Has JCB saved engines?

[CoolHands]

APontus said:

Batteries might be 'crap', but they're a damned sight better than the million year old 'tech' ICE cars store their energy in.

Back to school laddie

[APontus]

CoolHands said:

Back to school laddie

How old is oil?

[anonymous-user]

fido said:

Max_Torque said:

... it's pathetic efficiency up to even 50% or better.

That's not a fair comparison. If you take the end-to-end efficiency of an electric car then it's lower than this - you're only looking at the electric motor itself which of course is efficient - it should be! In the same way the turbo- part of an ICE engine is extremely efficient. Mining lithium is a filthy process.

So i have to take the end to end efficiency for the EV, but not for the ICE?

An EV is around 85 to 90% efficient at a "energy put into car level" ie the point you plug it in ( a modern eMachine can be as much as 98 or 99% efficient btw!)

An ICE is around 25% (as low as 18% in real world conditions) efficienct at the same point, ie where you stick the pump nozzle in the side and fill the tank



If you want to look at end-to-end it gets even worse for the ICE, because oil is generally found in rather hard to get places, needs to be extracted, transported, refined and transported again, and then pumped into your car.

It's generally agreed (the calc is very complex) that just the energy used to refine a gallon of gasoline would drive an EV about 20 miles (a 40kWh US gal of gasoline takes about 5 kWh to refine according to the most thorough study by the USA Argone National Lab).

And of course, as a ICE wear's it not only puts out vastly more emissions, but also gets less efficient. Compression ratio falls, rings leak, cams wear, valves gum up, injectors wear, fuel pressure falls. There are lots of factors that mean the homologation figures for an ICE an un-obtainable by actual owner cars in the real world. Evening using the incorrect spec of oil can lead to an increase in emissions and consumption!

[fido]

Max_Torque said:

An EV is around 85 to 90% efficient at a "energy put into car level" ie the point you plug it in ( a modern eMachine can be as much as 98 or 99% efficient btw!)

That completely depends on the power supply. If it's from a power station then the energy conversion alone could be 35-60% (gas-fired). Don't get me wrong I do love all the new technologies that are coming on board but I think pure-electric is as myopic as those who touted it at the start of the twentieth century. And they were very popular until ICE vehicles improved.

https://archive.curbed.com/2017/9/22/16346892/elec...

Edited by fido on Wednesday 9th June 00:08

[JonnyVTEC]

fido said:

That's not a fair comparison. If you take the end-to-end efficiency of an electric car then it's lower than this - you're only looking at the electric motor itself which of course is efficient - it should be! In the same way the turbo- part of an ICE engine is extremely efficient. Mining lithium is a filthy process.

No worse than oil and the blood oil associated with the various military operations to “secure” such oil…

Think about how much material an EV consumes over its life compared to tank after tank of hydrocarbon fuel. (Clue : it doesn’t, it’s in a metal box ready to recover)

[MadmanO/T People]

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

[rscott]

fido said:

Max_Torque said:

An EV is around 85 to 90% efficient at a "energy put into car level" ie the point you plug it in ( a modern eMachine can be as much as 98 or 99% efficient btw!)

That completely depends on the power supply. If it's from a power station then the energy conversion alone could be 35-60% (gas-fired). Don't get me wrong I do love all the new technologies that are coming on board but I think pure-electric is as myopic as those who touted it at the start of the twentieth century. And they were very popular until ICE vehicles improved.

https://archive.curbed.com/2017/9/22/16346892/elec...

Edited by fido on Wednesday 9th June 00:08

Given that electricity is required for production of petrol, then that will suffer from the same electricity production inefficiency. More so, given the amount of energy required to refine the fuel.

[GT911]

MadmanO/T People said:

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

Quite hard as it turns out.

The process of electrolysis and subsequent compression has significant energy losses associated with it.
By using the electricity downstream, you also then need to factor in transmission and distribution losses in the grid (as per EV charging points).
Converting hydrogen back to electricity onboard a hydrogen car then loses half the energy you put into the car.
The amount of electricity you would need at each fuel station is at least 2.5 times what would be required to charge an equivalent EV travelling the same distance.

One of the biggest challenges for EV implementation is to upgrade local electricity supplies, the challenge lies not with generating it (as per most anti-EV rants), it's getting it to the point of use.
If you then choose the hydrogen pathway with conversion to hydrogen at the point of use, you have now made that problem several times worse, and, you have also now created a problem with insufficient generating capacity as well.

Your idea requires major investment to all three parts of the process: electricity generation, transmission and distribution, hydrogen production and compression. Do some sums for tens of millions of cars and you very quickly get into hundreds of billions for the EXTRA cost for both the capital expenditure and the higher ongoing cost of purchasing the electricity. By extra, I mean compared to just installing charging points and using that electricity for localised battery charging.

The hydrogen pathway suffers from a major drawback associated with its far inferior energy efficiency. You can complain about batteries and Lithium (despite its near 100% recyclability) until you are blue in the face but ultimately the laws of physics don't give two sts.

[wisbech]

MadmanO/T People said:

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

Not hard at all... but not very efficient, and so likely rather expensive.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&a...

From this paper:

Cost of 1 kg of H2 (Mirai tank is 5.6 kg)

56KWh for electrolysis (they assume 59% efficiency)
13.2KWh for compression
2.25 euro per KG of H2 for the purified water. Required 9kg of water per KG of H2 - so note that this means you will have to be transporting a lot of purified water to the site - about 50 litres per car that fills up there

At UK wholesale power prices, that is about 5 quid a kilo, before any other running costs/ overhead costs of the station.

The main issue is then the throughput. To be able to refuel a car every five minutes (i.e. no parallel refueling) would be c 830kW. For a typical station with 7 pumps, that is >5MW (though you could reduce this by having storage tanks and running electrolysis 24/7)

Edited by wisbech on Wednesday 9th June 05:58

Edited by wisbech on Wednesday 9th June 05:58

[Polite M135 driver]

SpeckledJim said:

The point I was trying to make was slightly different.

A heavy ICE car is always bad news. It costs more energy to get it up to speed, and then if you brake, you swap that energy to a large amount of heat in the brakes.

Whereas a heavy EV isn't so bad. Yes, it costs more energy to get up to speed, but on slowing down, the weight counts in your favour, rather than against you, as a heavy car will be able to recover more energy than a light car will.

A heavy battery is usually bad news, and sometimes good news. Whereas a heavy ICE is always bad news.

This doesn’t make any sense at all. Yes, an electric car can recover some energy as it slows. Yes, a heavier vehicle will have more energy to recover than a lighter one travelling at the same speed. But this doesn’t mean it’s better to have a heavier car, becuase you only imperfectly recover the energy when you slow. At best, of course - if energy recovery was 100 % efficient - then weight would make no difference (to the energy cost of extra mass - obviously its terrible for handling). As it is, energy recovery is 60-70% efficient. So a heavier car ‘loses’ 30-40 % of the additional energy required to accelerate it over a lighter car.

A heavier battery powered car is always bad news, too. There is no getting around physics.

[Polite M135 driver]

MadmanO/T People said:

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

It takes more energy to produce hydrogen electrolytically - from water - than you can recover by burning it/putting it through a fuel cell.

The reaction H2O —> H2 + 0.5 O2 requires, as an absolute minimum, 237 kJ of energy per mole of water (18g). In reality, it costs more... think of that energy cost as the difference between the bottom and the top of a hill that you want to get to, a few miles away. You just have to move from the bottom to the top of the hill, right? Well yes, but there is another hill between you and the hill you want to be on top of, and it’s higher, and you have to go over it and down the other side to get to the hill you want to be on. This other, intermediate, hill is related to things like the energy required to get electrons into water to do the electrolysis, the energy required for the molecules to react at the surface of the electrodes you use, etc. Etc.

Burning H2 in air to get water gets you only the same amount of energy back - as your (unrealistic) cost of generating it - 237 kJ per mol of H2.

Chemists are working on ways of generating H2 more efficiently (lower energy barrier/intermediate hill) but it’s not easy or simple.

Edited by Polite M135 driver on Wednesday 9th June 06:40

[DonkeyApple]

JonnyVTEC said:

No worse than oil and the blood oil associated with the various military operations to “secure” such oil…

Think about how much material an EV consumes over its life compared to tank after tank of hydrocarbon fuel. (Clue : it doesn’t, it’s in a metal box ready to recover)

You would think that given the high profile in the news that the US controlled oil market has had over the last couple of decades that a bit of Chinese exploitation of some third world punters would really stack up against the millions of dead, tens of millions displaced and hundreds of millions oppressed to maintain oil price stability and control.

It's like the recent, sudden giving a fk about children in DR Congo who have been being murdered, abused and enslaved by the West since their backsides became a holiday destination for Belgians. Sitting in homes riddled with appliances that have used Cobalt for decades but only now making it about the children because of a car they feel bafflingly politically oppressed by. If it weren't for EVs then they would still be will fully oblivious to the horror and there never would have been the increased pressure to actually try and stop the exploitation.

Lithium extraction is crappy but the Chinese are poisoning and killing a fraction of the number of people on our behalf compared to what the Americans have been doing at our request since they took over the killing and exploitation from the British and Europeans in the 50s.

When you buy new goods you tacitly accept that other humans have been exploited on your behalf so that you may have that shiny new chattel. It's just about degrees of exploitation and destruction. The more stuff you buy that you don't need the more you endorse the misery of the less fortunate. But, you can pay some shekels to the spin and PR charity campaigns of the companies you're paying to exploit the less fortunate to help yourself think your a good person and not a part of the problem.

But the real key to batteries over fossil fuel is that the compounds within are recyclable. Very crudely speaking, in 40/50 years time when most cars are pure EVs the battery packs will all be being recycled so the same compounds will be used again and again.

Unless of course, a new, non chemical form of energy storage is commercially resolved by then, in which case all the billions and billions of Li cells will be sent back to the third world for landfill until enough people complain about how the people who live on the landfill are dying whereupon what was known all along will be revealed, that most of the batteries were just being dumped at sea the moment no one was looking.

[kiseca]

GT911 said:

MadmanO/T People said:

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

Quite hard as it turns out.

The process of electrolysis and subsequent compression has significant energy losses associated with it.
By using the electricity downstream, you also then need to factor in transmission and distribution losses in the grid (as per EV charging points).
Converting hydrogen back to electricity onboard a hydrogen car then loses half the energy you put into the car.
The amount of electricity you would need at each fuel station is at least 2.5 times what would be required to charge an equivalent EV travelling the same distance.

One of the biggest challenges for EV implementation is to upgrade local electricity supplies, the challenge lies not with generating it (as per most anti-EV rants), it's getting it to the point of use.
If you then choose the hydrogen pathway with conversion to hydrogen at the point of use, you have now made that problem several times worse, and, you have also now created a problem with insufficient generating capacity as well.

Your idea requires major investment to all three parts of the process: electricity generation, transmission and distribution, hydrogen production and compression. Do some sums for tens of millions of cars and you very quickly get into hundreds of billions for the EXTRA cost for both the capital expenditure and the higher ongoing cost of purchasing the electricity. By extra, I mean compared to just installing charging points and using that electricity for localised battery charging.

The hydrogen pathway suffers from a major drawback associated with its far inferior energy efficiency. You can complain about batteries and Lithium (despite its near 100% recyclability) until you are blue in the face but ultimately the laws of physics don't give two sts.

Where does the water come from, and would converting that into hydrogen have an impact on our water supplies?

[Condi]

fido said:

That completely depends on the power supply. If it's from a power station then the energy conversion alone could be 35-60% (gas-fired). Don't get me wrong I do love all the new technologies that are coming on board but I think pure-electric is as myopic as those who touted it at the start of the twentieth century. And they were very popular until ICE vehicles improved.

They were very popular until we found what appeared to be limitless amounts of oil in the Middle East and the USA. Oil was then super cheap and far more energy dense given the battery technology of the day.

[Killboy]

Volvolover said:

rscott said:

Polestar even published the break even point for a Polestar 2 Vs Volvo XC60 - with the European energy mix, around 50,000 miles is the point at which the EV has lower lifetime emissions than the ICE.
That drops to 31,000 miles if solely using wind energy.

https://www.polestar.com/uk/sustainability/transpa...

What about if you change it every 3 years on your 5k per mile PCP……..which is how these cars are bought

WTF does that have to do with the vehicles emissions?

[thatdude]

Vintagejock said:

More than likely. Eventually battery powered trucks will surely have to carry more weight in batteries than actual payload. And of course for all the eco warriors, how do you generate the electricity in the first place?

Nuclear fusion, duh.

It's only 20 years away from being commercially applicable!

[GT911]

Polite M135 driver said:

A heavier battery powered car is always bad news, too. There is no getting around physics.

You seem to like numbers. What % of the total energy being consumed by an EV travelling at a continuous 70 mph is contributing to the rolling resistance due to the weight of the battery? For arguments sake let’s say the battery weighs 400 kg and the vehicle weighs 2000 kg.
Post up your assumptions for the coefficients of drag/rolling resistance, frontal area and other onboard loads.

[Polite M135 driver]

GT911 said:

You seem to like numbers. What % of the total energy being consumed by an EV travelling at a continuous 70 mph is contributing to the rolling resistance due to the weight of the battery? For arguments sake let’s say the battery weighs 400 kg and the vehicle weighs 2000 kg.
Post up your assumptions for the coefficients of drag/rolling resistance, frontal area and other onboard loads.

I don’t know. I take your point that at steady speed the mass makes minimal/zero difference (I don’t know which, I don’t remember the formula for friction and if mass is in it or not). But cars don’t spend all their time at steady state speed, do they? The clue to this is that you can both get in and out of them without being horribly mutilated and also go places in them.

Although you have made me wonder if trains should never stop at stations but instead pick up passengers with something like those funny mail bag collecting They used to (?) have.

Edited by Polite M135 driver on Wednesday 9th June 09:07

[DonkeyApple]

kiseca said:

GT911 said:

MadmanO/T People said:

You need two things to make hydrogen: water and electricity.

Every petrol station on Earth is connected to water and electricity.

Bearing this in mind, can somebody tell me why we don't just make hydrogen at the point of sale, thus eliminating the need to transport it?

How hard can it be?

Quite hard as it turns out.

The process of electrolysis and subsequent compression has significant energy losses associated with it.
By using the electricity downstream, you also then need to factor in transmission and distribution losses in the grid (as per EV charging points).
Converting hydrogen back to electricity onboard a hydrogen car then loses half the energy you put into the car.
The amount of electricity you would need at each fuel station is at least 2.5 times what would be required to charge an equivalent EV travelling the same distance.

One of the biggest challenges for EV implementation is to upgrade local electricity supplies, the challenge lies not with generating it (as per most anti-EV rants), it's getting it to the point of use.
If you then choose the hydrogen pathway with conversion to hydrogen at the point of use, you have now made that problem several times worse, and, you have also now created a problem with insufficient generating capacity as well.

Your idea requires major investment to all three parts of the process: electricity generation, transmission and distribution, hydrogen production and compression. Do some sums for tens of millions of cars and you very quickly get into hundreds of billions for the EXTRA cost for both the capital expenditure and the higher ongoing cost of purchasing the electricity. By extra, I mean compared to just installing charging points and using that electricity for localised battery charging.

The hydrogen pathway suffers from a major drawback associated with its far inferior energy efficiency. You can complain about batteries and Lithium (despite its near 100% recyclability) until you are blue in the face but ultimately the laws of physics don't give two sts.

Where does the water come from, and would converting that into hydrogen have an impact on our water supplies?

I don't think we need worry because if we view the concept in basic terms it becomes easy to see the issue.

EV with hydrogen fuel cell pulls into garage. Garage takes electricity that could simply be used to refuel the EV but instead uses it to manufacture extremely expensive hydrogen which is then converted back to electricity to power the EV.

It's a process that can be hugely simplified and made much cheaper.

These JCBs are being designed to burn hydrogen on site in locations where hydrogen is produced as a byproduct.

But even that has an issue as utility markets such as Europe are begging to buy up this hydrogen to burn for clean energy and must pay whatever it costs to procure these clean fuels so as to avoid impending punitive charges.

[cidered77]

DonkeyApple said:

cidered77 said:

maybe not everyone in the future though.... Swanson's Law on solar, and rapidly improving battery technology is reducing the pay-off time for going off-grid all the time, and for the middle classes who are settled in their home (or, like me, just want a cool project and love tech) - more and more have the option to move largely off grid.

I say "largely", as you'd still need the grid for longer periods of bleak weather or for faults, etc - but you'd be reasonably expecting to pay a lot less for that. Grid still needs to be funded though, so those charges will get spread across a smaller number of people - including those least able to pay.

Energy patterns and how we get our energy has a lot more change than just EV to deal with - but as long as there is money to be made: that change is coming...

Solar is pretty much done. It's at its chemical max efficiency. It's a similar case with chemical batteries where much of the recent gains have stemmed from removing packaging and better management.

These two systems aren't like chips, they are very simple chemical processes where we are already able to move all the available electrons pretty much.

The key for both technologies is a genuine step change to new methods of capturing and storing energy.

With batteries this is why the move into using capacitors has stemmed from but those are crude means to release energy and are really only working as buffers around chemical batteries. The chemical battery was created about 140 years ago and despite what the hype tries to say the cold reality is that this tech hasn't actually moved on in any significant way since when you contrast it to all other areas of tech. It has lagged so badly that it is now the single biggest inhibitor to human progress. Over 120 years on from the first EVs we are still having to pack massive, inefficient and heavy bricks into EVs in order to try and take advantage of the monumental superiority of the electric motor over the ICE. Just look at EVs today. Their motors are in a different league to any ICE, magnitudes superior yet the end product is hobbled all the way back to being inferior because of the immense inefficiency of our current energy storage solution.

We can look at wind farms also to see the same crippling issue of not being able to efficiently store the energy that is created. In order to even begin to store that energy we are having to resort to battery tech that is thousands of year old, water batteries.

The latest venture is to try and use wind energy to split water to give Hydrogen that can then be compressed and shipped to be converted back to electricity at the destination. A phenomenally clumsy solution to be resorting to but born out of desperation because viable modern battery tech remains almost as elusive as it has done for the last hundred years.

The truth is that chemical batteries are woeful. They represent the single largest failure of mankind to progress.

When we do finally source a viable replacement that is efficient in both energy density and packaging we will live through the fastest and biggest change in this planet that anyone has ever seen technology wise. It is an event that will be so large as to make the Internet and the smart phone mere footnotes.

It will also also be the moment that ICE cars cease to have any relevance whatsoever as the only issue with EVs is the cripplingly ste batteries that strip all the other superior elements of the equation of their gains over ICE.

And hence why EVs only exist because of command economics and cannot exist under a free market model.

I really like EVs but no one can say that in 2021 we have good battery tech or that the current battery tech is going to continue to find improvements at the same rate. Modern batteries are clunky, incompetent crap and an embarrassment to human society.

Swanon's Law on Solar is that the price reduces 20% for every doubling of shipped volume. Easily googleable graph shows still very much happening.



I find it extremely hard to believe the volume of R&D money put into batteries won't see improves in storage capacity (other posts here seem to confirm), but my point was the option to go off grid is as much about cost as it is on performance of a home battery + solar, and increased volume in battery production of course will continue to reduce price.

Roll forward 10 years and the number of people drawing the majority of their power from off the grid will be significantly higher than now, which causes all manner of issues on how you fund the grid - which we'll all still need. Tis a tangential point to this whole thread, anyway.