Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip
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The question revolve around affordability and sustainability. Most of the interest was driven by fears we would be running out of oil, now it is driven by fears that we won’t run out of oil.
Not really viable for day to day use yet.
No not really but, when it peaked I saw 2.40 eur/litre (9.71$/gallon, now down to 1.80 eur/litre) in places... Of course, much of that is taxes, but hey, this stuff would receive a lot of subsidies.
Fwiw, I once (4 years ago or so?) spoke to someone from an ICE conference (a parallel conference to my breast cancer conference) who explained that ICE's can be made 100% clean (just output CO2 and H2O) and 100% circular (take all that emitted CO2 out of the air again), it's just an economic consideration, technologically we are there (I guess that is true for many if not most environment related technologies, we just never take environmental damage along in the price of products, in a way we make them artificially cheap).
But with greater adoption and more focus the prices are bound to fall.
And the prices of alternatives will be rising, both electricity and hydrocarbon fuels.
Also EVs seem to not be the answer to everything. If you live in a colder climate, out of grid or you need to drive long distances, it is not clear when on whether EVs will become practical for you.
What people are hoping for today is to get CO₂ from the atmosphere and hydrogen from H₂O with electricity from solar, wind or nuclear. (Though w/ nuclear you might use thermochemical hydrogen if you can get the temperature up)
The best use case for that I've seen is that the US Navy would like to synthesize jet fuel on aircraft carriers so they don't have to slow down to take on fuel from a tanker -- delivering fuel to an aircraft carrier has to cost more than it costs at your local gas station.
Also I think there is more interest in synthetic fuel for airplanes than cars. That Mazda could almost as easily have been run on ethanol, methanol or maybe even butanol. Even methane isn't that hard. Diesel engines can be run on Dimethyl Ether. Single-entity fuels are more efficient to make than synthetic fuels based on long-chain hydrocarbons.
Aviation, on the other hand, is a place where innovation goes to die, where airlines struggle to replace obsolete electronics, where the #1 and #2 aircraft in the world were designed in 1967 and 1982, etc. (... it wouldn't even be legal to sell a car based on a 1982 design!)
The FAA got off their butts and approved the unloaded substitute in 2022 and it's starting to roll out.
Airports want it ASAP because the (IIRC) ~20% higher cost is a cheap price to pay to not have to listen to people complain.
“On February 23, 2022, the FAA joined aviation and petroleum industry stakeholders to announce a comprehensive public-private partnership to transition to lead-free aviation fuels for piston-engine aircraft by the end of 2030.”
You can just use the methanol to run cars. CNG/CBG cars have existed for well over a decade.
What is the cost of the environmental damage from traditionals?
What is the real cost of the military used to guarantee the delivery of traditionals?
That is the opportunity cost of that same military expense?
Oil refineries, they have a cost.
What happens to the cost of synthetics as production volume increases?
Etc.
We need to consider the full cost landscape, not simply gallon v gallon.
Synthetic fuels are potentially valuable because they allow existing capital assets (internal combustion engines and the industry that produces them, fuel distribution infrastructure) to continue to be used.
I am glad to see research into them continue- it's difficult to predict what will scale well economically in five or ten or thirty years.
For any normal industrial process people would be really delighted that they could use iron as a catalyst but the economics of FT are so bad they've scoured the periodic table for something better and not had much improvement.
For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.
Cite for that? That's simply not true. In fact of all major infrastructure media in modern society, electrical transmission is by far the cheapest to upgrade. Even discounting industrial electricity and adding on DC charging of the EV, my household usage has gone up 35%.
You really don't think society can absorb a 35% growth in one infrastructure sector? That's just silly. Obviously there are "costs", but there's no justification for "can't handle" or "massive". At all.
I've heard the "grid can't handle all EVs" statement, but have not seen anything backing up the claim.
I believe the grid can in fact handle EVs becoming prevalent. We might need more power generation, which could be new plants, and/or residential solar.
Baring some kind of crazy legislation requiring ICE vehicles to be crushed or permanently parked, we are decades away from a scenario where pure EVs are the dominant vehicle type on the road. There are just too many serviceable ICE vehicles in play to expect them to really go away in the next quarter century or so. That allows plenty of time for anything the current power generation and distribution infrastructure lacks to be adequately addressed.
An ev drains way more power then a 2kw space heater.
Electric motors are even more efficient, but using them in the form factor of a car is also stupid. With robotics we can now make tiny self-driving vehicles that can do chores for us. Why should I drive a 2-ton car to the store to pick up a gallon of milk, when the store can send a small robot to deliver it to me? Similarly a large empty bus can be replaced with smaller ATV sized EVs that drive me from my house to the main artery and merge to form one train. That reduces the size of the EV engine and battery pack by 10x. Some of the problems to be solved are not merely technological but organizational and cultural.
You can ride a bicycle to the store to pick it up. Just think of the cardiovascular benefits.
And you know what? Think of the energy cost of the robot's manufacture, and the energy the delivery takes.
Cycling is my most common mode of transportation these days. I love it. But I also know it's not going to be practical primary means of transport for a huge slice of the population. And the "danger from cars" ranks pretty low in my list of reasons.
Human food is the most expensive fuel on the planet when you factor in agriculture.
A 2kW space heater used just 12 hours a day uses the same power per day as 4 mile per kWh EV driven 35,000 miles per year. Many space heaters see more than 12h/day of use but 35k miles per year is extremely rare.
EV’s are like microwaves, they use a lot of power when on but the grid cares about average load across millions of them not what’s happening in any one home.
“The battery size for a Tesla Model 3 ranges from 50 kWh to 82 kWh” that would give the largest a range of 20 miles.
Ev-database.org says they use 151Wh/km which is about 240Wh/mile.
Your hypothetical 2kw space heater uses 24kWh a day and is drastically less efficient than a heat pump.
EV zealots are just blind to the issues their silver bullet creates. Just like the "walk-able cities" folks.
Others will use dirt-cheap night time electricity.
And with Vehicle to Grid smart people can sell the extra energy in their car battery during peak hours and use the credits from that to charge their car overnight.
None of this is some kind of magical tech that's hard to use. Gridio (https://www.gridio.io) already exists and works directly with multiple EV brands.
The next time I need to plug it in is maybe on Saturday.
You need to use your electric heater 24/7 to not freeze.
The US's annual gasoline consumption is 135 bn gallons (2021 figure). At around 20 mpg (random estimate because I have to pick something), that works out to 2.7 trillion miles. At 30 kWh/100mi (figure from google), that works out 800 TWh if every gas vehicle in the US was suddenly switched for an electric one, or about 20% of the US's annual electricty generation of 4222.5 TWh (2018 figure). Also, that's about 5x the global crypto energy usage, vs just America's cars. [Obvious disclaimers: some of those estimates are arbitrary and not perfect, but they're in the right ballpark, and we obviously wouldn't switch to electric cars overnight]
Crypto was bad because it didn't actually accomplish anything with that power usage, but it was a pretty small footnote on the grand scheme of things.
There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.
Never going to happen for 80-90% of the US. It is neither economically feasible, culturally feasible, or practically feasible for most people in the US.
Work places are too spread out, homes are not located near workplaces, and there is no desire from anyone (my self included) to increase density.
I want less density not more, "walkable" cities only work if people actually want to live in a walkable city. Many many many dont
For the first time I can remember, my power company was sending out Texts here in the midwest during that last Arctic blast telling people to use less electricity because the grid was over taxed.
Our National Energy grid is very very fragile.
Converting natural gas furnaces to heat pumps and replacing resistive heating with heat pumps, would not increase the total electricity usage at all. Last I looked 40% of heating in Texas was done through resistive heating, heat pumps would be 3-4x more efficient. There is current power devoted to resistance heating to run heat pumps for every home.
That said, no one isreplacing NatGas with Electric Resistive Heating, that would be crazy, NatGas is still cheaper in most cases for people north of say KY but there are alot of HeatPumps going in
I am unclear why you think replacing a NatGas heater with a HeatPump "would not increase the total electricity usage at all" that is just false, and I am not even sure why you would claim other wise, NatGas is not an Electric Fuel Source so when you change from a non-electric fuel source to an electric fuel source you will use more electricity. Now changing from Resistive Electric to heatPump would actually drop your electrical usage in some cases (above 0degrees anyway)
Around here it is not uncommon to have a HeatPump with a Gas "emergency" heater for when it gets too cold for the heatpump, as Electric Resistive is TERRIBLE and expensive. The problem is when that combo is sold normally it is wiht 80% furnances or they just leave the old furnace in place and just upgrade the AC/Heatpumpt
Overall that seems like a reduction in total emissions, since you're using less natural gas overall to heat the same amount. Yes, it increases power demand, but is also lessens demand on natural gas by a greater amount.
This could be a overall net negative if the power mix is heavily polluting (coal... etc), but largely we're moving away from that over time and it will only get better.
This just isn't the problem at all; it's obviously a problem, but not the constraint here. Fossil fuels let you store energy in a distributed fashion (e.g. cutting and stacking firewood for the winter), which is way better for handling peaks.
If too many people get burnt by oversubscribed grids in the winter, I would expect that the middle- and upper-class response will be propane auxiliary heating systems.
The only thing that using natural gas to burn for a furnace (vs. using it for a heat pump) gets you, is that you need more natural gas generation plants and the infrastructure to handle the additional power on the system. On the other side of the coin, you have all the natural gas infrastructure to each house premise to maintain... which can leak, have issues, etc etc etc.
I do not live in texas.
Anyways in areas where it regularly goes below 0F, the transition will not be smooth (but probably still necessary). Heat pumps that operate efficiently down -20F are just coming out and will be even more expensive than normal heat pumps. Also most residential energy usage in really cold areas are from burning natural gas, so electricity generation is quite low compared to warmer parts of the country.
Indeed seems manageable.
That is an astonishing amount of electricity for something of so little value.
But anyway, to the larger point, I agree the grid impact is overblown, especially since we should be coupling consumer BEVs with home / business / warehouse / commercial solar.
1) where power is generated and used for crypto isn’t the same as needed for electric cars. Locations matter when you’re dealing with the creation of and distribution of electricity
2) moving electricity to all of the locations where it will be used is another problem. That deals with transmission lines, transformers, the last mile, and all of that stuff. That we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It is Andy the lack of awareness and planning concerns me.
In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity. And that's not just infrastructure that is already paid for. There is a much larger maintenance cost, an ongoing labor cost, and a much shorter useful life for anything related to fossil fuels.
This statement just doesn't pass even the most lax economic sanity check.
Why don't all the use cases where people don't care about anything other than the bottom dollar and don't run up against the weaknesses of modern batteries already run electric vehicles. I'm thinking like low daily mileage fleet of small vehicles in a warm climate somewhere with high fuel costs. Like why doesn't an EV Fiat Promaster exist and why doesn't every tradesman in Sicily run one? If the numbers penciled out then surely we'd have it, at least in some niche somewhere. We are starting to see mass EV adoption but it's right on the margin and the details on any specific use case make it cheaper or maybe not.
Longer term though, EVs replacing gasoline vehicles for those kind of use-cases is exactly what we're going to see. In the US, the postal service intends to start deploying tens of thousands of EVs over the next few years as they replace older gasoline powered delivery vehicles. The economics do apparently work out and pass the sanity check, just not overnight.
But anyway, your answer is because transportation costs are irrelevant for both gasoline and electricity. So, even tough they are much cheaper for electricity, none makes any difference, and nobody picks a power source based on them.
But some people makes a huge effort to focus on this non-issue and turn it into a showstopper on their discourse. People resorting to this is good evidence that there aren't any large showstoppers for cars electrification.
Assuming 100% of new cars where EV’s you’re talking 25 years before adoption approaches 98%. Plus on average each EV is only using ~50,000kWh / year or 400 watts average load.
I bet you the electrical grid couldn't handle everyone having an air conditioner in Texas in the 1920s but slowly people installed window and later central ACs and the grid grew.
The situation where everyone suddenly had an electric car is implausible
Electric car batteries are even seen as part of the solution to move to renewables.
Substation and individual point of charge capacity may not be there for areas without ac, or high density apartments - but that's where distributed charging stations come into play (aka charging stations) (very low volume of gasoline is distributed to home parking, currently). In the worst cases this is readily reduced with storage (liquid or power wall) at distribution centers.
Industries are built when demand is rising, infrastructure always has to change to cover the needs of the population.
EVs will be important sinks for electrical energy in the future, to balance out demand.
Won't engines have to be modified and reprogrammed?
The synthetic stuff is interesting because it may actually be practically infinite thanks to the fusion reactor in the skies. That is because storing the energy from wind and solar in form of chemical energy solves the storage problem of the renewables. If extracting energy from that storage without polluting the environment becomes viable it can be huge.
Not quite infinite, but renewable: https://edu.rsc.org/news/treasure-from-the-earths-mantle/202...
Nope. All this means is that oil is getting more expensive.
The problem with those is that Someone needs to front the billions to get them pumping - and with the current state of the world it's not guaranteed that they'll get their money back.
It's better for business to raise the price of existing oil production. C-staff gets their bonuses and stocks go up.
Here is a retrospective: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502609/
synthetic hydrocarbons as energy storage is interesting, but all about the economics.
I don't think there is anyone at all that thinks turning agricultural waste into carbon neutral synthetic fuel for ICE has anything to do with "oil not running out" (which it absolutely is, demand is at all time highs, while production is at 30 year lows and no new major oilfield has opened in the lifespan of most people reading this, just saying).
It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently.
Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
(Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. )
The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture", there is just the global oil market. This is why OPEC can manipulate elections by changing the rate at which they produce oil, and it is why Biden was able to "leverage" global prices to make the taxpayer billions by selling high and buying low.
The American reserves of oil are insignificant with regards to the next generation of transportation, and wringing out the last drops of oil from shale rock at prices approaching $70/breakeven (and rising fast) is not the savior of ICE.
Plus OPEC will happily drop prices and destroy American oil industry every so often because their breakeven is still dramatically lower.
>Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
"Being around" and "being affordable enough for your F150 and XL SUV" are very different things.
Oil absolutely will not remain affordable for Americans in 15mpg vehicles, and the next decade will see the death of cheap American oil. We cannot print enough debt to subsidize it forever.
When you consider the BILLIONS of humans who want way way more oil in China, India, and Africa (et al), you start to see how declining global production + quadrupling global demand = the end of cheap oil.
I agree that this is the current state. However, this can quickly change at the whim of the US president and doesn't even need congressional approval. In fact, we have seen increasing request from within the US to decouple from the global market and hence have a "domestic" and a global oil price. I don't know how this would play out if it ever happens. But all the legal groundwork is there and the US president can impose an oil export ban at any time if he wishes to do so.
Examples of requests to do so (without success so far):
* https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/141...
* https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...
The saddest part is, that the US has great solar and wind potential but the least incentive for a mass transition given the opportunity to decouple from the global commodity market at any time (elections anyone?)
https://www.aspenfuels.us/knowledge/what-is-alkylate-fuel/wh...
> Also worth noting is that while, yes, this synthetic fuel appears to make vehicles slightly more efficient, it still greatly trails the efficiency of EVs. Consequently, vehicles using this fuel will likely always be more expensive to drive per mile than their electric equivalents.
So why are we doing this again?
Even Toyota's first attempt (bz4x) is laughable for a company with their engineering pedigree. First the wheels fell off so often they had to do a recall. Now they're saying that you can fast charge the car a maximum of two times per day, software limited.
If I was a tinfoil hat wearer, I'd say they're sabotaging themselves on purpose.
Lithium-Sulfer and/or solid state will also likely come into play.
Aviation though... yeah I think that'll be synth fuel. That'll come down to how cheap solar and wind drop in LCOE in the next decade.
So you have (conservatively) 5 tons less cargo which is a 25% reduction from the typical 20 tons. Then you have (very conservatively) 20% less distance traveled due to needing more frequent recharge stops.
In practice then, you need double the trucks. So yea it is theoretically possible to electrify long-haul trucking, but it's also ruinously expensive. And that's ignoring any considerations for different maintenance.
Lithium-sulfur, Sodium-sulfur, and solid state variants plus a host of other tricks are coming down the pipeline in the next 5-10 years. A conservative estimate is that batteries will be 2x better than the current (the papers indicate 4x but let's see what happens).
The other aspects here:
- BEV semis are cheaper to operate long-term since electricity is cheaper than diesel (even without the carbon tax diesel operation should be paying), most calculations 5 years ago before the current 5-6$/gallon diesel crisis showed that.
- electricity will continue to drop in price as Solar/Wind continue to drop in LCOE over then next ten years
- BEV batteries will continue to drop rapidly in price over the next decade until the initial cost of BEVs will be structurally less than any ICE drivetrain
- highway self-driving, or highway "pack" driving, is going to get a LOT more prevalent. Highway self driving for trucks will likely converge/evolve with infrastructure to enable long haul trucks to self-drive at slower rates (more efficient) overnight and then be operated at "normal" speeds during the day.
So the number of trucks will probably be irrelevant in the long run. The key metric is probably the one that always mattered: how much to move a ton of cargo per mile. BEVs are probably close or will pass in 5 years ICE transport on equipment / fuel / energy costs alone. In ten years batteries will be so cheap that ICE drivetrains will simply not be a sane option except in the most extreme cases (long haul ultra-rural routes, long haul in deep winter, etc).
Maintenance wise, BEVs are simpler, less fluids, etc. They also might be more resilient to breakdowns. If you have a HUGE battery pack and three axles of power delivery (the Tesla design apparently uses the three axels for acceleration and then only one at cruise), then if one of the drive motors fails, you can fallback to another drive motor usually used only for acceleration. You can subdivide the huge battery pack and if part of it goes out, you have enough juice and drive motors to limp to someplace.
And again, long range can probably be boosted with swappable extra power trailers. Recharge rates will be moot because the power trailers are precharged. The power trailer can probably be shaped to increase the semi's rear aerodynamics better, and increase the overall efficiency of the semi as well.
This would be nice if it actually happens, but so far the new chemistries still have many unsolved fundamental issues, not to mention safety issues when increasing energy density further.
> [cost per mile / energy costs]
No arguments here, eventually EV running costs per vehicle will be cheaper. But there will probably be surge pricing for charging when renewable output is low. It won't be easy to manage that risk from a business perspective.
> [self-driving]
Sorry to be snarky, but weren't there supposed to be thousands of people's Teslas operating as robo taxis for 5 years now? I'll believe self-driving truck convoys when I see one operating without journalists or politicians watching.
Also, outside of your "power trailers" (see below) running the truck continuously like that would require battery swapping, which is a promising idea but also has a long list of unsolved problems (wear&tear, additional frames and braces required with swapable battery, cost of labour for swapping a truck's battery 4x per day).
> So the number of trucks will probably be irrelevant in the long run.
This left me dumbfounded. Double the traffic, double the CapEx, double the inspections/maintenance doesn't matter at all?
> [range extending trailers]
So your EV truck already lost 5+ tons of cargo space to a battery, now you wanna hitch an extra trailer (another 5~ tons for the frame and 5 tons for another battery. Since the max legal weight is 40 tons your range-extended Semi can now only transport around 10 tons of cargo compared to 25 tons for the most capable diesel trucks.
But in the end (25 years+) I think synthetics will be used for hobbyists to run their vintage vehicles on track days and weekends.
just at the highest level: formula e is floundering; f1's 2026 regulations will introduce a 100% sustainable fuel while making the electric part of the powertrain _less_ sophisticated (removing the MGU-h, so no more energy recapture from turbo spindown)
all three of these seem perfectly realistic:
- synthetics take off widely
- synthetics don't take off, but get far enough along that they are competitive with existing popular race fuels (which go for $10-15/gal)
- synthetics don't take off, but they get far enough along that speciality fuel producers can stand up their own supply chains with marginal r&d spend, but can't compete with other race fuels... for the first 5-10 years, then the race fuels are made illegal
ICE cars running on renewable but more expensive fuel would provide a good option to the expensive EVs as we ramp down fossil fuels.
it's believed we can have cars and equipment on synthetic fuels producing waaay lower lifetime emissions than equivalent battery electric vehicles
when that's the case, it has potential to reduce the scope of the mobile emissions problem to a degree where we can focus almost exclusively on cleaner centralized energy capture, for which the most difficult engineering has already been done, and storage, which needs more attention and investment either way
it would also allow for a quicker transition away from fossil, by giving people a more affordable transition option (or free, if cars don't need conversion) vs. buying electric, and by using more of the energy infrastructure that's already in place
Keeping in mind that manufacturing new cars (and the associated resource extraction) is extremely carbon intensive, then a carbon neutral-ish fuel might actually be the best option overall on a meaningful timescale.
maybe the government could subsidize it as national debt?
Governments could today choose to subsidise high percentage bio diesel and ethanol oil mixes and fund that by taxing all other fuels.
The end result could be exactly the same price for the many who do indeed struggle.
A hybrid can give the best of both worlds. A hybrid with a battery range of 50 miles can reduce your ICE usage by a factor of 10 easily (the vast majority of trips are shorter than that). But a lot of people think that reducing emissions by only 90% is not enough. With this you get to the full 100%.
I too think the 50 mile hybrid would have been a game changer. In an ideal world, 10 years after the Prius release (1997?) in 2007 the US government mandated a 50 mile all-electric range PHEV for all consumer cars.
But now the car companies face a choice: invest in a BEV drivetrain, or invest in a PHEV drivetrain. Almost all will do the BEV, because CEOs that don't get fired (see: BMW, VW, etc).
It'd be nice if this blogspam linked to the source so we could verify details.
I looked at several other sources covering this and they're all similarly quiet about what the fuel actually is. Looking at they supplier's (Coryton's) website, they boast about 'bespoke' synthetic fuels. So I'm guessing it's Mazda that's being shy about the details.
There is another engine design, a linear piston engine, which is just a piston connected to a magnet and coil. The engine generates electricity (at a constant speed, constant load) and this is fed to an electric motor. So the car is a hybrid. It's more efficient than a regular engine (which turns a large crankshaft etc.) and the fuel probably can be more finicky since the combustion cycle can be tuned for one operating point.
[1] https://coryton.com/lab/news/mazda-using-sustain-100-per-cen...
Let’s not even talk about all the things in the fuel system that seem to have a shorter life with ethanol involved, particularly injectors.
However, I am quite excited about using them for CO2-neutral long-distance flights. Being able to reach any place on earth in 24h is awesome, and there is simply no battery technology that can power a practical airplane.
Mazda also have an all-electric car, the Mx-30. (Starting MSRP $33,470)
Toyota/Subaru aren't much better. Japanese carmakers seem to hope that BEVs are only a fad.
It has a range of a “city car”, but a price of EVs with double the range.
It has max 50kW DC charging, while the competition has >100kW speeds. This makes the short range even more limiting.
It’s not even powerful, even though high torque is the one easy trick for EVs.
It’s a conversion of a gas car, not a dedicated platform, which wastes cabin and storage space. Mazda failed to keep the same front/rear weight balance making the car reportedly handle poorly.
It’s technically at the level of 2009 Renault Zoe or the old Leaf, but for a price of 2019 eNiro or the current Kona and Cupra Born.
I agree that the price is too high, but that is the case for all EVs
> It’s a conversion of a gas car, not a dedicated platform
Maybe because the platform was so safe/good... I love my current Mazda CX-5 (not EV)
Platform matters. BEV platforms are skateboards with flat floor and wheels basically at the very corners. OTOH CX-30 has an empty transmission tunnel taking up cabin space, and is so cramped they couldn't even fit normal-sized rear doors, and it's almost a 2-seater. Dedicated EVs of the same length have full-sized doors and spacious rear seats.
Mazda took out the engine, and didn't rearrange or rebalance anything else to match. No extra storage. They just left a hole and dangling cables under the hood. They've taken a front-heavy car platform and unbalanced it by making the the rear heavier.
EVs are expensive mainly because of batteries, but this one has a half-sized battery for a price of a full-sized one. You're not even paying for a better rest of the car. It's just a mediocre Mazda with a low-end EV tech that is 10 years behind. The EV side of it is really really bad. Old models of Zoe and Leaf that you can get for <$10K have this level of range and performance.
It just didn't come from dinosaurs, it's still a long hydrocarbon that burns.
The fuel in TFA game from ag-waste. So presumably it's carbon neutral on a ~1-2yr timeline.
No amount of time producing "nearly neutral" increases to the atmospheric reservoir will produce an improvement in runaway existing CO2 feedback loops.
[edit for clarity]
Neither make sense compared to halving our speed limits.
https://electrek.co/2022/09/12/tesla-access-all-the-batterie...
Do this exercise, pick a workman's work vehicle that has a hybrid version. Make note the mpg difference between the hybrid and regular model. I do mean a workman's vehicle, not a hybrid Versa or the like. A full sized van. A pickup.
Take the Tesla battery pack kWh and divide by the workman's hybrid drivetrain's batt pack. This is how many workman's vehicles could be hybridized with one Tesla.
Look up, make an estimate, the miles a workman drives per year. Do the same for the tesla.
Calculate the fuel burned by one tesla and N regular workman's vehicles and compare that to N hybrid vehicles + one Honda accord.
The scenario with the Tesla ends up burning (much) more gasoline than with the hybrids.
Now multiply that the number of Tesla's made per year.
Is this number high or lower than the number of workman's vehicles made every year?
Note, for simplicity, we haven't even considered far more damaging scenarios involving heavy vehicles doing stop-go all day. Like a municipal van. Or a garbage truck. Or package delivery.
Also note, for simplicity I did not consider the CO2 emission of driving a Tesla. I don't want to get into a "greenified grid" debate.
Teslas are about making rich yuppies keep their cake and eating it too. It makes them feel good, neigh superior, about their over indulgent, over consuming lifestyle. If they truly cared about CO2 they'd be clamoring for lower speed limits.
The first is that solar PV has already well exceeded the efficiency of growing crops for fuel by multiples. Then there’s wind, nuclear, hydro, etc. Biofuels consume far more land than renewable and zero carbon ways of generating electricity. Even worse they consume fresh water. Electric generation consumes very little water by comparison.
Secondly and related to this biofuels compete with agriculture for food. You frequently hear about using farm waste but there is only so much of that. Our machines use more calories than we do so try to scale that up and soon you are growing crops for cars. That’s a bad path to go down in a world where population is expected to peak as high as 11 billion. Much better to run machines on stuff we can’t eat than to set up a competition.
The only good bet against EVs is in heavy and long range vehicles not cars. I am skeptical of electric trucks not because they can’t be done but because I am skeptical of our will to build out adequate charge infrastructure. But trucks account for a lot less liquid fuel use than cars so solving the car problem is a huge win. If we electrified light vehicles we could cut liquid fuel use by more than 50%.
That doesn’t mean all car companies should totally cease ICE production though. There will still be some market for them into the foreseeable future. I expect EVs to take the bulk of the market though.
Explain why they aren’t solving the wrong problem?
2. Synthetic fuels still emit CO2, sox, nox etc. at the tailpipe
3. "Synthetic" fuels still use natural gas as the feedstock in production.
Synthetic fuel from renewable feedstock should only be used where we cannot replace ICE, for example planes.
Synthetic fuel for cars is pure heresy from the environmental point of view. We already are at the limit in the production of wood pellet for heating (the forest are suffering enormously from climate change), bio gas is using not only waste but also corn and "good" crops to be produced.
And of course, the process to convert all this biomass into a fuel is consuming a lot of energy.
Please, do not dream of everything green with synthetic fuels everywhere, this can only be part of a small part of the transition.
2) Petrol is great for passenger cars, but the world runs on diesel and fuels that are more or less equivalent to diesel, like Jet-1A. Can they make that?
We can conclude the Virent process is not competitive at current prices (or else it would be done more widely.) The more relevant question is would it be cheap enough to work in a world without fossil fuel net CO2 emission. It would have to be cheaper than obtaining the fuel from oil, followed by direct air capture and sequestration of CO2, for zero net emission.
EVs are much more efficient and better for the environment beyond the most obvious and biggest benefit of not having a tailpipe that spews CO2 into the air.
In other words; nobody should be hoping "carbon neutral fuel" is a path to continuing our status quo.
Hmmm. The fuel is hydrocarbons; so the emissions are at minimum CO2 and particulates.
One really has to distinguish between CO2 that would be emitted by the process in the current fossil fuel economy, vs. CO2 emitted when the world is off fossil fuels. In the latter, where do the carbon atoms come from if not from the biomass, and hence from the air?
It's similar to the farming industry producing incredible amounts of food just to feed cattle rather than to feed people. Not all crops grow on all land, of course, but as long as there are large scale famines in the world, I think it's immoral to dedicate so much land towards inedible foodstuffs.
We're already burning forests under the guise of "renewable fuels" that assume we've assured that the forests are allowed grow back the next 100 years even when biofuels are no longer profitable.
There are good reasons to rid ourselves from fossil fuels where we can, not just because of global warming but also because of political reasons (the oil states getting away with literal murder and a blind eye being turned towards their funding of what would become 9/11, for one). However, I fear that these plant based "alternatives" will be quickly bought up by the oil industry, touted as the future of green energy, and used to postpone greener alternatives to the internal combustion engine yet another decade.
The Porsche/Exxon syn fuel uses natural gas as it's feedstock, for instance.
I'm pretty sure the Mazda pr guy was just smart enough to omit that detail, not that they are hiding it's magical eco friendly origins.
https://coryton.com/lab/articles/the-opportunity-for-sustain...
It's still a long hydrocarbon chain that breaks down into CO2 during combustion.
This entire line of reasoning is avoided in the article, so I can only imagine it was sponsored by BP or SA.
Trucks are probably a good use case for synthetic zero or negative emission fuels.
You can use atmospheric carbon but it's very hard to pull it down out of the air because it's very dilute.
That's why hydrogen is such a big deal and being focused on instead. It's harder in every respect, but the base component is water, which is very easy to get.
Some kind of hydrogen/biogas generator hybrid might be viable too.
Some will become fully electric, but it's heavily dependent on the usage profile. There is a mining truck in use today that's never charged - but it's a special case where it goes uphill empty and comes back down in full load with regenerative braking.
The bar for what kind of usage makes diesel cheaper than gas over all is constantly creeping higher. Notice how a huge fraction of smaller medium duty trucks have gasoline engines these days.