Fuel of the Future

Intro

Hi! I’m Dave, and this is episode 2 of the Podcast of the Future!

We as Humans are funny creatures. Sure, well walk in a pinch, or from one room to the next, or in circles while talking on the phone, but when possible, we like to find faster more efficient, and more fun ways of getting from A to B. People got tired of the early morning jog somewhere around 3000 and 5000 BC, when we hopped on the nearest thing big enough to hold us, and called it a horse. Horses became so important to how we move around, that horsepower is to this day, how we measure how well we do it. We Invented the wheel around 3500 BC, but used them for pottery for about 300 hundred years before we stuck them on a chariot, and 5200 years before the invention of spinning rims.

These days, electric vehicles are more and more becoming the norm, and replacing fossil fuel vehicles, but when automobiles first came around, It was steam that made the first move. The “machine à feu pour le transport de wagons et surtout de l’artillerie” (“fire engine for transporting wagons and especially artillery”) Was made by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769 for the french army. In 1832, a very basic electric carriage was invented by Scottish inventor Robert Anderson, with a more practical American version of the vehicle(though it was a locomotive) coming out in 1835 from Thomas Davenport. An electric vehicle with rechargeable batteries coming from France in 1859, and improved in 1881, the Amazingly German “Flocken Electrowagen” in 1888 and finally the first commercially successful electric vehicle in Des Moines in 1891. As far as gas vehicles, the earliest ones used gaseous gasses in early experements in 1806. In 1886, Karl Benz(the progenitor of the Mercedes-Benz brand) created the first production vehicle, and the ones most common today, The first gas four-stroke, was built in Germany in 1876, and became mechanically similar to what they are today by 1890.

By the 1920’s Gasoline cars became the way to go due to a few factors. First and foremost, is energy portability. We’ve only recently gotten batteries to a point of usefulness for our cars, and not everywhere even had electricity. Once we could make gas, we could make a lot of it, and ship it wherever we wanted it to go. We struck oil in Texas in 1901, so the cost of gas went down dramatically, steam was better for long trips at a steady speed, like a train, and there wasn’t an infrastructure or good enough battery technology to keep up with the energy storage of a gas tank. Plus, in 1911, the electric starter was invented, replacing the Crank starter. So the era of trying to start your car, and snapping your wrist like a glow stick was coming to an end.

In recent years however, Electric cars have been making a comeback. Since 2008 when the Tesla Roadster first came out, more and more countries and companies have embraced the idea of feeding their cars lightning. In 2016 alone, over seven hundred thousand cars were sold, mainly in China, Europe, and the US. So, thats how we got from where we started to where we are. W here do we go from here?

Power sources

Before I get into where these cars are getting their energy, the first thing we need to do, is talk about is the motor. There are really two basic types of motors that are gonna move your car. electric motors, and combustion engines. Electric engines convert electrical energy to mechanical energy directly, which is similar to how a battery powered drill works. Combustion engines convert chemical energy to mechanical energy. Most of you who have combustion engines, are internal combustion engines, which means the energy from the (for example) gas, exploding, is directly moving a part of the engine. Usually this is a piston, but can also be a turbine, a rotor, or a nozzle. An external combustion engine is like a steam engine. The fire is on the outside, heating the working fluid (usually water, air or hydraulic fluid).

Electric

Lets start with electric motors. There’s not a lot of improvement to be done to the motor itself. While Electric Vehicles or EV’s for short, can move energy from the grid to the wheels at about 60% efficiency, the motor alone works at about 90%, losing the rest of to heat. So the question is, if were driving an EV, How are we going to power it?

Hydrogen

One already common in some places is the hydrogen fuel cell. The way those work is pretty straight forward. Follow me here: Water has less total energy than the hydrogen and oxygen that make it up. When making hydrogen, you put energy into water, and that separates it from the oxygen. SO, when you make it back in to water, you get that energy back. When the Hydrogen combines with oxygen, some electricity is released, and absorbed by the fuel cell. Even though they haven’t gotten as much press as battery powered EV’s, they certainly have some advantages. One of the biggest is our old friend, energy portability. Batteries are advancing very quickly, but as of right now, Hydrogen Fuel Cells, or HFC’s have it beat in a few different ways. First, charging time. Even at a Supercharger, in 30 minutes of charging, you only get 170 miles of charge into a battery, when it takes 3-4 minutes to get 300 miles in an HFC. You can make as much hydrogen as you can store, without having to dig holes in the ground to find it. There’s even the development of the home hydrogen fuel station earlier this year, which works off your homes power grid. It can make a liter of fuel in 15 minutes, and store it at the high pressures needed for HFC’s While its not wide spread, a few places have already been working on one of the biggest problems HFC’s face, infrastructure. Infrastructure is kind of a chicken and egg issue. Manufacturers wont develop technology that there’s nowhere to use, and governments don’t want to invest in infrastructure that there’s no consumer for. California, and Iceland have been tackling this issue. Good ol’ Cali founded the California Fuel Cell Partnership in 1999, and has helped set up 32 stations in that state alone. That might not seem like much, but it makes it possible to own, and therefore BUY an HFC vehicle. Iceland Has been doing a similar thing. See, Iceland had a TON of hydropower and geothermal energy, and REALLY takes advantage of it. Nearly 100% of their energy has come from renewable forms, with fossil fuel providing the rest. To fix this last bit, in 1999 They established Iceland New Energy to turn Iceland into the first hydrogen society by 2050. Its a small island with about a third of a million people, and over half of them in the capital city. Its an amazing testing ground for a technology like this, since you cant really drive somewhere that ISN’T using Hydrogen. There are problems though. Hydrogen is dangerous. Its explosive, and the flames that burn are near invisible. Not to mention its stored at extremely high pressures. Next is cost. While an average gas car costs 15 cents per mile, HFC vehicles cost about 33 cents for the same distance. The other big issue is efficiency. Sure, Its better than what we have now, and better than current battery technology, but many aren’t convinced HFC technology can go much further, while batteries are evolving in leaps and bounds. Once they overtake hydrogen in energy density, and charge time, putting more steps between an energy source and your wheels seems, to quote Elon Musk, “Extremely silly.”

Batteries

The other option, making leaps and strides since their invention in 1859, is rechargeable batteries. Unlike the Lead acid we started with, the most common is lithium-ion, in Electric Vehicles today. About 95% of Battery charging in EV’s is done at home, but there is a pretty amazing infrastructure already in place for it. There are 50,000 charging stations in the US alone. The reasons for the ease of setting this up is that an electrical power grid is already there, You get tax credits for buying them, and most importantly, you can set them up anywhere. Electricity isn’t under pressure, or explosive. You don’t need to dig up the ground to store dangerous chemicals, and zoneing isn’t really an issue. You can put them outside your store, or in a parking structure. You can put them in a house, you can put them with a mouse, you can put them here or there, you can put them anywhere! Now at the moment, there are a few types of chargers, Ranging from plugging your car into a regular outlet like you would charge your phone on for 2.25 miles per 30 minutes, to 170 miles with a Tesla supercharger in the same time. That does se em like a lot, but if you have a normal commute, and can plug your car in overnight (something I realize isnt an option for everyone) then in 8 hours, you’ve recharged 36 miles, just with your home plug. If you invest in a better charger which generally start at a grand? That can easily turn into 22 miles per hour. You might say to me, wont that make my electric bill go up? Yeah, because that’s how bills work, BUT, average gasoline cars cost you 15 cents per mile, while EV’s cost you between .04 and .07 cents depending on your electricity rates. So where are we going from here?

There’s a lot of categories that Batteries are being improved

Energy Density, size and weight, battery life, charge time, and cost: There are a few different directions were going with this. IBM is working on Lithium-air batteries. This would lead to a huge increase in energy density, and a possible 500 mile range. This would allow the Proclaimers to Drive 500 miles, recharge, and drive 500 more! It can last so much longer because the ions react with oxygen in the air instead of the electrolyte in the battery. This is likely to become commercial in 2020, if they can overcome some engineering problems. But! I’m willing to bet very few of you know the name John B. Goodenough. This 94 year old was to co-inventor of the Lithium-ion battery that has made our lives wonderful and internet filled. He took a look a look at his previous breakthrough, and said PASHA with all that lithium! Sodium is the Alkali metal of the future! He and another physicist, Maria Helena Braga came up with something new. Its called a Glass battery, and not only has triple the capacity of Lithium-ion batteries, it also has the potential to drastically reduce the cost, since Sodium is so incredibly abundant. Plus, the charge time is reduced from hours to minutes. Plus, *What theres more? You bet there is!* Since its a solid electrolyte, instead of a liquid one, its much safer, and less prone to shorting. That is a whole lot of improvement, Goodenough himself says its, “safe, low-cost, all-solid-state cell with a huge capacity giving a large energy density and a long cycle life suitable for powering an all-electric road vehicle or for storing electric power from wind or solar energy.” and if he says so, thats John B. Goodenough for me……sorry.

Solar

But what if we cut out the middle man, altogether? With the exception of Nuclear, geothermal, and tidal, basically every other every other energy source comes from the sun in one way or another. Coal, oil, and natural gas is really just plant matter, which is old stored solar energy, wind is the movement of air from one place to another due to uneven temperature caused by the sun. What if we got the energy from the sun directly? We first moved a toy car with the sun in 1955, and made a drivable one in 1958. Since then, we’ve kept making them, but mostly for engineering projects and specialty races like the biennial World Solar Challenge. A 3000 km race through the Australian outback. Some amazing solar powered vehicles are showcased here, but they’re all very flat and wide, and impractical for everyday use. HOWEVER, at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Ford showed off its C-Max Solar Energi concept. Its basically its C-max Energi(a plug-in EV) but with a solar panel array on the roof. Thats not a lot of surface area, but they also have an acrylic cover what works as a lens to concentrate the solar energy 8 times what it would be alone. The major issue right now, is that solar panels aren’t very efficient, and are expensive. 50 years from now? Maaaaaybe!

Bio Fuels

The other side of the commuting coin is the internal combustion engine.

Biofuels are being developed right now and for good reason. Its going to take a while for the cars on the road to be replaced with green alternatives. What if we were able to grow fuels from the ground, or snatch them from the air? We already use Ethanol, that we get from corn, but thats what we have now. What are we working on? And is it better?

Who out there owns a pool? Ever not clean it for a while? That green grossness is algae, and scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Labratory have been able to use pressure cooking to turn it into crude oil in 30 minutes. 30 MINTUES! To get from Aquamans front lawn to black gold! Its basically how the earth does it, but faster. Heres how it works, and also gets better. Algae takes sunlight and CO2, and turn into energy in the form of oil. If you take that oil and refine it? Then you have fuel, and while this needs to be refined in special bio-refineries, soon they’ll be able to use the regular fossil fuel kind. PLUS! With our ability to manipulate genes in plants(which well get to in a future episode) we could make algae that’s WAY better at making oils.

Another idea for a home made carbon neutral fuel comes from an Audi partner Sunfire. The important part of combustion fuel is an organic molecule made of hydrogen, and carbon, called a hydrocarbon, and Sunfire has been working on utilizing some hydrogen and carbon hiding in plain sight. Water and Air. Water is Hydrogen and Oxygen, and there certainly is a lot of carbon in the air lately. Also, this “e-diesel” as its been dubbed, contains no sulphur or other contaminates, so the engine runs quieter and cleaner. All of this is is produced by green energy in 3 steps. Superheat the steam to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, create “blue crude” by pressure cooking the hydrogen and carbon at 800 Celsius, lastly, some good old fashion refining. This is so good, you don’t even need special vehicles to use it. You can mix it with regular diesel, or use it all on its own. Sunfire is already making thousands of liters of the e diesel, and its aiming to sell it for just over a euro per liter. Carbon neutral, made from green energy, and the only byproduct of its creation is oxygen.

Steam

Theres one other power source that needs to be talked about, and I want you to bear with me here. I’m talking about the unlikely contender, the dark horse, the main byproduct of cooing pasta!….Steam! Wait, what? Steam? The next big thing might be angry water? Well….PROBABLY not, but check this out. Back in 1907, The Stanley Rocket held the land speed record at 127 miles per hour. This was in the year we figured out Typhoid Mary might be the cause of all those typhoid cases, and steam was already doing almost double the interstate speed limit. In 2009, a British team was able to make a steam powered vehicle go at 148 miles per hour, and BEING that they’re British, likely made it into a lovely afternoon tea. Another Company named Cyclone, Claims to have made a steam engine system that’s twice as efficient as your regular gas car(turning 46 percent of the generated energy into torque instead of 25 percent from a gas engine), and is able to use anything burnable as fuel. It does this by burning the fuel in a centrifuge, causing more to be burned then would otherwise. ALSO, The steam is kept at a high enough pressure that keeps the super-heated water in a liquid state until it actually gets to the piston, where it expands, and pushes the piston down. Keeping the water in a liquid state, also eliminates the need for other lubricants, so no oil changes! Though its not commercially available yet, in 2008, he signed a deal to develop engines for lawnmowers and garden equipment. Back in 2008, Harry Shoell, who invented the Cyclone steam engine, Gave an 8 year development time, so we MIGHT start hearing about the Cyclone Steam mower, any day now!

Speculation

Knowing what we know now, How are we gonna cruse around in the next stage of technology? What fuel will we choose? Will it effect the Mad Max Franchise? Over the past century, several options competed, and only one persisted. In the future, It very well might go the other way. Because of the different applications, and simplicity of some of the infrastructure involved, different applications might use different fuels. Its likely for city areas that fossil fuels might be heavily discouraged or restricted, with the possible exception of emergency vehicles. Solar vehicles are unlikely to catch on where tall buildings are popular, but wireless recharging could make plugging in electric vehicles rare, and large cities like Manhattan and Las Vegas would be able to implement a wireless charging infrastructure somewhat easily. Rural areas where often farms are miles apart, energy portability is still key, might stick with bio diesel to hold on to older vehicles, or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, especially if they can be home brewed. If EV’s are popular in those areas, it’ll be when solar panels are efficient enough to not leave you stranded. Suburban areas are likely to have a mix of available energies, as they’re generally in proximity to both urban and rural areas. The suburbs are also most likely to try solar first. Hybrid solar/plug in vehicles would thrive in suburban areas, where chargers are plentiful, but people still want to go as long as possible between charges. It wont be enough to NEVER charge for most people, but its sunny enough to make a difference. PLUS, an MIT startup called Ubiquitous Energy Is working on transparent solar cells. Every window on your car, and maybe every surface, might be sucking up that sweet sweet sunlight. And lastly, but not leastly, if we play our cards right, we might be lucky enough to live in a future with steam powered lawnmowers and chainsaws.

Outro

Thanks for listening to The Podcast of the Future. Be sure to rate and Subscribe. Follow me on twitter @podcastoffuture, for more fun, and updates. For sources, and to learn more go to Podcastofthefuture.com. Next episode, we keep talking about cars. What will they be made of, and how smart will they REALLY be? See you Next time, on the Podcast of the Future!

Sources

Hydrogen Fuel Cells

https://energy.gov/eere/articles/5-things-know-when-filling-your-fuel-cell-electric-vehicle

https://www.yahoo.com/news/simplefuel-home-hydrogen-fuel-dispenser-wins-1-million-143000192.html

http://cafcp.org/

https://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html

http://newenergy.is/en/aboutine/

http://cafcp.org/stationmap

https://thinkprogress.org/elon-musk-is-right-hydrogen-is-an-incredibly-dumb-car-fuel-d0f37a4c9bee

https://www.cars.com/articles/fill-er-up-refueling-the-2016-toyota-mirai-1420690448036/

Batteries

https://evobsession.com/electric-car-charging-101-types-of-charging-apps-more/

https://pluginamerica.org/understanding-electric-vehicle-charging/

https://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html

https://www.cars.com/articles/2013/11/how-quickly-does-the-tesla-model-s-battery-charge/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/super-safe-glass-battery-charges-in-minutes-not-hours/

https://www.pluglesspower.com/

Steam

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/148416-are-steam-cars-poised-for-an-epic-comeback

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/steam-powered-car1.htm

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-05/steam-under-hood#page-2

Biofuel

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/12/23/green-oil-scientists-turn-algae-into-petroleum-in-30-minutes/#2342f2e95689

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/28/technology/audi-diesel-air-water/

Solar

http://www.caranddriver.com/news/ford-c-max-solar-energi-concept-photos-and-info-auto-shows

https://www.worldsolarchallenge.org/

http://www.automostory.com/first-solar-car.htm

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188667-a-fully-transparent-solar-cell-that-could-make-every-window-and-screen-a-power-source