Gasoline has a lotta BANG per pound, making it pretty ideal fuel for the motorcycles we love. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer discuss the future of petroleum fuels, synthetic fuels, ethanol and more, plus electric battery storage and the prospects there for motorcycling. Much to cover! Kevin says, "Pounds per horsepower hour," "light molecules" and "heavy sluggish molecules...AND we discuss the 300,000-400,000 pounds of jet fuel an airliner has on takeoff--but not on landing!
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00This is the CycleWorld podcast. Welcome back, regular listeners. Welcome, new
00:00:05listeners. Today's topic with Kevin Cameron, our technical editor, and me, Mark
00:00:11Hoyer, editor-in-chief, is fuels. How we move energy storage, really. How do we
00:00:18store energy and stick it on our motorcycle and ride around? So we're
00:00:21going to talk about energy as it relates to motorcycles. Of course, we can't help
00:00:26but talk about more global things such as aviation and automobiles and shipping
00:00:32and everything else we use to move things and get around. You know, I'd like
00:00:39to start with steam power. Why don't we have steam-powered motorcycles? Get some
00:00:45coal. Well, it was shown that flash steam generators could make steam in a fine
00:00:54coil with a strong flame playing through it very promptly. So at the end
00:01:02of the steam car business in the 1930s, there were still a few hangovers, hang-ons,
00:01:09they were able to raise steam very quickly. So it wasn't that old process of
00:01:14give me some paper, will you? Got any little twigs?
00:01:25And of course, old Lear there, Lear of Learjet, claimed that he was going to
00:01:30build a steam automobile that would challenge the internal combustion paradigm,
00:01:37but it didn't come to pass. So it could happen. I mean, it could have been made
00:01:46to happen, but it turned out that World War I sorted this all out. What do we have
00:01:55that we can use in this pointless war? Gasoline engines. We've got gasoline,
00:02:03we've got engines. And they put gasoline engines into airplanes and trucks. And
00:02:10they put internal combustion engines, diesels, into submarines. They tried
00:02:16steam submarines, believe it or not, and they tried gasoline-powered submarines,
00:02:20but the fumes overcame the crew. So it was a big shakeout. And if World War I
00:02:29hadn't taken place, it's quite possible that steam would have carried on
00:02:34and received more R&D, but it didn't. So here we are with the spark ignition,
00:02:44gasoline-fired internal combustion engine. The great thing about it, compared with, say,
00:02:51a gas turbine, a gas turbine's efficiency depends upon how the percentage of maximum
00:02:58power that it's producing. Because it's a dynamic machine, its compression ratio,
00:03:03as you might say, depends on how much power it's making. So, for example, the
00:03:15specific thrust fuel consumption on takeoff is lower than in cruise, because on takeoff,
00:03:22the engine is running at its maximum. And Chrysler built their turbine car, and they
00:03:31put a few in private hands for a kind of beta test, and then it just faded away. Rover in England
00:03:40also put gas turbine in a Rover car and drove it around for a while. But
00:03:46I think they probably both looked at this and said,
00:03:51big money R&D stands between us and a useful product. Because in the case of the gas turbine,
00:04:01it's most efficient when it's running at maximum. Whereas the internal combustion engine,
00:04:07piston internal combustion engine, has the same compression ratio whether you're on full throttle
00:04:13or idle. And so, it is ideally suited to vehicles that must perform over a range of
00:04:23speeds from zero to whatever the state says it should be at the moment.
00:04:30What are the qualities of gasoline that make it win so far?
00:04:36The great thing about gasoline is, first of all, there was plenty of it. Because
00:04:44those oil wells that were drilled not very far into Pennsylvania,
00:04:54their main product that they could sell was lamp oil, kerosene. And the gasoline was
00:05:01dangerous because it evaporated and produced an ignitable mixture with air.
00:05:07Well, producing a prompt ignitable mixture with air is exactly what the internal combustion engine
00:05:15needs. You could imagine an internal combustion engine operating on wood, but it would be pretty
00:05:25gradual. But with gasoline, the first carburetors were evaporator carburetors, basically a gasoline
00:05:33soaked rag with air on its way into the engine passing over this rag. It was made to work.
00:05:43And then the spray carburetor invented by Maybach in Europe and by Hedstrom in the US,
00:05:53who was later chief engineer of Indian. The spray carburetor, gasoline's ability to evaporate rapidly
00:06:04was of essential importance to the internal combustion engine because
00:06:10try to start a spark ignition engine on diesel and you'll see why.
00:06:15Yeah, or kerosene.
00:06:17Doesn't want to.
00:06:19That was the story.
00:06:19In the 1930s, yeah.
00:06:22That was the story. You're probably telling it right now about guys in their tractors.
00:06:25Oh yeah, in the 1930s when nobody had any money. Start the engine on gasoline, which cost more.
00:06:32As soon as it was warm enough, switch to kerosene, which was cheaper
00:06:37and made a terrible smell and probably didn't run terribly well, but good. So initially,
00:06:45the definition of gasoline was whatever boils off from petroleum between two temperatures,
00:06:51a lower and a higher temperature. And for that reason, gasoline is not a pure substance like,
00:06:58for example, ethyl alcohol. All the ethyl alcohol molecules are identical, but in gasoline,
00:07:05you have light molecules with three or four carbons and hydrogens attached to them
00:07:13all the way up to nine carbons with hydrogens attached to them. And
00:07:22that range of boiling points worked out to be able to cold start
00:07:29internal combustion engines with spark ignition. And because part of that fraction of
00:07:38a distillation was extremely volatile, the way you started a car when it was cold was you
00:07:45enriched the mixture so much that the total amount of highly volatile stuff that evaporated
00:07:54was enough to make a mixture in the range of 10 parts of air to one of fuel, which is the rich
00:08:02limit to 18 parts of air to one of fuel, which is the lean limit. And that's why if you've ever
00:08:14driven a choke equipped car or motorcycle in cold weather, as soon as the engine starts,
00:08:21you have to kind of start easing off the choke because as the engine warms up,
00:08:26it evaporates more of the fuel. Just bringing them along. Yep. And so, if you're in a big
00:08:32hurry and you drive off, you've got partial choke on, but you have to remember to keep nudging it
00:08:38toward the normal mixture. And by the time you're a couple minutes down the road, you're
00:08:44able to have throttle response and drive normally. Because the engine has become hot enough to
00:08:51evaporate all of those kinds of molecules, the light, volatile ones and the heavier,
00:08:58more sluggish ones that remain on your fingers. Like, is this gasoline or is it diesel? Yeah,
00:09:05it's one of the reasons in a water-cooled automobile that they would run coolant through
00:09:09the intake manifolds. Absolutely. Inline-6, run water through the intake manifold,
00:09:17get it up to temperature quickly because the coolant's circulating only inside the engine.
00:09:22Until the thermostat opens and then... Yep. ...away you go. So, we have gasoline, which is
00:09:29obviously our dominant fuel. We've burned all kinds of things. We've burned wood,
00:09:34coal. We get gas out of the ground, natural gas, propane. We can burn alcohol made from
00:09:43many different things, including corn. What am I missing? About 40%. About 40% of the U.S. corn crop
00:09:51is made into fuel alcohol by fermentation. Diesel, kerosene, many different things that we can burn.
00:10:04And so, we've kind of talked some of the basics about gasoline. Let's talk about diesel,
00:10:13what's good about diesel, and then maybe some reasons we don't have it in motorcycles,
00:10:19starting with the smell, maybe. Well, there was that story that I think Mr. Honda told on
00:10:27himself. He said when he was a boy and the first car came down the road through his little rural
00:10:34town, he'd never seen anything like that, a thing that could move without legs and animals and so
00:10:40forth attached to it. And the smell, he said, the smell was so exotic that I ran after it
00:10:48for as long as I could keep up. And my dad had a cousin who loved the smell of gasoline and would
00:10:57stand there sniffing at it until he fell over. So, yeah, I think you don't hear these
00:11:04romantic stories about, oh, that diesel, nothing like it. But the early pioneers of
00:11:15internal combustion were competent theoreticians. They knew quite a lot about heat cycles.
00:11:25And the thing about the diesel engine that we know that it's called, the engineers call it
00:11:35compression ignition. And the idea being that if you have a high enough compression ratio,
00:11:42the air is so heated by compression that it is hot enough when a spray of diesel fuel
00:11:50is injected into it at pressures up to 30,000 PSI, which is like
00:12:00the maximum pressure in a handgun. Sounds expensive to replace.
00:12:05Well, it's had a lot of development. The fuel auto ignites. It burns without a spark.
00:12:17Diesels do not have air throttles. They take in all the air they can. And the load is adjusted
00:12:26by varying the amount of fuel that is injected. In the old days, there was a tiny piston pump
00:12:32for each cylinder that was a variable stroke. And today, it's common rail. There's a high
00:12:40pressure fuel rail serving all the injectors. And they are lifted either by electromagnetic
00:12:48solenoid means or by piezoelectric valve. Well, not having a throttle would be the first step
00:12:58in having a little bit better efficiency than a gasoline.
00:13:02Yes, because the higher the temperature of the combustion gas, the more energy is lost
00:13:13in movements of molecules that don't push on pistons. Molecules zooming here and there,
00:13:21like a high-speed photography of a busy bus station,
00:13:31that produces pressure on the piston. But if the molecules themselves are vibrating
00:13:37or if they're rotating, that energy doesn't push on pistons. That energy goes out the smokestack
00:13:45with the exhaust gas. So in order to limit that loss, reducing the temperature of
00:13:55combustion is important. And that's why there are all these
00:14:03ways of limiting the production of nitrogen oxides by recirculating combustion gas in diesels.
00:14:14Yeah, autos did it for a long time. I think it's less prominent now. But
00:14:19it's actually fairly clever. EGR doesn't usually function when you're
00:14:26matting it on your gasoline engine. You want full chat. You want all the power. They don't put
00:14:33inert gas back into the cylinder to effectively lower it.
00:14:37Well, they're going to do anything that doesn't appear on the emissions test,
00:14:45and they go over it carefully. And so if sharp momentary accelerations and so forth are not
00:14:52tested, then they're going to go to a maximum power mixture during that time and the emissions
00:15:00be dammed, so to speak. But the emissions test has to be something that can be completed in less
00:15:08than infinite time. So there has to be a compromise of some sort. But the basic, let's
00:15:15compare the efficiencies of a gasoline engine and a diesel compression ignition engine. It's quite
00:15:21typical for a gasoline engine to need to burn one half a pound of fuel per horsepower per hour.
00:15:32So that's 0.5. This is called brake-specific fuel consumption. For a diesel, it's more like
00:15:420.35 pound per horsepower per hour. So that's the big attraction for heavy trucking because
00:15:53those things consume a lot of fuel. It's a large part of the price that they have to charge
00:15:58the person who's shipping with them. So they want to be able to use as little fuel as possible so
00:16:05that their prices will be competitive. In World War II, well, even before World War II,
00:16:12there was some fear at first that the gasoline spark ignition engine had no future because it
00:16:18was limited by detonation and diesel was not. So the Germans built some diesel aircraft engines.
00:16:31And it's always been a puzzle to me why German tanks were not diesel, but Russian tanks were
00:16:38diesel. There was a Stinson called the Detroiter that had a diesel engine on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:16:44There was a diesel radial, I think. 1930s, yeah. Yeah. So also international shipping,
00:16:56ocean shipping, is universally propelled by very large direct drive two-stroke diesels.
00:17:05And those things run at over 50% fuel efficiency so that more than half of the energy in the fuel
00:17:15is turning the propeller or is being used to generate the electric power for the ship.
00:17:23And it's kind of like a Formula One engine was there for a while with all the energy going to
00:17:29some useful purpose somewhere. But it was pointed out to me by someone with considerable diesel
00:17:38experience that a single cylinder diesel, because of its high compression ratio,
00:17:44needs such a flywheel that it wouldn't be much fun to start or to ride
00:17:55because the throttle response would be something like
00:17:58tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk.
00:18:03Sounds like a traction engine on the farm there turning your water pump or something.
00:18:07The hit and miss was tuk, tuk, tuk.
00:18:10So a diesel engine on a motorcycle, to my mind, would be a desperation deal.
00:18:20I've got a motorcycle rolling chassis. I have a diesel engine from some small power unit.
00:18:28And I need to get around for the smallest... This is the Armageddon catastrophe vehicle.
00:18:38Well, they've got pull start diesels that you can buy from various outlets around the world.
00:18:44And I've seen people build those up. We have the KLR650 chassis that was made for the
00:18:52military, the US military that had a diesel engine in it. We tested one of those years ago.
00:18:58I imagine if you had a touring bike, I mean, imagine you're Harley-Davidson or
00:19:02your Honda Goldwing with a nice turbo diesel in it, well-insulated. It wouldn't be bad, you know?
00:19:09Could be done, sure.
00:19:10Wouldn't be as dynamic, certainly. And that's the thing,
00:19:13that's kind of what we came for in motorcycling in America is the dynamics.
00:19:18Motorcycles go, so far at least, they go back and forth between being a utility.
00:19:26Motorcycle registrations actually exceeded car registrations in England in the 1920s.
00:19:34Because people didn't have a lot of money for such things as motor vehicles.
00:19:40And the motorcycle gave you a whiff of motoring at a much lower price.
00:19:45And the other alternative is you want the motorcycle for the hell of it.
00:19:50And that's why the rough Superior S100 is regarded with such reverence.
00:20:00Because it's this big, long-legged thing that could just carry along country roads effortlessly.
00:20:08And you could reach any speed permitted by the circumstances.
00:20:14A lot of nice shapes there. A lot of nice shapes.
00:20:17Yeah.
00:20:17You're talking about 1920s, 30s, 40s England, a lot of motorcycles, sidecars with roofs on them.
00:20:26And you know, I'm going to do it, folks. I'm going to mention my Velocette, sorry.
00:20:32But I ride that bike and I've ridden it quite a bit.
00:20:35And I try to think about somebody going to the docks for work, getting up in the morning and
00:20:42relying on a 54 Velocette or a 37 or whatever to get to the docks, to their job.
00:20:48And I think, wow, you're climbing mountains just to get to the office.
00:20:52You know what I mean?
00:20:53Yeah.
00:20:53So, really something.
00:20:57When the war ended, World War II, in 1945, the quickest transportation
00:21:07that could be got into production was motorcycles.
00:21:12So, Germany had a huge explosion of motorcycle production.
00:21:19And so did Japan.
00:21:22I don't think the streetcars were running initially.
00:21:24I think there was a lot of trouble getting from where you could live to where you could work.
00:21:31And as soon as cars got into production in Germany, in Italy, and in Britain,
00:21:40motorcycles became not so desirable.
00:21:44And so they had to shift their role.
00:21:48England produced sporting motorcycles for the U.S. market, for Argentina.
00:21:54And once the Japanese market was saturated,
00:21:57Mr. Honda saw that America had only Harley-Davidson and a small number of
00:22:06adventuresome young men and police riding motorcycles.
00:22:10And he thought, those Americans will enjoy having a little fun
00:22:15on little motorbikes that we'll build for them.
00:22:19And so it turned out that you met the nicest people on a Honda, or whatever your choice was.
00:22:28But this is what has happened with motorcycles.
00:22:31They've gone back and forth between utility, cheapest form of motorized transportation,
00:22:38and riding for pleasure, excitement, passion, etc.
00:22:43And as Mr. Honda said in the owner's manual of the 1959 Bentley Twin,
00:22:52primarily essentials of the motorcycle consist of the speed and thrill.
00:22:59Indeed.
00:23:00Well, that's the cool thing about, you know, even like a Trail 125, we have a Trail 125.
00:23:05And they, you know, they recently, last model year, they kicked the power up slightly.
00:23:12And it's still not fast, you know, for a guy like my size, 6'2 and 220-ish pounds.
00:23:18Add a helmet, add a backpack.
00:23:21You know, I can go 57 on relatively flat ground.
00:23:24But it's actually really fun to ride.
00:23:26And you could have very high utility and very high fuel efficiency,
00:23:30somewhere in the order of 120 to 135 miles per gallon without too much trouble.
00:23:37And pretty vigorous acceleration and good times.
00:23:42And so you can, that's, for me, that's always been the charm of motorcycle.
00:23:45Well, it's one of the charms of motorcycling is the,
00:23:48you can have such efficiency if you seek it.
00:23:52And you still get a huge part of the thrill.
00:23:55Engaging your balance is a huge part of the thrill.
00:23:59Like that's so fundamental for me.
00:24:02If I don't ride for some period of time, I go on vacation to Europe or something.
00:24:07And I'm away from riding for two weeks or a week.
00:24:10I come back, you also don't notice it, but you get back on a motorcycle.
00:24:14And as soon as I pick up my feet and the clutch hits and I engage my balance,
00:24:20I feel a new, a new feeling, a renewed feeling of calm and centeredness.
00:24:26And you get that on a Trail 125 or a 401 Husky or a 900 SS to some degree, maybe a little higher.
00:24:35No, it's, it's really remarkable.
00:24:38Yeah.
00:24:38So diesel, very efficient.
00:24:40Obviously, you know, there's difficulties controlling soot and other things with diesel
00:24:48that are a little bit more vicious than in a gasoline engine there was during the fuel
00:24:55crises.
00:24:55If you're, if you miss some of those where you could only get gas on certain days,
00:25:00if you had an even numbered license plate or an odd number license plate,
00:25:04you could only go on Tuesdays or whatever to fill your car or motorcycle up.
00:25:10There were a lot of propane powered cars because propane was laying around and
00:25:15you can put an adapter.
00:25:17My generator at home runs on propane because it will not clog the carburetor from sitting.
00:25:23So I've never put gasoline in my big 6.6 gallon generator tank.
00:25:28It's always propane because I know I don't have to clean the carburetor, but propane,
00:25:32not a bad fuel, but I think gases, compressible gases is actually something we should
00:25:38talk about because we have, you know, one of seemingly infinite number of futures,
00:25:44potential futures, and one of those is hydrogen.
00:25:47But I'd like to start with something before, you know, something less.
00:25:51Liquid nitrogen, liquid, uh, liquefied natural gas.
00:25:54Yeah.
00:25:55LNG.
00:25:57That's the way natural gas is shipped overseas.
00:26:00You see these ships that have these huge spheres projecting up through the deck.
00:26:08That stuff has to be kept quite cold or it gases off unacceptably.
00:26:16And it doesn't work as a motor fuel unless you can refrigerate it and handle the pressure
00:26:26that results when it evaporates.
00:26:28So the reason those ships are, are going to Europe is, is the pipelines under the sea
00:26:36bringing Russian gas to Germany and so forth are no longer intact.
00:26:41So it, it changes the financial relationship somewhat, but, uh, propane is easily produced
00:26:52from other, from, from various refinery feedstocks and propane doesn't produce tremendous pressures
00:27:05and it can stay a liquid without being refrigerated.
00:27:09So it's a natural for things like powering your standby generator, or, um, if you want
00:27:15to run, uh, a fleet of trucks with the central base on a gaseous fuel, that's a candidate.
00:27:24Uh, natural gas is mostly methane with some, uh, other things like carbon monoxide or hydrogen
00:27:33in it.
00:27:34And methane has the most hydrogen in relation to carbon of any of our fuels short of hydrogen
00:27:42itself.
00:27:43There's one carbon bonded to four, uh, hydrogens.
00:27:50So it's called, it's CH4 is the chemical, uh, name for it.
00:27:57And it is also a feedstock for, from which so many things can, can be generated.
00:28:04And for a period of time, people were acting as though there were going to be battery operated
00:28:16airplanes for long haul.
00:28:19Now they are doing a lot of experimenting with short haul electric aircraft because
00:28:27there's no ground level emissions during takeoff and landing, which makes them attractive
00:28:33for, well, I have to get from the, from downtown New York out to, uh, the, the big airports.
00:28:42And if the big airports are a little farther along, you could build a hybrid electric,
00:28:48turbo electric airplane in which it takes off on battery power.
00:28:52So there's no emissions at the point of departure.
00:28:55The gas turbine starts, you cruise on the gas turbine and any excess power that is producing
00:29:02is charging the battery meanwhile.
00:29:04And then when you land, the turbine is shut down and you land on electric power.
00:29:08Again, no emissions at the point of arrival.
00:29:13So there's a lot of, a lot of stuff going on.
00:29:15Oh, air taxis are another one, pilotless air taxis.
00:29:19Um, do you think that will attract hackers?
00:29:25Yeah, I, it is attractive when you consider the complication and expense of firing up
00:29:30a helicopter and using something that's essentially, you know, a giant drone that you hang people
00:29:38in, it's electric, it's, you know, the complication, like there's an electric aircraft maker, Pipistrel
00:29:45that does small trainers that are electric powered, perfect application.
00:29:49Cause you're basically taking off, flying in the pattern, landing, touching goes, you're
00:29:54not trying to get to, you know, New York to Miami or something, you know, rattling around
00:29:59and you don't kind of have to mess with all that, but you can't, can't get too far.
00:30:04I mean, I think it's the triple seven has 300,000 pounds of jet jet a in it.
00:30:13For maximum, for a maximum travel distance.
00:30:16Yeah.
00:30:17Yeah.
00:30:17I mean, I guess so, you know, we, we have to talk about electrics cause there's certainly,
00:30:23I thought I was trapped in some kind of weird glitch in the matrix the other day.
00:30:28I mean, in Southern California, the proliferation of Teslas is, is pretty amazing.
00:30:33And I was in a situation where I had five white Teslas in a parking lot, all doing different
00:30:40things.
00:30:40And then, you know, I'm in an 89 Ford F two 50 with a four 60, which is kind of the anti
00:30:44Tesla sitting there looking around at all of this and thinking, huh, where are we?
00:30:49So there's, it's easy to package electric in a car because you know, people generally,
00:30:54most people are not noticing that it may weigh 9,000 pounds.
00:30:58Like the Rivian R1S performance thing is somewhere like around 8,000 pounds.
00:31:03There's the Hummer EV, which is a 10,000 pound car.
00:31:08Lots going on there, the electric motorcycle, all the, you know, they're great to ride.
00:31:14They're really fun to ride.
00:31:16You get a zero, you get a live wire, various other brands.
00:31:21Those are the two folks who've sort of tried to make the most out of making a business
00:31:26of it.
00:31:27And they're really fun to ride.
00:31:29The problem with a motor, a full-size motorcycle like the Rivian R1S is that it's, it's a
00:31:36motor, a full-size motorcycle shaped electric is that in the mind of the current motorcyclist,
00:31:43it's writing a check in your mind that the machine can't cash.
00:31:48Because if you get on it and you rip on it like a motorcycle, you're really pretty limited
00:31:54in range.
00:31:55You'd be lucky to get a hundred miles out of the, you know, the current battery capacity
00:32:01that we can fit on a motorcycle without making a motorcycle 800 pounds.
00:32:06And that's the, that's, that's the problem is packaging.
00:32:10That's the energy density thing.
00:32:11And I think maybe, you know, you have such a good handle on the, the relative weights
00:32:16and storage capacities and gasoline has this many kilowatt hours and I can put it in a
00:32:22gas pump is usually eight gallons per minute.
00:32:25Meaning you pull up on your MT07 with a 3.8 or four gallon tank.
00:32:31And in 40 seconds, you've put 135,000 kilowatt hours.
00:32:39Tremendous.
00:32:40A tremendous amount of energy.
00:32:41There's no comparison.
00:32:42And this causes people to wonder if the future will become more coercive.
00:32:54Oh, well, we, we really want to save the planet now and we're going to have a buyback
00:33:01program for all your nasty combustion vehicles and you're going to have to drive or ride
00:33:08electric in the future.
00:33:10Well, my argument, my, my hesitation over that proposition is there are 283 million
00:33:25cars and light trucks registered in the US and 3 million, 300,000 of those are electrics
00:33:34or roughly 1%.
00:33:35So if we look up and find that the average selling price of a new gasoline powered or
00:33:43diesel car or light truck is 48,000 and we multiply that times the registered fleet at
00:33:51the present time, we come up with a number that is 45% of the national debt.
00:33:58Now, nobody talks about ever paying off the national debt.
00:34:05Not ever.
00:34:06It is, it is so tremendous that it would be political suicide for any politician to utter
00:34:13the words.
00:34:16But we are contemplating a future of all electric vehicles.
00:34:25Now, if we then say, oh, well, what would it cost to replace them with the electrics?
00:34:30The electric average selling price is $10,000 higher.
00:34:34So, uh, the, the total fleet replacement cost would be again, much, much greater.
00:34:43So this makes it unlikely that gasoline and diesel are going to start disappearing.
00:34:55From our lives, because it is an immense proposition to switch over the entire human
00:35:03project from one source of energy, fossil fuels to another renewables, notably, uh,
00:35:13wind and solar with the political alternative of, of nuclear.
00:35:18Some people can't utter that word either.
00:35:20Um, on the other hand, some committed environmentalists from the past are a hundred percent
00:35:26behind nuclear power.
00:35:27So, because of course it produces no carbon emissions.
00:35:32Now, if, if you do a back of the envelope for say at a 777 flying New York to London,
00:35:42uh, and you say, well, it requires this much thrust to push the airplane along and cruise.
00:35:49That's the force and it's flying at, uh, Mach 0.78.
00:35:56That's the speed that gives you a horsepower and the flying time gives you a horsepower
00:36:03hours.
00:36:04Now this is, has nothing to do with the efficiency of the jet engine, because all we're talking
00:36:10about is thrust.
00:36:11How much push does it take to move the airplane?
00:36:14If we had an electric airplane running on batteries, we would need that same push if
00:36:19it weighed the same as the, uh, turbine powered aircraft.
00:36:25Well, I found that the battery would weigh 12 times more than the empty weight of the
00:36:31airplane.
00:36:33And then I thought, oh, wait a minute.
00:36:36Um, they're required to carry 45 minutes propulsion reserve, uh, over when, when you
00:36:44arrive, you have to have 45 minutes reserve in case you, there are traffic problems and
00:36:50you can't land for a while, or there's a weather problem or someone's holding a demonstration
00:36:57on the runway and you have to divert to another airport.
00:37:00And then I thought, oh, wait a minute.
00:37:03Uh, jet A burning aircraft land much lighter than they take off.
00:37:11In fact, if such an airplane has a problem after taking off, it can't land because its
00:37:18structure is not up to the thump.
00:37:20So it either has to circle and burn fuel or it has to dump the fuel.
00:37:26So we're going to design a new airplane to carry batteries and it's going to be quite
00:37:34heavy for each added 50,000 pounds of weight.
00:37:38We need another main gear wheel with the structure that it entails.
00:37:45The rule with airplanes is it takes a pound of airplane to fly a pound of whatever you
00:37:52want to carry with you.
00:37:53Passengers, fuel, et cetera, uh, comfy chairs in first class.
00:37:59So we know that batteries have improved steadily since the invention of the lithium ion around
00:38:081976, but not by a factor of 10 or 20.
00:38:12And we don't expect them to get a lot better, a lot faster just because we might like it.
00:38:25So what the airlines are doing and what international airline regulators are planning is that net
00:38:35zero carbon synthetic fuels will be produced for those applications that require a high
00:38:43density energy source.
00:38:46And the chemistry for this is all perfectly well understood.
00:38:50We just have to work out the economics.
00:38:54And the idea is to use, well, some people will tell you, it won't be long before we
00:39:00have so much electricity, extra electricity from wind and solar that we can use the extra
00:39:09to power the generation of synthetic fuels.
00:39:14And then I learned that there's another complication.
00:39:21And that is that, for example, if you're driving an electric vehicle and someone is doing an
00:39:28energy audit on you, they're going to say, oh, and what proportion of the electricity
00:39:35with which you charged your battery came from fossil fuels and what percentage came from
00:39:41renewables?
00:39:43And in the manufacturer of your vehicle, how was carbon involved and was any carbon dioxide
00:39:50released to the atmosphere?
00:39:52This kind of audit is going to become more and more stringent so that because government
00:39:59people want to be able to point to progress and they're going to need figures of merit
00:40:06to be generated that will enable them to do this.
00:40:09So I strongly suspect that they will not just produce enough synthetic liquid fuels for
00:40:19aviation, but also for another field of transportation that uses a very similar amount of fuel
00:40:26annually, namely ocean shipping.
00:40:30Aviation uses about just under 100 billion gallons a year.
00:40:39My dad told me he had a recurring dream in which he was suddenly faced with the necessity
00:40:46of drinking the entire ocean.
00:40:50And that's what that makes me think of.
00:40:54So I think that fundamentally, this change from fossil fuels to renewables is going to
00:41:07be a business.
00:41:08It is not going to be determined by politics alone.
00:41:12Someone will not be elected who says, now we're going to whatever.
00:41:18Because if you can't get investors to put money into these various schemes, such as
00:41:25building large numbers of recharging stations or building hydrogen generating apparatus
00:41:37that is commercially viable, it won't happen.
00:41:41Governments aren't going to put the money into these things because they have other
00:41:44uses for it, such as military pensions.
00:41:48And it's not going to be easy and it isn't going to be fast.
00:41:54So I would suggest that those of you who sit up suddenly at 4 a.m.
00:41:59thinking, there won't be any fuel for my motorcycle, relax, go back to sleep.
00:42:05There'll be something for your motorcycle.
00:42:10Because what's going to happen is it's going to take time.
00:42:14Again, it's investor limited to build all of that extra electric power based on wind
00:42:23and solar.
00:42:25And it's going to take a lot of coordination for some excess, notionally excess electric
00:42:34power to be used for liquid fuel synthesis.
00:42:39Now, won't the liquid fuel put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
00:42:46Yes.
00:42:48But the source of the carbon in the fuel and the source of the hydrogen are taking carbon
00:42:57dioxide out of the atmosphere.
00:42:59So it is carbon net zero.
00:43:02They will use direct air capture.
00:43:06You'll see these letters more and more frequently DAC to separate carbon dioxide from the
00:43:12atmosphere.
00:43:13It's now 419 parts per million and rising.
00:43:17And they will then employ standard chemistry to make with hydrogen.
00:43:28Liquid hydrocarbons that can be used for any purpose, such as, for example, making paint
00:43:33or synthetic chemicals of which the world uses an immense amount.
00:43:39So where are we going to get the hydrogen to combine with the carbon to make hydrocarbons?
00:43:46There are three kinds of hydrogen that are discussed now.
00:43:50Green hydrogen is hydrogen that is liberated from water by electrolysis, powered by 100%
00:43:59renewable electricity sources.
00:44:04A blue hydrogen is hydrogen that is sourced from fossil fuels, but produced in such a
00:44:16way that the carbon that is separated from this will be sequestered in deep mines forever
00:44:28and a day.
00:44:30So that carbon is gone.
00:44:31It's out of circulation.
00:44:33No more carbon.
00:44:34That's what would happen, for example, if they said, well, let's make hydrogen from
00:44:41methane.
00:44:42Methane has got a lot of hydrogen in it.
00:44:46They would have those carbon atoms left over.
00:44:48So in a lot of refineries, leftover carbon is burned to generate process heat.
00:44:56But in order to make blue hydrogen, the carbon that results from separating hydrogen from
00:45:04a hydrocarbon has to be permanently disposed of.
00:45:09And then gray hydrogen is the hydrogen that is just like blue, except that the carbon
00:45:17is not sequestered in a deep mine forever and ever.
00:45:21So when people say hydrogen in the future, they're going to say, which hydrogen?
00:45:29Because only green hydrogen is green, and blue hydrogen is a little bit green.
00:45:36But the combustion, I think the combustion from hydrogen, it's worth noting.
00:45:42Oh, absolutely.
00:45:43Yes, we should talk about that.
00:45:45Because when you combine hydrogen fuel with oxygen from the air, the only product is water.
00:45:54And when the shuttle main engines fire up, well, when they fired up in the past, what
00:46:03you saw, the exhaust was superheated steam.
00:46:09And so zero pollution from that combustion.
00:46:16A great fuel in that sense.
00:46:17A great fuel in that sense.
00:46:19Gosh, if we got hydrogen, but we got to break it off of stuff.
00:46:24We have to use energy to get our pure hydrogen to do what we want to do with it.
00:46:28Yeah.
00:46:29But now we're going to ask ourselves, why is that Kawasaki Idea bike powered by hydrogen
00:46:36so strange looking?
00:46:38It's strange looking.
00:46:39All those pods and Buck Rogers containers on it, on top and on the sides, have hydrogen
00:46:45tanks in them.
00:46:46NASA engineers used to say, hydrogen is huge.
00:46:52If we compress hydrogen to 10,000 PSI, five times the pressure you find in the welding
00:47:00bottles in the shop, then it takes six gallons of volume of that hydrogen to equal the energy
00:47:14in one gallon of hydrocarbon fossil fuel.
00:47:18So if your motorcycle has a four gallon tank, you're going to have to find room for 24 gallons
00:47:24of hydrogen at 700 atmospheres, 10,000 PSI.
00:47:29And the tank is going to weigh something because it has to be, as they say, wicked strong.
00:47:36And you're not going to want the sun heating up the tank, so it's going to be insulated.
00:47:44And you're going to have to have pressure regulators that step the 10,000 PSI down to
00:47:50whatever the gas carburetor on your vehicle uses.
00:47:54All that technology exists.
00:47:57It's just that filling up is going to be a little different from clanking the metal
00:48:03spout of your gas pump into the receptacle on your car.
00:48:09Seals for liquid hydrogen are Teflon.
00:48:16OK, let's do liquid hydrogen.
00:48:19Well, the first thing they tell you is liquefying hydrogen requires compression and refrigeration
00:48:28that add up to about a 40% increase in the energy cost of producing this stuff.
00:48:34So that's a hmm.
00:48:36All right, let's listen to the rest of the story before we decide.
00:48:41Now the ratio drops to four gallons of liquid hydrogen to equal the energy in one gallon
00:48:48of liquid hydrocarbon.
00:48:50And of course, the reason is hydrogen is super light.
00:48:53It's the lightest of all the elements.
00:48:59So this is going to make our motorcycle look funny.
00:49:07So whether it's a spark ignition engine burning the hydrogen, which is constantly perfectly
00:49:16practical, or whether we run that high purity hydrogen into a fuel cell and drive our vehicle
00:49:23electrically, the hydrogen, we're going to have to find a place for it.
00:49:29And there may not be a place for a passenger, possibly on a little trailer.
00:49:34Or we could put the hydrogen on the trailer for the sake of sociability.
00:49:40But everything seems to want to get in our way when we start considering these alternatives.
00:49:50It used to be that you just had to poke a stick in the ground over in Saudi Arabia,
00:49:55and oil would come out at a production cost of a nickel a barrel.
00:50:02No wonder they were eager to sort of hover over Saudi Arabia immediately after World
00:50:08War II, because once those Schlumberger surveys came in, and they looked at it,
00:50:15holy Toledo, this whole place, it couldn't float away.
00:50:21And so it became an immensely, it gained strategic importance.
00:50:29Now, how soon are any of these things going to happen?
00:50:32That's the thing that is always impossible to predict, because along comes some unnamed
00:50:38person and blows up that gas pipeline in Europe.
00:50:43So Germany, the fuel costs in German manufacturing have now just up, up, up.
00:50:52So they are madly offshoring manufacturing to places like Thailand.
00:50:59And German workers are saying, where's my job?
00:51:05And the government is saying, where's my tax money?
00:51:08And so it just becomes impossibly complicated very quickly.
00:51:16And on the one hand, we could say, well, we'll create a World Planning Bureau.
00:51:23A world?
00:51:26Everyone together agreeing about something?
00:51:30I believe it's been tried.
00:51:32Yeah, we're getting into sticky territory.
00:51:35It is really...
00:51:35Well, you want people to realize that this is going to be dense with politics.
00:51:41Dense with politics, and just even the straight up complication of doing the math and saying,
00:51:46like, well, I've got an 86 Toyota pickup truck, and it gets 24 miles per gallon,
00:51:52and I don't have to make it again.
00:51:53And yeah, it makes a little bit more carbon dioxide and the hydrocarbons are higher.
00:52:00But what's the cost of building a vehicle to replace it,
00:52:04if it's perfectly OK to keep driving it and maintaining it?
00:52:08And we talk about the tons of ore that have to be mined for new electric vehicles, and
00:52:16where are we getting our lithium?
00:52:17And the complexity is immense.
00:52:22One thing that I've always looked at when the proliferation of ethanol began, I thought,
00:52:32OK, if this fuel is as wonderful as we say, and it's renewable, I mean, there's the faction
00:52:40or the group that says you're burning food, which is true.
00:52:46The other part of that is, I look at what's going on in the world.
00:52:49Part of that is I look at what what's actually being used and what's being used to harvest
00:52:56the corn, and they're not burning alcohol.
00:52:58You know, they're burning diesel to do that.
00:53:01Yeah.
00:53:01And I think electric tractors have the same challenges that are, let's say, similar challenges
00:53:08as as putting electrics on motorcycles, just a different.
00:53:11Because, especially because during harvest season, those tractors operate 24 hours a
00:53:17day, it's a very intense period and there's no, oh, we're going to charge over.
00:53:22OK, we're done for the day.
00:53:23We're just going to plug them in overnight and go sleep comfortably while our vehicles
00:53:27are there are immense complexities and challenges.
00:53:30And, you know, we.
00:53:34You know, from my perspective as someone, I love electric motorcycles, I love riding
00:53:38them, they have a they have a use case that is not out of the question, you can see manufacturers
00:53:46experimenting with designs like BMW CEO to which is not a they call it's not a scooter
00:53:53and it's not a motorcycle, it's somewhere in between.
00:53:55They call it an e parkour, which is, you know, we got the design department smoking a little
00:54:00and coming up with fun ideas to put something together.
00:54:04It's a runabout, it's a it's a really neat townie bike.
00:54:07It's really fun.
00:54:08It's super quiet.
00:54:09It's got a nice design.
00:54:11It's pretty useful.
00:54:12It doesn't have storage.
00:54:13That's the one thing that you kind of you're putting so much battery and you don't have
00:54:16a place to put your cat.
00:54:17And that's a joke about a scooter that had an immense storage under the seat.
00:54:23And it said a sticker that said no pets.
00:54:26Yes.
00:54:27So you don't get to put your cat under the seat of your electric scooter.
00:54:31So you don't get to put your cat under the seat of your electric scooter.
00:54:35You know, Harley Davidson's got Mulholland and the lighter electrics that are a little
00:54:40more townie.
00:54:40And that makes a ton of sense.
00:54:42That's a great application.
00:54:44There's swappable batteries in Asian markets.
00:54:48So there's been a consortium of manufacturers who said we're building scooters.
00:54:51We're all going to use this standard.
00:54:53And there's a big wall of batteries all around the city, just places to get batteries.
00:54:57You take your flat battery out and you stick it in the thing and that light turns red and
00:55:03then another one will turn green and you pull that one out and you put it in.
00:55:06That's the one you get for trading the one in.
00:55:08Can't just take them off the shelf and go home.
00:55:10You got to trade one and you ride around on that.
00:55:13And that's a great application for electrics adoption.
00:55:16In the cities.
00:55:17The cities are where emissions are a major problem.
00:55:21Yeah.
00:55:22Not in Iowa.
00:55:23Although, of course, diesel, you can smell it a long ways off, diesel exhaust.
00:55:31So there will have to be a plan and it's not going to be easy to get people to agree with
00:55:43what it should be.
00:55:44And I suspect that since everyone is dependent upon aviation and upon ocean shipping, that
00:55:53agreement will come more quickly in those areas that are considered essential.
00:55:58Absolutely.
00:56:00So we're hoping that there will be synthetic net zero carbon liquid fuels being produced
00:56:10in time.
00:56:12I'm told that it was one tenth of a percent of all aviation fuel in 2022 and that this
00:56:20year it's expected to rise to half a percent.
00:56:25So...
00:56:27But you can't...
00:56:28The prospect is there.
00:56:29Yeah, you can't...
00:56:30I mean, it's really important to say that you can't...
00:56:33We have a hundred years of gasoline infrastructure.
00:56:42And if you were to remove that from our system and just said there was no gasoline and we're
00:56:48all driving around in electric cars and somehow we figured that out instead.
00:56:53And someone came to you and said, no, no, man, man, we get this oil, this crude oil
00:56:58out of the ground and we refine it and we turn it into this incredibly volatile liquid
00:57:04fuel.
00:57:05And what we're going to do with it is we're going to put it in a tank on the vehicle and
00:57:08you're going to drive around with this really flammable.
00:57:11And then we're going to bury it underground in tanks too.
00:57:14And we're going to store it underground and it won't leak.
00:57:16Don't worry.
00:57:17If you try to introduce that now, that would be hard to accept for a lot of people.
00:57:23Sure, yeah, it would.
00:57:25And anyway, we have a hundred years of infrastructure.
00:57:29It's all there.
00:57:30We can go to the gas station.
00:57:31I would say the adoption was very fast though.
00:57:33I mean, if you look at 1900 in New York City, San Francisco, Germany, Berlin, whatever.
00:57:41If you look at 1900, it's a horses and wagons and the cubic volume of horse shit everywhere.
00:57:49Yes.
00:57:50Was its own problem because they were, you know, like the tons of it being shoveled off
00:57:54the street.
00:57:54And where do we put it all?
00:57:57But it was what was happening.
00:57:58It was what was working.
00:57:59But by 1910, 19, 1920, horses were a novelty in a city.
00:58:05Like you were, they were, you know, maybe the cops were running around, but it was all
00:58:08internal combustion.
00:58:09It was all vehicles.
00:58:10It had a strong economic prospect.
00:58:13It was more convenient.
00:58:14It solved the poop problem.
00:58:16It did a lot of things that, that helped us move around.
00:58:19And it's kind of, it's obviously fueled where we are today and culturally transportation,
00:58:26commerce, everything that is fundamental.
00:58:28And we've had a hundred years of that.
00:58:30And so to say that we can rapidly, suddenly make billions of gallons of synthetic fuel
00:58:38to accomplish that.
00:58:39It just doesn't happen now.
00:58:42And for, you know, for some period of time, I mean, it's like anything like solar and
00:58:48wind have made a lot of strides in Europe.
00:58:50They've, they've made, they've made a lot of strides with replacing other sources of
00:58:56energy with wind and solar.
00:58:58So there's things happening, but you know, we get, we've had a guy in the comments, maybe
00:59:03more than one who's like, well, what about liquid fuel?
00:59:06I really like my motorcycle.
00:59:08And, you know, am I going to, am I going to lose that?
00:59:10How long am I going to be able to ride it?
00:59:12What, what will I be able to use?
00:59:15And, you know, if again, it's hard to, it's impossible to predict, but given how much
00:59:22work it would be to try and suddenly throw the switch, that's probably not how it's going
00:59:27to happen.
00:59:29And we have really, really, yeah.
00:59:31Pay the 15 trillion to replace all cars and light trucks.
00:59:36Yeah.
00:59:36And so things will age out and they did cash for clunkers and I don't know if that was
00:59:40good or bad, but they've tried it before and they'll probably try it again.
00:59:44But I'm going to keep my 89 Ford F-250 because it does what I need it to.
00:59:49It's, it's right for the mission.
00:59:52Yes, indeed.
00:59:53So I think that the transition will take a while and during that while we'll have choices.
01:00:01There will be more and more discussion of energy audits, just as in those gradations
01:00:08of hydrogen, green, blue, gray.
01:00:13There will be an energy audit for every pound of steel.
01:00:17These things will, in order to learn where all the energy is coming from and what it's
01:00:25going to and how we can decarbonize.
01:00:30And it's, it's going to take quite a while.
01:00:34It's not going to suddenly, we come home and find out, oh, here's your bill for converting
01:00:43your house to electric heat.
01:00:45And the people will be here to make the conversion Wednesday next week.
01:00:52Whether you like it or not, I don't see that happening.
01:00:55I think that we're going to see a process that takes place with, in the words of the
01:01:03Supreme Court, all deliberate speed.
01:01:08Well, you know, what have we always done?
01:01:12We've learned to manage ever more complicated systems.
01:01:15If you take the car, we just, in the beginning, we used a rag in front of a pipe and we probably
01:01:20had an atmospheric intake valve, meaning the suction of the piston going down, pulled the
01:01:25light pen spring and let some stuff in there and it went bang.
01:01:30And it was not clean and it was unreliable.
01:01:32And look at what, look at the complexity of control that we've laid on a modern automobile
01:01:38from the gas cap, in between the gas cap and the air filter, and then what comes out the
01:01:45tailpipe.
01:01:45It's incredibly clean.
01:01:47They're pretty darn efficient.
01:01:49Oil changes, like, oh yeah, you got to change your oil every 3000 miles.
01:01:53Well, that, you know, that was pretty true in a, and we'll use an 89 Ford F-250.
01:01:58Yep.
01:01:58You probably want to do that.
01:02:00The, the combustion chamber control, the way that the tolerances, tolerances, the way that
01:02:06rings work, the, the management of the gap between the top ring and the top of the piston
01:02:14to not trap hydrocarbons around the side of the combustion chamber, the, the ensmallening
01:02:20of the bore, a million complex little steps that we've learned and mastered.
01:02:27And that, that kind of thinking will be, I feel, applied to the system of human life.
01:02:35I mean, decarbonizing of human life.
01:02:38Yeah.
01:02:38Using, how do we, how do we get a human culture?
01:02:42Because we are to a great extent, carbon ourselves.
01:02:46Indeed.
01:02:49Well, it's impossible to, we haven't solved it, I guess, but we were hoping that, that
01:02:56this conversation, it certainly has helped me get a broader vision and grip, and I'll
01:03:03keep looking at ways, you know, we can save things over here to keep doing things we like
01:03:09over, over there.
01:03:11And we hope that you have some things to think about and maybe some, some items that you
01:03:19haven't thought about before.
01:03:20That's always the goal.
01:03:22Put, put this together and do something of value, break through the signal to noise ratio.
01:03:27So that's it for fuels.
01:03:31We appreciate you joining us.
01:03:34This episode, as ever, was brought to you by Octane Lending.
01:03:38If you look down in the video description, there'll be a link to octane.co.
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