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Germany's Bundesrat Calls for End of Internal Combustion Engine Powered Cars by 2030

posted by martyb on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:42AM   Printer-friendly

Phoenix666 writes:

In Germany, the Bundestrat, or Upper House, has passed a resolution to ban the internal combustion engine (ICE) [Note] powered car by 2030. It’s a nice gesture from a body that is pretty much powerless and composed of non-elected delegates (compare it to the Canadian Senate or British House of Lords), but it’s influential. The Dutch and Norwegian governments are making similar plans, and the EU could follow.

A graphic from the article shows Germany gets one-third of its electricity from renewables now. Will weaning its energy and transportation sectors off fossil fuels confer an economic advantage?

[Note: story is in German. --Ed.]

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:15AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:15AM (#413812) Homepage Journal

    It's really not clear at all that an electrical infrastructure is the right solution, when you need mobile energy in large quantities. Carrying that energy around in the form of hydrocarbons may well be the better solution.

    There's nothing particular wrong with burning hydrocarbons! The objections people have are (1) pollution from impurities, and (2) re-introducing CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere. However, if we manufacture hydrocarbons, both of those problems disappear. Manufactured hydrocarbons will generally be pure, and they will be carbon neutral (assuming the carbon comes from CO2).

    The infrastructure for distributing hydrocarbons (gasoline, methane, etc.) is already in place. We have a lot of technology that is designed to use this stuff. We can use renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) to manufacture hydrocarbons - they become the energy storage media. If we do this, we don't need batteries full of exotic materials, we don't need a new infrastructure of charging stations, people can fill up their energy-storage tanks in seconds rather than hours, etc..

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:45AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:45AM (#413829)

    Too many conversion loses when going from renewable to liquid fuels. Heat pollution by itself is a problem. Just not the one you can make money off.

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    compiling...

    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:01PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:01PM (#413848) Journal

      Combined cycle plants, district heating/cooling, etc. There is always a way to recycle. The problem is like you said, cost.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:47PM (#413865)
      Apparently Germany is already has an industrial-scale plant that uses the Sabatier reaction to produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and it is fairly easy to convert any motorcar running on ordinary petrol to run on methane, but if you don't want to do that it's easy enough to use the Fischer-Tropsch process or some other catalytic reforming process to produce high-octane petrol, though there are more losses involved in doing that. I believe they did the maths and found that it made sense to do. You'll have heat pollution regardless of what you do, and I think that such heat pollution is a drop in the bucket compared to the reduction in greenhouse gases. You can't have everything, but what they're doing to make carbon-neutral fuel is a fair sight better than business as usual!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @07:45PM (#414053)

        Digging out catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch || Sabatier isn't renewable.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:17AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @07:17AM (#414187)
          Hint, they're catalysts: they aren't consumed by the chemical process they facilitate! They will eventually get fouled up over time so you'll someday need to replace them but before then they'll produce plenty of the stuff you need. The Sabatier process uses a nickel catalyst, which is not a rare metal by any stretch. Fischer–Tropsch can use iron as its catalyst, and I don't need to tell you how terribly abundant that metal is on the planet. You can clean up fouled catalysts easily enough if you have a source of energy to do so, so you don't need to keep digging them out of the ground.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:53AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 13 2016, @10:53AM (#413831) Journal

    There are all kinds of advances being made in battery storage. There was another story about it yesterday but I didn't submit it because I couldn't get it to fit between the stories about graphene and Teslas. ;-)

    A key advantage to advances in battery technology over any ICE technology is that if you come up with a better battery you can plug it into the old device without any other changes. Electric motors in the rest of the apparatus, whatever it is, last a really long time.

    Twisting the energy economy around to accommodate fossil fuels is weird. It's like fitting the team of horses with bionic skeletons so they can run faster, instead of switching to cars.

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    Washington DC delenda est.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:17PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday October 13 2016, @12:17PM (#413852) Journal

    [...] pollution from impurities [...]

    That can happen, notably with sulphur. However, incomplete combustion (and it's always incomplete to some degree) of hydrocarbons themselves results in pollution. If they're burned in air rather than in pure oxygen, oxides of nitrogen are formed as well.

    This proclamation is just symbolic, but actual electrification of cars would lessen pollution in German cities. It would also be good public relations for the German auto industry after the scandal over the Bosch firmware [bbc.com]:

    [...] German carmakers agreed to recall 630,000 diesel vehicles to tweak engine software.
    [...]
    German transport minister Alexander Dobrindt said Mercedes Benz, Opel and Porsche as well as Volkswagen and Audi would adjust settings that increased levels of emissions such as nitrogen dioxide in some diesel cars.