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Quest for an Alternative Car Fuel Continues

Posted on: Wednesday, 10 August 2005, 09:02 CDT

IT IS nearly 20 years since Honda developed a solar- powered racing car which could drive right across Australia with no fuel input other than rays from the sun and no emissions whatsoever, other than the considerable exhaust from the fleet of helicopters and cars used as back-up.

And it's almost five years since Toyota and Honda pioneered the petrol electric hybrids Prius and Insight to provide, if not an alternative to petrol and diesel powered machines, at least more environmentally acceptable ones with typical fuel savings of up to 50 per cent.

But with the date for the first economically viable hydrogen- powered fuel cell having been at least five years away for the last decade and no breakthrough in battery technology on the horizon in spite of the fortunes spent, the arrival of an affordable and practical alternative fuel looks as far away as ever.

It's not that car makers can't build a car that will run on an alternative fuel, it's just that they cannot make it anywhere near economically viable.

That's something Ford found out with the expensive experiment with electric cars which saw them go into partnership with a Norwegian inventor to bring us the heavily subsidised, electrically powered Think car.

Ford poured its money and resources into researching battery technology but the size of the battery required prohibited anything outside of a town pool car application. "We got as far as we could," a spokesman said yesterday.

This range, in spite of the availability of advanced materials, cutting edge technology and sophisticated electronic controls, is little better than was achievable a century ago when the first electric cars tried to challenge the supremacy of petrol burners.

There is also, he added, doubt about the environmental advantages of electric power: unless renewable sources are used exclusively to generate the power needed to charge the batteries, there is no significant saving in carbon emissions.

It is this same arithmetic that is working in favour of the latest favourite to reduce our dependence on petrol, with farmers being encouraged to grow crops that can be fermented into bio- fuels. These emit similar levels of exhaust pollutants, but can be argued to be up to 70 per cent less polluting when the carbon emissions changed into oxygen by photosynthesis during the growing process are taken into account .

We may be moving in the right direction: next month Ford will put 40 bio-ethanol Ford Focus saloons into Somerset, where a bio- ethanol infrastructure has been put in place using bio-fuel from locally grown grain.

Source: Scotsman, The

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