I doubt we have even scratched the surface of battery technology though.
Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.
It calls for a couple of specific responses:
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
unfortunately burning things results in a lot more energy than the processes a battery uses.
> Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum,
Well... We do know how to make gasoline from the atoms - the same process that we use the make synthetic oil can result in gasoline as well. Of course this would case about 4x as much so nobody does. There is more energy in synthetic diesel some races use that since the energy content is part of winning. (generally though race cars use a gasoline engine running an alcohol because they can get more power and don't care about fuel economy).
> Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
Yes and no. Technology is getting better. The laws of chemistry and physics tell us the limits of this technology, but not how close to those limits we can achieve in the real world.
> johnea 39 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them b...
Thank you for raising this point!
It calls for a couple of specific responses:
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
Utterly false. Octane is a specific molecule with a fixed amount of energy. However gasoline is many different molecules with different energy content. The total is all close enough to the same that we don't normally think of this, but there are variations that we can measure in the lab.
> Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
There is, but that would be a lot more expensive (see synthetic gasoline above) and so we don't. More importantly, even accounting for the losses in a ICE, gasoline is still a lot more energy dense than we expect a battery to ever reach.