What will gas companies and distributors sell if cars run on electricity instead of fuel?
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Loading ...I was thinking about gas mileage, and how many prius owners say a good diesel gets better mileage, so I was watching a documentary on electric cars, and it came to me. What will happen to gas stations, oil refineries, oil tankers, and middle eastern companies which rely on having a liquid fuel being passed through them and burnt?
There will always be demand for oil, for the same reason there are millions of rotary dial phones still in service today. Even still, it would be very profitable for the gas stations and tankers that bring them that gas, to have a nice liquid fuel of some sort to carry. It’s much easier for them to replace the petroleum products with hydrogen or ethanol, than to relegate the distribution of fuel to the electric companies.
Electricity has a distribution system unmatched by anything else man made.
You read on sites like http://physorg.com all the time about nanotech being applied to hydrogen fuel cells, super-capacitors (eestor and the like), and using living organisms to create hydrogen and oil, like this:
If you look at advances in solar tech like nanosolar has made (being cheaper than coal and having the next 14 months or more of production entirely sold out.), Solar makes electricity directly, it doesn’t make hydrogen or ethanol. It looks like there’d be a compounding in that area of solar reducing energy costs, and cars that run directly on that energy. I think nanotech is making faster and larger progress in the area of solar than wind or wave.
So my rather uneducated guess is that cars that run on electricty benefit the most from the advances that have and are rapidly being made via nanotech, beacause of energy storage becoming lighter, faster to charge and stronger. Those same storage advances are revolutionizing the direct harnessing of energy from the sun. Hence those 2 compound in my mind to look like cars that run on electricity will outrun those that run on liquids you pump into them.
A funny way of looking at it is, electrons are very light, it’s much easier to pipe massive ammts of energy in electrons around, than it is to pipe around gallons of fuel. You never see an electricty tanker carrying electricity to another place. So if you can store that energy compactly enough with the minimum ammt of overhead (the battery), it looks like a pretty ideal way to do things.
Here’s a very good graphic I found explaining it: (from
If you want to get far out there, and I mean really far out there, they are really plans to send solar panels into space, then turn that energy into microwaves or lasers, to get the energy down to earth. ap release I’ve not found a good explanation as to how moving solar panels from our earths crust to geostationary orbit is going to overcome the insane cost of creating, blasting off, and maintaining such an operation, let alone the rather gigantic power loss of getting the energy beamed back down here.
This guy has an amazing understanding of the system as a whole. You being to realize how important weight is:
You can download his book for free at http://oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html
Fastest electric vehicles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrightspeed an electric sports car based on the Ariel Atom chassis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killacycle 0-60 in under 1 second and 1/4 mile in less than 8 seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_roadster 0-60 under 4, is a real car with total real car functionality, like a roof.
On the hydrogen front, the prettiest I’d say is the BMW hydrogen 7. Good review here: Edmunds
Negative review of the BMW 7 series here: Spiegel Magazine
It would be nice to have a wide array of viable alternative fuels. One thing is for sure. No matter who wins the alternative fuels race, we all win.
