From Slashdot:
The NY Times reports that the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.
The embargo comes after a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain whose ship collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China.
The Chinese embargo is likely to have immediate repercussions in Washington. The House Committee on Science and Technology is scheduled to review a detailed bill to subsidize the revival of the American rare earths industry and the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to review the American military dependence on Chinese rare earth elements.”
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Fighting over a few percent seems wastefull, the transmision losses in power grids are huge, check the cost of electric heating to that of gas, that should give a real world comparison, usually about 3 to 1 so by the time it gets to your home the fossiul generation is poor compared to a modern TD motor, the europeans get way over 55mpg these days, the only advantage hybrids have, and it seems rather slim, is regerative braking, what is the duration of the Tesla? something like 60 miles I think so it is a shopping or commute car, perhaps a rich mans plaything but not a serious car unless you have a normal car as back up, now where have I heard that before?
Chris Edwards says:
September 25, 2010 at 3:25 pm
“[…]generation is poor compared to a modern TD motor, the europeans get way over 55mpg these days, the only advantage hybrids have, and it seems rather slim, […]”
VW was very reluctant to join the hybrid hype. They’re darn proud of their TDI engines and never saw good reason for the added complexity of hybrids.
Another tidbit about keeping a car’s interior warm in winter – say, -10° and you’re doing 93.75 mph so you got a little bit of wind chill. A friend of mine used to drive a 3l Lupo, that was a tiny VW tuned to consume no more than 3 liter of Diesel per 100km; that’s 78.4048611 miles per gallon (and yes, the car did that on the Autobahn.).
The TDI engine of that car was so efficient and so small that there was not enough waste heat to keep the cabin warm.
Better add double-glazed windows to your Tesla. Or an extra heater.
Well, I went off and did a bit of research on rare earths. It’s not a problem.
The only thing going on is China is the cheapest provider, like everything else just about, and in the very short run can play political games.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/are-rare-earths-rare/
Ralph says:
>>Paul
>>The best power station thermodynamic efficiencies have been
>>above 60% for a quarter of a century.
So you say, with no references bar your own assertions.
Will IGCC do? (Runs on coal, oil, gas, whatever) Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. From:
http://www.energy.siemens.com/br/pool/hq/power-generation/power-plants/integrated-gasification-combined-cycle/Igcc-experience-and-further-developments.pdf
For achieving high efficiencies with CCPP and IGCC power plants the gas turbine plays a major role. The Siemens heavy-duty gas turbine portfolio is designed to support high CCPP efficiencies. The most advanced engine, which is the new SGT5- 8000H, is designed to achieve more than 60 % efficiency in combined cycle mode
(Fig. 7 and Fig. 8).
Paul Birch says: Whereas diesel engined cars are lucky to get 30%, even in unrealistically optimal scenarios.
Don’t know who’s trying to compare what to which, but not very long ago THE most efficient engine on the planet was a Marine Diesel at 54%. It’s just been surpassed by a combined cycle turbine at a bit over 60-something%. But folks are now looking to put the Rankine et.al. follower turbines on Diesels, so the tit-for-tat continues.
The “bottom line” though does not change. It’s darned hard to beat a Diesel.
For vehicle use, a Diesel is a much better match to the axle needs (don’t have to gear it down as much) and is much hardier to shock (it was not easy to get turbines to work in tanks…). Run either of them through a [ generator – transformer – lines – transformer – local lines – transformer – home – charger – battery – battery standing losses – inverter / power controller – electric motor ] THEN into the transmission, differential and wheels and you lose a pretty fair chunk. Somewhere around 1/2.
Some of the losses depend on the battery type you use and how much it spends standing, but 10% is a ‘modest’ number (some of the most efficient to charge / discharge batteries have the highest self discharge, so it’s a devilish optimization problem). Even with SPECTACULAR 95% at each of those stations, you end up with a lot of loss.
I love e-cars and hope to have one some day, but the reason you have one is NOT thermodynamic efficiency. It’s because a TON of coal costs about $20. Compare to gasoline…
(And remember that diesel is a denser fuel than petrol).
Gasoline is about 6 lbs / gallon Diesel about 8, you get about 26% more BTU / gallon.
Heavy goods vehicles are different beasts entirely; they are more efficient at constant moderate speeds, but have poor performance and struggle to accelerate when heavy laden or going uphill.
Nope. Not at all. Dodge pickups come with a Cummins Diesel just like the big boys. My Mercedes has the same engine as in the Mercedes trucks. Navistar diesels are in both ‘real trucks’ and Ford pickups. Etc. Yeah, VW has a different engine, but it’s one of the MOST efficient. The ‘struggle up hill’ is due to the power / weight ratio and has little to do with efficiency. (The lack of a restrictive throttle plate means that the efficiency changes little between modest and full throttle. I get the same milage at both speeds, only losing milage over about 60 MPH when air drag starts to dominate.) The older (mostly iron block) Diesels were more ‘long stroke’ than the newer ones, so worked better at low RPM, but newer “common rail” injectors with very fine mist and the quartz controlled ‘sputter’ of the fuel in bursts lets high speed low stroke Diesel be used (in cars OR trucks, as desired).
OK, so take the 50%-60% Prime mover efficiency and put in some transmission / wheel losses or put in the same prime mover efficiency (maybe plus a percent or two) at the generation plant but add all the conversion losses. The Diesel in the vehicle will win. But it can’t run on coal (without conversion to Diesel that loses about 1/2…)
Your 30% ‘efficiency number is way off and all I can figure is you picked up some ‘well to wheels’ number including refining. You’d have to put the same losses from (well or mine) to generator if you want to do that kind of compare.
GM says: There is a shortage of rare earth elements. What is this telling you?
That China is the low cost producer and everyone else was stupid enough to shut down production. The Mountain Pass Mine in California has 20 MILLION tons of reserves. In ONE mine in ONE kind of ore (and we have dozens more sites with a heck of a lot more ore). Global production is about 80 KILLO tons per year. Think about it.
Now when that ONE mine plays out, realize there are BILLIONS of tons of Monazite on the planet (a different ore). The bad news about Monazite, and why we don’t use it today, is it yields a waste product. It’s about 5-10% Thorium. Enough to power the planet for about 30,000 years in EXISTING PRODUCTION power reactors via a normal refueling fuel bundle swap. But since the present Uranium is so cheap, and the ore for Rare Earths currently in use is lacking Th, it’s cheaper to use the first ore than the Monazite as with Monazite you must “dispose” of the (mildly) radioactive Thorium.
So maybe, in 100 years or so, if we want to, we can start using the Monazite both to power the planet and to provide rare earths for the NEXT 10,000 years.
Look, could you do just a tiny bit of google work before posting your delusions? I read the article, and did some research, and discovered the above. You spouted your bias. It would have taken you about 5 minutes to find out it was flat out wrong and saved yourself the public error.
If you want to know what the resource case actually is, see:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/are-rare-earths-rare/
(Please forgive double posting the same link in the same article, but GM will never look one posting up thread, so I’ve put it here in the vain hope he will look at it and learn what you ought to do when wondering about actual resource limits.)
(“Spout” is one of those irregular words in English: I Elucidate, you spout, he/she/it/they spew 😉
Looks like another long night of cleaning up mindless errors…
GM says: And before anyone raises the tired canard about rare earth elements not being that rare in the crust, yes, that’s correct; the problem is that concentrated deposits of rare earth elements aren’t at all common.
Actually no. There are deposits all over the world. What’s in short supply elsewhere in the world is Chinese wage scales of $2 / DAY. Oh, and absence of whacko-lawsuits.
You can, should you wish, go lay on large beaches made of the stuff. Monazite. India has mountains of it (that they are using for Thorium for power). I’ll lay odds that right now the Thorium producers in India are taking a look at the rare earth ‘by products’ in a new light. If you don’t want to go that far, we have it in the Carolinas. (And a few dozen other states). Also Brazil has mega-tons of the stuff. Australia and Canada too.
From the link up thread you will fail to read:
Notice the PHOSPHATE that you are so worried about is also in them… It’s a “3 fer” mineral. I suggest you learn something about it, as it’s lethal to your main three worries of energy, rare earths, and phosphate in one go. Oh, and it has helium in it too, in case you are worried about THAT “scarce” resource:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite
It would seem that our beaches of it are not considered “large”, which gives you an idea how large “large” is…
http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/farooqs/notes/b8-3-4.htm
Now, just because economics does not seem to be your strong suit, let me explain what this means in economic terms. That 0.09% in all those Florida sands does not exist as a ‘reserve’ since there is cheaper stuff somewhere else (darned near every continent and some islands of the world) BUT if we ever needed it, that’s a plenty strong concentration to filter from the general beach sand (either flotation or settling or…) while putting the nice clean white and no longer containing radioactive monazite sand back in place. Care to guess how much sand there is in Florida? And sunk off shore? And all the way up the coast to the Carolinas (where the concentration rises enough to have been worth mining prior to China crashing prices.) And off those shores?
Now, the hard part, get a globe and look up the distribution of those sands in India. Try to fit the word “massive” between your teeth…
So yeah, China has a nice deposit of a different ore not “contaminated” by all that Thorium power source. So they become the low cost provider and all that other giga-tons of resource is not counted as a ‘reserve’. It is just disappeared from the economic view. And from yours. But it is still there just waiting for the day that we need it when the cheapest source runs out.
The thing that will confuse you the most is that THE very best cheapest ores are often the ones in shortest supply. So paradoxically, when we have the MOST total resource, is when folks PANIC the most over ‘running out’ because that one little patch of “excellent” ore removes all the others from view. The more we use up the best ores, and develop techniques to handle the poorer ores, suddenly ever larger blocks of ore come into economic existence. They were always there, but hidden by the cheap stuff. Like all the coastal sands from the Gulf of Mexico, past the keys, up to the Carolinas and beyond. Full of rare earths and nuclear energy. But unseen due to some small patch of better ore in China. (Or the equally good ore in California as the mine was shut due to low cost China labor).
So in a 100 years or so, we might need them, but for now it just doesn’t count. And that is part of why most reserves have a 35 to 50 year ‘lifetime’. Not because it’s all gone then, but because that is when the cost will rise by 1% and suddenly another 40 years of “resource” becomes “reserves”.
Not understanding that is your major impediment to clarity.
GM says: There are other places of course, but not that many of them and they have been either depleted or not developed.
Nope, again. THE major prior supply, Mountain Pass Mine, was NOT depleted. It was shut as China was cheaper. Currently being sent through the re-open process. Learn something about mining, please, prior to spouting about it.
And “not developed”. You say that like it’s a bad thing! 😉 Yes, it’s “not developed” because we don’t need it yet. It’s resource for 100 years from now, and for 1000, and for 10,000…
More will be certainly found in remote areas as demand increases,
Like just outside Los Angeles on the way to Phoenix, or the Carolinas, or darned near any beach in India, or…
but it will not make much of a difference due to that same old problem of the mismatch between exponentially increasing demand and finite and very limited supplies
And the Lust for the Exponential rises again… Tell you what, start with the Iron Age, and apply an exponential growth curve. OMG! We ran out of Iron before the Industrial Revolution!
Worse, start with the Bronze Age and copper / tin / zinc. OMG! OMG!!! We have NO copper tin or zinc left either!!!!
Now take the rate of tree cutting in 1700 and apply your exponential. IT’s The End Of ALL Life!!!! Not a TREE left standing!!!!!!!!!!!!
The simple fact is that growth is S shaped, not exponential. Your ‘exponential’ assumption is just wrong, broken, kaput, and it leads you massively astray.
Look up the composition of manganese nodules on the ocean floor. They are mineable today. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need several hundred tons of metals in my garage (my share…).
And if we DID mine them all, more would precipitate. Geology has not come to a screeching halt. It’s still active today. The U and Th erode into the ocean at a rate faster than we need to run the whole planet (and we can recover it at costs that make use affordable, just not cheaper than the cheapest U on land now). Similarly other metals erode into the ocean and end up in nodules, sands, and other deposits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule
So please, take just a moment to ask: If growth is S shaped and NOT exponential, and if we’re up to our eyeballs in TONS per capita of metals in resource that don’t show up in reserves quotes; what does that imply to the “doom scenario”?
It simply busts it into tiny little bits.
>>Dirk
>>Another tidbit about keeping a car’s interior warm in
>>winter – say, -10° and you’re doing 93.75 mph so you got
>>a little bit of wind chill.
A common fallacy here. A car has no wind chill.
Wind chill only applies to wet objects. In fact, the faster you go the hotter you get. In my aircraft the outside temperature may be -50oc, but the skin temperature is only -30oc. No wind chill there, it is 20oc warmer due to kinetic friction.
There was a fad in Oz a while ago of having tinny-holders (beer holders) on the side of trucks – to cool them down in the wind-chill breeze. Only problem being that they did not work, and the beer was at 50oc.
Wind chill cannot make an inanimate object cooler (unless it is wet).
Ralph says:
>>Paul
>>The best power station thermodynamic efficiencies have been
>>above 60% for a quarter of a century.
So you say, with no references bar your own assertions.
Will IGCC do? (Runs on coal, oil, gas, whatever) Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. From:
This is a sales brochure. All very nice if everyone buys these, but it will be 3 decades before Europe changes over. As I demonstrated earlier Drax power station in Britain, our largest power station, is running at 35% efficiency.
And even then your super power station is NOT as efficient as a diesel car on the open road. Take your 60% efficiency, and then subtract:
2% for line transmission
15% for battery storage
10% for electric motor
…. and you end up with 45% efficiency for the electric car. Make that just 30% efficiency with the heater on.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, modern diesels are looking for 55% efficiency within ten years time – and that is direct drive to the wheels, and with lots of cabin heat.
The only place that an electric vehicle makes a bit of sense, is in the center of a great metropolis. And then watch them scream, when they slap the same level of tax on car electricity, as they do on car fuel.
.
Ralph says:
September 26, 2010 at 12:46 am
While that is true, one cannot neglect the forced convective cooling of the surface if the car is moving through colder air; or if there’s simply wind.
A large-glass modern motor car will easily dissipate several kW of heat at around 20°C temperature difference; in still air. When you start moving the cold air outside, the rate of heat transfer increases. Add to that that several cubic metres of air have to be moved through the vehicle every minute to keep the occupants alert and comfortable; and that that air needs to be heated to about 20°C. There isn’t enough room in a car to carry around a heat-recovery heat exchanger for the fresh-air requirement.
Most smaller-engined, diesel-powered cars don’t supply sufficient waste heat to heat the car in very cold conditions; and take significant time to become useful heaters when the weather is even slightly chilly. High-tech ones have electric heaters in the coolant circuit to make the engine warm up more quickly! That’s a reflection of the engine’s thermodynamic efficiency.
As for the tinny-coolers, the lack of natural wind chill is fixed by using wet socks. You do have to change them often. But that’s not a problem unless you’re a POM. 🙂
Paul Birch says: Not even Ruthenium is really rare; there are tens of billions of tonnes of the stuff dispersed through the continental crust, all of it extractable if we really want it.
Well, that’s a bit ‘thin’ compared to the alternative sources:
http://www.sherdog.net/forums/f48/making-space-exploration-pay-asteroid-mining-1280643/
I’d guess that as long as you sold it slowly enough to not spook the market into a collapse of prices, the asteroid would make it worth while to do space mining…
I would go further and say that it is not possible for any element or isotope to be too rare; if it came to the pinch we could always synthesise it from more common nuclides at a cost ~1M$/kg or so (depending on the binding energy requirements and the demand).
Ruthenium is a daughter product of Uranium fission. Works great. Only problem is a bit of radioactive isotopes in the mix…
:-}
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
REPLY: Makes me wonder if we would find rare earth elements on the moon…if any nation could monopolize THAT supply, it would be the US!
Oh, wait, Obama killed the Constellation space project. Never mind.
AND the Chinese are planning a lunar lander (one hopes un-manned) for 2013…
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3747/moist-moon-hinders-chinas-lunar-telescope
So “Within this de-cade” ” to land a man upon the mooon, and return him safely to this earth”…
Wish we had that kind of visionary and ambition… /sarcoff> (whimper… sob..)
Well, if they find REE or Ruthenium, I’m sure they will sell them to us at a fair price…
There are folks thinking asteroid impacts would have left PGM in lunar soils:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/479/1
Ah, there it is:
But it’s a quote from the wiki, so even less reliable than a “sales brochure” 😉
Ralph: I reach the same conclusion that you do, but to deny that what the other poster said (that THE BEST power plant motors were now over 60%) is true, in the face of evidence that it’s basically correct, is a waste of effort.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a 60% turbine, a 54.4% Diesel, or a potentially even higher efficiency steam turbine at 70%-90%: It’s all the other bits around the generation and delivery that cause the overall efficiency to be poor (as you pointed out). (Like the steam boiler that sucks that steam turbine down to about the same as a Diesel).
It gets into a pointless “But old plants are not good like new plants” defense and is just standing on the weakest ground.
At the end of the day it’s the 95% x 95% x 95% x 95% x 90% x 80% x 90% x 90% x 95% for gen, transformer, transformer, transformer, charger, battery charge, self discharge, inverter / conroller, motor that does in the electric efficiency story. That product works out to 45.13% left at the end of the motor shaft… or about the same as a ‘typical’ automotive Diesel, even if the prime mover is 100% efficient at the power company. So give him a 60% gas turbine, or even an 80% steam turbine. The net-net ends up 27% to 36% ‘fuel to wheels’. Well less than a Diesel.
(And that is why Diesels dominate trains, trucks, boats, tractors, earth movers, etc.)
From E.M.Smith on September 26, 2010 at 3:15 am:
It should be mentioned however that those “diesel” locomotives are overwhelmingly diesel-electric, i.e. the gen-set concept. They are also now using the modern electronic controls with rectifiers and inverters and not complaining about any loss of efficiency. Note the use of dynamic braking. The lack of adequate electrical storage technology to use regenerative braking seems to have been overcome and hybrid trains are now increasingly on the market, notably the GE models (as we were well informed by their long-running seemingly-never-ending commercials).
Plug-in-only electric does not make sense. Gen-set electric does make sense, even more so with energy storage. Gen-set using diesel for the fuel likely makes even more sense, except for that nagging engine difference where diesel relies on self-combustion under pressure instead of ignition by a spark plug thus a diesel engine is more limited on potential fuel choices than a regular internal combustion engine. Not important for trains, could be important for cars and light trucks.
The competitor for the Man slow speed diesel mentioned above generates 84 megawatts and burns 330 tonnes per day. but not of diesel but heavy fuel oil at density approaching 1.0 and dirt cheap. That is economic.
Ralph says:
September 26, 2010 at 12:46 am
“[…]Wind chill cannot make an inanimate object cooler (unless it is wet).[…]”
Can it make an animate object cooler, assuming it is dry? 😉
>>It should be mentioned however that those “diesel” locomotives
>>are overwhelmingly diesel-electric, i.e. the gen-set concept.
Yes, but that is not because diesel electric is intrinsically more efficient – is it? Diesel electric is used as a transmission system because:
a. The transmission runs from big engines to many wheels becomes quite complex. (On a train bogey, for instance.)
b. You can get rid of the clutch (hot, heavy and smelly).
c. You can get rid of the gearbox (containing umpteen gears).
d. Ships can use props that swing though 360 degrees.
e. You can run the engine at a constant rpm, which is more efficient. This is certainly an advantage for those large dumper trucks, that are always changing speed.
Diesel electric is more an engineering advantage, rather than a straight efficiency issue.
.
Ralph says:
September 25, 2010 at 1:01 pm “…”
You keep comparing apples and oranges; the peak thermodynamic cycle efficiency of a state of the art diesel with the overall fuel efficiency of an antiquated power station. Your diesel reference was to a new heavy goods vehicle, not a car. Your power station reference was to Drax, a forty year old coal-fired station. If your primary energy source is coal, then diesel cars will need the diesel fuel first to be produced from that coal, with corresponding overall efficiency loss. Modern CCGT plants have a much higher efficiency.
Road vehicles do not use the most efficient diesel engines (those are heavy marine two-strokes), and lorries do not use the same type of diesel engine as cars. An HGV diesel operates over a narrower range of torque than a car engine is required to; it is for this reason that it is more efficient, but has poorer performance. Efficiency and performance are very different things. It is a simple fact, obvious to any motorist, that heavily laden lorries are able to accelerate only slowly, and labour going uphill; I have often been stuck behind one that has been forced down to as little as 20mph, when my car would have cruised on up the hill at 50 or 60mph. When a bus or lorry gets outside its designed optimum torque range, its fuel efficiency plummets (and often it belches black smoke too).
I invited you to do the sums, but evidently you didn’t bother. Diesel has 163MJ/gallon, so 55mpg is equivalent to 1850J/metre. At motorway speeds, aerodynamic drag dominates, and amounts to ~2m^2 x (30m/s)^2 x (1kg/m3) x 0.3(Cd) /2 ~ 270N. Rolling resistance is ~0.01 x 10m/s^2 x 1000kg ~ 100N. Total drag ~370N. The ratio of the two, which is the efficiency, is then ~20%. Way short of 50%.
Ralph says:
September 25, 2010 at 1:26 pm
“Have you touched a discharging battery? Does it feel hot to you?”
Yes, I’m doing that right now, and its uncomfortably hot. So hot it’s making my touch pad misbehave. And that’s just my laptop. The amount of heat needed to keep a car warm is small compared to the amount it uses to move (of which much is dissipated in its structure no matter how efficient the prime mover). Sure, if you want to dump a lot of heat in to warm it up instantly, you’ll waste battery power. But that’s true for internal combustion cars too. On mine the heater fan died long ago, so it’s not an issue for me.
E.M.Smith says:
September 25, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Paul Birch says: Whereas diesel engined cars are lucky to get 30%, even in unrealistically optimal scenarios.
“Don’t know who’s trying to compare what to which, but not very long ago THE most efficient engine on the planet was a Marine Diesel at 54%.”
That’s a marine engine. Not a car engine. And a peak efficiency, not an average efficiency. And it wasn’t the most efficient engine, just the most efficient diesel engine. The most efficient engines have probably always been rocket engines, which can quite easily exceed 90% efficiency in a vacuum.
“Your 30% ‘efficiency number is way off and all I can figure is you picked up some ‘well to wheels’ number including refining. You’d have to put the same losses from (well or mine) to generator if you want to do that kind of compare.”
That’s the fuel efficiency for a car on the road. It does not include refining or distribution. See previous comments.
Ten years ago I suggested to an MP that if the Gov really wanted electric vehicles to be popular (this was in west London, home of electric delivery vehicles) then they should pass a law making the car park companies (like NCP and very unpopular so no political fallout) supply small spaces with powr connector to top up and limit the price to 25% of a fossil powered car, most better off families who commute have more than one car so a commuter and a family car is norm, however in France this is fine but the UK, no good as I bet the line losses far exceed 2%, on a damp day (like half the year in England) just listen to the insulators sizzle in the transmission towers, look at the long distances the national grid runs, and with Scotlans, Wales and the west country on that grad lots of liniar runs, given they went from copper to aluminium for lightness I suspect the overall loss from ground to outlet, in the UK is 2/3 when I left that was the ratio of gas heat in my workshop to electric.
Paul:
It is a simple fact, obvious to any motorist, that heavily laden lorries are able to accelerate only slowly, and labour going uphill; I have often been stuck behind one that has been forced down to as little as 20mph, when my car would have cruised on up the hill at 50 or 60mph. When a bus or lorry gets outside its designed optimum torque range, its fuel efficiency plummets (and often it belches black smoke too).
You have never driven a truck, have you ! A car towing a 4 tonne caravan would also be down at 20mph on a hill – and that has nothing to do with fuel efficiency.
And lorry never gets out of its optimum torque range, because it has sixteen gears – minimum. And if you do get it out of range, you should not be driving it in the first place. Here is a demonstration of how not to do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN1nPjMrf00&feature=related (murdering prostitutes is not obligatory.)
And the engine may well be running at its most efficient setting, while thundering up a hill. Efficient, but just working very hard.
And your efficiency figures for diesel cars are way off, and again you cite no sources.
This is the US Department of Energy, and even they cite 45% efficiency for diesel cars, heading onto 55% in the near future.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/basics/jtb_diesel_engine.pdf
.
This is quite the discussion, very interesting, a few points. In one for or another, most of these have been mentioned, here is a summary.
– IIRC when a generic diesel is running at stoichiometric mix, it will pump out some smoke, most diesels don’t because they are fed a lean mixture for emissions, which ironically causes them to be less efficient.
– Plug ins, really in the end the discussion should be almost moot, as we don’t have the generating capacity to charge them. Spain/Italy have pinned their hopes on wind/solar. Germany is decommissioning nuclear plants. AFAIK UK is with the US and is simply not building enough generating capacity. IF we have a economic boom, we’re screwed for power.
– For heat, turn the A/C systems to heat pumps
– A few years back, rumor had it GM had a diesel Volt, 3 cylinder at that, small battery (less weight), that got stupidly high gas mileage without the BS of starting with a full battery and using that initial charge up like they are doing with the current mileage figures. I think BIG dump trucks, trains, and ships have had right all along; serial diesel electric is the right way to go!
– stop putting hydrocarbons in the ground (ie. landfills) and use newer thermo depolymerization techniques to cost effectively get diesel and greatly reduce landfill usage.
It seems to me that politic and crooked money have screwed the equation, the likelyhood is that truck slogging up the hill should not be there anyway, the load should be on rails without hills but the road transport lobby have seen to it that cannot happen so we get a bad transport system. Ships burn heavy oil and run at speeds car and truck engines will stall at the ones I worked on and saw were direct drive and ran at a few hundred rpm.
Diesel is less refined than petrol so must be more efficient to produce ? so what about its energy potential, I was taught in college that the less refined fuels had less potential btu output? What if we spent the vast sums of money making petrol or diesel motors more efficient instead of the elegantly engineered heat-robinson lash ups combining 2 technologies that dont work so well small scale? how about using the waste heat from cooling systems and exhausts for something ? anyone know how much, as a percentage of fuel used is lost to heat the world? this is indeed a great topic and there is fascinating stuff coming out here.
Steam city cars anyone?