Environment
The Race To Zero Emissions
Once upon a time, we were all whispering about a possible conspiracy that someone had invented a car that ran on something that wasn’t fossil fuel but the Big Oil companies resorted to various forms of skulduggery ranging from buying out the patents or technology through to murder to ensure that petrol and diesel continued to reign supreme in the motoring world. Fast forward to nearly 2020 (i.e. today) and there’s a new rumour on the block: the rumour that petrol and diesel powered cars are going to be phased out.
In fact, this is more than just a rumour. They’re starting to do it already in the UK. The famous university city of Oxford is going to ban fossil fuel powered cars from the city centre by 2020, meaning that only electric vehicles (and probably hydrogen powered vehicles) will be allowed to buzz around in the heart of the city. Looks like the complaint made by JRR Tolkien back in the day about “the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic” in the streets of inner Oxford is going to be dealt with… well, at least the roaring bit. The idea is to make the city centre the world’s first Zero Emissions Zone. (OK, to be picky, it will be Zero Emissions as far as car exhausts go – there will still be carbon dioxide and methane emissions as long as human beings breathe, burp and fart.)
This move to ban petrol-based cars is not unique to places as notoriously academic and ivory-towerish as Oxford. In fact, the Government of Scotland has announced that it will phase out petrol and diesel vehicles by 2023. Ms Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, has acknowledged in her statement (which covers other topics – the bit in question is about one-third of a way down if you want to find it) that it’s an ambitious project and is going to need a lot of infrastructure established.
This move by Scotland to be the first to phase out new petrol and diesel cars is ambitious, but it looks as though it’s part of a race between the old rivals England and Scotland to be the greenest. Apparently, the UK government has announced that it wants all new vans and cars on the roads to be zero emission vehicles (which is not a bad term for lumping electric, hydrogen and ethanol vehicles together – although it probably doesn’t include biodiesel vehicles). Because the UK has rules about the age of cars that they allow on the roads, this means that all their vehicles are slated to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2050.
What this means for the owners of vintage and classic vehicles, I don’t know. I guess they’ll have some sort of exemption or they’ll only be allowed out on special occasions. Or maybe they’ll have to be retrofitted to take biodiesel or ethanol. I suspect that even the royal Rolls-Royces and Daimlers aren’t going to be exempt.
Naturally, if there’s rivalry between England and Scotland to do something first, you can bet like anything that the other ancient rivalry will flame up and indeed it has: France has also announced that it won’t be selling any new petrol or diesel cars after 2040. Happily, the French government has also said that it will provide some sort of subsidy for poorer households so they can get an upgrade. And yes, this puts the pressure on all those French marques like Citroën , Renault and Peugeot to up their game and make sure that they’re only making hydrogen and electric vehicles by this stage.
Naturally, Scandinavia is already in on the game (and, incidentally, they’re old rivals of Scotland’s as well – which is why the north of Scotland likes to keeps up a few Viking traditions). Norway is already smugly announcing that half of its new vehicle registrations are electric or at least hybrid, and it says the Norwegian target is to end sales of fossil-fuel-only cars by 2025. Norway has been handing out tax breaks and concession for electrics and hybrids for ages, and it’s got the geography and rainfall needed to sustain the hydroelectric plants that are necessary to charge all those batteries. The Netherlands and Germany are also in on the act. This means, of course, that all the German and Swedish car marques we love are going to concentrate on electrics and hybrids. My beloved Volvo announced that every new Volvo car and SUV from 2019 onwards will be electric in some way: full-time electric, plug-in hybrid or at least a little bit hybrid.
However, if governments can live up to their promises (IF!!!), then it looks as though Scotland wants to win the zero-emissions race. I feel a song coming on, to be sung to the tune of Loch Lomond:
Oh ye’ll take the low road, and I’ll take the high road
And I’ll phase out petrol cars before ye
And me and my diesel will never drive again
On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond.
In fact, it seems as though Australia is a little bit behind here, as we’ve been slower to embrace electrics, although they are becoming more and more common. I’ve seen a few new charging points popping up near where I live, so people are starting to get on board. The Green Party has asked the Australian government to jump on board, but the Powers That Be are hesitant.
And I think they’re right to be hesitant. I’ve still got a ton of questions about the whole thing, though, as I guess many of us do. What happens to old classics and collectors’ items? Do electric vehicles and hybrids have the range to tackle our long Outback roads without stranding people in the middle of nowhere? What if we can’t afford a new car? How are we going to charge all those vehicles – are we going to just burn petrol and diesel in electric power plants instead of car engines (which seems pretty pointless)? Where do ethanol (which we’re already using in Australia) and biodiesel fit into this picture? Do we have enough charging points and can our electricity system handle all the new demand? What will happen to all those old vehicles internal combustion engines? Do they go to the landfill? Is there a way to recycle the metal and plastics used to make them? And what if we LIKE the cars we’ve got and what they can do??? Does the average Aussie driver get a say in all this?
However, we can certainly expect to be including a lot more electric vehicles in our car reviews, and it’s certainly an exciting time of change for the motoring industry, so we’ll do our best to keep you updated.
Plastic Bags To Fuel: It’s For Real
If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, you may have seen a few posts by various environmental groups kicking up a big stink about the amount of plastic that’s floating around in our oceans – and justifiably so. You might have seen a few pictures of the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch (floating around in the North Pacific somewhere between Japan and the USA). A lot of it is in the form of polyethelene, which is not biodegradable – the only thing that breaks it down is sunlight, which is why we deal with it by burying it in landfills underground where the sun can’t get at it. There are literally mountains and islands of it out there.
At the same time, folk are looking around at the existing crude oil supplies and realising that they aint gonna last forever. This, as well as the pollution issue, is one of the spurs driving the push towards hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles and biofuels.
Plastic is, however, another petroleum-based product. In other words, once upon a time, the lid of your coffee cup, your chip packet and your polar fleece top came from the same stuff that you put in your car to get to work this morning. What if this process could be reversed? What if you could un-refine the plastic and turn it back into oil that could then be refined the other way and used to keep our cars (and trucks and trains and ships and aeroplanes) running?
Well, they can do it. A few teams around the world have come up with ways to take all that waste plastic and convert it into something that can be used as a fuel feedstock – for diesel. I’m not a chemical engineer, so don’t ask me why most of the fun new technologies for producing greener fuel end up producing diesel rather than petrol (with the exception of ethanol, which plays nicely with petrol, as we’ve known for years here in Australia). Although one Aussie company called Foyson Resources (aren’t you proud?) has come up with a way to get petrol out of plastic.
The technology for converting plastic back into some form of oil has been around for at least 10 years, with companies in Japan, China, India, the Philippines and the US all having a go at it.
The process they use is called pyrolysis. Those of you with a smattering of Greek may recognise the “pyro” bit, which indicates that heat is involved. Literally, the process means “separating by heat”. It’s been described as a sped-up version of how oil fields and fossil fuels came to be in the first place. Basically, the long polymer strings made up of lots of carbon, oxygen and carbon atoms get split apart into shorter bits about 18 carbon molecules long.
OK, let’s ditch the chemistry and describe it simply.
1: Appropriate plastics are fed into the machine, usually after being shredded or chipped. Suitable plastics usually include polyethylene, polypropylene and a few others – but not PET (Recycling #1), which is easier to recycle.
- The shredded plastic is heated slowly and turns to a gaseous form. The exact temperature at which this happens can be anywhere from 250°C through to 400°C, depending on the pyrolysis plant in question.
- The gas is cooled to a liquid: crude oil. Bingo!
- Other gases keep going and have to go somewhere. With some pyrolysis plant designs, the gas is captured and used to heat the pyrolysis chamber. However, some of the gases can be a bit nasty, which is why the kibosh was put on a Canberra plastic-to-fuel plant last year.
- Leftover solids come in the form of “carbon black”. This can be used as a construction material or just like old-fashioned coal, which it’s practically identical to.
It seems to be early days still for the plastic-to-oil process in Australia, with the Foy Group (the ones who have got the grant to start a plant in Hume, Canberra) facing a few hurdles thanks to the possible emissions. However, given (a) the amount of plastic waste we all churn out and (b) the need to find good supplies of the crude for our petrol and diesel, I’m sure these hurdles can be cleared. I’m picking plastic-to-petrol as The Next Big Thing for greener motoring – and it won’t require any changes to our existing vehicle fleet.
If you’re really, really keen, it is apparently possible to do the plastic pyrolysis thing at home and make your own diesel. This probably comes with a heavy cost in the form of the energy input needed to heat a home-built plant, with the result that all the oil you produce will then be used to run the generator or powerplant used to heat the pyrolysis plant used to produce the oil and round it goes. At least it gets rid of plastic bags…
I personally would not try this at home and prefer to either cut down on the plastic bags I use or send them to the recycling depot. However, if you are keen and want to try, this page tells you how. No guarantees and do it at your own risk!
Level 2, 9 Help Street