Sidestep: There's no conspiracy. Using saturated hydrocarbons – extracted from fossilised sunlight- as an energy carrier and transportation fuel is just cost competitive with current EV tech.
There's a comprehensive, well used distribution infrastructure already in place, and 150 years of intensive, competitive development already behind the conversion of this fuel to mechanical energy.
Energy density's right up there. It can be transferred, contained and transported as a liquid at ambient temperatures and atmospheric pressure, has native shear stability for mechanical lubrication purposes.
Yet mixed with air becomes an explosive gas at a relatively low boiling point..
Lots of useful heat energy's released with oxidisation, and the harmless water & carbon dioxide byproducts can be released directly to the atmosphere.
Byproducts of the initial purification process can be turned into plastics, lubricating oils, asphalt.. an endless number of uses..
Of course the product needs to be competitively priced, but hey- easily portable, simply extracted chemically stored energy... what's not to love?
Your points are totally valid (although there might be some debate on the "harmless" aspect) but are missing the most important part - rate of consumption of this resource is maybe 60 million years / 150 years times what is sustainable. ! We have a handful of generations who have consumed the easily obtained resource and the extraction methods now are getting more marginal.
You later post:
Sidestep: Just got in from using my fossil fueled tractor to slash a field. Try doing that with an EV..
Computer & lights running off my fossil fueled generator since mains power's off - yet again.
Do kind of like the smell of diesel in the morning..
Is why we need to slow down the use of fossil fuels so that where it makes current sense (like your tractor) we can make it last longer and stop burning it where there are viable alternatives now.
When bio fuels were all the rage in the US, a few people were starting to run their cars off their own crops and were starting to talk about "miles per acre" and that has to be on an annual basis. It wasn't that great and the amount of food production displaced certainly highlighted how a limited number of people could use up an excessive amount of resource.
With renewables like wind here we now have generation that can run 24/7 (maybe not 365) so a single turbine at say 2MW over the off peak period of 11pm to 7am could produce 16MWh and charge say 1000 cars each day. Of course there are arguments about average production (may need second turbine for yearly average) but providing fuel for that same 1000 cars as say biofuel (to get the energy density, storage and distribution benefits you are talking about) each year would consume a huge amount of land compared to the footprint of a turbine.
There is the opportunity to reduce our energy inputs with smaller cars (how often do we need the SUV size) with electric highlighting that energy storage has a cost which wasn't so obvious with fossil fuel.
This is a huge topic and great to see the comments. Anyone out there in the process of building an EV who can share their experience?
Trusted
