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Shell is funding Gordon Murray Design (designer for 3 McLaren F1 championship wins and also the F1 supercar) and engine specialists Geo Technology with Osamu Goto (ex-Honda F1 engines) to build a city car prototype by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if they are able to bring the un-obtanium technology of F1 to a super mileage small city car--at an affordable price.
Shell has a long history of funding Economy Runs (first informal event in 1939) and Eco-marathon engineering competitions.
Murray has already done the T25 concept city car with central driver's seat. (Caution -- Flash-heavy and ego-heavy(!) site. Murray may be a design genius, but he wants to make sure that you know this...)
From the article:
One billion reasons why car technology has got to get better
Imagine twice as many people moving around your city. What would that mean for you getting to where you need to be? More traffic, more pollution, less space to move around. There are an estimated one billion cars on our roads right now and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts this will have doubled by 2050.
While alternatives, including electric vehicles, have an increasing role in meeting this demand, experts predict that we will still be relying on fossil fuels to power our vehicles for decades to come. This means we need to think of more innovative ways to move people and goods around. We need to consider how we could make the conventional internal combustion engine work more efficiently, while emitting less CO2, and we need to explore how we can put this into action using existing and readily available infrastructures.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Monday April 20 2015, @03:44PM
Doubling by 2050 would mean a continuation of the historical roughly 2% annual exponential growth curve.
The problem is...we've already used up about half of the petroleum that was in the ground when we started that curve.
The way exponential growth works is that, every doubling period -- 35 years, in this case -- you use as much of whatever resource you're chewing through as you had in all of the time before said doubling period. That we've burned through half the petroleum already means that, if we were to continue at the "predicted" growth rate, we'd suck the absolute last drop out of the ground by 2050 and have nothing at all left for 2051.
The reality of the physics of oil well extraction is that you just can't keep pumping at an accelerating rate after you reach the midpoint. You can continue for a bit, but that just hastens the time that you get a precipitous drop-off in production.
Basically, whether we like it or not, by 2050 we're going to be extracting oil at about the same rate we were in the '70s, or maybe even the '60s. And paying ludicrous prices for the privilege. You can already see the groundwork laid for this; our prime wells are miles offshore with wellheads a mile beneath the waves and more miles drilled through bedrock to get to the deposits. And even Canadian tar sands and shale oil -- the proverbial last-ditch jokes of desperation -- are now coming on the market in a big way. Sure, there's lots of oil to be extracted from them...but it's insanely expensive to do so (compared with the days of Texas gushers) and the quality is for shit.
In reality? Long before we make it to 2050, if our economy hasn't imploded due to the rising costs of oil, we'll have shifted the passenger fleet in a really big way to electrics. That doesn't do us much good for industry, especially food production...but there's hope there, too.
You see...you can make refinery feedstock from atmospheric CO2 if you've got enough energy to power the process. And solar power is unimaginably abundant; if we covered all the residential rooftops in the States with the types of panels you can buy today at your local home improvement store, we'd have enough energy for all uses for the entire planet. It's not cheap, of course, but it does place an upper limit on the cost of liquid fuels...
...and that cost is about $200/bbl. At that point, you can economically make "fossil" fuels with solar energy and atmospheric CO2.
The big question is whether or not our economy is capable of functioning with prices at that level, because we're going to have to get there and a bit beyond in order for there to be the financial incentive to start building up such solar infrastructure...and who'll be able to afford to build such infrastructure with energy prices so high and the economy in the shitter as a result?
If we can make it past that, we're home free, at least on the energy front. Limitless power with almost nonexistent operating costs -- just the initial capital investment. Getting there is going to be quite the challenge, though....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 20 2015, @05:45PM
The problem is...we've already used up about half of the petroleum that was in the ground when we started that curve.
Negative Externalities: Some else's problem since 1885.