re: #322 Lanaty

I’m hoping some great engineers end up saving us all by creating really fantastic batteries so that someday in the not-so-distant future, we might all just drive electric cars. Hug your local engineering grad student.

I know what you mean, for years starting back in the ‘70’s I held out such hope. One thing you would think in favor of electric vehicles would be the difference in efficiency between electric motors (90+ %) and heat engines (30+ %, high 30’s within narrow power-velocity bands for Diesels). Back in the ‘70’s for a short time there was some hope for batteries of high energy density using sodium salts as electrolyte. I even told my girlfriend that these batteries were maybe 10 years away from application. The problem was that this technology required that the electrolyte be held at high temperature, hundreds of degrees, in effect re-introducing a drawback similar to the one characterising steam cars, i.e. delayed start-up because of heating period for the medium, and just all-around messiness.

Here is the deal as I see it. There is no hope of any electrochemical cell ever coming anywhere near the energy density of hydrocarbon fuel, and I’m talking closer than many hundreds of percent comparison. I’m not an electrochemist or a Chem E but I’m about 95% sure I’m correct in saying that there will be only small improvements in energy density from here on out. Just the idea that the explosive power of breaking chemical bonds on every molecule in a tank, can be matched by the ho-hum giving up of electrons by ions to an electrode, is sort of laughable.

But here is the catch. You are hoping for ingenuity to come along and save us. What about billions of years old ingenuity inherent in the hydrocarbon cycle. Suppose H2O and CO2 are transported deep (dozens of miles) into the earth’s mantle, where catalysts help convert the nuclear-powered heat energy from the core, into potential energy carried by chemical bonds, with the liberation of O2? Remember my 95% certainty, well it also applies here, my level of certainty about the origin of fluid hydrocarbons. This would put hydrocarbons in the renewable energy category, and it seems the planet was constructed for the purpose of supporting civilizations on the surface with unlimited energy. Please Google hydrocarbons in the mantle. You will get thousands of hits to scientific papers on this topic, many just available as abstracts. Even the PubMed search engine, dedicated to health and life sciences, gave me about 700 hits 3~4 years ago. Historical note: the Russians have been studying the hydrocarbon cycle since the ‘40’s and for a long time were targets of derision for Western experts, so-called. No more.