Toyota Prius
The Auto Industry Isn't Quite Dead--Far From It (II)
June / July 2009
Volume 7 Number 3
When policy makers talk about the shift from oil to other sources, one recurring problem is that they underestimate the severity of the issue. We consume about 85 million barrels of oil every day globally, translating to over 3.57 billion gallons of fuel. In 2008, the United States produced a record ethanol production of 9 billion gallons, enough for about 3 days of global consumption. Reducing our need by any significant portion will involve use of a number of technologies in concert with proper policies and a conservation minded public. There are no technological quick fixes or silver bullets here.
Here's a snapshot of the current situation and a look at prospects.
Environmental concerns have led researchers to look for more sustainable alternatives to oil-based products. A number of solutions are being developed to help us maintain our way of life while mitigating the effects on the environment. For example, renewable sources of electricity including solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power are being developed to reduce our coal requirements.
Replacing oil is a tough proposition. Technology innovation in the automotive industry, as it is elsewhere, is closely allied to the need of the hour. Historically, the need in the automobile industry has been to sell more cars and to comply with increasingly tough emission standards. Today, our reliance on oil is seen not just an economic concern. Large oil importing countries such as the United States and India also see dependence on foreign oil as a strategic concern.
Our entire infrastructure is based on the assumption that oil or its replacement will be cheap enough so that the majority of the population will be able to afford it. Automobiles, after all, made suburbs possible. Breaking free of our dependence on oil is no doubt going to be a tough and lengthy process. Energy independence is largely a strategic concern, while the security of the oil supply is of primary importance to multiple industries and economies.
Sustainable energy, on the other hand, refers to a shift from an oil-based economy to one that will use renewable resources for our needs.
Automotive research initiatives today pursue both of these objectives. Auto manufacturers are looking at ways to make transportation less reliant on our crude oil supplies and more efficient with their use. Broadly, these approaches can be classified into alternate fuels and alternate powertrains.
Alternative Fuels
While gasoline and diesel are the most common fuels used in internal combustion engines today, a number of alternatives exist. They include other oil-based fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas, compressed natural gas, and ammonia, as well as biofuels. Biofuels are renewable sources of fuel for internal combustion engines. The most common of these are ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol is made from sugar-rich crops, such as corn or sugarcane, while biodiesel is made through a process called transesterification and uses vegetable oil as well as an alcohol. Ethanol is used as a replacement for gasoline in spark ignited engines, while biodiesel has similar combustion characteristics and can be used as a replacement for conventional diesel in compression ignition engines. There are also other biofuels, such as butanol, in the pipeline, but the current focus is on the economics of using ethanol and biodiesel.
Ethanol is a suitable fuel for use in spark ignited engines, but it cannot be used directly in gasoline engines. Because the combustion characteristics and the energy content of ethanol is lower than that of gasoline, the electronic control units that manage engines need to be calibrated for ethanol usage. These vehicles with modified control systems are called flex-fuel vehicles and are sold in the United States for use with blends of ethanol and gasoline. Very low percentage blends of ethanol in gasoline can be used to power unmodified vehicles.
Ethanol use to supplement gasoline is not without its critics, however. Ethanol in the United States is largely made from corn. A number of studies show that corn-based ethanol is largely energy negative, consuming more energy to generate a gallon of ethanol than can be achieved from that gallon. Ethanol also has other problems. It is hygroscopic, so it will pick up moisture necessitating an extra distillation process before it can be used in vehicles. This also rules out using the existing pipeline infrastructure.
Crude oil does not mix with water, so when water present in the pipeline is carried along with the crude, it can be simply settled out. Building an infrastructure specifically for ethanol will mean redoing the pipelines to ensure that there is no water inside. A number of scientists are suspicious of the drive to use and sell corn-based ethanol, claiming that supporting the agricultural industry is among its objectives, and that there is no long-term solution to the fuel issue by this method. It is true that U.S. corn ethanol enjoys a 54 cents per gallon subsidy from the government and has led to a rash of ethanol plants in the United States. In the long term, though, consumption of ethanol from conventional sources does not have potential to displace a significant amount of petroleum consumption.
Ethanol from sugarcane is energy positive, but is limited by the areas where sugarcane can be cultivated and used. Being a tropical plant, it grows well in Brazil and is one of the reasons why Brazil has a self-sustaining transportation system. The other reason is the relatively low use per capita, compared to use by Americans, for example.
The ethanol industry has been trying to move from feedstock sources such as corn and sugarcane to agricultural waste such as corn stovers. This would lead to use of cellulose that is otherwise waste to farmers and is called cellulosic ethanol, which can be produced by existing technology. The limiting factor to its adoption today is economics. Using cellulose in waste materials involves using enzymes to break off the lignin in the structure. The overall economics of the process makes it more expensive than alternatives. If cellulosic ethanol should become economically viable then it will improve the penetration of ethanol in the overall oil market. Without it, though, ethanol will not be able to make significant headway in reducing oil consumption.
Compression ignition engines are hardy cousins to the spark-ignited engines. They are less finicky when it comes to fuel quality and the requirement to run on diverse fuel sources. When Rudolph Diesel first demonstrated the engine, one of his aims was to enable the farmer to use his produce to power the engine. One of the early demonstrations was using peanut oil as fuel. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that biodiesel as an alternate fuel is far easier to use in diesel engines. It can be used interchangeably with petrodiesel with no noticeable changes. It can even be mixed in any ratio in the fuel tank with no engine modifications whatsoever. It is cleaner burning with lower particulate emissions and has lubrication properties that ultra low sulphur diesel (ULSD) lacks, making it far easier on the high-pressure diesel fuel pump. It also has a very high-flash point, making it safer to store and use.
The issues with biodiesel are largely related to manufacture and feedstock availability. Biodiesel is a methylated ester and is manufactured by a process called transesterification. Starting with vegetable oil feedstock the transesterification process exposes it to alcohol and a base catalyst in a batch process that normally takes about eight hours to complete. Because it is a batch process, manufacturing high quantity biodiesel with repeatable quality is a capital intensive venture. A number of researchers are trying to develop a continuous process for biodiesel manufacture. If these efforts should be successful, it would be relatively easier to reduce the costs involved.
Feedstock sourcing is another major issue with biodiesel. The feedstock here is normally a vegetable oil, though waste animal fats have been used in some pilot programs. These processes are normally optimized for rapeseed oil, soybean oil and palm oil. A number of countries are also trying to use Camellia and Jatropha as feedstock, growing them on marginal land that is otherwise left fallow. Increased use of feedstock has led to rapid deforestation in countries like Indonesia where forests were razed for oil palm plantations.
By far, the most promising alternate fuel feedstock today is algae. Algae are rugged, single celled organisms that have the potential to be used as fuel feedstock. They are extremely fast growing, increasing the effective output per acre per year to numbers that are theoretically magnitudes higher than conventional first generation feedstocks. While oil palm yields about 500 gallons per acre per year and coconut about 230 gallons per acre per year, algae have the theoretical potential to yield about 5,000 to 15,000 gallons per acre per year. With production rates like these, it is theoretically possible to satisfiy our transportation needs with algae-based fuels.
While algae can grow in the wild with no human intervention necessary, growing algal strains to maximize the oil content is still a tricky manufacturing process. Algae can be grown in open ponds or in closed photobioreactors. They have their own pluses and minuses. Open ponds are much cheaper and easier to scale. But they have issues with invasive species taking over the ones being grown. Evaporation and temperature control are also much more difficult. Closed photobioreactors have the advantage of keeping invasive species out as well as being easier to control. But this comes at a very high-capital cost, which makes it difficult to scale up. Closed photobioreactors also have growth problems with current yield much below the theoretical yields. A number of scientists have questioned the numbers behind the algal economics calling it impossible to achieve. With no real historical data available, algae might fall short on expectations.
Startups are also toying with synthetic biology to develop mutant microorganisms that can be tailored for specific fuels or to develop bioversions of crude oil, which can then be run through the existing refinery infrastructure. Companies such as Synthetic Genomics, LS9 and Amyris Biotechnologies are working in this area. Details of their progress remain murky, however, with no real idea of how economically feasible their technologies are. All of these biofuels save algae, can only supplement our thirst for oil. They can stretch our available oil for a few more years but they cannot replace our requirement of about 85 million barrels a day.
Alternate Drivetrains
A vehicle that has more than one source of power driving the powertrain is called a hybrid. A hybrid design could be as simple as a bicycle with electric assist, but in the conventional sense, refers to a power plant that combines an internal combustion engine with a motor and an energy storage system (batteries, flywheels or ultracapacitors). Such a vehicle has the potential to run on electric power, IC power or both depending on the requirements.
Hybrids as a category today can be seen largely as a stopgap solution toward more sustainable transportation methods. As an interim solution, they perform brilliantly in some driving cycles and also help increase awareness towards sustainable transportation. For extreme efficiency in transportation, the electric drivetrain is still the simplest solution available though.
Electric vehicles have made a resurgence in the last five year and are fast emerging as viable alternatives to internal combustion engined automobiles. Electric vehicles refer to purely electric vehicles that use stored energy from a battery, through a motor for propulsion. Contrary to public perception, these are not a new invention. Electric vehicles existed before the first practical internal combustion engine in vehicles. They went out of favor for precisely the same reason they are slow to catch on today—€”range. Modern internal combustion-engined vehicles have a range measured in hundreds of miles with the capability to quickly refill the tank. Most electric vehicles use batteries for their energy storage and batteries in turn have been the biggest bottleneck to electric vehicle progression.
Today's resurgence is due to a number of promising battery developments in lithium ion chemistry that make the electric vehicle an acceptable alternative. Combined with a number of other factors such as increasingly volatile crude oil prices and environmental consciousness, the electric vehicle is increasingly finding acceptance with consumers. There are two big differences between the current generation and previous generation vehicles: they have an acceptable range of above 100 miles with some companies claiming up to 220 miles on a single charge and they are being promoted as a sporty alternative, not just as an eco-friendly one.
Electric vehicles are not totally green. They do however shift the pollution problem from a number of distributed sources, that is, the automobiles, to a central location, the power generation facility. If the power generation were from renewable sources such as solar, hydro or geothermal energy, then these vehicles can be considered green. But even if the generation were from fossil fuels, there are still numerous advantages to shifting the pollution to a central source. For one, it is easier to obtain a higher efficiency at a central location than at a number of distributed sources. And that applies to pollution as well. It is cost-effective to cut pollution at one giant central location rather than at automobiles. Additionally, internal combustion engines are much less efficient than steam turbines that are used for electricity generation.
Depending on the availability of fuel—€”coal or other fuel versus oil—€”this might also make strategic sense for countries, which have one but lack the other. With a number of renewable electricity sources coming on stream in the near future, electric vehicles might turn out to be a significant portion of the answer to solving our addiction to oil.
Sivam Sabesan is an industry analyst in Frost & Sullivan's technical insights practice.
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