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

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: 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!
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  • (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.