound in it and doesn't burn as hot, so there will be a performance hit and the gas mileage hit is predictable. I suspect that technology on engines specifically designed to burn only E85 will make much of this up with higher compression, less or no EGR, etc. but it will be hard to fully overcome the basic BTU per pound disadvantage. The simple fact is that gasoline was selected as the motor fuel of choice a century ago because of its combination of high BTU per pound and efficient burning. Technology such as diesel and engines optimized for lighter hydrocarbons such as butane and for alcohols may be competitive, but a technology other than the Otto cycle, such as turbines, is the way to move the optimum point to other hydrocarbons such as kerosene (Jet fuel).

Hydrogen fuel cells in hybrids is likely to be a target for immediate research because it solves a major problem with current hybrids -- the cost and life issues with the NiMH batteries. It remains to be seen whether the carbon footprint of fuel cell hybrids or pure electric cars will improve on that of Otto cycle cars; hybrids don't improve on the carbon footprint at present.

With a clean sheet of paper and a blue sky, cheap fusion power would enable other alternatives not considered now. A way to close the carbon cycle of automobiles with the Otto cycle is to use electric power to make synthetic iso-octane from carbon dioxide and water vapor in the air (or liquid water). This pure 100 octane gasoline burns very clean in current engines. The key enabling technology of cheap fusion power remains out of reach because it's 20 year development time removes it from the budget of any group of politicians that feel the electorate isn't willing to invest in something that far away. This has been true for over 30 years.

[WarrenJ]

Hydrogen will simply never be a viable fuel source. It does not occur naturally anywhere.

Can you drill a hole in the ground and tap a hydrogen well? Nope! It's not there.

At best, hydrogen is an energy storage medium. And a poor one at that. It must be manufactured, at a cost, and then stored (impossibly) for later use. I'd urge youse not to buy any stock in this pipedream.

Regards,

Warren

[Marika]

Can I use the corn to feed my horse? But then again, the horse has a pretty big carbon footprint too...

[Marika]

Everyone remember the Jetsons? I wonder what their carbon footprint must be?????

[WarrenJ]

Everyone remember the Jetsons? I wonder what their carbon footprint must be?????

I'm sure it was minimal. Their household fusion reactor was in the kitchen just behind the trash reclimator.

Regards,

Warren

[Cadillac Jim]

Hydrogen is a common, inexpensive industrial gas available in a wide variety of purities and containers, including tanker trucks and railroad cars, and even by pipeline. Hydrogen generators using things like zinc and acid in water are also available commercially, and some have even suggested that hydrogen fuel cell automobiles be fueled by metallic zinc.

Safety concerns make demand for hydrogen low, limited by specific industrial uses such as specialty welding and specific chemical processes where its unique properties make it indispensable, which are rare. Its use as a fuel would drastically alter the supply infrastructure that would make the hit that we see in the corn and grain infrastructure look like a transparent adjustment. The appeal of hydrogen is that hydrogen fuel cell efficiencies of over 90% are seen, and high energy efficiency from grid to wheel is attractive as a possibility.

The thing that leads me to synthetic octane is the fact that a 15 to 20 gallon tank can last a week, weigh 50 to 65 pounds, and provide you-dial-it-in performance with existing automotive technology. The keys are cheap energy, a source that closes the carbon cycle of the fuel and thus destroys the carbon footprint, and a cheap industrial process for producing synthetic iso-octane from carbon dioxide and water. The development of this would seem to be cheap compared to the development of fusion power plants.

[PAUL T]

The way I look at this bill is that if the goals set in it were not attainable, the automotive lobbyists would have been all over it, crying foul. I just read an article on clean diesel that had a truck getting 31 MPG. To me it is just a political ploy to show us(me and you) that they(politicians) are doing something about the oil crunch. Then when time gets closer to deadline they can say "Look what we did!" Anything to make them look good.

[Cadillac Jim]

If a goal is unattainable, sometimes the best decision on the part of the automaker is to remain silent and let events unfold without taking a partisan stance. If nature will win your battles for you, why take the hits yourself?

[WarrenJ]

Hydrogen is a common, inexpensive industrial gas available in a wide variety of purities and containers, including tanker trucks and railroad cars, and even by pipeline. Hydrogen generators using things like zinc and acid in water are also available commercially, and some have even suggested that hydrogen fuel cell automobiles be fueled by metallic zinc.

Jim,

I'm unclear. Are you suggesting hydrogen is a viable alternative fuel?

Regards,

Warren

[Cadillac Jim]

Hydrogen is a common, inexpensive industrial gas available in a wide variety of purities and containers, including tanker trucks and railroad cars, and even by pipeline. Hydrogen generators using things like zinc and acid in water are also available commercially, and some have even suggested that hydrogen fuel cell automobiles be fueled by metallic zinc.

Jim,

I'm unclear. Are you suggesting hydrogen is a viable alternative fuel?

Regards,

Warren

No, read the rest of the post. The second paragraph takes away hydrogen fuel as a quick easy solution (emphasis added to clarify the point addressed here):

Safety concerns make demand for hydrogen low, limited by specific industrial uses such as specialty welding and specific chemical processes where its unique properties make it indispensable, which are rare. Its use as a fuel would drastically alter the supply infrastructure that would make the hit that we see in the corn and grain infrastructure look like a transparent adjustment. The appeal of hydrogen is that hydrogen fuel cell efficiencies of over 90% are seen, and high energy efficiency from grid to wheel is attractive as a possibility.

The third paragraph makes a case by example of my personal long-standing frustration that fusion power has never been funded sufficiently to achieve its perennial 20-year payload. Fusion power has remained at the end of a 20-year development program, awaiting commitment and funding, for about 40 years. If we had committed to it in 1965, we would have been energy independent by 1990, and automotive technologies today would be independent of foreign terrorists.

[WarrenJ]

Fusion power has remained at the end of a 20-year development program, awaiting commitment and funding, for about 40 years.

Well put, but I don't think the technology is yet in place, nor might it have been under the best of circumstances.

Regards,

Warren

[Cadillac Jim]

Fusion power has remained at the end of a 20-year development program, awaiting commitment and funding, for about 40 years.

Well put, but I don't think the technology is yet in place, nor might it have been under the best of circumstances.

Regards,

Warren

If there had been commitment and funding sometime in the last 40 years, the technology might well be in place for at least the cheap local energy part of the puzzle. That kind of change in the economic landscape shapes megatrends, making it difficult to predict things like what would have happened to automotive technology. For example, technology to take large masses of CO2 out of the atmosphere and use it as a source for hydrocarbon synthesis will never even be looked at unless money can be made on the resulting products, which would be astronomically expensive without the cheap local power source. As things exist now, CO2 is an industrial by-product that is stockpiled like radioactive waste to reduce atmospheric emissions.