Page 26 - Motor Trend (April 2020)

NEWS I OPINION I GOSSIP I STUFF
Frank Markus
Technologue
Science Will Find a Way
to Zero-Carbon Transportation
ith the rest of this issue focused on the auto
industry’s small but significant next steps
toward reducing the transportation sector’s
carbon footprint, I figured I’d zoom out for a
Wbig-picture view of the end game: zero-carbon
transportation. The concept may sound like the lunatic
ravings of a bearded Vermonter in a Rabbit diesel
trailing french fry fumes, but it’s a long-term planetary
imperative that wise and wealthy visionary venture
capitalists are investing heavily in right now.
Light/Personal Vehicles Battery-electric drive will
handle the lightest-duty ground-vehicle and short-
distance air-taxi service. Engineering advances underway
will greatly increase the volumetric
and gravimetric energy density and the
inherent safety of the batteries them-
selves while reducing the time required
to recharge them until users find them
as convenient to live with as today’s
combustion powertrains. IBM very
recently announced the discovery
of a battery that uses a nickel- and
cobalt-free cathode and a high-
flash-point liquid electrolyte that helps
resist formation of the lithium dendrites
(spikes) that can form on the cathode during
fast charging and cause a short circuit. The
three promising new undisclosed materials
it uses can reportedly be extracted from seawater.
Research is also ongoing into solid-state
batteries, and companies like GBatteries are
developing ways such as pulse-charging to
reduce charging times for all batteries.
Larger Ground Transit/Hauling Carrying
heavy loads over long distances presents
significant challenges to battery power, so fuel
cells can take on these tasks. We’ve covered
Nikola’s ambitious plans to sell fuel cell–powered semis
and to build a network of 700 nationwide refueling
stations by 2028. The Toyota Project Portal and Hyundai
HDC-6 Neptune are both fuel cell semis, and all are
counting on economies of scale to bring down the cost
of manufacturing the fuel cells and building out of the
infrastructure.
For now Nikola is planning to ask $375,000 for its
tractor—roughly triple the cost of a comparable diesel
rig. All such plans rely on implementation of the H70HF
(70 MPa/10,000-psi high-flow) refueling standard due
for release this year. Such pumps will dispense fuel at
a rate of roughly 310 miles in 5 minutes.
26 MOTORTREND.COM APRIL 2020
Ships and Planes Electric power just doesn’t make sense
for shipping and air travel, so biofueled combustion will
be the best carbon-neutral option. That means biodiesel
and derivatives like biojet-A. The U.S. leads the world in
annual biodiesel production, at 1.8 billion gallons, most of
which comes from chemically reacting a lipid (vegetable
oil or animal fat) with an alcohol. Its well-to-wheels (or
wings) carbon content doesn’t net to zero yet, however,
and even devoting 100 percent of our arable land to its
production wouldn’t replace our petro demand. But
using algal biodiesel cultivated in tubes might reduce
the required land use to the size of Maryland, according
to estimates by the Department of Energy. Sadly, the
energy required to separate the lipids from these algal
cells today can be greater than the energy they
contain. But researchers at the Univer-
sity of Utah recently demonstrated a
“mixing extractor” that shoots reus-
able solvent at algae sludge, causing
the lipids to attach to the solvent,
from which they can easily and
quickly be separated. Research
is ongoing, so these hurdles will
surely prove surmountable.
Carbon Neutral Energy In a post-
Fukushima nuclear-averse world, some
will fret about where the carbon-free
energy will come from to make any of these
advances possible. Hydrogen boosters advocate
using surplus wind and solar power (after
vastly ramping up the capacity of each) to
hydrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen.
Meanwhile, the Bill Gates–backed Heliogen
startup has just set up a solar mirror farm
in the Mojave Desert; it features computer-
aligned movable mirrors the company says
can concentrate enough solar energy to
generate up to 2,700-degree heat. (Water
dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen without electricity
at 2,500.) That’s well above the 1,000-degree tempera-
tures generated by typical solar mirror farms, and it’s
hot enough to produce steel. ILLUSTRATION: QUARTA_
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s hope we muster
enough will to utilize our vast engineering know-how. Q