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220 comments on An EROEI Review

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Petroleo on March 18, 2008 - 11:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

So what you are saying is that if you burn biomass A and B together in a power plant and use the electricity to power a BEV, then that could (depending on the efficiency of the plant, transmission and batteries) be more efficient than using the energy in biomass A to convert biomass B to ethanol and run the car on that? Interesting.

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Neven911 on March 18, 2008 - 4:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Yes, This is the ridiculous thing about the obsession with liquid fuels. An internal combustion engine with an optimistic efficiency of 30% has an EROEI of 0.30 whereas you could expects a BEV to be 0.8+. The whole thing is based on the continuation of ICE based transport which are the "installed base" creating inertia in the re-engineering of the system. The justification is "Range", evidently though 80%+ of trips are under 40k's we require ranges which match liquid fuel cars, this is clearly untrue.

There is some truth in the old joke "God managed to make the world in seven days because (s)he had no installed base"

There are some signs of sanity in the asylum though, I see VW have totally dismissed Hydrogen and are delaying their entry into the hybrid fad as long as possible, VW and Toyota must be licking their lips at their prospects in the US in the coming years

Neven MacEwan B.E. E&E

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Engineer-Poet on March 19, 2008 - 12:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The whole thing is based on the continuation of ICE based transport which are the "installed base" creating inertia in the re-engineering of the system.

Which is silly, because the useful lifespan of a light-duty vehicle is ~17 years and 50% of the lifetime mileage is driven in the first 6 years.  Designing infrastructure with a 50-year lifespan to suit ephemeral vehicles is letting the tail wag the dog.

The justification is "Range", evidently though 80%+ of trips are under 40k's

The PHEV is the solution to that.

I see VW have totally dismissed Hydrogen and are delaying their entry into the hybrid fad as long as possible

Good and bad, respectively.  Hybrids are no fad; the PHEV is an evolutionary path to the pure BEV as battery technology improves and prices fall.

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220 comments on An EROEI Review

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