Hacker News Reader

Comment by remote_phone | Hacker News Reader

Making electric trucks makes more sense. Then you can centralize the CO2 collection to the power plants and make it much more efficient.

View on HN

No doubt an electric truck is better than a diesel truck, but the diesel truck already exists. Consequently any comparison needs to include the impact of scrapping all the existing trucks and replacing them with electric ones.

Ideally you'd do that slowly to maximize the utility of the emissions from building the diesel truck in the first place, so add-on technology to make them more environmentally friendly is a very good thing.

Or go 100% renewables power and EVs (keep it in the ground), no carbon capture + sequestration needed for emissions. For net negative GHG emissions, sequestration using bio-remediation such as ferrous oceanic seeding and kelp bloom capture/sequestration makes infinitely more sense (cheaper/easier) than direct emissions or atmospheric capture. Phasing-out ICEs and FF extraction must be global goals if we are to survive.

Regulating buses and trucks to be electric in short timespan would be much harder politically.

Having the conversion option available would be a great addition to synthetic carbon neutral diesel compatible fuels.

Syn-fuels are never carbon neutral, you always have CH4 Emissions when producing, transporting,storing or burning fuel (and N2O too if you burn the fuel using air and not pure oxygen). CH4 is not only a rather potent GHG, it also oxidizes to CO2. Obviously the emissions are a lot lower than using fossil fuels but they are still there.

Most busses here (the Netherlands) already are electric I have read in China it's the same. For trucks it will be harder though

I don't think so.

Building an electric car emits a ton of CO2 as well. The figure that is often used is that building your car generates just as much CO2 that what it will generate during its lifetime of driving.

So even if your truck runs 100% on renewable energy (and that's a big if, not to mention that creating this system also generates pollution before becoming green), retrofitting existing vehicles with technologies such as this one should be studied seriously.

That figure is flat-out wrong, though. It's a myth.

Can you link to an analysis?

Here’s a comprehensive study from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...

Is that the one that was massively revised about a month ago, where all the 'worst-case' assumptions for ev production related emissions were dramatically reduced?

The numbers in this report compare the emissions cost of a new BEV to that of a new ICE. But I don't see anyone seriously arguing that people should buy new ICE's; rather, the claim seems to be that people should keep modern ICEs on the road as long as possible before replacing them (with something better than an ICE). This analysis says it takes 19,000 miles of driving to make the acquisition of a BEV emissions-neutral compared to buying a new ICE; how many miles do you have to drive to make it neutral compared to holding on to your Honda?

It's questionable whether keeping your car longer seriously affects how many new cars get made. If you buy a new car and sell it in three years then somebody else can buy it. If you keep it for six years then the person who would have bought it still needs a car for those three years, so now they have to buy a new car in your place. Selling your completely functioning car just puts it in the hands of someone else. What really takes them off the road is wrecks and unjustifiably expensive repairs.

So how long your car lasts isn't really a question of how long you personally own it, it's a question of whether you maintain it well so that it stays on the road for the next guy and don't get into a wreck.

If you can afford to do it, it would actually help to buy a new electric car, keep it for only a short period of time and then sell it and buy another new one. Because then you're the one buying new cars and you're choosing a BEV, and every one you sell into the used market is someone who then doesn't have to buy a new car that might have been ICE.

That... doesn't sound right to me. Cars are manufactured in numbers to satisfy demand. Buying new cars fuels demand. We'd all like new cars --- we like new everything! --- but this sounds like rationalizing.

Sure, they'll make as many cars as people will buy. And if you were buying new cars and crashing them, that would cause them to have to make more new cars. But if you're buying new cars and then selling them, your demand is offset by you satisfying the demand from the person who bought your old car.

If everybody did that then it wouldn't work -- nobody would be buying the used cars. But there are more than enough people who would never do that anyway because they can't afford it, that it's a gain for all the people who can afford it to do it.

And, of course, the substitution isn't perfect, so if 95% of new cars were already electric then this might not be worth it. The benefit comes from you choosing a new BEV when someone else might have chosen a new ICE. But when existing new sales are much less than half BEV, making the better choice can easily outweigh the imperfect substitution.

I'd heard similar complaints to GP about embodied energy, but not for electric vehicles. Only with HEVs and ULEVs, which are far more complicated than either of their competitors. It's no wonder they'd have higher embedded energy footprints.

> Under the average U.S. electricity grid mix, we found that producing a midsize, midrange (84 miles per charge) BEV typically adds a little over 1 ton of emissions to the total manufacturing emissions, resulting in 15 percent greater emissions than in manufacturing a similar gasoline vehicle. However, replacing gasoline use with electricity re-duces overall emissions by 51 percent over the life of the car.

This has steam coming out of my ears, and I agree with the goal they set for themselves. I haaaAAAAaaate when scientists pull tone-deaf shit like this. It's why I ran away from theory into applied as fast as my legs could carry me. Nobody is gonna drive an 84 mile range vehicle. The market has shouted this from the rooftop and if Concerned Scientist have not heard this, then they're nowhere near as smart as they want everyone to think they are. Use real numbers and spare us your white tower bullshit. A competitive car will have 2.5x times that range. That probably lowers that lifetime number into the high 3X%'s which is not as compelling but also not lying.

Lying to prove a point is the worst kind of lying, because when your detractors catch you in it then the unconvinced have confirmation bias against your original premise. Cut that shit out. For everybody's sake.

35% lifetime emissions reduction is not a slam dunk. Many more additional efforts (read: lifestyle changes) will have to go along with that improvement. And that's nearly as hard a pill to swallow as a car that only gets 84 miles per charge brand new.

I don't understand your comment. You're complaining about lying but the one who is lying is you.

1. The phrase "265-mile-range BEV" appears 9 times in the document. That's not 2.5x times that range. It's more than 3.1 times the range of the small BEV.

2. The document never mentions a 35% emissions reduction. On page 21 (or 31) you can see a chart showing a 51% CO2 reduction for the 84 mile BEV and a 53% reduction for the 265 mile BEV.

Reading further: the increased embodied energy for the Leaf is one tone of carbon. The Tesla is six tons.

The fact that the Tesla retains the same emission reduction is because it’s a much larger vehicle. The same sedan would burn much more gas. So what I’d want to know is what’s the footprint of the 2019 extended range Leaf? 2 tons? Five? What’s the lifetime efficiency profile there?

(Also I didn’t realize that power in the Midwest was quite that dirty. That’s nuts and it drags the profile down for everyone else. Apparently EVs in the West are a slam dunk, and also on parts of the eastern seaboard. Iowa? Not much of an improvement)

This is in the report.. the 84mi EV is a Nissan Leaf. That was a very popular EV for 2015 (the year of the report). People definitely did and still do drive it. It's one of the best selling EVs every year.

I would suggest reading the report a little more closely.. It also has numbers for a 265mi Model S... so you don't need to make up estimates for such an EV.. it's in the report.

The 2017 Nissan Leaf had a range of 107 miles. The 2018 and 2019 Have an EPA mileage of 150 miles. The 2019 also has a large battery version with a range of 226 miles.

It's the 2015 leaf that had a 84mi range... it was a step up from 2014's 75mi range. The 2011 version had a 73mi range.

The Leaf was the best selling EV from 2011-2014 and in 2016. It lost out to the Model S in 2015 by 10%. 400k Leafs sold (bestselling EV of all time)... Tesla is just now starting to surpass that number.

Obviously a report from 2015 wouldn't include Leafs from the future.

That’s pure fiction. Even large batteries (100+ KWh) pay for their manufacturing emissions within a few years.

A car is a bit more than a large battery.

You’re manufacturing a car either way aren’t you?

In fairness, I hear that the lifespan of large working trucks is far longer than vanity consumer cars.

To the point where semis typically have more digits on their odometers.

Does that actually matter though? They'd replace the batteries, not the full truck.

Perhaps not, but just something to keep in mind.

not at all, we are talking about replacing an existing vehicle or retrofitting it.

> Building an electric car emits a ton of CO2 as well

And building a regular fuel car doesn't? (Assuming we need to build some kind of car anyway?)

"Electric cars are bad for environment because of building them and producing batteries" is plainly just a myth.

> (Assuming we need to build some kind of car anyway?)

Why do you assume that, given the parent comment explicitly talks about retrofits?

Some retrofits will happen. I would guess, though, that 90% of electric vehicles will be manufactured as electric vehicles, rather than as retrofits. So to focus only on retrofits to make the argument is rather misleading.

that's quite a nice strawman you have there.

I haven't claimed that electric cars are bad for the environment, just that replacing a perfectly working vehicle by another one is not necessarily a win.

Cars don't appear out of thin air and that manufacturing process ? it pollutes a ton.

If the replaced vehicle is used in some way, it’s a net win.

It sound like a tough sell to me if the vehicle can be retrofitted to capture 90% of the CO2 it emits.

To be fair, once it is captured, I am guessing (e.g. no data) that using it as fuel would release CO2 as well, so we would be somewhere below these 90%.

Still, the new vehicle won't appear out of thin air, and the electricity it uses won't either (hopefully it is nuclear or renewable).

Either way, I don't see why such a tech gets rejected outright. I hate gas cars as much as everybody and can't wait to see them replaced by good public transit systems, LMV and yes electric cars.

In the meantime, we have an enormous pool of gas car in circulation, anything that can help reduce their environmental impact is a win in my book.

Well because it's 90 percent efficient vehicles will emit 10% the amount of CO2, but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly. That might be ok if we weren't already at the world's carrying capacity for CO2, instead we need to be drastically reducing our emissions this is just an expensive stopgap measure that keeps us digging up carbon.

As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.

>As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.

I agree 100% and it disturbs me very deeply, along with the hundreds of other insane things going on these days, climate grief is definitely a good way to describe how many people feel about the magnitude of these issues.

>but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly

Not necessarily, we could (and should) sequester CO2.

Capturing 90% of the CO2 is a nonsense claim.

how so ? that's the claim of the article.

I am not claiming that this makes it automatically true, but some data to back why it is false would help.

Thermodynamics: the energy produced by the engine comes from forming CO2 and heat in the first place. Capturing 90% of it without using all the energy produced by the combustion doesn’t make sense, it defies the laws of physics because entropy is being reversed.

They're bad because the world isn't producing nearly enough electricity for us all to go electric. And producing more electricity IS going to be bad for the environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com