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EV's are great for short distances. I readily concede that EV's cover 95% of our trips. It's not the distance that is the problem, it's the cost. Even the Tesla family car is going to be around $40k.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/03/31/tesla-to-offer-affordable-cars-by-2015/
Even with electricity at about half the price of oil per km, that's still expensive to me.
Still, I hope that battery prices can drop to my kind of range, as cheaper batteries would be useful across a range of applications. Really cheap electricity storage is the holy grail for *so* many reasons, but I just don't know if we're going to get there.
In the meantime, boron cars would have a slightly different engine but should be around today's car prices. The fuel would be *much* cheaper! So cheap you could buy the initial boron for your car (about $200, or over $400 for 2 lots), and then recycle that for ever by just mailing it to your country's first boron recycler. Even with the cost of mail & de-rusting it would be cheaper than petroleum. It solves the chicken-and-egg problem of early adopter cars in a country without the fuelling system to run them.
As the boron economy eventually grew you would just swap the boron over at your local garage or shops, and eventually sell the spare tub back, or keep it in your garage for a blackout. Hydrogen leaks terribly and can explode. Boron only burns in a super-oxygenated environment. It's *safe*, so you can store it for years. Your car could operate as a backup power station during blackouts, which is not that big a deal here but in Canada could be the difference between life and death in a snowstorm.
It would solve energy security, climate change, air pollution and associated health costs, and deliver clean driving in clean cities with a far safer fuel. I'm a fan.
Now I'll hand you over to Dr James Hansen. Enjoy.
***
Download the free book here that outlines more wonderful things about the boron economy, describes plasma burners that convert ordinary household waste into most of the ingredients required to build the next house and car and boat, and even details nuclear-waste-eating breeder reactors like the GenIV Integral Fast Reactor.
Free book "Prescription for the planet" here
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/03/31/tesla-to-offer-affordable-cars-by-2015/
Even with electricity at about half the price of oil per km, that's still expensive to me.
Still, I hope that battery prices can drop to my kind of range, as cheaper batteries would be useful across a range of applications. Really cheap electricity storage is the holy grail for *so* many reasons, but I just don't know if we're going to get there.
In the meantime, boron cars would have a slightly different engine but should be around today's car prices. The fuel would be *much* cheaper! So cheap you could buy the initial boron for your car (about $200, or over $400 for 2 lots), and then recycle that for ever by just mailing it to your country's first boron recycler. Even with the cost of mail & de-rusting it would be cheaper than petroleum. It solves the chicken-and-egg problem of early adopter cars in a country without the fuelling system to run them.
As the boron economy eventually grew you would just swap the boron over at your local garage or shops, and eventually sell the spare tub back, or keep it in your garage for a blackout. Hydrogen leaks terribly and can explode. Boron only burns in a super-oxygenated environment. It's *safe*, so you can store it for years. Your car could operate as a backup power station during blackouts, which is not that big a deal here but in Canada could be the difference between life and death in a snowstorm.
It would solve energy security, climate change, air pollution and associated health costs, and deliver clean driving in clean cities with a far safer fuel. I'm a fan.
Now I'll hand you over to Dr James Hansen. Enjoy.
***
Boron-Powered Cars and Greenwash,
Blees properly ridicules FutureGen, commonly dubbed NeverGen, as a greenwash construction of the coal industry, intended to make it look like they were working on cleaning up their horrendous environmental damage.
Blees suggests that hydrogen-powered cars are a greenwash of the oil and auto industries, while they continue to stick us with gas-guzzlers. That charge may be too strong, but it seems fair to say that they have not been looking at alternative vehicles as hard as they should have been. Also I need to point out a possible personal bias: I have been driving a hydrogen-powered car over the past two weeks [a BMW executive recognized me on an airplane and offered a free trial – for the first time I can look my Mercedes-driving lawyer friends on the level, even though it was just a trial – don’t get excited, the hydrogen cars are not for sale, would be very expensive if they were, and there was only one place, in Jersey City boondocks, where I could fill it up.
Blees thinks that there is a superior alternative to hydrogen. Here is the basis of the idea. If a metal is ground into fine enough dust, nanoparticles, it will burn. We could burn iron-dust in our cars, capture the rust-dust, take the rust home, and cook it to drive the oxygen off, thus recovering our initial iron dust, which we then could use to power our car on its next trip. We supply energy at the time of cooking. Iron is just the energy carrier.
So iron dust is an alternative to hydrogen as an energy carrier to power our post-fossil-fuel cars. Iron dust (unlike hydrogen) has the advantage of being non-explosive, but (among other things) it is heavy and gets heavier as rust. Enter a better idea: boron. It is much more energy dense than iron: it takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline. A tank (box) of boron would cost a few hundred dollars, but you only need to buy one tankful, when you buy your car. After that you just take the boron oxide to a store, a Seven-Eleven would be happy to serve, and trade it in for a box of boron (anyone can handle this material). Blees figures that processing boron oxide back to boron would cost only tens of cents. Even if he is too optimistic (or if Exxon/Mobil sees to it that he is put 6-foot under – they are not likely to appreciate competition from Seven-Eleven), it should be much cheaper than gasoline. If the processing from B2O3 back to B is done with carbon-free electricity, it takes care of the carbon emissions problem. Blees, as you might guess, envisages the energy coming from IFR nuclear plants.
O.K., let’s go back a step. It is widely agreed that electric cars can be a solution for a piece of vehicular needs, and plug-in hybrid-electrics are a partial solution for the remaining piece. We should start with those technologies because they are ready to go, and batteries will improve, even though it has been slow going. But we must have something other than gasoline for complementing the electric part. Hydrogen, used in a fuel cell as opposed to being burned in an internal combustion engine, has the great advantage of emitting only water vapor as an exhaust product. Hydrogen could be produced at remote sites where renewable energy, such as wind or solar, is plentiful (or by IFR). But it has technological challenges, as described well in Science a few years ago, and more so in Joe Romm’s book, The Hype About Hydrogen.
Automakers have been working hard on hydrogen for several years. Some of the technological problems must have been solved. All I can say is that the hydrogen-BMW drove great, better than any car I have ever owned, with enough getty-up for even a Texas cowboy (I am not a Texas cowboy). The car also had a gasoline tank, to avoid stranding with no hydrogen, and at push of a button switched seamlessly between hydrogen and gas.
In dismissing hydrogen Blees relies in part on a note by Tromp et al. (Science, 2003) suggesting that hydrogen leakage might threaten the stratospheric ozone layer. But Michael Prather (Science 302, 581, 2003) looked harder and found that it is unlikely to be a problem with realistic hydrogen leakage rates. There are greater challenges for hydrogen, though.
Getting the price of hydrogen vehicles down to a reasonable level is a big challenge and there would need to be a distribution system analogous to gas stations, perhaps replacing them. Boron must have challenges too, but maybe less. Blees says the boron must burn in pure oxygen, which requires miniaturization of an oxygen supply system for the car. I wonder if collecting the boron oxide and converting it back to pure boron is as simple as claimed? Also, the product of hydrogen (in a fuel cell) is water vapor, which we do not have to worry about. That is the big draw of hydrogen: zero pollution. I wonder if we can burn boron without tailpipe pollution?
Bottom line: Blees has stimulating, revolutionary vision. The jury is still out on hydrogen vs boron vs something else. But I am confident that there are better alternatives than fossil fuels. It is time to start working much harder on such alternatives.”
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf
Blees properly ridicules FutureGen, commonly dubbed NeverGen, as a greenwash construction of the coal industry, intended to make it look like they were working on cleaning up their horrendous environmental damage.
Blees suggests that hydrogen-powered cars are a greenwash of the oil and auto industries, while they continue to stick us with gas-guzzlers. That charge may be too strong, but it seems fair to say that they have not been looking at alternative vehicles as hard as they should have been. Also I need to point out a possible personal bias: I have been driving a hydrogen-powered car over the past two weeks [a BMW executive recognized me on an airplane and offered a free trial – for the first time I can look my Mercedes-driving lawyer friends on the level, even though it was just a trial – don’t get excited, the hydrogen cars are not for sale, would be very expensive if they were, and there was only one place, in Jersey City boondocks, where I could fill it up.
Blees thinks that there is a superior alternative to hydrogen. Here is the basis of the idea. If a metal is ground into fine enough dust, nanoparticles, it will burn. We could burn iron-dust in our cars, capture the rust-dust, take the rust home, and cook it to drive the oxygen off, thus recovering our initial iron dust, which we then could use to power our car on its next trip. We supply energy at the time of cooking. Iron is just the energy carrier.
So iron dust is an alternative to hydrogen as an energy carrier to power our post-fossil-fuel cars. Iron dust (unlike hydrogen) has the advantage of being non-explosive, but (among other things) it is heavy and gets heavier as rust. Enter a better idea: boron. It is much more energy dense than iron: it takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline. A tank (box) of boron would cost a few hundred dollars, but you only need to buy one tankful, when you buy your car. After that you just take the boron oxide to a store, a Seven-Eleven would be happy to serve, and trade it in for a box of boron (anyone can handle this material). Blees figures that processing boron oxide back to boron would cost only tens of cents. Even if he is too optimistic (or if Exxon/Mobil sees to it that he is put 6-foot under – they are not likely to appreciate competition from Seven-Eleven), it should be much cheaper than gasoline. If the processing from B2O3 back to B is done with carbon-free electricity, it takes care of the carbon emissions problem. Blees, as you might guess, envisages the energy coming from IFR nuclear plants.
O.K., let’s go back a step. It is widely agreed that electric cars can be a solution for a piece of vehicular needs, and plug-in hybrid-electrics are a partial solution for the remaining piece. We should start with those technologies because they are ready to go, and batteries will improve, even though it has been slow going. But we must have something other than gasoline for complementing the electric part. Hydrogen, used in a fuel cell as opposed to being burned in an internal combustion engine, has the great advantage of emitting only water vapor as an exhaust product. Hydrogen could be produced at remote sites where renewable energy, such as wind or solar, is plentiful (or by IFR). But it has technological challenges, as described well in Science a few years ago, and more so in Joe Romm’s book, The Hype About Hydrogen.
Automakers have been working hard on hydrogen for several years. Some of the technological problems must have been solved. All I can say is that the hydrogen-BMW drove great, better than any car I have ever owned, with enough getty-up for even a Texas cowboy (I am not a Texas cowboy). The car also had a gasoline tank, to avoid stranding with no hydrogen, and at push of a button switched seamlessly between hydrogen and gas.
In dismissing hydrogen Blees relies in part on a note by Tromp et al. (Science, 2003) suggesting that hydrogen leakage might threaten the stratospheric ozone layer. But Michael Prather (Science 302, 581, 2003) looked harder and found that it is unlikely to be a problem with realistic hydrogen leakage rates. There are greater challenges for hydrogen, though.
Getting the price of hydrogen vehicles down to a reasonable level is a big challenge and there would need to be a distribution system analogous to gas stations, perhaps replacing them. Boron must have challenges too, but maybe less. Blees says the boron must burn in pure oxygen, which requires miniaturization of an oxygen supply system for the car. I wonder if collecting the boron oxide and converting it back to pure boron is as simple as claimed? Also, the product of hydrogen (in a fuel cell) is water vapor, which we do not have to worry about. That is the big draw of hydrogen: zero pollution. I wonder if we can burn boron without tailpipe pollution?
Bottom line: Blees has stimulating, revolutionary vision. The jury is still out on hydrogen vs boron vs something else. But I am confident that there are better alternatives than fossil fuels. It is time to start working much harder on such alternatives.”
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf
Download the free book here that outlines more wonderful things about the boron economy, describes plasma burners that convert ordinary household waste into most of the ingredients required to build the next house and car and boat, and even details nuclear-waste-eating breeder reactors like the GenIV Integral Fast Reactor.
Free book "Prescription for the planet" here
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf
![[serious]](/data/avatars/m/160/160873.jpg?1431539545){kind=avatar}
