TRANSPORTATION CONSIDERATIONS
We have a vision that will allow the future of motoring in our age of oil supply stress and global warming to be the most exciting experience possible.
Our goals are to foster vehicles:
1. Whose design excites our desires and driving excitement keeps us thrilled.
2. Whose range and load carrying capability meets our needs.
3. Whose size, utility and range fits the American life-style.
4. Whose safety is uncompromised.
5. In which our enjoyment isn’t mitigated by fuel shortages, outrageous prices, or worry about warming the earth or polluting our environment.
We believe that Americans want to preserve and enhance these driving qualities and attributes ---
while at the same time:
1. Being independent of oil (gasoline or diesel).
2. Dramatically decreasing the atmospheric pollution we live with.
3. Significantly lowering the Greenhouse gases emitted.
How can these apparently diametrically opposite goals be achieved?
See our transportation Vision, Goals and Agenda
If these are goals you want to see in your driving future, this site can inform you and help you to be part of the solution.
These are ambitious goals, so it is necessary to do this in steps. It is the immediate purpose of this site to show you, by example, that they can be achieved. We hope that the knowledge can free you from the slavery of the big money interests, and empower you to take the actions that can help all of us to find the best paths to the goals.
Details about the Current mission of this site:
To present you with enough information to understand that there is a way to achieve the above vision and goals with existing resources and technologically feasible developments (all with engineering: research is not needed to accomplish our goals). Furthermore to debug some commonly accepted beliefs, and to present a long term picture that is sustainable.
We will show that fossil natural gas and renewable natural gas are currently the only vehicle fuels that can enable us to meet the vision and goals of the Institute for Energy Resourcefulness. We must use fossil natural gas to start the transition away from oil now. It is much cleaner for our cities and reduces global warming. At the same time we must increase the number of waste-to-methane gas recycling facilities, so that we can eventually generate enough renewable natural gas (methane) to run our transportation. Along the way we will mix increasing amounts of renewable natural gas with its fossil version. We will also discuss the topic of growing algae and then anaerobically digesting it to produce additional methane, and then the even more distant technology of mining methane gas from the bottom of the world's oceans.
As we proceed to wean ourselves off oil, we will get some help from ethanol. Currently corn is used, and this is not energy efficient or environmentally friendly. However sugar cane ethanol is much more environmentally friendly: it is grown in massive quantities in Brazil, and can be grown in many places such as Hawaii, and the southeastern US and even California. Eventually ethanol made from bio-wastes will make a contribution, but at this time it is unclear whether so called cellulosic ethanol will ever be cost competitive with anaerobically digested bio-wastes (producing methane), but that understanding is years away.
By laying out the facts as unbiasedly as possible, we will show that other than fossil natural gas mixed with a growing amount of renewable methane and sugar cane ethanol (and eventually cellulosic ethanol) there is no better way to meet the vision and goal of the Institute for Energy Resourcefulness in the next 2-3 decades, and perhaps far beyond. Our challenge is to present you with enough information that you can build on the data and convince yourself. We will debunk the LI-Ion based electric car myth of 'clean transportation'.
Our mission also includes the need to educate you about the urgency of moving to the use of these alternative fuels before either the coming economic crisis or the environmental crisis besets us. Again we will try to be as unbiased as possible, and use real data not scare tactics. If you follow the Institute for about 2 years from the fall of 2009 you will be able to verify - along with us - the accuracy of our view. That's all it will take!
We will, of course, use all the data that is available, but special mention must go to the work of the California Air Resources Board (CARB). It concludes, the well-to-wheel carbon associated with electricity from the grid (needed for plug-in electric cars) is greater than that of reformulated gasoline or low sulfur diesel (both of course refined from oil). This is because of the percentage of electricity that is made from coal. Hydrogen’s well-to-wheel carbon content is even higher, because most of the hydrogen comes from reforming natural gas, or electrolysis of water using that same electricity. The key result is that we can't look to electric vehicles until renewable electricity, i.e., wind and solar form a substantial mix of our sources. Of course nuclear is an open option, but even if agreed upon will take at several decades to make a significantly greater contribution.