Electric Dreams.
Our roads host a race to determine how the future will be powered, but only a single competitor may be permitted to finish. Everything will be electric, without exception. Electrical transmission is the carrier without equal. Batteries will provide storage, without question. Don’t ask questions.
Why?
Industry is risk averse and will reject a radical revolution if a gentle evolution will achieve the outcome desired. When we transition from one solution to another, the new idea tends to look very much like the old. I should know. I’ve spent a career attempting to incite revolution within the ranks of corporate chiefs.
They are difficult to rouse.
Oil has offered a powerful and convenient means to drive civilisation, and an elegant innovation to an alternate means would not reject this old solution entirely. We identify the harmful properties of the existing solution, and we reject them. We identify those beneficial properties of the existing solution and we retain them.
The electrical grid delivers power to every corner of our civilisation, and yet that final step onto the road remains a struggle. Huge, range anxious batteries must be wrought that weigh ten times their gasoline equivalent.
Electrical solutions struggle to imitate the power density and storage that liquids offer to our transport infrastructure to drive it along the road. To the innovator in search of elegant solutions, what liquid may possess similar properties to our gasoline foundation?
Methanol.
I keep returning to methanol.
A larger tank than gasoline is required for sure, but far smaller than its battery equivalent. Emissions are for definite, but mainly water and carbon dioxide and the potential for biogenic or sustainable sources. For decades, the Indianapolis 500 has propelled racers to tremendous speeds using methanol.
I’d welcome comments that resolve this naïve query.
