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You have not answered the power problem. The amount of electricity needed to run a refinery is small. Power stations in refineries burn oil or gas from the refining process, and the main object of this is to provide process heat. The power requirements of the lighting and pumps etc is an incidental benefit. About 90% of the energy in the crude oil emerges in the refined products, so there certainly isn't a massive generating capability in refineries.

But more seriously, 30 million cars doing 40 miles a day involved increasing our daily electricity production by 50% even if the motorists spread the load evenly over the day. They won't of course, and that exacerbates the problem.

I don't want to provide transport for myself and my family at the lowest possible financial cost if it will involve a massive and polluting expenditure in the electricity industry and involve big imports of primary fuel like oil gas or coal. Nor do I want it to encourage nuclear power plants.

And I don't want to contribute to increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere if I can help it. That is why I favour the use of the production of hydrocarbon fuels for road transport by synthesising them from freely available water and atmospheric carbon dioxide. The energy source for this would be renewables. (Denmark for instance produces more electricity than it needs. The excess should be used for making fuel) I am very much in favour of hybrids which make better use of the fuel of course, despite the additional complexity of these things which is a negative consideration.

The fact remains that at the moment and for the foreseeable future, hydrocarbons is by far the best way to provide adequate energy for transport. It needn't be petrochemical fuel however, and sticking with the ICE - which will accept either type of fuel without modification - seems to me to be the best way of weaning ourselves of fossil fuel.

At the moment the combination of unacceptable (to the vast majority of us) charging times, and the need to do it at frequent intervals due to the poor range means that EVs are unsuitable for general use. Even the government subsidy combined with other perks like no congestion charges and free parking etc, combined with hoopla from people like Llewellyn has not managed to raise the sales of these things above about 1%. Sales are actually falling in the US, and I suspect that in a few years EVs will have passed into history as they did in the early 1900s.

That it evidently suits you and you enjoying driving one doesn't change the fact that most people find them a poor choice. I hope it continues to give you pleasure and that when you come to change it for another EV that the manufacturers are still making them, but I feel that they will eventually abandon production. I'd give it a decade at most.

You have not addressed the problem of getting a lot of electrical energy into a car in a short time either. At the moment, batteries are unable to accept charging at these rates, but even if one was developed, the high voltages and currents involved would make it necessary for the passengers to vacate the vehicle during the process. I don't believe this would be readily accepted by the public.

An electric motor is a much cleaner, simpler, more elegant and efficient machine than an ICE, but unfortunately lack of an efficient way of providing, storing and transferring enough energy to supply an electric motor renders it impractical for most of us.

We could use the 30 million gallons of fuel per day saved by the cars running on electricity for local generation.
I am interested by the hydrocarbons from renewables but i just cant imagine we would have the capacity to enable it at present.I read this, admittedly a newspaper probably isnt the best resource for research http://www.theguardian.com/sustaina...ioxide-co2-climate-change-photosynthesis
New technology or processes may come which will but until then it a very power hungry process.

The batteries charge time is slow but rapids are not painfully slow but for my use i have only used them maybe 8 times. They are 500v and 100a and you can stay in the car.

Porsche have developed an 800v car which does a 250 mile charge in 15 minutes. The Mission e. One downside, 800v chargers dont exist. Yet.

I guess only time will tell which will win out, but it will probably be a long slow road. The public have an inherent dislike of change especially with very expensive things and their cars are often seen as an extension of themselves, so not surprising there is a slow take up.

It will probably be a mix of all modes for many years but for consumers the choice and competition can surely only be a good thing.

Right i am off now to do some more reading up on Hydrogen production. You know i do like the look of that Toyota Marai.

You need to Look at Joule Unlimited's site. They are producing fuel at the rate of 25,000 gallons per acre per year using nothing but sunlight!

The whole point of EVs is NOT to burn the 30 million gallons of fuel. If you are going to burn it, you might as well burn it in cars, surely! If you are proposing burning it in a thermal station the overall efficiency is way below what modern cars can manage (Thermal power stations waste two thirds of the energy ) Gas turbine power stations manage about 50%, but overall it is more efficiently used in a modern ICE.

From the figures you give, rapid charging would take you 30 minutes I guess. My point is if you want to do it in five minutes, you would need 3,000v at 100A.

Also to provide the same grade of service, as it takes six times as long, you will need six times as many charging points. And as you can only get something under 100 miles per charge you need a LOT more charging stations too.

Take a conventional motorway services. I haven't counted but I guess they have about 20 pumps. If you went over to battery cars you would need 120 charging points, each taking 50 kW. A total of 6 MegaWatts!

I'm sorry Blueskier, but this simply isn't a practical proposition. Nobody is going to provide this sort of infrastructure for free. You would end up paying more for the electricity than you do for petrol or diesel!

In passing you might like to look at this site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

It gives the energy densities of lots of different fuels. You will not how poor batteries are, and interestingly, how poor hydrogen is by volume. It is about a fifth or a sixth of hydrocarbon fuels. It wins on weight because it's so light, but unfortunately the containers needed to hold it are extremely massive so in a practical car it loses out there too.

Hydrogen is better than batteries but not as good as boring old diesel or petrol.

I think it is a sort of arrogance that leads people to assume that we can do what people a hundred years or so ago failed to see. They were not fools, and realised after trying alternative approaches like steam cars or electric cars and compressed air that the ICE beat them hands down. It still does.

The comment about burning the fuel to make electricity was very much tongue in cheek.
I think you are way off with your mileage calculations by the way. Total road fuel use in 2012 was 33400 tonnes which if my calculations are right is 10.5 millions gallons. And it is dropping, from here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...transport_consumption_factsheet_2012.pdf page 6. There are 30 million + cars in the UK but there is no way every single one of them averages 40 miles every day. But lets not get bogged down in that.
I am aware of the energy densities, but you must admit that is burning the fuels in a lab. Not the reality of carrying them round in a vehicle with an inefficient engine. Surely the energy used to drive per mile is a more relative than energy density. Batteries are heavy, fuel light that is a very simplistic argument.

Thanks for the Joules link, i will have a look at that.

Yes steam, compressed air and electric have been tried before and ditched. But in 100 years the ICE has improved immensely due to technology as have other technologies, EVs included. They have a lot of catching up to do.

If EV is already a dying solution with hardly any take up from the public with no future, why have pretty much every manufacturer invested billions upon billions in them? They have every conceivable variation of the ICE in production, tried and tested and popular. Why are they doing it? Love the planet? Dont think so. Maybe they have some insight into the market, maybe even more than you and I.

I guess we need to resurrect this thread in 5 or 10 years time.

Cheers. BS.

That Joule project seems like promising stuff.

A company i used to work for had loads of sparks on Stanlow including TRC, Thornton Research Centre. The sparks always had tales of boffins basically left to do whatever they wanted with unlimited budgets.
Also tales of Shell buying up ideas for fuel alchemy and burying them.
I have no first hand knowledge but was also intrigued. And i am a sucker for a conspiracy theory.

You say EVs have improved but the important bits of them are the motor and the battery.

The motor has not improved much, for the excellent reason that it was always pretty good. Efficiency is around 90%

The battery is a different story. Although the development of Lithium chemistry gave an improvement of about five times, it has stuck there, and an improvement from about 0.4% to 2% of hydrocarbons is nowhere near enough to give it a competitive edge against them, even allowing for the massive losses of an ICE engine.

Remember too, that the huge lost energy of the IC engine is not all waste. It is put to good use in keeping the occupants warm and this has no impact on range at all.

There have been efforts to recover the waste heat - or part of it - using thermoelectric generators (TEGs) - which look interesting too ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603110849.htm )

I accept your point about the fuel consumption figures, although I cannot explain the error. There are undoubtedly 30 million cars registered, and the figure of 40 miles a day on average is widely accepted (it is accurate in my case, certainly) If it is an average, this must take into account those not doing anything like 40 miles a day as well as those doing a lot more. It can only be explained by cars getting a lot more efficient, but that doesn't fully explain it either. I will look into it in more detail.

Confession time, there is a problem when you have several web pages open and are watching MOTD. The fuel figures on that doc were kt so 35,000,000. Whats a factor of a thousand between friends?

"In 2012, consumption of road transport fuels in the United Kingdom was 33,339 thousand tonnes of fuel (kt). Consumption of fuel used for road transport purposes decreased from 34,164 kt in 2011 (a decrease of 2 per cent) and from 36,949 kt in 2005 (a decrease of 10 per cent)."

In the first figure from 2012 it is not entirely clear. The figure from 2011 makes it clearer.

I was surprised when i saw that figure, now it makes sense.

http://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility
This has some amazing stats.
Average car is used only 4% of the time.

There have been a number of frankly potty ideas for storing enough energy to run a car.

One of the recent ones was to use an 80 Farad capacitor and charge it to 1,500 volts. This would be achieved using a wonderful new high-tech material for the dielectric involving ultra high purity bariun titanate. A company called Eestor was set up in Texas and attracted a great deal of attention and millions of dollars in venture capital, with which the founders paid themselves an excellent salary.

It rumbled on for years, with little in the way of progress to show for it. Concerns about the 25 kWh of instantly releasable energy and how it would behave in a crash were dismissed as ridiculous, as was the difficulty of voltages like 1,500 floating about in the wreckage. They also ignored the phenomenon of saturation (the capacitance falls as the voltage rises) and stoutly refused to allow any third party testing.

Peripheral and irrelevant 'progress' was announced such as the development of associated DC-DC converters that would transform the high voltage on the capacitor to something that could drive the motor, and measurements of the purity of the barium titanate. But the essential detail of whether such a capacitor could be made and whether it would work remained shrouded in mystery.

Eventually it was found not to work and the whole structure of misplaced hope collapsed, taking with it the investor's money and a Canadian manufacturer of EVs or golf trolleys who had paid millions for the intellectual property.

I was sceptical from the first and was accused of 'trolling' by the enthusiasts when I asked awkward questions on a blog about the system. Many of these enthusiasts lost a great deal of money investing in what was essentially a wildly optimistic idea from the first.

I think it is important to keep an open mind about unlikely claims like this, but not so open as your brain falls out!

So cards on the table. Are you just very clued up and interested in transport and energy or do you have some professional involvement?
No problem whichever or neither is the case. Made an interesting path for the thread.
You original question was expressed very much in laymans terms and i feel was almost like a baited trap.
Paranoid? me? quite possibly.

Why dont you join an EV forum so you can get the opinion of some people who have a lot more time using EVs and other types of EVs than just my rather limited ownership?
SpeakEV is a very popular one. Is also a very active forum. And not totally dedicated to EVs.

Either way thanks for the conversation, i think it has run out of steam (excuse the pun) unless another EV owner is a member of wikiwirral and pipes up. Any time you want a ride drop me a PM.

Cheers, BS.

I have no professional interest in cars, or any great interest in them. I just like to look at the detail of claims made for things.

EVs caught my attention as the 'Zero emissions' claim was so palpably false. Checking on various other claims made for them revealed they too were less than the truth or unsupported by any calculation of what they involved.

That some people - like yourself - happen to lead lifestyles that can accommodate the deficiencies easily doesn't make them universally a viable alternative unfortunately.

I am mainly interested in renewable energy and how the intermittent nature of it can best be addressed. This is how I came across the Eestor business.

I will look at SpeakEV at your suggestion. I too have enjoyed the chat and agree it has run out of... charge???

Well maybe we come full circle with addressing how the intermittent nature of renewables can be addressed.
I presume you have heard of the V2G system. Vehicle to grid.
This uses the cars that are mostly parked up as electricity storage units from solar or wind and they can feed back to the grid at low or no generation times.
I have a vague recollection of an island in Denmark or Sweden where the whole population have Leafs and they run this V2G rather successfully.

I've heard of it, but I am not convinced by it. If I had an EV, my intention in plugging it in would be to get a full charge, not to supply the grid. Batteries are an expensive way to do it anyway.

So far the best solution I've seen is Isentropics Ltd and their pumped heat system. This is dirt cheap (its mostly tanks of gravel) and is about a third the cost of pumped water storage. It is readily scaleable, and there are no geographical requirements. They are building a 2MW system which will be connected to the grid to see how well it performs. I notice, too, that they have a way of combining it with underground compressed air storage which raises the efficiency of the two of them to over 90%, better than batteries!

http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

It confuses me how compressed air storage can be significantly more efficient that hydro storage.

Hydro generation above 5MW's efficiency can be as high as 95%, so its the pumping stage that must be inefficient.

Surely a liquid is more efficient in a turbine than gas and surely pumping a liquid is more efficient than pumping a gas?

Gravel heat storage would seem to me to have a low energy storage by volume as a limiting factor, the melting point of rock which isn't particularly high, the heat capacity of rock isn't brilliant either.