Many states are working to protect people's health while at the same time the Republicans are busy undermining these efforts by wiping out the regulations under which these efforts operate... And precisely WHAT could Washington do to prevent California from pursuing the goals listed above? You may want to put down the hyper-partisanship and look at the details. For instance, what is the expenditure in $/vehicle supported for the various options above? What are the operating costs, what is the net efficiency, etc? After all, if California is spending its citizens' tax money unwisely, you WANT the people in Washington to provide a counterweight of some sort.

MPGe makes no assumptions about where the electricity came from. If it came from wind or hydro, there was very little waste heat associated with the generation.

They don't have enough to solve our problems with current methods. Corn ethanol is already an inefficient biomass-to-fuel scheme that's more a farm-price support program than an energy-security or climate-response program, and it wouldn't be able to replace US consumption of motor gasoline even if it used the entire crop. It dumps a large fraction of the captured carbon back into the atmosphere in processing, plus fossil carbon from the fuel used for process heat (mashing and distilling). We can't keep using such methods if we expect to get anywhere.

Faster switching means lower losses in the system. Less heat in a better-cooled package means easier thermal management. Running upwards of 300°C junction temperatures means air cooling is sufficient; no costly liquid cooling systems required, or just use engine coolant. There is so much to like about this.

Given that the supply of biomass is grossly inadequate to replace gasoline, relying on drop-in substitutes means that petroleum producers will be in good shape for decades to come. The failure to convert lignin and the unspecified fate of hemicellulose suggests that the net conversion efficiency is low and the amount of product from the available biomass will fall that much farther away from being an actual replacement for rock oil.

Believe it. My Fusion Energi is currently claiming a lifetime liquid-fuel economy of 134.7 MPG.

SJC absorbed the lesson about battery production capacity vs. savings. You're learning, son.

TP, I have been calling for the hybrid-optimized engine for years as well (many times in these pages). I doubt anyone was listening, but the need was obvious and Mahle came through. The jet ignition is an interesting way of solving the problem of slow combustion and consequent low efficiency. Mazda's Skyactiv uses spark-controlled compression ignition to do much the same thing.

Miscanthus is both a replacement for, not a byproduct of, food production AND a non-native species which probably offers little habitat for animals and insects. It has the potential to be an ecological disaster.

TP: Glad you see the case for killing the Hydramatic.

Polluting bio-fossil fuel energy facilities will be progressively phased out and will be progressively replaced with much cleaner lower cost REs. You could not be more at odds with reality:The costs of "renewables" are driving up the net cost of electric power in both Germany and Queensland, where the price spikes which occur when the unreliables prove unreliable offset all the savings from "free" energy.The total ecological failure of the Energiewende is proven yet again (as if we need more): "In Germany, the world leader in renewables, just 35 wind turbines were installed this year. The country needs to install 1,400 per year to meet its climate change targets."Fossil fuels are not being phased out in these countries. They are being locked IN. The decarbonization success stories use hydro and nuclear. Since the e-energy required by 2045/2050 will be twice as much as today, many more new/added REs facilities together with storage will also be installed. And they will have the same problem of reliably filling that storage that they have today, and the solution will also be the same: fossil fuels. That is the road to runaway greenhouse warming. Large very costly NPPs are no longer competitive and constitute questionnable investments. These plants work fine and are by FAR one of the cheapest ways to reduce GHG emissions in our arsenal. They are only costly in nominal terms because of ridiculously overblown appraisals of dangers which are in fact very small, and consequent gross over-spending on "safety". That fake "safety" has so far cost millions of lives world-wide, as the clean-air benefits have been lost due to the fake "safety" making nuclear "uneconomic". What price breathing? REs, storage units, electrolysers, H2 production and distribution facilities will soon become better investments, starting in the next economic down turn, forecasted for 2020? The "renewables" people have been pushing AGAINST carbon taxes for a couple of decades. They know that nuclear power can decarbonize energy while their schemes cannot, and putting nuclear power on a level playing field means it wins and they (and FFs) lose. This is why they want mandates and subsidies instead. The IPCC has long held that climate change cannot be successfully fought without nuclear power, and the tide is turning. Finnish Greens have gone pro-nuclear and are talking about small reactors for emission-free district heating. When not even all the Greens believe your stuff any more, you've lost; you just don't realize it yet.

More to the point, we need plenty of carbon-based things other than fuels. Being able to make them directly from CO2 is a big win.

It took you 2 days to come up with something THAT lame? I notice you don't work weekends.

When your hydrogen supply depends on the electric power being on? NO, AlzHarvey!

If they loaded the holds almost full, there would be no way for the cargo to shift in this way. This would require odd distribution of weight to avoid overloading the ship, though; it might not be practical.

AlzHarvey lies AGAIN: Current, near future and future clean energy development and production is proving Dr Hansen and SAEP mostly wrong with regards to on going energy production trend. He lies by misdirection. Production is irrelevant; what matters is emissions. The French, Swedish and Ontario grids have far lower emissions than "renewable" Germany and Denmark. This is because they do not use or need much (if any) fossil fuel for "backup" and "firming". REs (Hydro/Wind/Solar) combo together with minimum storage for 24/7 service is a strong possibility, specially where variable Hydro, with large water reservoirs, is used as the filler to supply energy for peak demands and whenever wind/solar is not producing enough energy. Conventional hydro is the only form of non-chemical, non-nuclear stored energy that works on the scale of weeks to seasons. There is only so much of it and it comes at the cost of destroyed ecosystems and extinct fish runs. With a few exceptions, the construction of new very high cost NPPs (20 cents to 28 cent/kWh) Barakah's projected power cost is around 11¢/kWh. In S. Korea that figure is quite a bit lower because it didn't require hiring overseas labor.

AlzHarvey lies: Pro nuclear SAEP will continue to claim100% efficiency Never said that and never will. I wrote Entropy Blues 15 years ago and I haven't changed my views. will never admit that clean REs, electrolysers, H2 production and storage, FCs, FCEVs (ground, sea and air units) have a great future and will play a major role in worldwide efforts to contain and reduce pollution and GHGs. The gross inefficiencies in hypedrogen production, storage... and reconversion to its original form will make it a far more expensive medium for most uses than nuclear energy. AlzHarvey will never admit what Dr. James Hansen declared years ago: the best decarbonized electric grids in the world do not use wind and PV, but hydro and nuclear. Of those, only nuclear can scale. AlzHarvey is a propagandist for the Green propaganda pushed by fossil-fuel interests.

Roger, you're right as far as you go. But consider this twist: There is nothing in cement production which requires combustion. It would be no real difficulty to use off-peak electricity to drive the calcination reaction and produce nearly pure CO2. If more electricity was used to turn CO2 into the CNTs for reinforcement, and the rest sequestered, the process proper would be carbon-neutral. It would be slightly carbon-negative over time as the alkaline cement carbonated itself. The production of aluminum runs exclusively on electricity. The current process generates strong GHGs including tetrafluoromethane, but I suspect that it can be destroyed by reaction with sodium hydroxide to make sodium fluoride, CO2 and water. Turn the CO2 into CNTs and recycle them as anode elements; recycle the NaF as solute for aluminum production. All you need for this is a carbon-free source of electric power, and nuclear energy is just the ticket. Build it out using said CNT-reinforced cement until you've served at least the base load and mid-load, then use the overnight excess to make the concrete and CNTs. I suspect there might be massive carbon sequestration possibilities with cellulose. (I hope) We all know about engineered wood products, but I suspect that CNT-reinforced cellophane might be able to improve the properties in a number of ways. This might go double if e.g. acetylization of the cellulose renders it largely immune to rot. Use this to make structural elements and clad them in cement or gypsum skins for fireproofing. Voila, you have turned construction into a net carbon sink. That's just the beginning, I'm sure you can think of more.

AlzHarvey, I have shown you the figures for electric power production in QC and compared them to US consumption. QC is a very small fish and gets along because it is largely alone in its bowl. If QC exported every kWh it could, it would not even decarbonize 10% of eastern US electric consumption, let alone the road transport sector.

Why not just make certain classes of vehicles PHEVs by law, so that they are available in emergencies? Taxicabs, perhaps? PHEVs as civil-defense assets. That's a great idea.

Let's see... 1000 l / 22.4 l/mol * 2 g/mol = 89.3 g/scm Or 11.2 scm/kg, so 3.8 kWh/scm comes to 42.6 kWh/kg.

S. Korea is marketing 1400 MWe nuclear reactors world-wide, AlzHarvey. Whatever happens with hypedrogen is going to be a sideshow compared to that.

I have to agree: this is a very big deal. If you can make already-light things like aluminum cans (and the F150) even lighter, you not only save material, you also save all the lifetime costs of moving the saved weight around. If the standby cost of keeping the electrolysis systems ready can be held down far enough, this could be a good way to use unreliable energy from PV and wind to make a valuable product and sequester carbon in the process. This appears to be far better than hydrogen for that purpose.

Electrolyzers run something like 60% efficiency; the round-trip losses from PTGTP are going to be well over half. Throwing H2 into NG pipelines pretty much wastes everything that's good about H2 by making it difficult to recover. Hypedrogen is the bad-yet-trendy idea* for energy storage. Highview Power has a much more efficient and scalable scheme; they are claiming efficiency as high as 75%, but even the low-ball round-trip figure of 60% is about equal to just the electrolysis step of H2. There is nothing explosive and the hardware is very cheap both to own and to operate. We should be building literally GW of these things TODAY. * Ever notice that we have a LOT of bad ideas that are nevertheless trendy and eat up mindshare (and research and subsidy money), pushing out things that could actually WORK? We live in a sea of propaganda. Who benefits from this propaganda? Follow the money. How much have you made this week, AlzHarvey?

It's a pity that gallium is such a scarce element. I bet that silicon carbide is going to be the most common high-power semiconductor material for the same reason silicon won out over germanium: cost.