The Oil Drum: Canada

This week's installment of the podcast is a conversation that I had with Ulf Bossel, organizer of the Lucerne Fuel Cell Forum, one of the biggest scientific fuel cell conferences going. This conference used to flip every year between a focus on low temperature PEM fuel cells and a focus on high temperature solid oxide fuel cells. A couple of conferences ago, the PEM cycle was dropped on "sustainability" grounds and now the conference is flipped between the SOFC program and a general fuel cell program.

You can listen to the conversation by clicking play in the built in mp3 player or by downloading the show directly by clicking on the link. A transcript is available for this conversation below the fold.

or download the link directly: Ulf Bossel on the H2 economy vs the electron economy (12MB, 35min)

Here are some reports that may be of interest as well.

This is a guest post by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi. Affiliations, ASPO- Italy and www.eurozev.org. It is a fantastic account of how a 1970s Fiat 500 has been retrofitted with batteries and an electric motor to create the Post Peak Car. Be sure to watch the videos linked to at the bottom of the page.

Fig 1. Chantal poses with the little 500 at the Ecoauto fair in Torino, September 2007. It is not a toy car, it is Chantal who is a tall girl.

"Have the guts to consider the silent consequences when standing in front of the next snake-oil humanitarian." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan

I believe our generation faces a sobering choice: Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship. I firmly believe this is our choice, and we must look to solutions that move us in that direction. I also believe that if most people understood that we are pushing a very serious problem onto our children - instead of assuming scientists and engineers will solve the problem - then we would collectively pursue a solution with far greater urgency.

Lord Ron Oxburgh, former non-executive chairman, Shell UK; chairman, House of Lords select committee on science and technology; honorary professor, Cambridge University

The morning began with a Keynote address by Lord Oxburgh former non-executive chairman of Shell, who spoke on “Out of Oil, into Hot Water.” He began by noting the economic difficulties that are coming as demand continues to exceed supply. We are not, after all, making oil any more. (Ed comment – well let’s not forget biofuels – and it turned out he did not). Because these problems will arise around the time of peaking they will likely be precursors to it, and these economic consequences will come sooner than expected.

The problems, however, are not that we are running out of oil, rather it is that we are running out of cheap oil. When oil fields are abandoned there may be 60% of the original oil (OOIP) that is left in the rock. At present this is just too expensive to extract, but it leaves us with a problem since most transportation requires a liquid fuel. To work effectively the vehicle must have a small, relatively light engine, together with a storage reservoir full of fuel, that must in turn, be as light, yet energy dense, as possible. The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) has filled that need for the past century or so. The fuels that power it are among the most energy dense of those commonly available. That alone, however, is not the problem.

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] Forget not the reddit and digg buttons!

The time has come to put the ongoing biomass debate in a larger context. My thanks to many TOD participants for their informative comments. I usually work the "problem" side of climate change, peak oil and natural gas supply in North America. Here I intend to address the "solutions" side of the debate. It is important to remember that no solution is without its attendant problems.

This post is lengthy and complex because the larger picture requires that I talk about a number of different subjects: electricity generation and usage trends, the weather & climate, coal trends, natural gas trends, CO2 emissions as they relate to electricity demand and biomass for power generation. However, if you'll bear with me, a coherent picture emerges at the end. I will confine myself to the United States and not talk too much about oil.

Last weekend I went to see "Who Killed the Electric Car?", a 90 minute documentary about the rise and fall of California's zero emissions standards which created and subsequently destroyed the movement toward all electric vehicles around the country. The movie does a good job of examining all the different players involved in fighting the zero-emissions standard, not just placing blame with the US Auto Industry, Oil Industry, the "Hydrogen Lobby", but also blaming Toyota for their opposition and consumers who were mostly unwilling to consider a car with a range under 150 miles.

As Toyota seems like they are close to choosing to move forward on manufacturing plug-in Hybrids that could travel an estimated 50-100 miles on electric before needing much gasoline, it's time to start to if electric plug-in hybrids are something worth considering. This would allow folks to stretch out that one gallon of gas for many more miles than they can now.

What the movie brought to my attention is that the electric car really offered two key advantages: