What have they found out about weight?

At the same time, we have an overproduction of corn due to government subsidies, and it’s well known that corn can be fermented into alcohol, so it’s no wonder that corn ethanol is the first out of the gate.

But imagine what might happen if the U.S. mandated that all new cars were FlexFuel. Obama has promised to do this by 2012. It costs less than $100 per car to make it FlexFuel.

So now, suddenly everyone can choose E85. Gas station owners will have a good reason to offer E85. Farmers will soon realize that corn can’t scale to meet the demand. So you will have a great demand and a supply that can’t keep up. At this point, investment money from the private sector will flood into cellulosic ethanol.

It will happen.

But even if an EV has 1000 miles of range, with no fast-charge electric filling stations, people will still have range anxiety.

Replacing our liquid fuel filling station infrastructure with fast-charging electric filling stations will cost trillions of dollars, and take 30-50 years to fully make it’s way into rural areas. Remember that with fast-charging, you need batteries at the filling station – lots of them. You also need somewhere to put those batteries which is reasonably temperature controlled and out of the elements. With the high electrical currents involved in fast-charging, you also need short power cables to avoid power losses. So batteries will have to go underground, or in temperature controlled structures very close to where the cars fill up. Not cheap…

For heavy duty long distance travel, liquid fuels are far better. It’s simple physics. The energy density of liquid fuels is in a different ballpark than batteries. So if we can’t figure out a viable way to make bio-fuels, we’re screwed.

“Lightweighting leads to remarkable operating efficiency…”
This seems intuitive, and is certainly true for normal gas engine cars, but for EVs, regenerative braking recovers most of the extra energy required for acceleration, and larger inductive electric motors are actually more efficient than smaller ones, so adding a little extra mass doesn’t seem to effect efficiency that much. The only possible issue I see here is the power density of the batteries, but at 30 miles AER, just about any battery chemistry would have ample power.

“In January 2008, Bright Automotive launched as a stand-alone company, from Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)…”
Now I’m beginning to see the picture. RMI has to do something with all the carbon fiber work they’ve been doing. But given what GM and others have found out about weight, it seems RMI’s aerodynamic research may be more applicable here.

But meanwhile battery tech is doubling every 7 years, and we already have electric cars with 250 mile range.. range anxiety may become a thing of the past soon ethanol or not.

http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+The+Magic+Box++How+Coskata+Will+Deliver+1Gallon+Ethanol/article13199.htm

I agree algae biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol hold a lot of promise, and I hope that Dr. Chu and the new administration do their best to facilitate the deployment of these technologies. A sysadmin-friend of mine has a user who has a promising cellulosic ethanol process working in a lab at Virginia Tech, and it really sounds great!

But I’ve burned soy biodiesel (only B5, but still) from truck-stops along I-81, I’ve burned E10 in my Ranger (labeled as “gasoline”), and I’m going to try E85 in my lawnmower once I work my way through the 2.5 gallon can that’s lasted me since August…. But I have yet to knowingly encounter either algae biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol in real life.

I sure hope that I do encounter 2nd-generation biofuels in real life soon, though! These next few years are going to be interesting, and I’m hopeful that it’ll be the good kind of interesting! But, as always, time will tell.

P.S. The Commodities Hour show on the local NPR station out here has spent a lot of time analyzing the food versus fuel issue. The farmers here live and die by the futures market, and so they spend an awful lot of time studying it.

Another problem with CNG is the trillions of dollars required to replace our liquid fuel filling station infrastructure with CNG filling stations. Infrastructure is a big deal. It takes many years to change it.

I think the best option for the range extender is the one the Volt already has – E85. Ethanol can be made from non-food sources for as little as $1/gallon, and in quantities large enough to replace 35% of our current gasoline consumption by using cellulosic gasification:
http://www.coskata.com/EthanolFeedstockPotential.asp

With FlexFuel EREVs like the Volt, roughly 80% of our current gas consumption can be converted to electricity. If Ethanol can replace 35%, this adds up to 115%, more than enough to eliminate gasoline.

As for natural gas, it’s much more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity that propels an electric car. The same amount of natural gas would go 3 times further on electric than with CNG. Using natural gas for EVs also creates much less CO2 emmissions than a gas engine car.