Sources of energy for transport between now and 2050

probe

The World Energy Council has recently released a report on various transportation energy technologies and scenarios between now and 2050. The people behind the report seem to be mainly from the legacy automotive industry. When one considers that Mercedes Benz has announced a fuel cell version of their B Class is going into production in 2010 – it is difficult to believe that it will take as long as this report suggests before hydrogen gains real traction in the marketplace. (Aside from companies wanting to keep their cards close to their chest in terms of their progress in hydrogen energy systems – one wouldn’t be surprised if a number of well financed new technology startups don’t emerge with no internal combustion engine legacy in Europe, Asia or elsewhere in the world, over the next few years).

The report brings together some interesting information on the relative efficiencies of various liquid energy carriers. Europe has the most efficient car fleet with an average consumption of 6.6 l/100km. Average consumption in Africa, North America (the new Third World member?) and China is closer to 10 l/100km.

http://www.worldenergy.org/documents/transportation_study_final_online.pdf
(144 pages)

(executive summary: http://www.worldenergy.org/documents/transportation_study_executive_summary_online_version.pdf)

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carveone

probe wrote:

The World Energy Council has recently released a report on various transportation energy technologies and scenarios between now and 2050.

Just a personal opinion but I'm beginning to believe that there will be no magic energy supply that will preserve private car transport beyond 2015. Correction, affordable car transport. Oil will exist of course, but how much of it will be exported to edge ecomonies like ours remains to be seen.

England now exports only a fraction of its North sea oil finds (10% drop per year since 2001). I think most people are missing this - the oil production graph is flat at 80 million barrels per day or whatever it is, but the oil export availability graph shows a marked decline as the oil exporting nations start using more of their own oil reserves.

My prediction for 2050? The horse

Europe has the most efficient car fleet with an average consumption of 6.6 l/100km. Average consumption in Africa, North America (the new Third World member?) and China is closer to 10 l/100km.

Sounds about right. My car in Canada was 10/100km and here (when I owned a car) was about half that. Engine capacity is half too (1.1l vs 2.2l)!

Conor.

carveone

Another plus for the horse: You could be absolutely legless and still legally drive home.

Capt'n Midnight

carveone wrote:

Another plus for the horse: You could be absolutely legless and still legally drive home.

no you wouldn't , a good horse or donkey has a built in autopilot

Seriously, bicycles can beat horses if you have good roads. That's what happened back in the 1880's. Horses are like steam turbines, if you don't use them all the time they arren't as efficient as you still have to provide fuel off peak, so they aren't useful for commutes and as for keeping them in a city.

maniac101

In fairness, it's been the Japanese, and not the Europeans, who've made the most progress in developing regenerative braking systems in hybrid vehicles, where the kinetic energy of the car is stored as electric energy on braking, and is then used to drive an electric motor.

carveone wrote:

Another plus for the horse: You could be absolutely legless and still legally drive home.

Don't bet on it! I was once breathalysed on a bicycle!

Capt'n Midnight

maniac101 wrote:

In fairness, it's been the Japanese, and not the Europeans, who've made the most progress in developing regenerative braking systems in hybrid vehicles, where the kinetic energy of the car is stored as electric energy on braking, and is then used to drive an electric motor.

The old battery charging regenerative braking isn't all it's cracked up to be. On the DART it's fine because its used directly by other trains. But when you have to recharge a battery it's not so good , as there are losses on converting from electrical to chemical and back again - these can easily be 60% and that's not including the electrical losses.

Regenerative braking is great for saving brake blocks and since the braking effect is speed dependent you automatically have ABS. but if you want to conserve the energy best to use a flywheel or perhaps compress air. since it's easy to design a motor that also works as a generator and you already have a battery it's a no brainer to dpo that to recover SOME of the energy when you brake. whether a better system would be worth the weight is another matter.

silverharp

i'm not sure about hydrogen as a solution, I remember hearing something that if every car was powered this way then something like 10% of the traffic would hydrogen delivery trucks

my guess is that society has had a free ride off cheap fossil fuels, people will just have to lower their expectations so I guess there will be a general shift back to public transport. commuting times would improve as well

probe

silverharp wrote:

i'm not sure about hydrogen as a solution, I remember hearing something that if every car was powered this way then something like 10% of the traffic would hydrogen delivery trucks

my guess is that society has had a free ride off cheap fossil fuels, people will just have to lower their expectations so I guess there will be a general shift back to public transport. commuting times would improve as well

Hydrogen will more than likely be created at the filling stations from electricity and water by electrolysis. There will be no requirement for tankers to transport same. In any event if hydrogen was to be centrally manufactured it would probably be compressed into tablet form. See the news item below.

.probe

Danish Researchers Reveal New Hydrogen Storage Technology

Science Daily — Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented atechnology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy:a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

With the new hydrogen tablet, it becomes much simpler to use the environmentally-friendly energy of hydrogen. Hydrogen is anon-polluting fuel, but since it is a light gas it occupies too muchvolume, and it is flammable. Consequently, effective and safe storageof hydrogen has challenged researchers world-wide for almost threedecades. At the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, aninterdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet which enablesstorage and transport of hydrogen in solid form.

"Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normalpressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. Withour technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normalgasoline tank", says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department ofChemistry at DTU.

The hydrogen tablet is safe and inexpensive. In this respect it isdifferent from most other hydrogen storage technologies. You canliterally carry the material in your pocket without any kind of safetyprecaution. The reason is that the tablet consists solely of ammoniaabsorbed efficiently in sea-salt. Ammonia is produced by a combinationof hydrogen with nitrogen from the surrounding air, and the DTU-tablettherefore contains large amounts of hydrogen. Within the tablet,hydrogen is stored as long as desired, and when hydrogen is needed,ammonia is released through a catalyst that decomposes it back to freehydrogen. When the tablet is empty, you merely give it a "shot" ofammonia and it is ready for use again.

"The technology is a step towards making the society independent offossil fuels" says Professor Jens Nørskov, director of theNanotechnology Center at DTU. He, Claus Hviid Christensen, TueJohannessen, Ulrich Quaade and Rasmus Zink Sørensen are the fiveresearchers behind the invention. The advantages of using hydrogen arenumerous. It is CO2-free, and it can be produced by renewable energysources, e.g. wind power.

"We have a new solution to one of the major obstacles to the use ofhydrogen as a fuel. And we need new energy technologies oil and gaswill not last, and without energy, there is no modern society", saysJens Nørskov.

Together with DTU and SeeD Capital Denmark, the researchers havefounded the company Amminex A/S, which will focus on the furtherdevelopment and commercialization of the technology.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050907102549.htm

silverharp

probe wrote:

Danish Researchers Reveal New Hydrogen Storage Technology

Science Daily — Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented atechnology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy:a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

interesting, it is a 2005 article, any updates on this?

probe

silverharp wrote:

interesting, it is a 2005 article, any updates on this?

Watch this space: www.amminex.net

[They raised €7 in venture capital for the project in September 2007.

http://www.amminex.net/images/stories/pdf/amminex%20press%20release%20sep-07.pdf ]

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carveone

maniac101 wrote:

Originally Posted by carveone
Another plus for the horse: You could be absolutely legless and still legally drive home.

Don't bet on it! I was once breathalysed on a bicycle!

Just me being silly :rolleyes: I was remembering the old Irish story about the town drunk who would fall into the cart and the horse would bring him home. Then some smart lads took the cart apart and put it back together inside his house along with the horse. And he never drank again etc etc

So town drunks can look forward to cars going away and being able to fall into their cart!

Ahem,

Conor.