WHAT IS THE BEST SUSTAINABLE GROUND TRANSPORT OPTION?

My personal sense is that we will begin to phase out internal combustion engines over the next quarter century.  The executive director of the International Energy Agency, Nobuo Tanaka, predicts a disappearance by 2050.   As the lithium battery will probably be the final battery, and a fuel cell can take a vehicle (for the same internal space of the system) five times further, future land transport will most probably be powered by fuel cells.  

Yet, there are near fatal flaws plaguing this technology.  As the person who wrote the initial Senate legislation creating the Matsunaga Hydrogen Act, and in the nineties chaired the U.S. Secretary of Energy's Hydrogen Technical Advisory Panel, while I continue to harbor hopes about the long-term importance of hydrogen, I suspect that we remain many decades away from the Hydrogen Economy.  Fortunately enough, there is methanol, a liquid biofuel capable of directly being utilized by fuel cells.  Ethanol has two carbons and will have difficulty.

While the current practice is to produce ethanol (the alcohol you can also drink) through fermentation, methanol (right) is best manufactured from methane (left), which can be obtained by gasifying biomass.  No matter how you analyze it, methanol is cheaper to produce than ethanol, and, further, does not compete with food options.  One incredible fact is that one gallon of methanol has 1.4 times more accessible hydrogen than a gallon of liquid hydrogen (LH). Amazingly enough, a gallon of each today costs $1.50/gallon.  If they are produced from renewable resources, the price could jump to perhaps $2.50/gallon, still not bad.  The energy content of LH is one-fourth that of gasoline, while methanol is half, or double that of LH.  

As methanol is the only liquid fuel that can reasonably efficiently be directly fed to a fuel cell, and our infrastructure is liquid, not gaseous, why don't we look closer at a possible biomethanol economy?  Alas, our national policy has purposefully ignored this potential.

Given green methanol, you're not going to combust it in an engine, unless you're a drag racer.  The direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is the obvious pathway.  The problem is that almost no government research has been done on the DMFC.  We are a billion dollars away from real commercialization, with the risk that a DMFC might just not be practical.  However, it is real because Toshiba has been marketing one for portable applications, and a few other companies are trying, also only for electronic devices.

So, today, I responded to a colleague on this subject, who had sent me a link to a Department of Energy web site touting the plug-in electric car.

Dear John:

Sometime soon I was planning to post on this subject, and will.  Your reference should help me be a bit more optimistic, because I was planning to lean in the negative direction, and almost surely still will.

I plugged in the number for Hawaii, and the costs are similar, both around $3.74.  But that is because our electricity rates are three times the national average.  My analysis, which hasn't changed much from when I did this for my book on SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth, delves into the added cost of EV's, especially plug-ins (I am favorably disposed towards hybrids), and how you will never make up the difference.  Then, when you add the limited range, the fact that 38% of our electricity still comes from coal and that the lithium battery will be last battery (the periodic table says so), I continue to have reservations.  

Plug-ins are just not selling well, Tesla* is only for the rich and Fisker Karma went bankrupt.  I appreciate that there is a transition period, and the time to build that bridge to the future is now.  Thus, I don't oppose EV's.  I just have a sense that there is too much overblown enthusiasm for a pathway that is questionable.

So what is the future of grand transport?  C.E. Thomas makes a case for fuel cells.  However, he is pushing hydrogen, which I think is as much as a century away.  I've known Sandy for decades and we've had this debate about what is best, on numerous occasions.  I still think the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is this future.  But I can't seem to convince enough important decision-makers.  I wrote in the Huffington Post almost five years ago on:

Is There An Option More Promising Than  the Plug-In Electric Vehicle?

And remain convinced that the DMFC is the way to go.  We need a billion dollars to do this, or prove it won't work.  

The opportunist might turn out to be Qatar.  At least this is what the advised the Emir when I was there.

Aloha.

* Cheapest Tesla costs $60,000, although a third generation is being floated to the media for sale by 2017 for $35,000, with a 200 mile range  and a battery switching operation that should take only a minute.  I'm not optimistic.  For one, Better Place, a company formed to do just this, is now bankrupt.

I thought the above message matched well with my topic of today. In particular, there are excellent links to various elements of this broader subject.  To answer the question of the day...for the third time...the direct methanol fuel cell remains my choice as the best sustainable ground option worthy of development.

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