Tipping Point?

By Ron Beasley

Four dollar a gallon gasoline has stimulated something that should have been done years ago - development of an alternative to the internal combustion engine.  And for once it may be an American automaker that is leading the way.

High oil prices fuel development of new hybrid batteries

NISKAYUNA, N.Y. � Rising oil and gasoline prices have put spring into the steps of the engineers at General Electric's global research headquarters, who're developing new battery technologies to power everything from hybrid cars to tugboats, city buses and diesel locomotives.

"The price of gasoline is going up dramatically, so we're looking more seriously at this," said Robert King, a senior hybrid engineer who's researched hybrid technologies for more than three decades. "The cost is still one challenge, but I think as we see the price of gasoline going up, more effort is going into the development of technology."

The silver lining in high oil prices is that they may hasten the arrival of energy alternatives that should bring a number of benefits.

Oil historian Daniel Yergin calls today's high prices a "tipping point" that will lead to alternatives to oil. New battery technologies could leave the United States less reliant on foreign oil while reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions.

Sound like a pipe dream? General Motors' chairman and chief executive officer, Rick Wagoner, announced Tuesday that his board has given the green light to begin manufacturing the Chevy Volt, an extended-range electric vehicle.

�The Chevy Volt is a go. We believe this is the biggest step yet in our industry�s move away from our historic, virtually complete reliance on petroleum to power vehicles,� Wagoner said in a statement, pledging to get the Volt into dealerships by late 2010.

That would be earlier than the timetable announced by Nissan Motor Co.�s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, who in mid-May said that Nissan would sell large numbers of electric vehicles to U.S. consumers by 2012 and would offer electric cars for corporate fleets in 2010.

And it's not just automobiles:

Across GE's production line, work is under way to use new battery technologies to help propel tugboats, power delivery trucks and heavy machinery and even support diesel locomotives.

Next year, GE will begin field-testing hybrid locomotives, which get their electric power from batteries, not from overhead electrical wires. They use large sodium batteries that allow energy to drain slowly, reducing fuel consumption and allowing locomotives to operate on quieter battery power when they're crossing through towns.

This is encouraging because it represents a clean break with the internal combustion engine.  The alternatives discussed up to now have been internal combustion engines powered by bio-fuels or hydrogen. As I pointed out here a few years ago neither are real solutions.

Hydrogen: We should have known that if George W. Bush is talking about it it's not a good idea. The reality is hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy transfer medium. It does not occur naturally and has to be produced by by splitting water. It requires more energy to split the water than you get back when you burn it to create energy.

Ethanol: Like the photovoltaic cell ethanol requires energy to produce and requires square miles of land to grow the raw material, grain. In Brazil they are already clearing rain forests to grow grain for ethanol production.

We have recently seen a huge spike in food prices as a result of corn being raised for fuel and many are questioning the large quantities of water required for production as that resource too because less abundant.