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Fuelling Alternatives |
The shift to a clean-fuelled future is a classic chicken-and-egg situation. Fossil fuels are deeply entrenched in our economic, political, social, cultural and technological systems. To move away from them towards more sustainable sources of energy, means resolving the conflicting interests of all parties involved: governments and manufacturers as well as consumers
We want change, but we also want convenience. We want the thrill of the future, but we also hanker after the certainties of the past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the motor industry. The internal combustion engine was a masterpiece of 19th-century mechanical engineering, bringing together a chain of mechanical and chemical processes to generate power, and hence motion, from commonly occurring raw material. Billions of dollars of development over the course of a century has turned the original crude engines into compact, refined power plants that deliver previously unthinkable levels of efficiency and reliability.
So far, so good. Society shaped itself around this technology. The internal combustion engine was the passport to personal mobility and economic growth. For decades, the car was king. For huge swathes of the developing world, the car is still a totemic object, a symbol of economic freedom and future
prosperity. But a growing minority thinks differently. According to them, cars don’t drive economies, they cripple them. Estimates of the cost of congestion vary, although annual figures of $30 billion have been cited for the UK economy. However, as the developed world’s attitude to the car starts to cool, manufacturers are seeing opportunities to continue growth in developing economies.
Herein lies the problem. Car use creates pollution and congestion, all the while consuming fast-depleting fossil fuels, most of which are sourced from the world’s most unstable regions. The political ramifications of our reliance on fossil fuels are unquantifiable.
According to Earthtrends (earthtrends.wri.org), in 2003 global consumption of gasoline for transportation use was 1,101,279 million litres, an increase of over 20% since 1990. The current system is fatally unbalanced. To counter one problem does not necessarily solve another. Low-emissions technology will have little impact on congestion; perversely, the next generation of compact city cars designed to circumvent pollution legislation might actually end up increasing congestion. Cutting congestion – through road-pricing schemes and pedestrianisation – simply shifts traffic somewhere else, with a corresponding increase in pollution.
The internal combustion engine was not an essential element in the evolution of the modern motor car; many propulsion methods were considered by the early pioneers, including steam and electricity. But inevitably it is fossil fuels that dominate the modern debate, as politicians and car makers cast about for ways to reduce carbon emissions and counter pollution and congestion. The alternative-fuel debate has moved into the mainstream, but as yet there is no clear consensus.
The most straightforward and least disruptive shift is the adoption of biodiesel as a substitute for petrol. Put simply, vegetable oils can be synthesised into biodiesel using a process called transesterification, as the plant oil, which contains glyceride, reacts with an alcohol like methanol or ethanol. Many countries, most notably Brazil, have well-established bioethanol markets. Several manufacturers, like Sweden’s Saab (a subsidiary of General Motors), are investing heavily in biodiesel technology and infrastructure, stressing the environmental and performance gains to be made from using biofuels, and illustrating by example how the shift to a cleaner power source need not impact on infrastructure and lifestyle and the ‘driveability’ of their cars.
While biofuel has many champions, it is not without its problems. Special interest groups, notably Biofuel Watch UK, point to links between the increasing demand for biofuel crops and a fall in the acreage needed to grow food crops. Add this to the well-documented deforestation of countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, where rainforests are being cleared for profitable crops of palm oil (as noted by the environmental commentator George Monbiot). However, any increase in demand from emerging Western markets for ethanol-based fuel, like E85, will encourage developing countries to switch to
producing crops for export, raising local prices and creating scarcities as food crops like corn are turned into fuel instead of grain. Nevertheless, many major manufacturers have technical programs to develop efficient ethanol-based cars, mindful that their engineering and brand values cannot be undermined by a new fuel standard.
Ultimately, we are likely to see a growing market for FFVs, flexible-fuel vehicles designed to take a mixture of standard fuels and biofuels, depending on availability.
Read the whole story in Sublime Issue 6, page 44.
