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With F1 aiming to be running e-fuels and thus keeping their ICEs and from going full electric, will we see other motorsports go the same route and save the glorious sounds of ICEs? Could e-fuels feed into mainstream and topple electric eventually, or would there be supply issues on such a large scale? I really want to continue to hear exhaust sounds!
E-Fuels definitely improve the environmental credentials of ICE engines significantly but the challenge then becomes the sustainable manufacture of the fuels. If that is cracked then it could be an option. Battery EV's cannot be the answer. Batteries are not sustainable or environmentally friendly and just shift the damage done to the environment from the end user to the supply and manufacturing chain and end of life processing and disposition of the used batteries. That whole process could be cleaned up significantly of course but you're still dealing with some unpleasant elements and processes.
I still have high hopes for hydrogen. Seems like a perfect accompaniment to wind and solar power where you can utilise excess energy generated on very sunny and windy days into Hydrogen which then goes to generate power or become a fuel for cars. Not the most efficient process in terms of percentage of energy converted to motive power, but if you've got an abundance of solar and wind energy then so what. It's no less efficient that petrol and diesel.
As for exhaust sounds...well they can be manufactured. they are effectively manufactured in current ICE cars. the sound of engines strangled by turbo's, catalytic converters and other restrictions compromising their design means alot of effort is made to 'tune' the exhaust systems to manufacture a certain sound and create silly pops and bangs on down shifts. So if we're happy with manufactured sounds on ICE cars then why not just pipe exhaust sounds through the speakers of an EV? you could choose the car sound you like off the big silly iPad on the dash board and enjoy.
Could e-fuels feed into mainstream and topple electric eventually,
No. For personal transportation - cars, small vans - electric has won. All the alternatives (synthetic fuels, hydrogen) are much, much more expensive. Electricity -> hydrogen -> synthetic fuel -> ICE -> movement is horribly inefficient. Compare it to electricity -> movement, or even electricity -> battery storage -> movement.
I still have high hopes for hydrogen. Seems like a perfect accompaniment to wind and solar power where you can utilise excess energy generated on very sunny and windy days into Hydrogen which then goes to generate power or become a fuel for cars.
There are some huge hydrogen projects being developed in different regions of the UK. They are going to bundle in CO2 sequestration, fuel, albeit for larger vehicles like trains and even power generation. You're hopes will almost certainly be realised.
I've always thought you could see hydrogen as a battery replacement technology. Ultimately it uses electricity to do I've the wheels so all the electric car drive chain development is still valid.
Batteries are not sustainable or environmentally friendly and just shift the damage done to the environment from the end user to the supply and manufacturing chain and end of life processing and disposition of the used batteries.
I hear this argument quite frequently but I've not been able to find any evidence to support it.
Batteries might be far from perfect, but they're a lot better than current ICE technology in reducing carbon emissions and eliminating local NOx emissions which are so damaging to health.
Even if you could produce e-Fuels in quantities for road cars in an environmentally sustainable way you'd still be left with the pollution caused by burning it in cars which would by that time be more expensive to make, maintain and of lower performance than their battery electric counterparts, it's like saying we'd still have steam trains if we had e-coal.
Hydrogen is dead for road cars purely on the economics for all the same reasons, Scania have even stated that battery is the way forward for their trucks.
the challenge then becomes the sustainable manufacture of the fuels
Aviation and the military will always require some sort of chemical fuel for the energy density and range. Whether it's more efficient to use a fuel cell and electric motors or burn it in an ICE is another question. Alcohol and vegetable oil are the obvious fuels to use as the basis of ICE fuels. Problem is, they are mostly made from stuff that can be used for food so they will end up pushing up food prices and causing pressure for more clearing of forests for farming.
I gather that hydrogen is quite tricky to work with, much trickier than natural gas, so the idea that existing infrastructure can just be switched to hydrogen is probably a bit simplistic. Then, you need a renewable source for the hydrogen, probably involving using solar or wind generated electricity. There will be conversion losses at each step, so it's not obvious that this will really be better than batteries for most purposes. Battery production is ramping up a lot now, so recycling will become much more attractive now that there are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of them to work with.
My prediction is that ICEs will tend to become a niche thing for things like military and aviation use and batteries will replace them for normal vehicles. Also, the world is urbanizing fairly steadily, so most people don't need to own a personal vehicle. Autonomous vehicles will cut a major cost of taxis, so I think that most people living in cities will use public transport and rent a vehicle for hauling heavy stuff.
To me a desire to "save the internal combustion engine" is slightly troubling - hanging on to the past where we should just be aiming for the most environmentally sound methods of transport. But the noise is also linked to the quantity of stuff being burned/emitted. If that's fossil fuel-based it's the worst of all worlds but when it moves to low carbon it's still a relatovely inefficient method of converting energy into motion, compared with the alternatives. I think the affection for exhaust noise is going to become a nostalgic one soon, with its place being a bit like that of racing classic cars.
Rather like in electricity generation though, I suspect the answer will be somewhat "horses for courses" and a mix of BEVs, hydrogen, biofuels etc, alongside a drive for reduction (public transport, infrastructure, cycling, where we build etc etc.). In electricity generation, pretty much regardless of how many wind turbines we build, we still have a need to reduce our consumption.
As for the environmental negatives of eg batteries, while I wouldn't disagree per se I would point out that they need to be considered as a comparison with the impacts of the alternatives, which are currently quite a lot worse. Sadly there is a lack of clear independent quantitative comparison, or at least a lack of reference to it by those making the arguments.
Glorious sound? You only like that sound because of its association with speed, power and thrills. If you took an engine to a remote rainforest tribe and revved it up, I don't think you'd get much love from the locals.
Imagine you live on a street where most the cars are electric and you're the one starting a cold diesel at 6:30am.
You're looking to introduce a new fuel where you have limited infrastructure, is more expensive to build than an electric car (battery prices going down, tech going up), more expensive to run and more enviromentally damaging so will incur extra charging for that. Why are you so keen to implement an excessively expensive answer to not many questions?
All that is equally true for hydrogen, plus you get the massive problems with safety compared to petrol
Thols sums it up nicely. tricky is an understatement with hydrogen
Sooner the ICE is gone, the better.
Lithium mining is not a pretty or environmentally friendly process...
More reading for those who think Lithium and EV battery production is environmentally sustainable...
Lithium Mining Environmental Impact
There is no "environmentally friendly" process that allows most of the population to transport themselves around in 2 ton vehicles.
But electric vehicles are an order of magnitude better than ICE
This only looks at one aspect but illustrates a point
I do reckon that the ICE has still got a long future in front of it, albeit with e-fuels. That combined with eletric hydrogen will be the likely future once they get mass production sussed out.
I belive electric cars with batteries are a dead end because its unsustainable. Simply because unless there's a massive change in battery composition/design, there isn't enough rare earth metals to turn every car on the road to electric.
I have heard somewhere that if you didn't use these metals for any other industry (i.e phone/laptop batteries etc), we'd only be able to manufacture enough li-ion batteries for every car in the uk before exhausting natural resources. That's it. Wouldn't be anything left for the rest of the world. Even with improved battery recycling it would be unsustainable.
Problem is, they are mostly made from stuff that can be used for food so they will end up pushing up food prices and causing pressure for more clearing of forests for farming.
Only if you use primary crops, there are plenty of secondary crops out there that can be grown on marginal land and improve soil as they grow, even primarily cellulose based crops can be converted to ethanol (see acid hydrolysis and steam explosion)
Hydrogen is dead for road cars purely on the economics for all the same reasons
All that is equally true for hydrogen
In what way do you imagine burning hydrogen is environmentally damaging? Aside from nitrogen oxides which can be cleaned up in a catalytic converter. There is no CO2, sulphur or any hydrocarbons in the emissions, it's literally water.
Of course you can use it to manufacture synthetic gas but that's still far cleaner than petrol or coal.
As for safety, it's no less safe than LPG which has been used for years now.
Sooner the ICE is gone, the better.
What do you propose to use for converting landfill and digestor gas to energy or powering aircraft and ships then? That's an easy statement with complicated implications. There are still avenues to "clean" fuels that at least keep the carbon in a cycle rather than adding to net output. They are not the only solution but they are A solution.
This only looks at one aspect but illustrates a point
That'll be accounting for the recycling infrastructure which doesn't exist as it's not commercially proven. And also these laughable statements:
In the fossil engine/battery calculations, “we excluded the raw material needed to produce the electricity and the [fossil] fuel because this is contingent on factors such as national electricity mixes and fuel extraction efficiency.
“When it comes to raw materials there is simply no comparison,” said Mathieu. “Over its lifetime, an average fossil-fuel car burns the equivalent of a stack of oil barrels 25 storeys high. If you take into account the recycling of battery materials, only around 30kg of metals would be lost – roughly the size of a football.
So not accounting for fuel usage when it suits them, how about the fuel usage based on the generation mix? Is that equivalent barrels of oil or barrels of petrol/diesel? It wouldn't hurt to show what the worst case barrel of oil equivalent (thats a thing) would be for various generation sources, excluding renewables obviously.
Now I realise that these are essentially meaningless soundbites designed to stir interest (hell it annoyed me enough to pull the proper report) but it's crappy reporting (not gonna call that journalism) that gives people ammo to use when people don't bother checking the sources. I'll take a gander at the report later as I'm sure it actually has some good reading, I'm already impressed by it's referencing which craps all over the National Infrastructure Assessment I've had to [s]read[/s] endure recently.
Rather like in electricity generation though, I suspect the answer will be somewhat “horses for courses” and a mix of BEVs, hydrogen, biofuels etc, alongside a drive for reduction (public transport, infrastructure, cycling, where we build etc etc.). In electricity generation, pretty much regardless of how many wind turbines we build, we still have a need to reduce our consumption.
Very much this.
I live the other side of some woods from a set of dual carriageway traffic lights.
The sooner the glorious sound of the full throttle pops and bangs brigade is dead and burried the better. Judging by the frequency they manage to take out the crash barriers in a 40mph limit the owners will be too.
Battery EVs will be the only option to buy in 10 years, So F1 will inevitably follow suit as manufacturers will want to race what they sell (c.f. Diesel at Le Mans). If they don't then in 10 years time F1 will still exist in it's current state, but the big money Sunday afternoon event will be Fomula-E.
More than anything else, ICE cars are slow! You can drool over an Audi RS4 with a bike rack all you like, but in 15 years time your nan will be driving a Tesla that's faster. It'll look old-fashioned like those steam cars in museums.
I hope we'll see biofuels rolled out as an alternative. But mostly because I think it would be a shame fkr them to end up as museum pieces (And ethanol/veg oil arent that expensive as a base).
MILLENIAL SNOWFLAKES ARE KILLING THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE INDUSTRY. WHY CANT WE HAVE VROOOM VROOMS?
look mate, I'm just trying to make sure I don't have to swim to work in 30 years and that my children don't have to fight the the Resource Wars of 2050-2061.
WAAH LITHIUM MINING IS NOT VERY NICE
Because oil is so much better?
Plus we don't just burn the lithium and once the car is end of life it can be recycled.
JAG's going to be very upset once he finds out where aggregates come from!
More than anything else, ICE cars are slow!
F1 cars are much faster around a circuit than anything else. Thing is, most people don't want performance cars, they want something cheap and reliable to pick the kids up from school, go shopping in, etc. Teslas are expensive luxury toys for wealthy fanbois, that's not the future of the car industry.
Well I've never owned anything cheaper or more reliable than my Leaf... electric absolutely wipes the table there.
Amazing how many people seem threatened by a change to what power unit pushes their car forwards, I've been driving the affordable end of EVs for 6 years and guess what, they are just cars.
Plus we don’t just burn the lithium and once the car is end of life it can be recycled
Heavy lifting.
MILLENIAL SNOWFLAKES ARE KILLING THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE INDUSTRY. WHY CANT WE HAVE VROOOM VROOMS?
look mate, I’m just trying to make sure I don’t have to swim to work in 30 years and that my children don’t have to fight the the Resource Wars of 2050-2061.
WAAH LITHIUM MINING IS NOT VERY NICE
*sigh* and it was going so well
Amazing how many people seem threatened by a change
Amazing how many people seem threatened by challenge.
MILLENIAL SNOWFLAKES ARE KILLING THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE INDUSTRY. WHY CANT WE HAVE VROOOM VROOMS?
look mate, I’m just trying to make sure I don’t have to swim to work in 30 years and that my children don’t have to fight the the Resource Wars of 2050-2061.
WAAH LITHIUM MINING IS NOT VERY NICE
Lithium mining still produces CO2 emissions and uses machinery that runs on ICE. Also, lithium is a limited resource much like fossil fuels are.
Well I’ve never owned anything cheaper or more reliable than my Leaf… electric absolutely wipes the table there.
Yes, exactly. It's the opposite of a Tesla. It's not fast or glamourous, it's affordable and practical. In a decade or two, cities will be full of cars like the Leaf, not luxury performance cars like Teslas.
In what way do you imagine burning hydrogen is environmentally damaging?
It's not the burning. It's the relatively large amount of energy required to produce, transport and then burn the hydrogen deliver a given amount of energy at the wheels.
Lithium mining still produces CO2 emissions and uses machinery that runs on ICE. Also, lithium is a limited resource much like fossil fuels are.
We should be talking in relative terms. The argument being made is not that BEVs are perfect or their impact is zero, it is that their relative impact is lower so they are a significant step in the right direction. Lithium mining is pretty bad for our world, and it's not just lithium. Similar implies to some of the other ingredients of batteries. But the same applies to a greater extent to the materials and fuels in manufacture and operation of ICE cars, mainly the fuel. The extraction, refinement, transport and burning of oil required for a mile travelled has a far larger environmental footprint. (Unless you ask those with a vested interest in the oil industry, who tend to ignore the upstream aspects, compare big EVs with small ICE cars and apply a much dirtier than UK energy mix.)
Doesn't lithium come from salt flats in Chile? The bad mining is other materials like cobalt etc, no? And there are many options for those that are continually being worked on.
So, if batteries are bad now, doesn't mean they will always be bad. And with lots of battery cars on the road there will be a commercial imperative to diversify and improve. Judging by the number of news stories on phys.org about battery tech there are a lot of people working on this.
Burning fossil fuel on the other hand is always going to result in dangerous emissions. But, if we get emissions down to say 5% of their current levels then CO2 will once again be regarded as not dangerous.
It’s not the burning. It’s the relatively large amount of energy required to produce, transport and then burn the hydrogen deliver a given amount of energy at the wheels.
But the argument for doing it is that it's an energy sink for otherwise unused renewables which will be needed for proper grid balancing. Plus you don't have to necessarily burn it, fuel cells are far more efficient. It's an undisputed fact that energy conversion incurs losses and hydrogen production is intensive but if it's otherwise free energy then it becomes somewhat less of an issue.
Also, lithium is a limited resource much like fossil fuels are.
Lithium extraction is at about the stage of the Texas oil rush if you compare with the oil industry. Only the very easiest to exploit has been taken so far. And recycling techniques are improving all the time with the latest procedures yielding battery quality lithium. Unlike fossil fuels it doen't just go up in smoke.
The cost in terms of CO2 of producing lithium is tiny compared with the CO2 produced by an ICE in it's lifetime, any you're forgetting that the ICE takes CO2 to manufacture too.
Anti-EV propaganda comes from the sources you'd expect, ICE specialists such as Aston Martin and the oil majors, don't fall for it.
Personally I read the stuff from the likes of the Fraunhofer institute and concluded the EV wins hands down on CO2 where I live. As a bonus you get quieter vehicles that don't stink. So I bought one and liked it so much I replaced it with another.
Consider how the quality of your life would improve if everyone who can't use public transport or their legs used an EV. You might not join the thousands of premature deaths caused by ICE pollution for a start.
Lithium mining still produces CO2 emissions and uses machinery that runs on ICE. Also, lithium is a limited resource much like fossil fuels are.
Except, unlike fossil fuels, you don't need an unlimited amount.
~63kg in a Tesla.
~16-40million tonnes available for mining.
Or 700,000,000 cars (there's currently 1 billion on the road, but I suspect Lithium availability isn't the stumbling block to getting the Hilux with a machine gun on the back off the roads).
And like oil, the price will go up, people will go off exploring for it, more will be found and better ways of mining.
When the car was invented we were still rendering whales for oil*............
*Maybe not fuel for cars, but the fossil fuel oil industry grew up to meet the demand for oil. And in a rather grim reality whaling fleets now use whale oil as fuel 🤢
I buy a synthetic fuel called Aspen. I use it in my petrol stove; it's cheaper than Coleman fuel but still about £4/litre, much more expensive than normal petrol.
But the argument for doing it is that it’s an energy sink for otherwise unused renewables which will be needed for proper grid balancing. Plus you don’t have to necessarily burn it, fuel cells are far more efficient. It’s an undisputed fact that energy conversion incurs losses and hydrogen production is intensive but if it’s otherwise free energy then it becomes somewhat less of an issue.
Except you've still got to make all those extra solar panels, wind farms etc to overcome that inefficiency, and the same problem is solved far more efficiently by just plugging your car in and letting the grid use it for ballancing.
I buy a synthetic fuel called Aspen. I use it in my petrol stove; it’s cheaper than Coleman fuel but still about £4/litre, much more expensive than normal petrol.
Diesel is about 25-30p/l before tax. White Spirit is about £2.50/l. Most of the cost is in sticking it in a small bottle and shipping it. As a comodity ethanol (a viable alternative to petrol) is about 30p/l (and that's 40% higher this year).
Will Efuels make it to other motorsport applications – yes.
Can Efuels have a positive impact in the general population – yes
Is there enough capacity at the moment to achieve the above – NO
Is a lot of money and resource being put into the above – YES
Is there a huge amount of misinformation going around from very influential think tanks – YES
Like who – committee for climate Change (CCC), Transport and Environment (TnE)
Articles in the press which are put forward from CCC and TnE are not helpful, they lack a lot of very pertinent information around GHG’s and where they accumulate, where they are then disposed of they should always be treated with a pinch of salt. It’s no secret im “in the industry”, but at a much more research focused end of it. Quite simply electric is not a silver bullet, it should absolutely be used as part of the solution, but not in place of technologies that can be used now, and in later years will help fix the issue the of the legacy car/truck parc.
Also, the term “Efuel” is la little disingenuous to some of the technologies on the market and there is no-one definition of what constitutes an EFuel. Point to note. Lithium only contributes a small amount to a LION battery - approx. 160grams perkWH – or 11kg’s in a 450kg battery (its not the same for all, but roughly that), there is then ~60kgs rest of a Lithium Carbonate equivalent.
There is a lot of talk about these new EFuels using up lots of energy resource which would otherwise be better transferred straight to motors via batteries. In the whole you’d argue yes, however the design of the technologies is that they would sit within locations and infrastructure utilising their own energy sources from sustainable sources and not tapping into existing grids. Some technologies that may arguably sit out of the Efuel definition, also use very little electricity as they have exothermic reactions powering themselves. Also, transporting energy in a liquid state is by far the most efficient means for its size vs weight vs ability, nothing else comes close to its energy density. The picture is not as clear cut as some with very invested interests will try to tell you. The main thing is you must start somewhere.. Carbon will be a circular economy, yes it will burn, but the capture of that is possible, there are exhaust technologies looking to capture that at source!
There are now a number of scientifically driven studies and articles coming out that are worth reading, such as;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261921001562
they are worth a read
Greybeard
Full Member
I buy a synthetic fuel called Aspen. I use it in my petrol stove; it’s cheaper than Coleman fuel but still about £4/litre, much more expensive than normal petrol.
it's not strictly synthetic, it's just alkylate and is fossil derived. it does however have very low aromatics (<5%) which makes a "clean burning" fuel so is OK to be around in small engines for hours a day.
Except you’ve still got to make all those extra solar panels, wind farms etc to overcome that inefficiency, and the same problem is solved far more efficiently by just plugging your car in and letting the grid use it for ballancing.
Sui answered this well.
Relying on cars for grid balancing is a risky strategy IMO, for day to day stuff it's probably fine but if you need a rapid start you absolutely need something that has everything ten minutes ago. Thats where you can fling a peaking plant running a gas turbine on hydrogen into the mix, it can generate its own fuel and then when full just sell the excess. Odds are it would mostly sit at standby but thats ideal.
Lots of references to lithium - if this really was so limited, and likely to be a bottleneck, what would the price be doing? Whilst in reality it's at a 10 year low and still drifting down.
Lots of references to lithium – if this really was so limited, and likely to be a bottleneck, what would the price be doing? Whilst in reality it’s at a 10 year low and still drifting down.
Uh huh, bring up the ten year trend for crude, last year it hit a ten year low. What does that say about the relationship between limited resources and commodity trading?
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil
Your assertion is also wrong, lithium is on a rapid rise and has been since December.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
Thats where you can fling a peaking plant running a gas turbine on hydrogen into the mix
Not sure I’d regard a gas turbine, peaking or otherwise, as a truly fast response. Not from idle anyway. Spinning reserve possibly, but then you’re burning fuel all the time. Inertia, then water, then spinning, then GT isn’t it - or have I got that wrong?
At the moment we’re playing around (conceptually) with supercap, battery, fuel cell, GT - flexibility is in there somewhere and the order might well change depending on how you operate them.
Hydrogen is not efficient, but it can be effective. Hydrogen plug-in hybrids are interesting but potentially expensive. I’m already talking to train manufacturers about battery hybrid trains (not hydrogen interestingly).
There will be many solutions which will all have to work together to make the future work.
PS - inter-seasonal storage. Summer energy harvesting and winter heat and light. That’s the big one I think and that feels more hydrogeny.
hydrogeny.
trademarked..
will we see other motorsports go the same route and save the glorious sounds of ICEs?
what role does the sound play in the competition? Are there points for noises? How is it judged?
If lithium were limited in supply then I don't think major manufacturers would be planning to switch their production to EVs requiring lithium. Pretty sure someone would have thought of that.
Sui
hydrogeny.
trademarked.
Did you ever hear their first album? 😉