Political Cortex: Future Car: What will you be driving?

With oil in the $75 range, and poised to go higher at any moment (the current crisis extends into Iran? Rebels in Nigeria? A deepening chill with Venezuela? Russia gets tired of being talked to like a three year old? Mexico runs dry? Take your pick.), American automakers have responded by... designing new large SUVs. It's hard to blame them, when there's little evidence that American consumers have shown any willingness to drive around in vehicles occupying less than an acre of road space.
In fact, despite the rising costs of fuel, statistics out last week show that the average MPG grew from 21 MPG in 2005 to.... 21 MPG in 2006.
But if there's one sure thing, it's that it will get worse. As Jerome a Paris has detailed in his series of diaries, there's every evidence that the post-Katrina rise in oil prices is only a prelude to what's to come. There's little to no capacity for expansion on the production end of the pipe, and an ever greater demand sucking at the other end. You couldn't ask for a better formula for demonstrating the effects of supply and demand on prices. Forget "price gouging." That's only a distraction. Oil prices are going to go up, and there's next to nothing any president or congress can do to prevent it.
So... what then? Do we have to sit and take it on the chin? Just exactly what are the options? How will you get to work five years from now? How about ten?
Telephones, Trains, and Sprawl, etc.Before I get to the car stuff, let me say what this diary is not about: it's not about fixing sprawl. It's not about concentrating living areas near working areas, rezoning land use, or funneling people toward public transport. All those things are good, all those things are necessary, and all those things will have to happen if we're to survive. But all those things also have consequences that are hard to think through. The fact is that for at least the last sixty years, we have structured our society in ways that encouraged people to spread out. We've subsidized sprawl to the tune of trillions of dollars, and encouraged it with everything from education policies to popular culture.
Reversing the deleterious effects of sprawl is a project so costly, so complex, so daunting in scale, that it even a plan as detailed and wide-ranging as Energize America only lightly touches on the subject. Is fixing this problem essential to our long term survival? Absolutely. But wrapped up in this are pervasive issues ranging from the "frontier spirit" to good old American racism. I'm not going to solve it in this diary.
This diary is about cars and what makes them go.
Future FuelWhen people start discussing the future of transportation, the problem is generally boiled down to one of fuel. Gasoline? Diesel? Biodiesel? Ethanol? Hydrogen? Dilithium crystals? Each of these has been proposed (okay, maybe the dilithium proposal only shows up if you talk about cars at a Trek conventions), and each comes with its own list of pluses and minuses.
While wind energy, solar, and new forms of hydro all offer at least partial solutions to getting more power onto our electric grid, when it comes to cars, we're talking portable energy -- and that's a different breed of cat. Strapping a windmill on the roof of your car is not a good way to generate power (so you can stop that wind-powered Ford Fiesta conversion you were working on right now). To power a car, energy has to come in a form that's light enough and compact enough to reasonably be carried along.
Oil-based fuels, such as gasoline, fit that requirement well. With well over 100,000 BTUs stored in a single gallon, they do an admirable job of providing a lot of go in a small space. So admirable, that for a hundred years there have been few real efforts to look elsewhere for automotive power. Now that we're forced to face the looming end of the oil age, finding alternatives with the same mix of high power to volume is turning out to be a tougher nut than many might assume.
Here's a quick run down of things we might use to push metal down all those highways we've built.
The Portable Power Rainbow
Oil-Based
Oil - Biofuel Blends
Biofuels
Fuel / Electric Hybrids
Electric
Gasoline
E85
E100 (Ethanol)
Plug-in Hybrid
Batteries
Diesel
BioBlend
Biodiesel
Plug-in Diesel Hybrid
Hydrogen
Over in the red zone are the oil-based fuels we know and guzzle so much of today. You might also put natural gas in this category. It's not oil-based, but it is a fossil fuel with increasing demands biting into a limited supply, and there are a few vehicles designed to work on various forms of compressed gas. Note that this red zone includes all current hybrid cars, even my beloved Prius (which took a huge smack in this nose this week when an SUV shredded a tire and flung the steel-belted mess right at me).
In the slightly less oily yellow zone are the blended fuels, generally some mix of oil and either bio-diesel or ethanol. Light biofuel blends are spreading across the country. Those of you just encountering that "all grades contain at least 10% ethanol" sticker on your gas pumps might be interested to know that us hayseeds in the Midwest have faced that mix for the better part of a decade. We've already gone through all the goobers who were convinced that their precious mechanical pal could not run on anything less than 105% pure petrol. They were wrong. Of course, at the high end of this scale, where you find fuels like E85 (85% Ethanol) and bio-diesel mixes above 50%, you may have to steer clear. Many new vehicles can burn these fuels, but there are some problems. Notably, ethanol is a powerful solvent, so if you have plastic components in your fuel system, anything above E15 is a no-no. Biodiesel tends to gel at a higher temperature than its petroleum-based namesake, so those with diesel vehicles in northern climes may need to steer clear of high blends in cold weather (or put on a twin fuel system).
The pure bio green stripe finally sheds the oil pump altogether. Bio-diesel can from a number of sources, including cottonseed, rapeseed, and soybeans. Future sources may include various types of algae. In any case, if you have a diesel car, depending on the model, you can likely burn pure bio-diesel with little or no changes -- so long as you take care of that pesky cold weather issue (many areas that offer B100 switch to B20 in the winter). Ethanol is produced in the United States mostly from corn, though there is growing interest in cellulose-based ethanol. Most gasoline powered cars that are "flex-fuel" capable can also burn pure ethanol, but with only about 2/3 the BTU of gas and considerably different combustion characteristics, plus that pesky dissolving all the plastic bits aspect, filling your take with ethanol is definitely pushing the limits of your car's fuel-management computer if you're not approved for this stuff.
The hybrids occupying the light-blue band of the fuel rainbow are not those you can drive out of a dealer's showroom today. These are plug-in hybrids, able to get some of their power from the electrical grid. Typically, a plug in hybrid uses batteries on trips of up to 20 miles (on some prototypes, up to 50 miles), then uses fuel (either petroleum or bio-fuels) for longer hauls. There are kits available for modifying some existing models into plug-in hybrids (including a couple for the Prius), but the cost of these kits is currently above $10,000.
Finally, over in the indigo stripe are cars that draw all of their power from the electrical grid. They may store that power using various kinds of batteries, ultra-capacitors, fuel cells, or some mix of the above. They might also tackle the storage problem in some unexpected ways. Also shown in this band are cars powered by hydrogen. However, there are several places where hydrogen could come into play.
Okay, now that we know the options, let's investigate what advances can be hand from each "color" of solution.
Petroleum Products: Keep on Keepin' OnOne of the moves we can take is to simply keep burning what we've done, but to do it better. Current generation internal combustion engines are only about 30% efficient. That is, less than 1/3 of the energy in the fuel consumed is available to move the vehicle forward.