Energywise

The Fiat Siena Tetrafuel can run on gasoline, ethanol, blends of gasoline and ethanol, and also natural gas. Is your next car going to be a multi-fuel? Photo: Fiat Brazil

A recent New York Times story describes the efforts of billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens to promote alternative energy, including wind and natural gas. What caught my attention was the beginning of the story, which says demand for natural gas cars like the Honda Civic GX is running high in certain corners of the United States where that fuel has become an attractive alternative to pricey gasoline.

This is interesting because consumers have long been dismissive of natural gas vehicles. The main problem is a lack of natural gas filling stations (there are only about 1,600 in the U.S.). And then there's range. Natural gas vehicles have around half the range of comparable gasoline cars. (See other pros and cons here.) These issues have discouraged consumers and automakers alike. The Times reports that Honda plans to produce just 2,000 Civic GX units this year; Ford and GM don't even have natural gas cars to offer.

What puzzles me is the this-or-that fuel approach. You can either run on gasoline or natural gas. Why aren't automakers offering cars designed to run on both?

Note the emphasis on designed. Sure, retrofitted vehicles that can burn gasoline and natural gas have been around for decades. But where are the truly multi-fuel automobiles for the masses?

The beauty of such vehicles is they help solve one of today's biggest energy problems: uncertainty. With fuel prices oscillating wildly, is it better to stick with gasoline, invest in a natural gas vehicle, buy a hybrid, or what? Who knows? That's why multi-fuel is interesting. You fill up with whatever fuel is cheaper, or available, where you live. It's no silver bullet for the energy crisis, sure, but it just makes sense in places where more than one fuel is available. The point is multi-fuel could work as a bridge from petroleum to other possible technologies and fuels, be it batteries, hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol, whatever.

Last year, I wrote about one such multi-fuel vehicle, the Siena Tetrafuel, created by Fiat in Brazil. This car can run on pure gasoline, pure ethanol, blends of gas and ethanol in any proportion, and also natural gas. It will burn the natural gas -- the cheapest car fuel in Brazil -- while cruising, and it will switch on the fly to the liquid fuel mix whenever it needs more power. From the article:

And here's the best part: you can put any mixture of gasoline and ethanol into its tank -- from 100 percent gasoline and no ethanol to 100 percent ethanol and no gasoline. The engine automatically adjusts its ignition timing and the quantity of fuel injected into the cylinders on each cycle to get the most power out of whatever mixture you've got while keeping emissions under control.

Cars that can use different mixes of gasoline and alcohol have been around for years. And vehicles that let the driver switch between natural gas and gasoline aren't new, either. But one car that can do both -- switching automatically between the fuels and adjusting its engine to suit an arbitrary gasoline-alcohol mix -- that's very new indeed.

In other words, Fiat engineers designed the Tetrafuel engine -- and programmed its engine control unit -- to operate optimally for all those fuels. Not your usual retrofit. Its multi-fuel capability eliminates the two main problems of natural gas-only vehicles. Can't find a filling station with natural gas? Just use gasoline or ethanol. And with both gas and natural gas tanks, range is not a problem anymore.

Fiat's Brazilian subsidiary unveiled the Siena Tetrafuel almost two years ago. It expected to sell 2,500 units in 2007; it sold more than 10,000. This year it has sold nearly 6,000 so far. In terms of annual sales, the Tetrafuel should represent less than 1 percent of all flex cars sold in Brazil (flex cars can use both gasoline and ethanol; 1.7 million were sold last year). It's still a tiny market. But for Fiat -- and Brazilians -- it's nice to have such option around in case oil prices skyrocket or something. It's all about flexibility. (In fact, gas prices oscillations and the availability of ethanol at filling stations led to an automotive revolution in Brazil; sales of flex cars went from virtually nothing in 2003 to about 90 percent of all new cars sold last year, when the Brazilian auto industry saw all-time record sales.)

So back to the original question: Why aren't other automakers considering multi-fuel? Well, in a sense they are. There are a number of projects around. BMW has shown off a gasoline-hydrogen luxury sedan. Volvo developed a prototype that runs on gasoline, E85, natural gas, hythane, and biomethane. Most of these projects, however, don't involve mass-produced, affordable vehicles. Automakers say developing multi-fuel vehicles require a lot of R&D and the cars will need extra parts like separate tanks, sensors, and so forth, making the vehicles expensive. But how expensive? Fiat, for example, did a good job in keeping the Siena Tetrafuel's price tag low enough. In Brazil -- the only place where the car is available -- it costs about the same as a regular Honda Fit.

I guess in the end automakers will regard multi-fuel as a niche, too small of a market to bother. They appear to be seeking the "next big thing" that will take them out of the hole they find themselves in. But then again, as uncertainty about energy prices and availability mount, it appears that betting on a single fuel is a bad bet. We need more omnivorous vehicles.

General Motors has announced plans to launch European versions of its much-ballyhooed Volt, the plug-in hybrid it expects to start producing in 2010, according to a report this week in the Financial Times. GM expects to sell it on the Continent as an Opel, and in the United Kingdom as a Vauxhall. The Volt will be a so-called series hybrid, in which the car is always propelled by its electric motor, with a backup internal combustion engine recharging its lithium-ion battery pack when necessary. Toyota's plug-in electric car, also scheduled for 2010, will be a parallel hybrid, in which the electric motor and internal combustion engine alternatively provide traction, as required. According to the FT, groups led by Korea's LG Chem and Boston's A123Systems are competing for the contract to provide the Volt's batteries.

Could mobile-phone transmitters drive the first widespread commercial use of solar-power in Africa?

A number of companies are betting on that -- and whether they succeed will say a lot about the long-term chances that solar-energy can deliver real benefits to large numbers of Africans.

Generally, solar-energy has proved too expensive for African homes and too difficult for African electricity companies -- beset by many operational handicaps -- to master. Mobile-phone companies, which in Africa are prospering, are better positioned to embrace alternative energy sources, and mobile-phone base stations are a good candidate because, in rural Africa, grid power often is unavailable.

A Swedish-Indian company named VNL, VNL, plans to introduce solar-powered base stations aimed at the African marketing, working through various suppliers of telecom equipment.

VNL's big engineering claim: an easy-to-build radio tower that consumes no more electricity than required for an ordinary light bulb.

Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent have separately installed about 400 solar-powered base stations in African countries including Senegal and Uganda.

VNL's base station will cost $3,500 and require 100 watts to run, about the same as a light bulb. By contrast, the GSM stations most widely used today can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000. The most energy-efficient models require around 600 watts; others may need several thousand watts.

Critical support for these innovations is starting to come from Africa's leading mobile-phone providers, notably Celtel, MTN and Vodaphone, who together control a majority of the sub-Saharan telephone market.

As widely reported in today's newspapers, Aug. 8, the Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a request from the Texas governor to reduce the amount of ethanol required to enter the nation's fuel supply. Under law, 9 billion gallons of renewable fuel are to be sold in the United States this year, but if such goals are found to be causing severe economic hardships, EPA is authorized to waive requirements. Texas cattle ranchers argue that their feed prices have soared because of crop diversion to ethanol production.

The New York Times has reported the shut-down of the Center for Capacity Building, a small NCAR team that has been assessing potential impacts of climate change on poor countries, attracting wide global notice. The program, led by Michael Glantz, evidently was ended for budgetary reasons, as the National Center for Atmospheric Research has had to tighten its belt. NCAR, in Boulder, Colo., is one of the five or six leading climate modeling centers in the world. Over the last five years, a source told the Times, the center has lost 110 jobs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a former NCAR staff member who writes a widely followed contrarian climate blog, decried the loss of the climate-impact program. "Knowledge related to the societal dimensions of global environmental problems is fundamental to efforts to arrive at practical and effective solutions," Dr. Pielke said. "If anything, we need to expand attention in these areas."

To track reactions to the situation, stay abreast of Andrew Revkin's blog.

One lasting impression from my July visit to Ken Sakwa, a champion farmer in rural eastern Uganda: how Ken's new Chinese-made motorcycle is transforming his ability to expand his commercial farming activities.

A lot of attention is being given to how China and India are bringing big technologies to Africa: hydroelectricity, solar technologies, computing, mobile-phone infrastructure. No question, these are important. But virtually unnoticed is how less expensive motorocycles are making personal transportation affordable to people who only recently dreamed of owning a bicycle.

Sakwa is a farmer I have been getting to know for the past few years in East Africa. He grows maize, green beans, cotton and a bit of peanuts. As farm prices have risen, he's become more interested in buying and selling crops grown by his neighbors. The motorcycle is a critical "enabling" technology, permitting him to travel over dirt roads easily and cheaply.

Sakwa this spring bought a motorcycle made by the Chinese company Dayun. Five years ago, European companies dominated the African market for motorbikes. But prices were high and repairs relatively costly.

The Chinese have transformed the motorcycle market -- in both East and West Africa -- with less expensive motorcycles and cheaper parts. True, the bikes are less powerful. But at least now Sakwa can afford one.

The influx of Chinese bikes seems likely to grow.

What happened a decade ago in Asia surely will happen in Africa: motorbikes as a "ubiquitous" form of transport.

Major auto makers supplying the U.S. market, having previously supported the government's effort to boost average fleet efficiency to 31.6 mpg by 2015 from 25 mpg today, are now having serious misgivings, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal. Ford and Toyota are among those that had expressed confidence in their ability to meet the new goal but now are complaining about the scale and pace of what the National Highway Safety Administration proposes. Toyota is quoted as saying that the implementing regs are "substantially front-loaded" and "increase at a rate much greater than anticipated" by law.

It's just a local story to be sure, but a New York Times article today does a nice job of describing what it take to build an electrical substation in a modern megacity. Conventionally substations--the transformer and switching arrays where transmission voltage is stepped down for district distribution--are just surrounded behind barbed wire in what otherwise might be vacant lots, easily recognizable by their large ceramic insulators. But in New York City's South Bronx, Con Ed's latest station is housed in a nice brick building with fake windows, which might easily be mistaken for a fancy condo. Built at a cost of $300 million, the substation has a number of green elements such a grated vaults that allow for natural circulation and placement of huge tanks containing insulating liquid in motes, to contain any leakage. Seamless 10-inch steel pipes, which are not something bought off the shelf, sheathe the cables that enough current "to power a small Caribbean country."

With everybody from venture capitalists to green-minded homeowners keen to see breakthroughs in solar energy, it's getting harder all the time to separate the hype from the reality. Last week--the last week of July--a team at MIT announced it had achieved a major advance that they claimed could make photovoltaic energy economically viable at last: a method of storing PV-generated electricity at night, by means of a new catalyst for separating oxygen from the hydrogen in water. The general idea is that the hydrogen gleaned from the water could be used to power fuel cells, so that none of the solar electricity would be wasted.

The most notable thing about this announcement is the fabulously extravagant and overheated language in which it was made. A write-up of the principal investigator's article, distributed by Science magazine to journalists, described the innovation as "revolutionary," "a huge leap," "unprecedented," and "nirvana." Only in the seventh paragraph of that release do we hear the investigator express confidence that "this is going to work." So it doesn't exactly work yet? Or, to judge from an EE Times write-up, it probably works about as well as a well-established method for separating oxygen from hydrogen, but perhaps more cost-effectively.

To take another example, First Solar, a relatively young company based in Tempe, Arizona, has suddenly been getting a lot of attention with claims that it has figured out a way to make PV material at an installation cost of $1 per watt--though the global average for solar installations was in the range of $6 or $7 per watt last year. How plausible is that claim? Well, it's hard to know, because as a feature article appearing in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine points out, "The company does not talk to reporters. Not at all."

That article was written by a freelancer and edited by a colleague, but I can attest to the accuracy of its singular point. A few months ago I (that is to say, a journalist) was asked at the last minute to moderate a session at a big PV meeting in San Diego, in which the CEO of First Solar was supposed to be one of the panelists. At the last moment he reneged. A month or so later it just so happened I was at a meeting near Tempe, so I called First Solar and asked if I could come over to take a look at their breakthrough technology. The answer, after a handful of phone messages and a couple of e-mails? No.

This week I was contacted by a small company that has been working with a national laboratory to develop an improved way of depositing PV on a variety of materials, so that, for example, solar cells can be incorporated right into a building's shell. The company recently won an r&d award, prompting it to contact journalists. The chief technology officer of the company described the company's technology to me in careful detail, but he refused to make any claims about how much the process would ultimately cost or when exactly they would be able to introduce their first products. Now that got my attention.

The dramatic reversals in U.S. air regulation, reported and discussed two weeks ago, are proving nettlesome not just for environmentalists and for some of the parties that had challenged rules in court, but for the energy industry generally. John Dizard reports this week in London's Financial Times that utilities had spent upwards of $75 billion for SO2 and NOx retrofits to meet the rules that now have been overturned. Dizard quotes a source at the Washington law firm Bracewell & Giuliani saying that just the lost value of SO2 emissions allowances could come to $15-20 billion. PPL, a Pittsburgh utility, has announced losses associated with defunct NOx allowances could come to almost $100 million.