Hybrid car

[GaryPaladino]

This is an interesting article. The hybrid and plug in car craze is not only going to lead to the need for more power plants (which use coal, nat gas, or nuclear fuels), but is going to require huge amounts of rare earth metals (which are called “rare” for a reason). Sounds like the scientists need to work on a battery containing carbon monoxide, instead of rare earth metals. Once hybrids are in the majority, they will need their own Yucca Mountain to store all of the used batteries. I wonder if significant amounts of rare earth metals survive in old hybrid batteries and can be recycled economically. What affects do we have if certain levels of rare earth metals leech into the water supplies?

All we need is for China to control the rare earth market and the world’s wealth.

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[Fish]

True. But what's the alternative? We have limited resources on the planet to produce energy, and the US has a big chunk of the demand for them. For example, we need way more oil than we have under US territory and we need more and the world has less all the time. Is that a problem? When will it be a problem? 10 years from now? 25? 50? It will happen. There's no new cheap petroleum being made these days.

We do have plenty of coal and uranium. Good supply of wind too. But those resources can't be poured into a gas tank. Best we can do right now is to use them to make electrons or hydrogen gas or maybe other simple fuel molecules. The technology in electric cars and hybrids and the rare-earth metals in those technologies will be needed to move cars based on any of those other cheap sources of energy. And that's another resource problem.

So where do we go? Biofuels could go directly into gas tanks, but they won't be feasible without some scientific breakthroughs - likely eventually, but no one knows when. What else is there? Get rid of cars? Nah, we're a car culture. Pry our cars out of our cold dead hands, right?

Sure looks like there's no easy solutions. Oil IS a problem. Rare earth metals may fast become a problem. These things WILL put pressure on the world to use energy resources more efficiently, whatever those resources are. Such pressure will change economies in painful ways. Technology WILL advance and relieve some of the pressure and pain. No one has a crystal ball to figure out when and how much, so I wouldn't bet all my chips on any one technology yet.

So are hybrid/electric cars a bad idea or a good one? No one really knows for sure (not even the "experts"), but they're one line of attack that might work. I don't want that to be our only line of attack - seems that if you don't know the right solution, you seed several things, observe and measure the results and try to pick the best to go with. Or you can believe steadfastly that you actually know what the future will bring...

I think it's good to see some real attacking starting to happen when the alternative would seem to be (and has been) to hide in the status-quo foxhole waiting for the crystal ball to start working correctly before the inevitable bomb drops.

- Fish

[RandyJ]

I think it's good to see some real attacking starting to happen when the alternative would seem to be (and has been) to hide in the status-quo foxhole waiting for the crystal ball to start working correctly before the inevitable bomb drops.
- Fish

Fish, not to take away from the points you made in the above post, but just gotta say I almost choked on all the metaphors in that one sentence.

[Fish]

Fish, not to take away from the points you made in the above post, but just gotta say I almost choked on all the metaphors in that one sentence.

I knew what I was doing and was goin for the record for mixed metaphors. Face planted into the prose tho. The agony of defeat...

- Fish

[RandyJ]

Have we discussed these small-scale nuclear units here? On the surface, seems very appealing.

[okieboater]

When the engineers and politicians in Washington DC get on the same page, the issue around oil as our cheapest engine fuel will be solved.

Take a look at history and see how many times the worlds primary source of energy has changed.

[prophet]

When the engineers and politicians in Washington DC get on the same page, the issue around oil as our cheapest engine fuel will be solved.

Take a look at history and see how many times the worlds primary source of energy has changed.

wood>coal>oil?

[Fish]

Overheard in the US Congress in 1800: "It makes no sense to switch from wood to coal! Wood is everywhere, there's way more of it than we'll ever need, it's cheap, people would have to buy new coal stoves when their wood stove works just fine, and coal smoke smells bad. There's nothing we do today that coal will do better than wood! It's just doesn't make sense. Trying to develop a new energy technology is a waste of money thought up by coal entrepreneurs and crazy dreamers who think it could lead to some kind of industrial revolution! Ha!"

...Fish

[GaryPaladino]

Certainly the burning of hydrocarbons seems to be the most cost effective way to use energy at this time.

While I would love to believe we can "invent" our way out of this, I wouldn't count on it. Most of our engineering energy right now is used to incrementally improve our current inventions. Think about it, even though invented 50, 100 or 1000 years ago, how much have these items changed vs their original design? What has been invented that is likely to replace them?

The canoe - new materials and tweeked the shape slightly
the kayak - new materials and tweeked the shape slightly
the crapper - added power flush and reduce water consumption
the 4 cycle engine -added computers, electonic controls, efficiency and emmision controls

The canoe and kayak have pretty much been replaced for what they were originally invented for, but are hanging on for recreational purposes and maybe some navy special forces work.

What a lot of folks seem to want but I don't think we'll see (in our lifetime) is an obsolescence of the internal combustion engine. Think about the way the word processor completely destroyed the need for a manual typewriter. The old underwoods are used only for decoration and historical artifacts. They are not even useful for recreation. In the grand scheme of the history of mankind, all the manual typewriter did was screw up the layout of the modern keyboard.

[prophet]

what is the mpg tradeoff for power windows, locks, butt warmers, etc.?