Forget Hydrogen: Here They Are, The Two Fuels of The Future

Forget hydrogen. You can mostly ignore natural gas. Even diesel may not grow much.

The two fuels that will largely power us for the next 20, maybe 30, years are already here. They are gasoline (with some ethanol in it), and electricity.

That’s it. That’s all she wrote.

First, gasoline

Those hallowed green
visions of a gasoline-free future in our lifetime will not come to
pass. We’ve spent a century building a global economy around oil, and it
will likely take most of another century to change it.

In other words, gasoline will power some of our vehicles for a long, long time
to come. It won’t power 90-plus percent of our vehicles, as it does
today–but far more fuel-efficient gasoline and diesel vehicles will be
the single biggest contributors to reducing vehicular energy use for at
least the next 20 years, probably longer.

Then, grid power

After
that comes electricity. It’s widely distributed, the cars that use it
are quite pleasant to drive, and within 10 or 15 years, the battery
technology will have improved to the point that compact electric cars
will have ranges of 200 miles or more. That’s enough to make them vastly
more acceptable than today’s common ranges of up to 100 miles.

Natural
gas will probably increase its share, but it may be limited in use, and
possibly regional. India and Iran are increasing their production of
natural-gas vehicles (NGVs), and the U.S. has domestic supplies in some
regions and pipelines across much of the country.

In North America, however, it may become more common for large commercial
vehicles than for passenger cars. Globally, Pike Research projects that
sales of NGVs will expand at a compound annual growth rate of almost 8
percent, to total 20 million vehicles by 2016.

Goal: carbon neutrality

The
end goal should be getting as close as possible to fuels that have a
neutral “wells-to-wheels” carbon footprint, which is to say they release
no net carbon into the atmosphere.

Today, we’re a very long way
from that point. But getting solid data on the wells-to-wheels carbon
impact of driving one mile using different fuels (and working toward
promoting fuels with the lowest carbon impact) is the right way to
start.

Today,
with U.S. fleet average fuel economy around 25 mpg, a mile driven on
electric power is virtually always lower-carbon than one driven by
burning gasoline. And that will remain the case until U.S. fleet average
fuel economy doubles to 50 miles per gallon, when the gasoline car is
better than power from a handful of the dirtiest grids.

But that change will take decades. And that’s a major reason plug-in vehicles of all sorts (plug-in hybrids, range-extended electric cars, and battery electric vehicles) make the most sense for the next decade or two.

All about the fuel

Right
now, more than 90 percent of a vehicle’s carbon footprint is the fuels
involved in powering it. According to M.A. Weiss et al., in their 2000
report from the MIT Energy Laboratory, On the Road in 2020: A Lifecycle Analysis of New Automotive Technologies, fully 75 percent of a vehicle’s lifetime carbon emissions come from the fuel it burns over its lifetime.

Another
19 percent is from the production of that fuel. Extraction of the raw
materials that make up the vehicle adds another 4 percent, and only 2
percent of lifetime carbon is due to the manufacturing and assembly
process.

So the fuel used to power the vehicle is key.

Who are the players?

In
our view, the two most viable types of fuels for the medium term are
petroleum products (gasoline, diesel, natural gas) and electricity,
which already has a distribution system in place.

As for hydrogen,
it has enormous challenges to overcome: There’s no distribution
infrastructure, and it takes enormous amounts of energy to separate out
hydrogen molecules from the substances they bind to, whether the source
is water, natural gas, or something else. That makes its wells-to-wheels
energy balance highly dubious.

Back to gasoline. In the future,
it may well be blended with ethanol in higher proportions than it is
today. The maximum since 1978 has been 10 percent ethanol, but the EPA
last October approved a 15-percent blend (E15) for cars from 2007 to the present, and just last week extended the approval to 2001-2006 models.

But don’t expect that to happen any time soon. Carmakers, small-engine manufacturers, and others launched a lawsuit asking that the first approval be overturned.

Over
time, we think ethanol will become part of our liquid-fuel mix–perhaps
at higher proportions yet, as much as 20 percent. But as currently
manufactured, ethanol has several major issues to overcome.

Ethanol

Currently,
the corn-based ethanol used in the U.S. is not economically viable
without massive government subsidies (the same could be said for
electric vehicles). Gasoline prices will have to rise substantially
before it becomes competitive.

Nonetheless, in 2007, the U.S.
Congress passed a mandate that the U.S. must use 36 billion gallons of
ethanol by 2022. It’s not entirely clear how this will happen.

There
are also serious questions about the wells-to-wheels carbon balance of
corn ethanol, as well as other concerns over its water usage (as high as
8 gallons per gallon of fuel), displacement of food crops, and other
concerns.

Canes & grasses

The
sugar-cane ethanol used in Brazil is now twice as productive per acre,
but import tariffs prevent us from buying it for U.S. gasoline supplies.

The
ultimate promise lies in biomass ethanol from things like switchgrass,
as well as custom designed algae that gain energy from photosynthesis
and actually excrete ethanol compounds. All of those technologies,
however, are still in the research and prototyping phase, and they’re
unlikely to have a noticeable impact for 10 years or more.

Automakers,
however, like ethanol. Adapting vehicles to run on it is far less
costly than engineering electric vehicles from the ground up, and
consumers don’t have to change their habits. They just have to get used
to fewer miles per tank, since a gallon of ethanol contains less energy
than a gallon of gasoline.

Electricity better on carbon

At
the moment, electricity (even from coal-burning powerplants) has the
best carbon footprint per mile driven. Compared to a 25-mpg car, fueling
an electric car even on the dirtiest power grid in the country emits
less carbon per mile than burning gasoline.

When you double the
bogey to 50 mpg, you get a handful of edge cases where burning gasoline
is marginally lower-carbon than driving the same mile on grid power.

A
2007 study jointly authored by the Electric Power Research Institute
and the Natural Resources Defense Council provides the details. The first volume looks at greenhouse-gas emissions, the second volume at U.S. air-quality analysis.

Engines get way less thirsty

By
2020 or before, electric cars are likely to be cost-competitive with
gasoline vehicles (depending on oil price, of course!) as the
price-performance of lithium-ion cells falls at 6 to 8 percent a year,
as it has in the consumer Li-ion cell market since 1989.

It’s
worth noting, however, that gasoline and diesel vehicles will get far,
far more fuel efficient with significant doses of advanced technology:
turbocharging, direct injection, variable valve timing, and better
transmissions.

J.D. Power predicts direct injection will be fitted
to 25 percent of U.S. vehicles in 2015; industry analyst IHS Automotive
predicts the number will be 38 percent the following year. Almost 9 out
of 10 vehicles will have variable valve timing in 2016, IHS says, and
turbochargers will comprise either 12 percent (IHS) or 25 percent (J.D.
Power) by then.

The full-size sedan of 2025 (e.g. Ford Taurus)
might weigh one-third less, have a drag coefficient as low as 0.22, and
be powered by a 1.8- to 2.0-liter direct-injected turbocharged engine
putting out 300 horsepower–which could conceivably return 35 to 40 mpg
in regular use. That’s just half the carbon output of a similar car
today

What that means is that gas cars will get more efficient
fairly quickly, and that’s the bar that electric vehicles will have to
compete with in 2020 and thereafter.

The infrastructure question

We’ve spent 100-plus years building a retail distribution infrastructure for gasoline to fuel cars, and that’s the strongest.

After
that, all households, multiple dwellings, and businesses at least have
120-Volt electricity widely available onsite. While 240-Volt power is
needed for recharging battery electric vehicles in practical timespans
(6-8 hours vs. 12-16 hrs), that’s a much easier problem to solve than
building a brand-new distribution infrastructure for another fuel.

Natural
gas probably has the most potential beyond electricity, since it’s
widely used and there is at least some household availability in some
regions. Building natural-gas fueling stations with any kind of
comprehensive coverage, however, would be a major challenge.

Some
analysts expect NGVs to be limited to certain duty cycles: Long-haul
truckers who can fill up at regularly spaced Interstate rest stops, for
example, or local commuter vehicles in areas like the LA Basin.

Ethanol tough, hydrogen very tough

Ethanol
in its most concentrated E85 form cannot be distributed through the
current gasoline system (it eats rubber seals and other components, as
it does in engines that aren’t designed for Flex-Fuel use) so it must be
carried in separate trucks, kept in separate tanks, etc.

That’s
one reason it’s much easier to distribute ethanol blended into gasoline
(as E10 or the upcoming E15 that the EPA has just approved for certain
models) than as E85. (The number after the “E” indicates the overall
percentage of ethanol in the liquid.)

And
hydrogen, though energy-dense and emissions-free, has the worst
distribution problems of all. General Motors found that it took more
than 2 years and close to $2 million to get permission to build a single
hydrogen fueling station in White Plains, NY.

Multiply that by
the 15,000 stations you’d need for minimal national coverage, and you’re
getting into the tens of billions of dollars–without even asking where
the hydrogen might come from.

In other words, nothing’s easy.

Which wins on price?

It’s
almost impossible to predict the relative costs of driving a mile on
gasoline, a gas-ethanol blend, natural gas, or grid power 10 years
hence. That’s because it largely depends on the price of oil, which will
make the default fuel–gasoline–more or less attractive.

In the
short term, government subsidies play a large role in kick-starting
sales of alt-fuel vehicles. The Bush and Obama Administrations have
instituted various programs of low-interest loans and grants to
encourage investment in fuel-efficiency and lithium-ion cell technology.

There
are also tax credits up to $7,500 for buyers of plug-in cars, and
state, regional, and corporate entities offer various additional
incentives on top of those.

If
oil rises gradually but steadily, there may be less desire by consumers
to switch than if it spikes as it did in 2008, then collapses. Some
evidence indicates that the volatility of oil-price change is more
important than the actual level. Think of it as the “frog in a pot of
cold water” theory.

No energy plan

In
the U.S., what’s lacking is a long-term vision on how we can reduce our
dependence on oil for transportation. Decades from now, for example, oil
may have higher and better uses (like being made into plastics) than
being burned for vehicle fuel.

Right now, ethanol backers (largely
Midwestern agricultural interests) have one vision, natural-gas backers
(e.g. T. Boone Pickens) have another, the growing electric-vehicle
lobby has a third, and no coherent policy exists to coordinate it.

We
have no national goal, no space-shot effort, no pledge to cut energy
use 5 percent in one year and 30 percent in a decade. The best time for
such a goal–when the nation was willing to do anything in the weeks
after 9/11–was utterly wasted by an administration that urged its
citizens only to resume shopping as normal.

So?

Perhaps
the free market will sort it out in the end. But that would be easier
with accepted metrics to evaluate the results of tests, new
technologies, and incentives. If policymakers and the public could weigh
the efficiency of alternatives, look at results, compare and weigh the
costs, results, and prognoses, we might make progress quicker.

But
the current political climate in the U.S. would seem to preclude
enactment of a comprehensive long-term energy plan. Instead, we now have
various mandates (e.g. the ethanol requirement), subsidies (e.g. the
plug-in tax rebates), research programs, and other Federal and state
regulations.

Instead, we’re likely to see a slow evolution to more
efficient gasoline vehicles. Plug-ins will increase in numbers,
reaching noticeable percentages by the end of the decade, and
natural-gas may be an option for some buyers. But if you’re an average
U.S. driver, don’t expect to give your gas station a miss any time soon.

[Automotive News (requires subscription); Pike Research]

This story originally appeared at Green Car Reports