Advanced BioFuels USA – Gas-Powered Cars Won't Die Off Any Time Soon

by Nathan Bomey and Joann Muller (Axios) ... Americans are keeping their vehicles longer than ever — good news for repair shops, but bad news for anyone expecting a rapid phase-out of gas-powered cars.

Why it matters: The longer people hold onto their internal-combustion cars, the longer it will take to replace those vehicles with newer, more environmentally sustainable technology.

Driving the news: The average age of light vehicles on the road in the U.S. is now at an all-time high of 12.5 years, up three months from 2022, according to S&P Global Mobility.

The big picture: Sticker prices for new cars are rising, and existing vehicles are lasting longer, giving owners reason to hold onto their current ride.

Zoom in: April's average new vehicle transaction price was $48,275, up 3.7% from a year earlier, partly because of the popularity of more expensive trucks and SUVs, according to Kelley Blue Book.

While EVs run cleaner than their gas-powered predecessors, there's an environmental toll attached to mining the requisite materials and building new cars — so there's a decent argument that, all things being equal, it's better for people to squeeze as much life as possible from their old vehicles before making the switch. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post George Will: Because multiple subsidies seem insufficient to lure multitudes into buying electric vehicles, President Biden is resorting to a labyrinthine industrial policy to supply what people are not demanding. A purchaser of an EV is eligible for tax credits of up to $7,500, if:

There are no such agreements with some nations that are important sources of EV materials, so the Biden administration has issued a semantic fiat: In the context of the pertinent legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the phrase “free trade agreement” shall mean any deal that encourages environmentally and labor-friendly trade — and such agreements do not need congressional approval. The Constitution says: “Congress shall have power … to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

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Goldman Sachs says the IRA’s subsidies of green investments will cost $1.2 trillion over a decade.

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Biden wants EVs, which were only 5.8 percent of U.S. new car sales in 2022, to be 67 percent by 2032. (His initial target had been 50 percent by 2030.)

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Congress has inadvertently empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to accomplish indirectly what Congress never intended. Biden’s EPA has issued such stringent limits (beginning with the 2027 model year) on the pollution generated by each manufacturer’s total fleet, the limits will make internal combustion vehicles scarce.

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Two-thirds of new cars sold nine years from now will be EVs? That will not happen, but much money will be spent not getting there. READ MORE

Excerpt from The Guardian: Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be.

As you may know, the government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. The problem with the initiative is that it seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions, which is a welcome development, particularly in respect of the air quality in city centres. But if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different. In advance of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, Volvo released figures claiming that greenhouse gas emissions during production of an electric car are nearly 70% higher than when manufacturing a petrol one. How so? The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last upwards of 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of effort is going into finding something better. New, so-called solid-state batteries are being developed that should charge more quickly and could be about a third of the weight of the current ones – but they are years away from being on sale, by which time, of course, we will have made millions of overweight electric cars with rapidly obsolescing batteries. Hydrogen is emerging as an interesting alternative fuel, even though we are slow in developing a truly “green” way of manufacturing it. It can be used in one of two ways. It can power a hydrogen fuel cell (essentially, a kind of battery); the car manufacturer Toyota has poured a lot of money into the development of these. Such a system weighs half of an equivalent lithium-ion battery and a car can be refuelled with hydrogen at a filling station as fast as with petrol.

If the lithium-ion battery is an imperfect device for electric cars, it’s a complete non-starter for trucks ....

But let’s zoom out even further and consider the whole life cycle of an automobile. ... You can now make a car for £15,000 that, with tender loving care, will last for 30 years.

We need also to acknowledge what a great asset we have in the cars that currently exist (there are nearly 1.5bn of them worldwide). In terms of manufacture, these cars have paid their environmental dues and, although it is sensible to reduce our reliance on them, it would seem right to look carefully at ways of retaining them while lowering their polluting effect.

A sensible thing to do would be to speed up the development of synthetic fuel, which is already being used in motor racing; it’s a product based on two simple notions: one, the environmental problem with a petrol engine is the petrol, not the engine and, two, there’s nothing in a barrel of oil that can’t be replicated by other means. Formula One is going to use synthetic fuel from 2026. There are many interpretations of the idea but the German car company Porsche is developing a fuel in Chile using wind to power a process whose main ingredients are water and carbon dioxide. With more development, it should be usable in all petrol-engine cars, rendering their use virtually CO₂-neutral.

Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created. READ MORE