With just a little bit of luck, Ian Gould (in a comment over at Quiggin’s) has it right and John Howard’s views on emissions trading will only be a matter of historical interest. But even so, the issues facing an incoming Labor government with regards to emissions trading will be essentially the same, so it’s worth looking into the issues raised in this report in detail.
One of the key issues in this report is what happens to all the other schemes designed to reduce emissions – and/or develop technologies for reducing emissions? There’s a whole list of them – the rebates for putting solar cells on your roof, the solar cities program, the housing energy efficiency programs, the bans on land clearing in Queensland (one of the major reasons we met our Kyoto targets), and the group that’s probably of most interest to the readers of this blog, the federal mandatory renewable energy target, and the either recently-introduced (in Victoria) or proposed state-based renewable energy targets.
The idea behind emissions trading is that you increase the price of emitting greenhouse gases enough so that people will find alternatives to doing so, whether by reducing energy use, or using non-emitting energy sources, including renewables. Under such a scheme, if renewables turn out to be cheaper than other emissions-reducing methods, they will be used. If they’re not, they won’t. So what’s the point of retaining schemes specifically to mandate renewable energy?
That, in a nutshell, is the view expressed in Chapter 8 of the task force’s repor – only schemes that fill gaps not covered by the trading scheme should continue. So, while land clearing restrictions and regevegetation schemes should continue, the federal MRET should be wound up in 2012, the Victorian mandatory renewable energy scheme, and Queensland’s 13 percent gas power scheme, should be abolished, and no such further schemes should be introduced by the other states. Government support for research into renewable and other non-emitting technologies should be continued and expanded, and support for demonstration plants continued, but deployment decisions should be made by the market.
The counterargument, for example made by the ACF in this document (PDF), is that renewables need specific help because of the entrenched bias over decades towards the fossil fuel industry. But surely the point is to cut emissions at the lowest cost, not build a renewables industry for the sake of building a renewables industry?
In any case, you haven’t heard the last of this debate – for instance, from Peter Martin today.
Incidentally, the renewable generators seem to be very slow off the mark – they don’t have a single press release out on their response to the report, and nor does the wind energy association. Anybody know what gives?
…doesn’t the fossil fuel industry receive about $5-10Ba/yr in subsidies? If so, what is to happen with this, and how does the Govt reconcile it with their position on MRET?
There have actually been a lot of state based initiatives, summarised here at the Queensland government’s EPA website:
http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/environmental_management/sustainability/climate_change_and_greenhouse/national_and_state_government_initiatives/#gen1
Beattie’s latest $400 million policy is downloadable here:
http://www.thepremier.qld.gov.au/news/initiatives/climate/index.shtm
Agreed, Mark, there are lots of them.
The sheer number of different state and federal initiatives is argued to be problematic in the report.
The mandates are needed to kickstart the investments.
With the mandates in place, the project will find getting finance a hell of a lot easier than without.
That is, there is a guaranteed, demonstrable demand. Bankers and other investors like that in start-ups.
A similar position is found in the biofuels market – incentives offered are for litres sold, meaning you have to find funding for not only building a plant but to keep it running until your sales start flowing. If the government was to mandate E10, for example, the initial investment capital would be far easier to raise, because the investors know there is a market.
Yes, Robert, that’s true, and it underlines the lack of national leadership on the issue.
BigBob: that may well be the case.
But establishing an ethanol industry is a secondary goal here, the goal is to cut CO2 emissions.
If they’re still not competitive in the market despite the cost of emissions permits, why should any further incentive be put in place?
“Incidentally, the renewable generators seem to be very slow off the mark – they don’t have a single press release out on their response to the report, and nor does the wind energy association. Anybody know what gives?”
Maybe they are smart enough to realise they are just not wanted here.
Why bother?
Probably, they have packed up and gone somewhere that the government is not nuke mad.
I think Jed hit the nail on the head with the very first comment, and I’m surprised no-one else has picked up on it.
How on earth can you justify abolishing support for renewables and imposing a cost mechanism on the market when you still have $10 billion a year going out of government coffers into the coffers of the fossil fuel companies? The market mechanism will be meaningless as against the systemic bias and unlevel playing field.
MRETs and similar schemes are there in order to overcome the massive entrenched barriers to new technologies. Those barriers will – and currently do – prevent least-cost emissions reduction measures from being implemented. In my view, MRETs are a clumsy way of overcoming that barrier, and they should be replaced by much more elegant and targeted feed-in law schemes. But whichever way you cut it, if you want to achieve cuts of anything like 30% by 2020, you’ve got to supplement economic measures with direct regulation.
As a final comment – where are the renewables companies? As someone who’s been grappling with this issue for years, trying to encourage them to come out of their shell, I can tell you they are punch drunk and sh*t scared. With notable exceptions like Pac Hydro, the few remaining in Australia are hiding in their shells and hoping that things change, but most of them have gone overseas or left the industry altogether.
I wasn’t advocating biofuels Rob, just giving an industry example I know of where there is considerable interest in starting up plants, but the high startup costs without access to a guaranteed market has stalled development, even though there are government incentives for production (in the form of possible margin gains due to a favourable duty regime).
The same holds true for financing a big renewable energy project, the ease and cost of financing to allow start-up will be facilitated by some level of mandated demand.
The mandate is needed to kick it all off – then it has to be competitive to the other suppliers. It just takes some of the risk out of some very big money plays.
As far as subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, I’m not sure but I’d guess that to get the kind of numbers Jed talks about you’d have to include government road funding and the value of infrastructure built in the past. Furthermore, I suspect a lot of the fossil fuel subsidies discussed is for fossil fuel exports rather than domestic consumption (which may be a bad thing, but misleading as far as discussion of our domestic energy sector goes).
But as far as feed-in laws go, if our infrastructure was designed for a centralised model of power generation, it was designed for a centralised model of power generation. That may be less than desirable now, but they’re decisions that have been made (it’s like bitching about the R&D money nuclear has received over the decades; you can’t un-spend that money).
If the cost of unscrambling the egg of a centralized grid makes centralised non-emitting energy cheaper than decentralized non-emitting energy, that is unfortunate but no reason to choose the more expensive option.
One other point on this issue: the non-CO2 pollutants from power stations and cars are grossly undercosted.
By the way, here’s an interesting paper on subsidies to fossil fuel use in Australia.
Same thinking that got us into this mess. The best method would be to build a system which has the best long term returns. Not the least short term cost. Though, you cannot achieve a the long term if the short term hurdle is too high. So the point is to direct resources to the most sustainable technologies, but still enact the required transition in the short term.
You don’t build a good bridge by putting up lots of cheap rope bridges.
Robert,
Your information is way out of wack on the ethanol thing. I spoke last week with a cane producer/ethanol share holder who reported that in their part of Queensland they are getting up to 10,500 litres of ethanol per hectare. Farmers supplying cane for sugar production are getting around $25 per tonne (around about production cost) for their cane, farmers supplying cane for ethanol are getting $48 per tonne for their cane. This is with ethanol at 70 cents per litre. There is a new cellulose conversion technique being trialed in Australia which holds the promise of a further 8000 litres per hectare on top of the 10,500 litres.
Some people I know who own a concrete supply business do a lot travel around Australia (they have done the Variety Club Bash every year) say that they get the E10 fuel whenever they can because it is cheaper and their vehicle runs so much better on it. This is a common story. The mining people a keen for DE10 (diesel 90 ethanol 10) because it makes the diesel combustion cleaner.
Market forces here are clearly not working. There is a saving and there is demand. What has gone wrong.
I had another conversation with a Victorian ethanol producer whose feed stock is corn and grain. Their yields are only a faint reflection of the Queensland experience and yet it is still a viable business. I asked the representative why they were not gearing up for ethanol production in the Ord River stage 2 when it becomes a reality. He said that they were in Victoria because this is where the feed stock was available and where their market was. So I pointed out that if the Queensland yields were reliable surely shipping the fuel would be a minor cost. He said that this is inescapeable logic.
My assessmment of this industry is that it is in a state of early development. The opportunities are slowly opening up after being suppressed by the oil industry’s lockout supported by Howard. Coupled with the Coles/Woolworths stranglehold on petrol outlets it is difficult make change rapidly with the political posturing that will continue till the election.
If the Queensland yields are repeatable across the tropical belt and the hybride cellulose conversion process proves effective then Australia needs only 1 million hectares under ethanol to give us E85 nationally for all fuel injected vehicles.
Creating ethanol is a Primary goal, as it is totally self supporting and offers a significant Reduction in fuel costs which will only be reinforced by a carbon “thingey”. The only thing that this industry needs is consistent government policy. Howard’s policies flapping violently like a luffed sail make for stalled investment. This industry is certain to contribute greatly to improving Australia’s trade balance in the coming years. At full deploymment that trade offset would stabstantially counter trade losses from declining coal sales.
Ethanol is far more real than “clean coal” or carbon credits or nuclear power. It is a here and now technology. Just turn up the tap.
BilB ,
The figures you are quoting don’t feel right.
As far as I know, there are no differentials paid to sugar cane growers for the different end use as they are paid for cane into the mill. The mills then decide whether to send the sugar to food or ethanol. It is unlikely that they would pay a premium to send cane to ethanol. But I must admit, I don’t know you could be correct as I only deal with the sugar industry on the margins.
Which Victorian ethanol producer? There are only 3 plants in Australia operating currently. Two in Qld, one in NSW.
The first major grain plant MAY be up and running second half of 08 in Swan Hill.
My job will entail supplying into the grain (and eventually cellulosic) ethanol industry and there really isn’t much going on in terms of actual new developments proceeeding. Existing plants (Manildra from waste starch and CSR’s sugar based ethanol plants) are ramping up. There are a number of plants slated to start in the next two years – but they have all been slated to start in the next two years for a few years now!
Even if every plant slated to start up gets going, we will only be looking at 1000-1500 million litres of ethanol. That will require 2-3 million tonnes of grain. There will not be enough capacity to supply every litre of E10 that would be required, if E10 was mandated.
Cellulosic conversion is not going to be happening in any significant fashion for 5 years. Maybe from cane it might be sooner because a lot of the issues are resolved due to the way in which cane is processed. Other cellulosic feedstock are much more problematic.
As to the Ord River – transporting ethanol or ethanol blends is not as easy as transporting petroleum fuels as the ethanol is quite enamoured with water leading to seperation issues. Sea voyages are problematic – requiring chemical ships not petroleum tankers – with vastly higher freight costs.
Ethanol production needs to be near the feedstock and the market to be viable.
On the policy front, yes the Government has not moved very quickly (surprise!) to advance ethanol or biodiesel production against the established majors and the food chains. But the industry has also been it’s own enemy – shooting itself in the foot very effectively a few years ago such that public confidence was shot. This is recovering slowly.
Still, selling anything over an E10 blend is illegal with heavy penalties.
As I said elsewhere, the mandate should be that all cars sold in Australia should be flex fuel capable, meaning that they can use anything from 0 to 85% ethanol. This gives the consumer the option to use what is readily available at the time and provides some level of future proofing of vehicles.
Sorry for the hijack Robert!
No problem, BigBob!
Always good to have informed commentors on relevant topics.
BigBob,
This information was direct fron the interested parties themselves. You can get them on the phone and check it out yourself. Appearently the way that the industry works is that the grower gets two thirds of the crop return and the mill gets one third. So growers feeding the sugar mills are locked to the sugar market yields, and growers with contracts with ethanol producers get the ethanol yield share. This was from a grower in the Birdekin area. The figures were: hectare yields of 100 to 124 tonnes of cane per hectare from which 92 litres were produced fromm each tonne. A further 86 litres per tonne were projected to be yielded from the remaining cellulose material when the process becomes generally available. That may not be an industry wide arrangement, but that is what was reported to me.
The staggering thing here is that the coalition have completely ignored the CO2 reduction potential of this industry. It is not counted in any way into the environmental restitution projections. As also have the ALP. Neither party give ethanol anything other than lip service. And that is in the face of absolute proof of ethanol’s potential as demonstrated by its dramatic performance in the Brazilian economy.
I will spell it out yet again. Brazil, by government direction, started producing ethanol from sugar cane over 25 years ago and now more than half of their vehicle fleet run on ethanol mixes of between 50% and 100%. As a result Brazil is the only South American country to pay off its world bank debt from its own economic performance. Brazil’s 185 million people together release only the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as Australia’s 20 million people. And this is while Brazil gears up as a manufacturing powerhouse for Europe.
The stock information available on google appears to be out of date. Recognise that ethanol production is an evolving technology. Clearly there is less interest in all of this from the oil companies I suspect because they do not control the whole process and ethanol displaces the petrol from which they make more of their profit. We are at the point when the oil companies have to realise that the game is up. The fossil fuel flow has to slow down. The oil companies are the ones who should be investing in the cane production and the ethanol conversion factories.
BigBob if you have definitive conflicting information the please produce it.
The world bank claim may not be correct. But googling South American World Bank Debt brings up a very interesting picture.
A useful tool:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:20535285~menuPK:1192694~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:239419,00.html
This quote is from Page 17 of the 2nd PDF in Mark’s link from the Qld Premier’s website. It seems to me that 500000 tonnes less greenhouse gas is worth putting some cash into.
But what if we can get 1 million tonnes less, or 2 million tonnes less, for the same amount of dough?
Big Bob,
I didn’t read all of your post before commenting.
I spoke with http://www.indcor.com.au/ (Agri Energy Ltd 03 8689 3000) and Pioneer Cane. Also seek out Friends of Ethanol. I have to say that I am reluctant to give more detail as I did not ask for authority to quote these people publicly. But that should be enough information for you to track down the same information path.
The Ord River would only ship out the ethanol not fuel blends. The shipping of ethanol is routinely done in the Americas and Europe is now committed to shipping large quantities of the material. So if shipping costs are high at the moment then this is short term.
Building a future on grain ethanol would be a poor choice if you were committed to major growth because as you correctly point out grain production in recent years is highly volatile and grain produces far less ethanol per tonne, although still worth doing.
If selling more than E10 is illegal then there is the problem the Howard government has regulated to maximise Australia’s CO2 emissions. That is moving into a special class of government arrogance.
On cellulosic ethanol you need only ask more questions of more relevent people to get a complete picture.
You are not suggesting a more dangerous and unhealthy option, I would hope.
Is that a one off $7.3 million expenditure for a perpetual 500000 tonnes saving? If it is an annual expenditure it is still $15 per tonne of CO2, well inside the task force recommendation of $20 per tonne.
In fact the government should b collecting $200 million in levies for the 95% balance of CO2 being released. That is if anything is done at all.
BilB,
I thought the sugar cane thing might be something like that. As I said, I am not an expert on ethanol from sugar. As to cellulosic conversion of bagasse (the fibrous remnant of sugar production), most sugar mills burn this as fuel currently.
The problem with using sugar is the same as using grain, you are competing with other industries for the feedstock. Sooner or later, the price for sugar as food will be better than the price for ethanol. Look at corn prices in the US, as ethanol has shrunk excess supply, the price overall has risen. You eventually reach an equilibrium point but seasonal and regulatory factors can upset it easily
The other thing is that the yields per tonne are poor. 90 L/T is really not a great way to obtain ethanol, you need to piggy back on the sugar mills to make it feasible – you are far better off with grain at ~450 L/T if you are running a plant for ethanol. This is due to the major cost (after feedstock) being distillation energy. Cane syrup will only give you 6-8% alcohol ‘beer’ to distill. Starch based procceses produce double (potentially more) the alcohol. This cuts your energy to distil a litre markedly.
Trust me on cellulosic, it isn’t coming tomorrow. We will be a key technology provider and it is really 5 years away from being a commercial reality IF current projects are successful. As I said before, sugar may be a little sooner as they have a lot of the feedstock issues covered as they are already milling. I may be able to tell you more later, as I am off to a major Ethanol conference in the US at the end of the month.
I know the people at Agri-Energy well – they are putting up the Swan Hill plant due in mid to late 08.
Re:shipping, ethanol is still very expensive to ship. One solution would be to have dehydrators at the receival areas. This may become common as the industry expands.
Still, my original point stands – with all the plants currently planned, we won’t produce enough ethanol to make every drop of petrol E10 or better.
My preferred option, as noted, isn’t to mandate the fuel side of things, but mandate the engine technology. This gives people the choice of what to use and gives future flexibility. Vehicles pre-86 can’t reliably handle E10, vehicle built 86 to now generally can. Most could be converted to flex fuel for less than an LPG conversion. We should be flex fuelling all engines from now on so they can run on anything up to E85 (many overseas flex fuel engines can run E100 happily).
Pre-cellulosic, we certainly will not be able to be anywhere near self-sufficient on ethanol. Post-cellulosic, I still doubt we will, but we will be a lot closer.
I like ethanol as a fuel, my future employment rides heavily on it’s success but I certainly don’t see it as any magic solution. It will be a part of the mix of measures taken.
Oops, that last post is mine.
Not trying to impersonate you BilB!
BigBob,
Well those ethanol yields per tonne for grain are new information, what is the grain harvest per hectare? On the baggasse its burning is a significant electricity supply for Brazil (I need to check that but that is my impression). At the end of the full cellulose cycle the resultant residue is lignin. The burning of which is just short of supplying the energy for the full ethanol conversion cycle, I believe. Regardless of where we are with production capacity at this point in time the ethanol industry (with exception of wind energy and hydro which is a declining resource) is the most advanced carbon reducing industry that Australia has and is the industry that can be advanced at the greatest rate at nil cost to the public (Robert might have another opinion on that which I am only to happy to hear about).
Big Bob you are in the most exciting of businesses and part of a product that maost Australians will identify as being their biggest visible contribution to CO2 containment. I can’t wait to be running my vehicles on E85 (and that will include a Pipistrel Virus [google that and read the spec you will be blown away] next year all things going well). The Nowra ethanol people tell me that E85 should cost around 89cents per litre, even if it we the same price as petrol I would feel better about my travelling.
Ethanol is only part of the GW solution, but it is a vitally important part. Electric vehicles will also become a key part of the solution. Your future employment is secure.
Grain harvest estimates! I wish I could!
As I recall, it is around 2 T/ha for wheat. So you get 800-900 L/Ha. But that is broadacre farming. Sugar cane is far more intensive, but suitable land is also limited.
Sugar cane will produce more ethanol per hectare due to the heavy crop – but there are some pretty significant environmental issues attached to the cane industry,which I won’t cover here.
I doubt E85 will be that low – it will distort the market to much. Still, you can’t legally purchase E85 anyway. I have heard no news from Government about relaxing the fuel regs either.
Well there it is in a nutshell 900 litres per hectare versus 10,000 litres per hectare. If the Ord River was to be utilised only for cane for ethanol then that would take Australia to E25 without the cellulose cycle, and E50 with the celullose cycle, with out including ethanol from other sources. Either way it is good for the atmosphere. So vote out the obstruction.
So what did you think about the Pipistrel Virus? Pretty cool, Huh. You are looking there at a transport vehicle that weighs 285 kg (one third of the weight of your car) will travel at 240 klms per hour on as little a 9 litres of fuel per hour (24 klms per litre), can travel point to point (direct) and takes off and lands in 100 metres on dirt tracks. If you do a lot of country travel you have got to look seriously at this $100,000 gem. The gps navigation systems now are spectacular. And the time saving potential is spectacular. Safety? With the more advanced terrain mapping navigation systems nowadays and the potential of guided landing these vehicles are manyfold safer than driving on country roads. My uncle John Prentice carted oil pipes around the Simpson Desert for the oil companies for half of his life and finally retired. On the last trip home to Fraser Island after concluding the sale of his business he fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road and was killed. Flying has its hazards, but so does driving.
BilB, still flogging this horse?
Any progress on the “complete solution” for transportation in Australia? From memory, you had to close a gap between petrol consumption of 19 billion litres a year and potential sugarcane ethanol production of ~2.5 billion litres. And of course, there’s that little matter of diesel.
No doubt you’ve come up with something that involves a cellulosic ethanol technology that is gonna happen “real soon now”.
You know what? If I had to bet on which would happen first, “clean coal” or cellulosic ethanol, I reckon I’d go for clean coal. The coal industry’s very survival depends on it, so there will be no lack of funding.
I think this may depend on how deep the cuts are that you are aiming at and in what timeframe.
George Monbiot in looking for 90% cuts in Britain within a 24-year time-frame decided, appropriately I think, that he had to decide the future shape of energy supply. In fact, having ruled out nuclear he needed to call on everything feasible that is possible with reasonable cost. If that is the scenario, regulation, government intervention and picking winners is inevitable. Nevertheless he seeks to harness the power of markets to get things done.
Carbonsink,
Cellulosic will beat clean coal by a long way – but it is not going to be a cure-all for producing transport fuels.
Limited production from a few feedstocks is possible in five years. Full on production that might begin to look like replacing fossil fuels in the transport sector is ten years away – unless oil goes up spectacularly, which is a possibility.
BigBob, I want to believe in cellulosic I really do, but its always 5-10 years away. Its kind of like the fusion of transportation, except closer.
Have you read Robert Rapier’s blog? When RR tells me that there’s been real progress on cellulosic I’ll start believing.
Ethanol at the moment is more about pork-barrelling than making transportation greenhouse neutral.
Carbonsink,
I did some probing around yesterday and as you are saying cellulosic projects appear to have gone off the radar. Nothing appears to be proceeding. This to me has all of the feel of patent litigation hangup. Exactly what happened to automotive broadband radar, technology that should have been in our cars 20 years ago but became sidelined by 2 competing American claimants. There are some clues, however, and I will do some phoning around to see if I can find out what has happened. But from the information That I have gathered so far, there are possibilities far beyond my imagination. More concerning though are combustion byproducts from ethanol. But from what I can see these are more prevalent in older engines. Indications are that electronic control of combustion conditions can (all but) completely eliminate these nasties. It is important to recognise that ethanol is a stepping stone fuel. It gives us time to convert from existing combustion based motive power to predominately electric motive power, phasing out petrol completely along the way. That transition will take at least 50 years. At the end of the transition ethanol and straight sugar (I believe) will become the fuel cell energy medium of choice for electric vehicles. Having said that there are some really fascinating technology advances occuring with the storage of hydrogen at low pressure where the hydrogen is molecularly attached to nano lattices. Dr Franz Trieb of the German Aerospace Ministry points out that Concentrating Solar Thermal Power yields more energy per square kilometer than can be achieved by plant energy capture and conversion. I do not know what energy model he used to make that claim, but it is probable that solar power will be used very significantly in the near future to charge an aver increasing number of vehicle for medium range transport. That is why the energy conservation idea is flawed. Electricity demand will just steadilly continue skyward. Howard does not have the faintest appreciation of these issues. He has been Australia’s most disastrous prime minister.
Carbonsink,
There are definite porkbarrel elements, especially in the US. This is American agriculture we are talking about.
You are right cellulosic has been one of those “in 5 years” things for quite a while. However, it is moving. A lot of the technology has now reached the stage of being practical. For instance, the cost of enzymes for the process is now 1/30th of the cost when cellulosic was first mooted.
A lot of the problems are on the logistical and initial processing side. Cellulosic feedstocks are generally bulky and need a lot of pre-milling etc.
There is a lot of money going in to these projects – from a lot of sources. I will know a lot more after my visit to the US on the state of play over there.
BilB and BigBob,
my concern is that if we follow the ethanol path (due to pork-barrelling and false promises) we will waste a decade or two that could have been used to electrify ground transportation. As you’ve correctly pointed out, capturing the sun’s energy via solar thermal and converting it to electricity is vastly more efficient than photosynthesis, sowing, harvesting and refining crops into a liquid fuel.
Following the wrong path is dangerous. Remember the “hydrogen economy”?
Again I urge you to read Robert Rapier’s blog, some well-to-wheel efficiency numbers for the Tesla Roadster and above all this presentation from Tesla.
Now I know Tesla have a barrow to push, but when they say “An electric car will go 32 times as far as an ethanol car” are they that wrong?
The problem is the installed base is huge.
Ethanol can be used, with some minor modifications, in engines that have been produced for at least the last 20 years.
To go to another form of propulsion is going to take a very long time, IMO.
Electric vehicles have one big advantage that I can see, in that you can concentrate where the pollutants are produced, giving you one emitter to deal with, not millions.
Still, if you think cellulosic has been coming for ‘5 years’, I reckon the electric car has been just around the corner since the 1960’s.
Carbonsink,
You seem to be following the view that ethaonl powered vehicles and elcectric powered vehicles are mutually exclusive. Nothing could be further from the truth. I currently own 3 Petrol powered vehicles and soon will own a petrol powered personal air vehicle. Ethanol will allow me to operate these vehicles in a more environmentally responsible way. My next vehicle purchase I hope will be an electrically powered one, which will be my family trial in this area. As these vehicles improve in capability and range without compromising deliverable function I will progressively transition to an all electric fleet. Further down the track I fully expect there to be plug in charge/ethanol fuel cell hybrides which will have phenomenal range and power. There are many manufacturers in the world following this theme. http://www.obvio.ind.br/obviona/news 011.htm for example.
One does not threaten the other, quite the contrary. They are mutually INCLUSIVE.
That link again “http://www.obvio.ind.br/obviona/news 011.htm” take it out of the brackets and it will work. Lots and lots of electric vehicles available in China.
The problem is the installed base is huge.
Ethanol can be used, with some minor modifications, in engines that have been produced for at least the last 20 years.
Fair point, but we have to move to a new technology one day, so why not start now? If we start chopping down rainforests in SE Asia to grow palm oil, I don’t think we’re really solving anything.
Electric vehicles have one big advantage that I can see, in that you can concentrate where the pollutants are produced…
Or potentially no pollutants at all.
Still, if you think cellulosic has been coming for ‘5 years’, I reckon the electric car has been just around the corner since the 1960’s.
Yeah, but the electric car actually happened (kind of) recently in the form of the Prius and other hybrids. With minor modifications you can convert a hybrid into a plug-in electric car.
Even enough there to excite Robert M
http://www.zapworld.com/ZAPWorld.aspx?id=4560
One of the problems we have is that World Trade Organisation rules allow adverse environmental outcomes. It does this by privileging pro-trade policies and practices über alles. The WTO is the only organisation where you can bring the most powerful governments to heel. Somehow they need to take on board the climate change agenda.
At the Earth Summit 2002 there was a move from the WTO to take over the sustainable development agenda from the UN. Most people thought, not unreasonably, that this would result in a judicious sprinkling of the word “sustainability” through their documentation, whereupon they would carry on as before. It will take complete solidarity from the G8 and more to re-orient the WTO.
BigBob,
Some up to date indications of progress with bagasse cellulosic ethanol and working production costs
http://ethanolbrasil.blogspot.com/2007/05/brazils-dedini-unlocks-ethanol-advance.html
Don’t tell Carbonsink, it would leave him with nothing to talk about.