It's amusing that you think you are so avant garde Eric, but what you are describing is what I was predicting and recommending BP invest in 30 years ago when the whirling dervish of industrial revolution compressed into a Gordian knot of a thousand moving parts in engines in cars looked as though it had done its dash.
I have been amazed that it took 30 years for electric cars and photovoltaics to become competitive and they are not yet really competitive. Such a simple thing - a little electric car tootling around town with a small battery, regenerative braking and 4 moving parts [= the wheels - not counting the doors opening, the radio dial twirling, the aerial going up, the windscreen wipers, and the air conditioning pumping away].
Another thing I dreamed of was superconductors, but they remain far from practicable. In 1990 I took our son to Japan and we visited the science museum in Tokyo where had demonstrations of superconductor levitation and suspension including a little model train floating down a track.
You seem to think people are arguing that there's something inherently good about the good old Otto and Diesel engines powering a ton of steel car, with oily mechanical drive trains and hydraulic/mechanical brakes using friction to stop.
Even if photovoltaics are not cheap enough, big power stations can generate electricity so efficiently compared with tiny little Otto/Diesel engines in cars that electricity should win against gasoline and diesel. Range has been a big problem for electric but with 7SSSSs [7 second swap stop stations] that issue goes away.
You say batteries are getting better, but they are NOT yet good enough so very, very, few people are opting for full electric. Maybe Elon's gigafactory will make home-storage cheap enough and batteries cheap enough for electric cars to go mainstream. Or maybe not.
I guess that when I was promoting electric cars 30 years ago, and carbon taxes if CO2 did turn out to be a problem, and inventing the idea of liquified CO2 from power stations piped 400 metres under the ocean [patented by Mitsubishi after I told a couple of Mitsubishi engineers about it] you'd have been arguing that Otto engines were hunky dory and Diesel engines were dirty polluters. BP was funding research into fusion reactors back in 1986 and the photovoltaic business BP Solar was well underway. BP adopted the slogan Beyond Petroleum and it was not just green-washing. BP really was trying to invest in future successes. We did not pay for dead-end R&D. When something was turning into a fizzer, I would dump it like a hot brick [methanol for example, and CNG]. I ran methanol projects in the early 1980s in NZ and BP Oil International was keen on methanol too. I got Alan Revell [the managing director of BP NZ] to stop CNG development when oil crashed to $10 a barrel in 1986.
It's amusing seeing you newcomers getting overly excited about new things then lecturing your grandmothers how to suck eggs. My company Qualcomm has invested heavily in Halo and sponsors Formula E and Formula 1. While you lecture about it, I'm busy creating it.
My boss in 1986 [Don White] was a hydrogen fan way back in the early 1970s when he was with Shell before moving to BP Oil International. I couldn't see hydrogen getting going any time soon and sure enough, 40 years later it's still experimental. Electric cars are now reality and with improving prospects. Especially if 7SSSSs are developed to take away range anxiety and the high cost and inefficiency of huge batteries to get range.
Lugging around a spare ton of battery is ridiculous. Sort of like a dung beetle pushing its food along in a highly inefficient way - backwards upside down instead of just eating wherever they are when they get hungry.
It would be so much more pleasant and efficient for the dung beetle if they could simply stop at 7SSSS food deposits along the way instead of pushing a big spare load around which isn't needed until much later. Camels also carry big lumps around with them to enable range and duration.
Mqurice |
