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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Because the market prefers oil, is why. And it's easy to see why: oil packs an awful lot of kilojoules of energy into a given volume. That matters whether you are a motorbike or a cargo ship. And its price per KJ is pretty low too - remember that most "electric" solutions simply burn fuel in power stations instead of in engines, and use that to charge batteries, losing energy at every step of the conversion.

We will go battery/fuel cell/whatever - but the cold hard fact is, that technology just isn't ready yet.

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The market prefers it because there is a 100-year head start on distribution networks and standards to the consumer for gasoline.

The only thing that could compete with that is the ability to plug it into the wall yourself. But battery technology has not improved much in that same 100 years and there's no universal battery standard to swap out for a new one during roadtrips.

In a half-dozen generations there will be complaints from gas station owners as they go the way of slide-rule manufacturers and have to get government subsidies to stay open.

Not to mention the convenience of refuelling in minutes rather than hours.

If there's any sense in the world, one would hope that the existing infrastructure will complement any new energy source; we'll still need rest breaks and the odd sandwich at least, it would make sense if they could also recharge the fuel source, economies of scale and all that jazz.

Yes and no. In the medium term, we can expect hybrids to play a bigger role, whilst we wait for battery technology to cover the energy density gap. In less than 20 years, simple economics are going to force us to a solution of full electric cars for urban use, and hybrids for longer trips, with the hybrid normally being charged from the wall, but using oil-based fuels for longer trips (or when the owner forgot to charge the car overnight). That should reduce oil consumption enough to make alternate sources, such as algae-derived diesel, a viable alternative.

Hmm, the thing is tho', there isn't much upside to shifting burning fossil fuels from the engine to the power station. Sure the power station is more efficient in burning the fuel - but then you have to charge batteries too, so that efficiency goes away again. There's really not much point to electric vehicles until you can run them all on batteries charged by nuclear power.

I agree, but the article was specifically talking about oil, not fossil fuels. But I don't think we're dead in the water on the electrical utility front - fusion research is finally starting to enter the final stretch before commercialisation - ITER is expected to get us to the point where we can construct the first commercial-break-even reactor: http://www.iter.org/proj/iterandbeyond

Actually, I find ITER as a pretty good indicator that governments around the world don't feel like they won't be hurting too much on the energy front for quite some time. If they wanted to, they could up the (in context) risible investment in fusion to get a working reactor up and running by the mid-2020s. I mean they're talking about investing about $1billion per year for the next 30 years, from the entire planet. Up that to $5billion, and you can halve the development time. They really aren't terribly concerned at the moment.

On other fronts, Laurence Livermore is starting to get interesting with their inertial fusion designs: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/ife/how_ife_works.php

And of course nanotech may yet allow us to produce the cheap, efficient solar panels that would be needed to use solar as a baseline energy source. So no, I don't think it as being much of a risk to move car energy over to electricity, starting today.

NIF is a well designed/funded scam to do weapon research, it will never have a consumer benefit.

I would not say that NIF is a scam, as they are quite open about their priorities: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/

Except coal cost's ~1/10th what refined Oil does.

1 short ton (907kg) of coal costs $71.25 as of October 2010 coal has an energy density around ~32.5 (MJ/kg). 907kg * (32.5MJ / kg ) / $71.25 = 413 MJ per $.

Compared to gas at ~3$ / gallon. So, 121 MJ / gallon / (3$ / gallon = 40 MJ per $.

Oh, and whilst we are on the subject, Does anyone here have their favourite theory for where the next big advance in energy tech is going to come from? Personally I'm surprised by the lack of government investing in nano-tech. Battery tech, fuel cells and solar panels all seem like prime candidates to benefit from a better understanding of how to construct materials at the molecular scale.

What can you do with "nanotech" that you can't do already? Bear in mind the scale that CPUs are manufactured to now.

Well, I've noticed that solar panel design is starting to head that way - most of the latest and greatest stuff coming out of that corner of research is about using exotic nanotech to produce better panels.

Battery technology can also stand to benefit, allowing for higher energy density batteries, and potentially reducing our dependence on lithium.

Or how about a space elevator, that makes space-base solar cells a viable solution for base energy generation?

These are just a few guesses about how nanotech is likely to help, based on current research results, but there are no doubt other avenues of use of nanotech that I haven't thought of / aren't aware of that are relevant in this context.

What we really need is a better capacity to model the properties of materials designed at nano-scale. Sadly it's the sort of research that has trouble attracting investment because it's too far away from an actual product. But if we ever get to the point where we can use genetic algorithms to search for materials having specific properties, that would turn the world on it's head.

A lot of our nanotech is still in the micro domain or dealing purely with chemicals. A CPU's fundamental organization is too small to be seen without a really, really good microscope, nanomedicines currently only deal with germs and minor changes to their environment, and so on. We have yet to touch the macro domain. For example, nobody has built a car body out of carbon nanotubes so far, and just imagine what would happen if someone found a way to make photovoltaic cells self-assemble on boards dipped in a vat.

Oil is like finding an underground vault full of batteries of vastly superior energy density to any electric battery you can make. How are you going to compete with that?!

That would be coal; oil adds the property that they vanish completely (from the user's perspective anyway) when they're flat, so you've got zero disposal issues.

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