1. 25 Fuels are similar for any system.doc.lnk

Fuels are similar for any system. Solving the fuel problem is a separate issue.

(This relates to material in Chapter 3)

The misconception that getting people out of cars will solve our transportation energy problems distorts much of our thinking. Roughly put, the facts are that:

Public transit today is no more energy-efficient than single-occupant cars

Electric energy produced from fossil fuels generates just as much of the principle greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, as energy produced by internal combustion vehicle motors.

Solving the problems of global warming and the shortage of fossil fuels is a matter of finding alternative fuels. Period. Shifting to public transportation systems will address the problems of congestion and can improve energy efficiency per passenger mile. However, we are fighting a rear-guard action as long as we continue to use fossil fuels. Just as we have seen with passenger cars over the past three decades, every improvement in efficiency will be offset by an increase in usage. In the short term we must fight mount that rear-guard fight. As we do so we cannot lose sight of the fact that in the long run world needs to find an alternate, preferably a renewable energy source to replace fossil fuels.

THE REAR-GUARD ACTION: MAKING THINGS MORE EFFICIENT

1.1. What is energy efficiency?

We are accustomed to measuring energy efficiency as miles per gallon (or liters per 100 Km outside the U.S.). Give ourselves some credit for improving according to this metric. Figure 1 derived from the U.S. Department of Energy figures shows automobile efficiency improving by about 50% between 1978 and 2000. On the downside it shows that truck efficiency did not increase nearly as much. The figure also shows that actual mileage decreased as light truck registrations roared ahead over the same period. As American industry became more efficient in energy consumption per ton of vehicle, American consumers developed a lust for more vehicle weight. We have met the enemy and it is us.

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Our ultimate objective of course is to move people and goods around, not metal. By this measure cars are still a dismal failure. If we assume that the payload of the average car is a 200-pound commuter, then the efficiency is still only about 1% of that of a highway truck or simply walking:1

Payload (lb.) Payload (tons)

Miles/gal gal/mile Gallons/ton mile

Private Car 200 0.1 20.7 0.048309 4.83E-01

Semi Truck 60000 30 5 0.2 6.67E-03

Walking/biking (10 mi./day)

200 0.1 1000 0.001 1.00E-02

The

1.1.1. Energy expended per net ton mile (excluding packaging, vehicle itself)

The law of conservation of energy, known as the first law of thermodynamics, ensures that whenever energy is converted in form its total quantity remains unchanged.

1 Walking is of course not directly comparable. Most of our metabolic energy goes into the simple process of living. Therefore the energy requirement to go 50 miles is not proportionately greater than the energy to go 1 mile. Furthermore, people don’t drink gasoline. The calories consumed in producing what we eat far exceed the caloric content of the food itself. Whatever the figures, there is no argument that walking handily beats driving for efficiency.

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Figure 1. U.S. Car and Truck Mileage

Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Transportation Technologies, 20th Edition Transportation Energy Data Book, Table 7-16

Entropy is the measure of disordered, or unusable energy in the universe. “Entropy increaseth” is a shorthand summary of the second law of thermodynamics. Something is lost in any conversion of energy from one form to another. That is why a perpetual motion machine is impossible.

In automobiles this means that

Energy is lost in converting crude oil into gasoline

Energy is lost in using an engine to convert gasoline to power

Energy is lost converting power into motion

These are only a few of the losses. It takes a lot of energy to get crude out of the ground and to a refinery and more energy to get the gasoline to market. There is spillage, seepage and evaporation to consider.

The frightening statistic is how much energy is lost in each conversion. Figure 2 shows that car engines are only about 30% efficient in converting gasoline into rotary motion. Two thirds of the energy potential is lost to heat and friction in the process of vaporizing the fuel, expanding the fuel by burning it in a cylinder to push a piston, converting the linear motion of the piston into rotary motion in the crankshaft and getting the power to the back wheels.

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Figure 2. Percent of Energy Conserved in changing from fuel to motion.

Notes:

1) This is taken from http://www.h2fc.com/tech.html, saved as Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Investor.pdf. Their intent is to show the efficiency of fuel cells.

2) An Otto motor is a standard automobile engine

3) One horsepower =.745 Kilowatts. This is a logarithmic chart. Car and truck engines fall around the “100” just above the word “Power”.

After gasoline is converted into rotary motion the question remains how efficient the motion of tires on pavement is in getting us to our destination. A car loses energy in:

Overcoming wind and rolling resistance. It takes a certain amount of energy to keep a car traveling at a constant speed. Modern automobiles are most efficient operating on a straight flat road at about 55 miles per hour with fully inflated tires and no cross winds. As we know from the window stickers on new cars, even this ideal highway mileage, which few drivers ever achieve, is not very good if you consider that all the energy is spent merely fighting resistance.

Braking. First you spend energy getting the car in motion. Then you convert that kinetic energy back into heat which the brakes dissipate into the environment. One of the efficiencies of electric trains and cars, and hybrids such as the Honda Insight, is that they convert kinetic energy back into electricity as they brake instead of simply throwing it away.

As Figure 3 shows, electric motors of the power required in transportation approach 95% efficiency. That figure is misleading, however, because it is only the last in a series of other, less efficient conversions required to bring electricity to the motor in the first place:

Energy to get the fuel to an electric generator

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Figure 3. Efficiency of converting electricity into motion with an electric motor.

Source: EURODEEM, European electric manufacturers’ consortium on improving efficiency.

Note: Automobile engines run in the range of 100 kW.

Conversion of fossil fuel (mostly) into electricity, with about 40% efficiency. GE2 is working on bringing that up to 55 or 60% in their next generation of power generation equipment.

Transmission of electricity to the point of use. Here the efficiency is quite high, about 95%3

At the end of the day, the cumulative efficiency of electric motors for vehicle propulsion is no better than equivalent to gasoline or diesel. It is, however, cleaner and quieter at the point of its ultimate use.

There are several initiatives, including one by Princeton University and British Petroleum, to find a way to immobilize part of the 3 to 4 billion tons of CO2 we generate each year in salt aquifers or the deep ocean. Whether or not this is feasible in the first place, it will certainly be easier if that CO2 can be captured at generation plants instead of at individual automobile tailpipes.

Electric power offers a major potential advantage in that it does not need to be generated from fossil fuels. Whatever its other drawbacks, nuclear power, which still accounts for about 20% of our power needs, does not contribute to global warming by producing greenhouse gases. It is much easier to generate electricity from renewable sources such as wind, geothermal energy and solar cells in fixed sites instead of on board a vehicle. Given the advantages of generating electric power elsewhere, the question of getting it into the vehicle becomes of high interest.

CAPTURING ELECTRIC POWER USING FUEL CELLS

Up until now electric cars have run on batteries. They are expensive, heavy, and don’t offer much range. Battery technology only improves incrementally. Relatively few people believe they offer a long-term solution. There has to be a lighter, more concentrated way to carry electric energy aboard a vehicle.

Hydrogen offers an alternative. Fuel cells convert hydrogen gas into electricity. The controlled chemical reaction they use to oxidize hydrogen gas into water is a much more efficient means of converting it into energy than exploding it or burning it with an open flame. Also, the electric energy that fuel cells produce is more useful for driving a machine than the heat that would be created by combustion. Using fuel cells and hydrogen, then is an alternative to using batteries in an electric vehicle.

Hydrogen is an unwieldy fuel to carry around. As the Hindenberg disaster demonstrated, it has a tendency to explode. Keeping it liquid requires ultra-low temperatures, but carrying it in gaseous form requires bigger tanks than are practical to design into cars. For these reasons most fuel cell technologies involve a two-step process. First there is a chemical process to generate hydrogen; then a second reaction using the hydrogen to generate electricity. The major variation among fuel cell systems involves techniques of reforming some kind of base fuel into hydrogen. Big ones can run as hot as 1800° F. Smaller systems, suitable for use in vehicles, operate at lower temperatures and are generally less efficient.

The fuel cells that are closest to being commercialized use conventional carbon-based fuels gaseous and liquid fuels. The process of reforming them to release hydrogen gas perforce creates some kind of carbon compounds, usually CO2, the most benign to release into the atmosphere.

On a gross scale, then today’s fuel cells have the same drawback as internal combustion engines. They add to the CO2 in the air. They do offer a few incremental improvements. They make more efficient use of the fuel, which means they release less CO2 per unit of energy. On top of that, the catalytic processes they use are inherently cleaner than combustion. Fuel cells generate significantly less of the really noxious gases like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.

Carbon is not essential to the operation of a fuel cell the way it is to internal combustion engines. It is only along for the ride, the most convenient means of freighting hydrogen atoms to their point of use. Carbon can be removed from the system when the technologies are developed to conveniently store pure hydrogen or when a better, preferably a reusable carrier is found.

The characteristics of an ideal hydrogen carrier are:

Physically, it needs to be rather light. If a vehicle is going to carry it around, it needs to be able to carry a fair amount of hydrogen per unit weight of carrier. It also needs to be in a form that is easy to work with.

2 http://www.gepower.com/de_de/abo_ge_pow/html/releases/19991207.html

3 http://cnwm.berkeley.edu/cnwm/reports/RE98-0002/

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Chemically, it would take little energy to bind it to and separate it from hydrogen gas. As an analogy, consider carbon dioxide and water. It takes little energy to dissolve CO2 in water (H2O) to form carbonic acid, and little energy is released getting it back into gaseous form. It is the fizz in your soft drink. It is the theory behind burying our excess CO2 in the ocean. Researchers need to find a compound that will accept and release H2 as readily as water accepts and releases CO2. That way the system can recharge the spent carrier with hydrogen instead of releasing it into the environment.

Chemically, it should not easily get clogged up or “poisoned” by elements other than hydrogen that ruin its ability to accept and hold hydrogen.

Environmentally, it cannot be too corrosive, toxic or otherwise unfriendly to humanity if it escapes due to a car crash or whatever.

Cost has to be within reason.

Experimenters are working today with metal hydrides, simple molecules made up of only metal and hydrogen. They satisfy the first criterion in that they generally carry a sufficient amount of hydrogen per unit of weight. The most commonly used of these, a magnesium-nickel alloy, is able to carry about 3% of its weight in hydrogen. 4

The other criteria are more of an issue. Hydrides can be “poisoned” by a number of contaminants. They can be explosive and corrosive. However, with many good minds working on the problem it is likely that they will find new compounds or work around the problems with existing ones at some point in the future.

As is often the case in technology, there is a leading-edge alternative that appears too good to be true -–and may be. Graphite Nanofibers are microscopic platelets of carbon that can be spaced so closely that there is room for hydrogen molecules but not oxygen or anything bigger between them. More than that, the platelets have something of an electrical charge that helps them hang onto the hydrogen. Once it is forced into the platelets, it will stay there without a great deal of pressure. One researcher projects that a one cubic foot fuel tank at 1000 pounds/square inch pressure (not that much; eight times the pressure in a bicycle tire) could hold enough fuel for 4000 miles. They claim this is about six times the amount that can be stored by a similar weight of metal hydrides.5 This is a roundabout endorsement of metal hydrides; by this math, they should be able to fuel a car up to 600 miles, which would be wonderful in itself.

Fuel cell systems are a natural complement to our electric grid. While electric generators are capable of putting out more or less the same amount of power around the clock, demand for electricity is highly cyclical, usually peaking in the afternoon. This fact is reflected in our electric bills; rates are set higher during peak hours to encourage homeowners to schedule.

Various schemes in the past have attempted to store the excess energy available at night for reuse during the day. One of the most obvious devices was to use cheap nighttime electricity to pump water uphill to a reservoir, then let it flow downhill during the day to generate more valuable peakload electricity.

If fuel cells ever become a major part of our energy system, the process of splitting water into oxygen to release into the air and hydrogen for storage as a fuel will demand a great deal of energy. It would make sense to draw that energy from the grid at night when there are fewer competing uses are low. The scheme adds more value than pumping water for two reasons. First, the process of reconverting hydrogen into electricity is very efficient, and secondly, hydrogen is transportable; it can be used to fuel vehicles.

Costs in changing modes of energy

Generate electricity from fossil fuels. See www.smart.com smart car discussion for the energy loss in generating electricity for trains.

4 See www.h2fc.com/materials.html for a comprehensive list of hydrides and their properties.

5 Dr. Terry Baker, Northeastern University. Interestingly, there are no new papers published since 1999. The only commercial company working in single-walled carbon nanotechnology, Carbon Nanotechnologies Incorporated, says there are mixed reviews and that they are not pursuing hydrogen storage.

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However a vehicle is powered, a significant amount of energy is lost in preparing and delivering the fuel. Only a small fraction of the energy potential of the crude fuel is actually turned into motion. Figure1 shows some of the network of paths between energy sources and vehicle motion. The percentage figures indicate how much energy makes it through from one state to the next. For example, about 81% of the energy content of crude oil is retained in refined motor fuel. Automobiles are between 20% and 40% efficient in turning fuel into energy.

The biggest loss occurs converting heat into mechanical motion. Conventional power plants use heat to drive dynamos. Internal combustion engines use heat to move pistons. Either way the process cannot exceed the theoretical limit set by a thermodynamic law call the Carnot ratio. It isn’t heat per se that does work, but pressures caused by differences in the amount of heat. A car’s piston moves down because there is more heat (and therefore expansion) above it than below it. Imagine exploding gasoline vapor both above and below the piston. You would get twice as much heat but no motion. And probably wreck the motor.

The maximum energy that can be drained out is the difference between the heat from fuel and the heat in the environment. The hotter your fire and the colder the environment, the more efficiently you can convert heat into mechanical motion. Expressed in Fahrenheit, the formula for the Carnot ratio is.

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Figure 1. Energy Losses in Mode Conversion

Substituting in some numbers, if the burn temperature is 500°F and the surrounding temperature is 50°F, the maximum possible efficiency is 47%. Raise the temperature to 1000°F and the maximum efficiency is 65%. Raise it to 8000°F, as in a nuclear reactor, and the process a) is very efficient but b) melts your furnace. In practice 40% efficiency has been a good number for electric generators of all types, with gasoline engines, because they are typically smaller and run cooler, somewhat less efficient.6

Generate hydrogen from electricity and water

Using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen is a very efficient process, about 98%7. Hydrogen is a wonderfully efficient fuel. Fuel cells can turn it directly into electricity. The problem is storing and transporting the stuff. ((more on this elsewhere).

BIOMASS – another green solution

6 Kordesch, K. and Simader, G. 1996. Fuel Cells and their Applications. VCH Publishers: New York, NY

7 Emergy, 162.

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Figure 2. Efficiency of motor types (from Kordesch and Simader, 1996)

Otto is the German name for standard four-stroke gasoline engines.

Alcohol has remained a marginal fuel despite the fact that policy makers have smiled on alcohol fuel programs since the energy crisis of 1973. The basic problems have been that:

Petroleum is cheaper to produce.

There are more profitable uses of farmland than growing crops for fuel.

Farming itself takes a lot of energy. Taking into account the energy used in fertilizers, farm operation and refining, the net energy gain is about 15%8. In other words, it takes the energy equivalent of 6 gallons of ethanol to produce 7.

Alcohol fuels also put CO2 into the environment. That contribution, however, simply offsets the CO2 absorbed by photosynthesis in growing the crops. Biomass fuel programs are “green” in the sense that they do not make a net contribution to the earth’s CO2 balance. With the right engineering in refineries and motors there is no reason they should augment the levels of other greenhouse gases either.

Ethanol fuel programs were generally corn-based. Corn has a very high yield per acre. It is easy to extract a concentrated form of energy from corn: simply ferment and distill it, like making moonshine. The product is good for motor fuel. As good as it is, however, the best part of the energy captured by photosynthesis is in the stalks and leaves. They generally get plowed under.

Biomass has a potential contribution to make in repairing mankind’s depredations of the planet through farming. Since we took the fertility out of the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of agriculture our style has been to exploit the land and move on. We chop down the trees, farm intensively until the topsoil is depleted, then look for new lands. Since we ran out of new land in the last century we have propped up old lands with fertilizers largely derived from petroleum or using energy from petroleum.

Plants can regenerate soil as well as deplete it. Since the farmers moved west, former farms in New England are once again covered in trees and deep topsoil. Farmers in the U.S. and Europe traditionally leave fields fallow and use crop rotation and other modern farming practices to restore the land.

An electric generator that burns trunks, roots, stalks, leaves, flowers and fruit can wring more energy out of biomass fuel than an alcohol program that only uses part of the organism. It burns at a high temperature, like a forest fire that consumes everything in its path. It uses the heat just like heat from burning petroleum or nuclear reactions, to make steam that drives turbines that drive generators.

Quantity, not quality, matters for plants that are going to be totally incinerated in generating electricity. It would be a waste to use high-value stuff like corn. In fact, the best approach would be to grow crops that take no irrigation, fertilizer or attention and are not too much trouble to harvest on otherwise useless land. Spent farmland or range land would be ideal.

Developing plants or shrubs that grow robustly under adverse conditions and improve the soil in doing so offers an interesting challenge for plant breeders and geneticists. Any such program is likely to develop gradually. The benefits do not appear to be so overwhelming that there is an immediate financial winner. The most leveraged investment would be in unproductive land that could immediately be turned to some profitable use growing fuel crops and might be improved over the course of years to the point that it could again serve as range or farm land.

NUCLEAR

There has always been a high level of irrationality surrounding all things nuclear. They range from irrational expectations of power “too cheap to meter” to irrational fears of nuclear war and nuclear poisoning such as that in Chernobyl. Irrational does not mean groundless. Of course there are risks associated with using nuclear power. Irrationality lies in the fact that we are unable or unwilling to measure the risks of nuclear against its rewards, or, given that mankind will continue to demand more and more energy, to make a rational comparison of the risks of deriving it from nuclear plants as opposed to other sources.

Raw nuclear fuel in the form of uranium is relatively abundant. The technologies to refine it for use in power generation plants are proven, as is the technology of the plants themselves. There has been scant improvement in the processes in the past quarter century, however, because of the growing political resistance to nuclear power programs throughout the world.

8 Emergy, Page 141

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The irrational fear of power plants themselves remains despite the fact that nuclear power generation has far and away the best safety and environmental record of any segment of the electric industry. Our irrational fear of nuclear waste means that they continue to accumulate in surface storage facilities near populated areas because we are scared to choose any long-term dump deep in the ground and far away from people.9

Australia and the United States are large countries vast areas of which are quite sparsely populated. Even they have been stymied by the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) political reaction as they attempt to designate a place for permanent storage of spent nuclear materials. It is human nature to accept the consequences of decisions we don’t make, such as deciding to stop depleting our oil reserves and pumping CO2 into the environment, rather than make a decision on a nuclear waste disposal site. While it is true that science cannot guarantee that deep disposal of wastes will not come back to haunt us in some way, an the risks are surely orders of magnitude more acceptable than those of global warming.

Since waste disposal is an international problem and there are no insurmountable problems associated with waste shipment, it would make sense to seek an international solution. Russia, which needs the money, could profit by establishing an international disposal site in part of its vast hinterland. It might choose a port on the Arctic Sea, ice-free for enough of the year to accept shipments of waste, frozen solid enough of the time to have no other economic value. Canada might be able to do the same on its northern islands. Lastly there is Antarctica, with no permanent inhabitants and owned jointly by the world community.

It would be naïve to assume that any international agreement on nuclear waste disposal will be arrived at easily. However, at the same time we are considering projects to dissolve billions of tons of CO2 in oceans and aquifers, would it be out of the question to examine look for a disposal site that would make nuclear energy a viable proposition?

Almost everything associated with nuclear energy must be done on a massive scale. The capital requirements to build a nuclear generator are huge. The machines are huge. Any disposal site will have to be huge. When the nuclear sector does revive it will favor huge companies like General Electric and Westinghouse. However, politics has rendered investment in nuclear technology such a disaster for so many years that it is unlikely it will turn around quickly.

The most leveraged plays in nuclear power may be in uranium mining. When and if new plants come to be built the value of fuel in the ground will grow. The privately owned U.S. Enrichment Corporation, successor to the government agencies that used to process nuclear fuel, and its Russian counterpart also stand to benefit. These agencies are decreasing their capacity as demand wanes. If the market reverses, they should enjoy a relatively long period of high margins until new capacity comes on line.

SOLAR CELLS

Electric generation is a huge business. The graphs in Figure 4 borrowed from the National Electric Reliability Commission (NERC), Peakload demand in the U.S. is around 700,000 Megawatts. In the short run there is no way to meet that kind of demand with renewable resources such as solar power. Just as a reality check, today’s solar panels generate about 12 watts per square foot. Enough solar panels to cover today’s peakload demand would be time and a half the size of Delaware.

STRUCTURE OF THE GRID

We speak as if there were a single, massive electrical grid spanning the country. Actually there is one on the East Coast and one on the West, with a third, semi-independent grid in Texas. The grids do not respect national boundaries, extending seamlessly into Canada and Mexico. About 5% of the power is lost to transformers and line resistance moving electricity over the grid. The farther it travels the greater the loss.

Generating plants throughout the grid contribute power and users throughout the grid draw it out. Just because the grids themselves are huge does not imply that all electricity in the grid travels long distances.

Traditional electric generators spin magnets within a wrapping of copper wire. The power to spin the turbines that spin the magnets may come from steam generated by burning oil, gas, or coal, or by heat thrown off by a nuclear reaction. Hydroelectric plants use water to spin the turbines.

9 http://www.nuke-energy.com

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Whatever the mechanism, traditional generators are typically huge. The markets for electricity are immense. Big machines lose less energy to friction and electrical resistance than small ones. Big nuclear and coal-powered plants are more efficient at converting fuel into steam. Big plants require fewer people to operate. It is not much more difficult to get a permit to build one huge plant than two smaller ones. Given that electricity is relatively cheap to transport over the grid, the bias in traditional electrical generating plants has been towards bigger plants.

The grid doesn’t care whether it gets its electricity from thousands of small generators or a handful of big ones. Power is power. In addition to large new generators coming online to meet our increasing electric needs, we can expect to see contributions to the grid from several smaller sources.

Most conventional generators use heat to create steam to drive turbines to spin generators. The process is only about 40% efficient; a lot of energy is lost in the form of waste heat. Industrial facilities that need heating plants in any case find it most economical to use the steam heat twice, first under high pressure to generate electricity, then under low pressure as a source of heat. Though the electric companies have at times resisted, regulations now generally allow cogenerators to sell their excess power to the grid.

Using waste materials such as sawdust and animal manure to fire cogeneration plants pays off threefold. It disposes of the waste and satisfies both heat and power requirements. This kind of cogeneration is considered a green source of power. It does not put any more CO2 into the atmosphere than was taken out by the biological processes that created its fuel.

Solar cells require considerable amount of area relative to the electricity they generate, so much that it would be wildly impractical to create solar farms dedicated to generating electricity. It is, however, becoming increasingly practical to cover the roofs and the sunny sides of buildings with solar cells. Most buildings can meet their own needs and contribute their excess to the grid, then draw from the grid when they need more than they can generate. Fortune has it that solar cells generate the most during the daylight hours when demand it at its peak.

Stationary Plant

Mobile Unit

Input Inter-mediate

Output Input Storage Conversion Drive

Conventional Car

Gasoline Gasoline Internal Combustion

Hybrid Car Gasoline Gasoline and Battery

Generator Electric

Electric car Generator feed

Electricity Electricity Battery Electric

Electric Train Generator feed

Electricity Electricity Electric

Fuel Cell Petroleum Petroleum Fuel Cell Electric

Fuel Cell Methanol Methanol Fuel Cell Electric

Fuel Cell Generator feed

Electricity Hydrogen-rich carrier

Hydrogen-rich carrier

Hydrogen-rich carrier

Fuel Cell Electric

Fuel Cell Generator feed

Electricity Hydrogen gas

Liquid Hydrogen gas

Metal Hydrates

Fuel Cell Electric

Hydrogen Generator feed

Electricity Hydrogen gas

Liquid Hydrogen

Liquid Hydrogen

Internal

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gas gas Combustion

Hydrogen Generator feed

Electricity Hydrogen gas

Liquid Hydrogen gas

Liquid Hydrogen gas

Turbine / Hybrid

26 Safety and Liability.doc.lnk

27 Expert agencies and think tanks.doc.lnk

28 Public policy.doc.lnk

Public policy

The transportation, energy and communications industries are highly regulated. They use public facilities in the form of roads, right-of-ways and bandwidth. There are cross-subsidies legislated into the financial structure of all three industries to serve significant social ends. In general, business subsidizes private use of both roads and communications.

Policy is set through a political process that tends to favor loud voices and vested interests. Vested interests generally favor the status quo. Carmakers, oil companies, and the former telephone monopolies are at least assured a hearing. So far they have been quite effective. Oil is relatively abundant and our expanding fleet of bigger and bigger vehicles thoroughly depends on it.

While the concepts in this book must ultimately succeed on their own merits, changes in policy can help them along.

1.1. Telematics

Driving with one hand while yakking on a cell phone is dangerous. Lawmakers and public opinion are already working on that problem. This trend should result in voice-activated phones that rest in a hands-free cradle. It will provide the basis of the platform that will be needed for peer-to-peer communications.

1.1.1.2. Legislate that hands-free harness identify the vehicle

It would be very useful if the cell phone in a car could identify the car, the driver and the location. It would mean conceding so much privacy that there is significant doubt whether it will ever happen.

The question is more in the realm of philosophy than technology. Relations between our liberal democratic governments and their citizens have a fairly long track record. Do they abuse the information they have about us? Would they abuse more if they had it? Ultimately, do we trust our governments enough to give them the ability to know our whereabouts?

The fact is that for years we have proven willing to concede privacy for convenience. We allow our names to be listed in the telephone book. We identify ourselves to grocery stores in exchange for their knowing who we are. We make purchases with credit cards. We lay our finances out completely for mortgage bankers. We almost encourage credit rating companies to collect information about us, and we give our landlords, employers and creditors the right to access it.

Our cell phones include a chip that uniquely identifies them to the cellular network. The phone periodically sends a signal to let the network know where it is, so the cellular network will know the tower through which it needs to route incoming calls. Just by recording the data it already has your cellular service provider could serve as a fairly effective “big brother.” Anyone else who wanted to invest the effort could probably also track us by our cell phones. It might not be worth the trouble though. It would require setting up a grid of radio antennas, and without the cooperation of the cellular carrier it is difficult to piece together what was being said on digital (as opposed to analog) circuits.

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The odds are that big brother won’t need to bother. Our cell phones will include GPS (global positioning system) circuitry simply for user convenience. GPS is capable of identifying the phone’s location to within a few feet, soon to be inches.10 Systems such as GM’s On*Star use GPS as the basis for providing their customers with roadside assistance, directions, and even help locating restaurants and gas stations.

Once our cell phones include GPS most of our privacy will be forfeit. The cellular company of course knows who the phone belongs to. They will be able to tell anybody who can compel them to do so where the phone is at any point in time. They may equally be compelled to allow wiretaps.

The question as far as transportation is concerned is the extent to which we can assume that there is no privacy to protect and build on that assumption to improve traffic movement. How much efficiency can we add to the transportation system if we can marry up the following bits of information:

Vehicle identity

Driver identity

Geographic Position

Destination

An automated smart car fleet will already need to know all except the destination. It will need positive confirmation of who the driver is for credit and insurance purposes . It will probably take two-factor security to make it work. The driver will need a smart card and/or cell phone and some sort of biometric recognition such as voice as well. Once the driver has been so well identified to the system, he might as well provide his destination and accept advice on the best way to get there.

A peer-to-peer system communications system would need to know about the vehicle but not the driver. It needs to know where it is to relate its position to an automated map. It needs to know its destination in order to tell the driver when to change lanes and when to turn. It needs to be able to describe the vehicle in referring to itself in communication with other cars, such as “Please merge after the gray Honda.” The only thing a peer-to-peer system does not necessarily care about is the identity of the driver.

The passenger does not have a car in a jitney system. The other three items of information, that is, identity, position and destination, are fundamental to efficient scheduling and routing.

1.1.1.3. Legislate drivers license reader in auto telematics. Licenses already are machine-readable (scannable)

There would be a number of law enforcement benefits to having a car recognize its driver. If the car would not start except for recognized drivers, it could cut down dramatically on auto theft. A car with a license reader could send the driver’s identity to police cruisers on demand, eliminating the need for an officer to engage in high speed chases or expose himself by approaching unknown suspects whom he had stopped. It is a public policy question as to whether having the car transmit the driver’s identity on demand is any different than having the driver show a license on demand.

There may come a point when everybody on the road needs to identify themselves. At the point when cars are required to carry active electronics for peer-to-peer communications, it would make sense to require automotive black boxes similar to those in airplanes that would allow forensic analysis of a car’s movements prior to an accident. The identity of the driver would be key.

The technological implementation of such the system will be simple compared to getting public opinion to allow it. Most drivers licenses are already designed for optical scanning. It would be just as easy to put a chip in them, or going a step further, to let something a person already has, such as a cell phone or a smart card, serve as a voucher for the driver’s license as well. The turning point will probably come when the convenience of letting the system know who is driving outweighs whatever interest there is in absolute anonymity.

10 See http://www.trimble.com/gps/howgps for an excellent description of how GPS works and why the inexpensive circuitry they put into a phone today may become more accurate over the years.

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There is certainly a balance to be struck between the knowledge available to the cellular carrier and whatever is made public. Public opinion will not stand for the government peeking in our bedroom windows, so to speak, by tracking our every action.

The GPS feature could be made switchable on and off

The identity of the driver in a peer-to-peer network would be confidential

1.2. Right of ways

Inertia will be sufficient to force a change in the way we use our highway rights of way. Right-of-way is only being acquired at about half the pace required to keep up with traffic growth.11 The legions of wetland, air quality, historical preservation, noise abatement and other special interest groups that oppose highway building continue to multiply.

Our demand for roadways, like our automobile mileage, has increased in a more or less linear fashion over the past half century. The case for new roads is based on projecting this historical growth linearly into the future. We know this is unrealistic; a shortage of fuel or global warming is bound to curtail traffic growth over the next two decades. A problem for planners is that they need some numbers to work from and there is no consensus behind any alternative projection. So they stick, willy-nilly, with their traditional methods for projecting traffic growth.

In light of our inability to forecast, the resistance to highway building is probably a lucky coincidence. It will force us to live for the most part with the transportation corridors we have already established. It means using them more efficiently, which in turn means that we need to have more occupants per vehicle and/or move some traffic from roadways to rails.

Bicycles

Public policy should encourage bicycles and pedestrians as a matter of public health and urban revitalization as well as to ease congestion. Being out in the open is a very human experience. People can enjoy the weather, talk to each other and take in the scenery. Open also means vulnerable. The presence of cyclists and pedestrians is a sign that the streets and neighborhoods are safe. The police have found that bicycle patrols link officers to the community in a way that riding in a cruiser cannot do. The same is true of the general public. The mere presence of large numbers of people is at once an indication of the safety of a place and a deterrent to crime.

1.2.3. Require sidewalks to be built as part of new development

We need sidewalks in our suburbs and places to walk to on those sidewalks. In the last half-century most builders assumed that the home buyers would drive everywhere. They fed the American dream of owning a large house with a double garage on a large lot on a wide street with no traffic. Even where there are sidewalks, so many streets end in cul-de-sacs or double back on themselves that you can’t easily walk through a neighborhood, and the small shops you would like to walk to are not there in the first place. Commerce has all moved to the mall.

Ideally, public policy should support our cultural yearning for community. It would foster sidewalks, local convenience stores, coffee houses, newsstands, bistros, taverns and the other small enterprises that define a neighborhood. If there is a way to do it, tax policy should favor businesses that bring in foot traffic. Their customers will cost the community less in roadway usage, pollution and public health costs.

1.3. Support of innovation

A century ago, when ridership was large and the systems could be profitable, most public transportation was privately owned. Over the past several decades it has evolved into a public service for people for whom driving is not an option. In big cities many patrons, especially on subways, are affluent. They find public transportation faster and don’t want the aggravation of driving and parking. The majority of passengers, especially on buses, remain people of modest means for whom driving would be too expensive.

11 See http://www.fhwa.dot.gov////////realestate/acqhist.pdf The amount spent by the Federal Government is more or less constant. It is not a good measure because it only supplements what the states spend. Administrators gave the 50% figure in a telephone call with the author.

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Public ownership can stifle innovation. Metropolitan transit authorities are public bodies that have to satisfy political constituencies. Public transit is one of the best-protected niches for union labor; public systems are not expected to show a profit and they don’t have competition. Drivers and mechanics are in a strong bargaining position vis-à-vis their political oversight boards.

Public policy needs to support private transportation services that want to integrate their operations with public transportation, or in some cases even compete with public transit. That would include jitney systems and rental adjuncts to light rail and subway systems.

Fare collection in most public transit systems amounts to collecting tokens, coins and bills or debiting the fare from a prepaid card. Credit billing would be an enormous step forward. It would allow middle-class passengers to pay for transit the same way they pay for their telephones, gasoline, cars and almost everything else, via a monthly bill. Credit billing would also give the transit system the opportunity to identify their passengers. It would provide a wealth of information about origin-to-destination travel patterns instead of simply the ridership on individual lines.

1.3.1. Support information integration between drivers license and credit info.

Although we have recently made some progress in cutting down, the many identification cards we carry wind up being both redundant and incomplete. Your driver’s license, social security card, ATM card and credit cards are redundant in that they all say who you are. They are incomplete in that they each carry a different fragment of the information you need to provide to different interested parties. Therefore:

The state wants to see a birth certificate before issuing you a driver’s license.

The passport office wants to see your driver’s license and a birth certificate before issuing you a passport.

The social security office wants to see a birth certificate before issuing you a social security card.

Your bank wants to see your driver’s license and a credit card before cashing a check.

Your neighborhood bartender wants to see your driver’s license and social security card before serving you a drink.

A car rental company wants to see a driver’s license and your credit card before renting you a car.

Immigration wants to see a passport or a driver’s license and some other form of identification as you drive into the U.S.

The driver’s license is the key piece of documentation we carry around. It is needed in almost every type of transaction because it is the only piece of identification that routinely carries a person’s photograph. The other kinds of identification, especially credit cards, only vouch for it.

Driver’s licenses, as any high school-aged drinker knows, can be faked. The holograms and other built-in defenses make it harder, but the equipment needed to make them is commercially available. A birth certificate, the major document one needs to get a driver’s license or passport, are even easier to fake. It is just a piece of paper.

The various state Departments of Motor Vehicles do not see providing identification as their primary mission. As their name implies, they are in the business of granting people permission to use the public highways.

As a matter of public policy it would make sense allow the state DMVs to collaborate with credit issuing and credit verification services. Many states’ driver’s licenses are already machine readable. Most merchants that take credit cards already verify them in real time. The process would be significantly smoother if:

Credit could be associated with the ID document itself. Credit account information could be encoded on a “smart card” drivers license or available through a database lookup of credit records associated with the ID. Many people have multiple credit accounts; they could specify different accounts for different purposes, or choose which account to use for a given purchase.

There were a uniform means of validating the ID. The picture itself is the major advantage the drivers license as identification. The bandwidth available to any business would make it possible for the online verification process to send a picture of the purchaser to a display screen at the point of sale. The sales clerk could immediately do a three-way comparison of the database picture, that on the drivers license, and the purchaser himself.

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This proposal would not put the state in the credit card business. It would merely formalize the industry practice of using drivers licenses to confirm credit sales by creating an electronic link between the drivers license document and credit records. The credit issuers would have to invest the same level of trust in this third party document, the drivers license, and accept the same risks that they currently do with their own cards.

During a changeover period it would become increasingly easy to make purchases by simply showing a drivers license instead of drivers license and credit card. The transition would be akin to the airline industry’s implementation of electronic ticketing, which also incidentally depends on drivers licenses for identification.

This is not a proposal that the state do anything beyond allowing business to pursue this path. It will simplify a number of transactions, most notably those in the rental car business.

1.3.2. Support integration of publicly-managed rapid transit and private auto rental businesses.

The wireless Internet is going to be an essential link between transit customers and other services, including other transit links. Many subway systems already support cellular telephones by providing antennas in their tunnels. Government can facilitate the integration of transit systems by making it a matter of public policy that cell phones be operable aboard all transit vehicles. A possible alternative would be to bluetooth-enable all vehicles, so commuters can link to a local network, and have a unified channel linking the vehicle with the Internet. At the present the cell phone alternative looks both simpler and more feasible.

1.4. Fuel taxation

The price of gasoline is a highly sensitive issue in every democratic country. Whether it costs $1.50/gal as in the United States or three times as much as in Europe, the cost structure is long established and is supported by a good many vested interests.

Raising taxes would be like eating spinach. Good in the long run because it would cut down on all the problems associated with using fossil fuels, but so unpalatable in the short run that it will be difficult to get through any legislature.

Government may be better able to change the way fuel taxes are spent. Of the 18.3¢ per gallon that the Federal Government now collects, 2¢ goes to rapid transit and 12¢ goes to the Highway Trust Fund, with the balance accounted as general revenue.

The Highway Trust Fund is used to reimburse states for part of the expense of building interstate highways. In practice it has been a classic pork-barrel, doling out money both to meet transportation needs and as political favors. Money in the Fund is dedicated to building and improving the same kinds of highways we have today in anticipation of more of the same kind of traffic we have today.

The public policy shift would be to recognize that roads and traffic cannot continue to grow as they are now. What, then, should be done with the fuel tax? We need to keep it; to cut it would only increase fuel consumption. The money could be channeled into research into new fuel technologies. That might be productive, but government money has a way of skewing incentives. There is already a great deal of good research underway. Probably the most useful application of such large sums would be to increase the allocation to rapid transit systems.

Foreign Policy

Given that the world of Islam was endowed with most of the world’s oil, as long as we depend on petroleum energy policy will be inextricably tied to foreign policy. It is only within the last century that most Islamic countries spun free of European colonialism.12 The lingering resentment is fanned by the Islamic press, religious fundamentalism and political demagogues. They sell us oil because they have no other source of income. For three decades at least they have resented and resisted our attempts to control the quantity they pump and the price they charge. Our fuel supplies would be much less secure if a radical government were to come to power in Arabia or the Emirates.

There is an Arab saying that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Being a frequent enemy of Russia, India and the U.S. certainly qualifies China as a friend of the Muslim world. China has close ties already with Pakistan and Iran. They would love to supplant the United States as a good friend and protector of the oil producing states. Our role

12 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”

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as protector may well be challenged in the next two decades as China’s growing military and political power make them a credible alternative.

China will become a huge market for oil. After their automobile fleet grew at a rate of 17% per year for 15 years they still had about one car per 120 inhabitants. If automobile usage ever approaches that of the West, their one country could easily soak up more than the entire world production of oil.

China has proven an obstreperous negotiator in international treaties. They have been tough to deal with in matters of intellectual property, arms control, arms exports, tariffs and other issues. They are not likely to succumb easily to international pressure to limit pollution or carbon dioxide emissions, or to curb their appetite for oil. Developing countries that want to resist international pressure on these issues are very likely to rally behind China. Most such counties are much less responsive to their people’s protests than Western countries. China might, for instance, find it quite acceptable to allow the oceans to rise, drowning Bangladesh and requiring Shanghai to retreat to higher ground, in exchange for industrial growth and political power. No Western country could make that trade-off.

Europe is far ahead of the United States on most environmental issues. By the time our government gets serious about global warming we will have exasperated our European partners, exacerbated the damage, and quite possibly squandered the opportunity to form a global consensus to deal with it. At this point it looks like a political solution will be a long time coming.

Technology may not be an adequate solution, but it could be the only available solution to the problem of global warming. Renewable energy sources must ultimately become the least expensive as we use up fossil fuels. The sooner we arrive at that position the healthier it will be for mankind.

1.5.1. Mandating a system of fully intelligent highways and vehicles.

The automobile industry likes to remind us that it employs directly or indirectly something like 6% of our work force. The energy industry is also a major employer. These vested interests are funding a lot of transportation research. It is no great surprise that many features of today’s transportation paradigm are usually taken as given:

We will depend primarily on personally owned vehicles for transportation.

These vehicles will have rubber tires and will travel over the existing system of roads, which we will continue to improve.

Petroleum will remain available at reasonable prices for a period of time sufficient to allow a changeover to other fuel sources. More experts believe that the alternate fuel source will be hydrogen than anything else.

Owners will be responsible for driving, fueling and maintaining their own vehicles.

The free market will be the primary determinant of vehicle design.

Proceeding from these assumptions, the automobile industry is devoting its research money to more efficient engines, new fuels, and improved conveniences such as in-car computers and communications.

Shell and British Petroleum are seeking new fuels for whatever vehicles we wind up driving. No doubt they would like to see the current system continue. Dealing with millions of individual cars and drivers is simply more profitable than selling to wholesale transportation providers like public transit. They do not have too much control, however, over how vehicles evolve. They are doing research and making investments in solar power, fuel cells, hydrogen fuels and the systems to deliver fuel to vehicles.

For investors, the biggest money is usually to be made in disruptive technologies13. The interesting question is what might disrupt the above assumptions. Here are a few observations:

Roadways cannot increase as fast as the demand for travel by personally-owned-vehicle. All over the world they are falling behind.

29 Social impact.doc.lnk

13 Clayton Christianson, “The Innovators Dilemma”

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30 Investment opportunities.doc.lnk

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