Clean Fuel Startups Are Collapsing | Hacker News Reader

Clean Fuel Startups Are Collapsing

wsj.com

The investing world is getting what EV and green manufacturing advocates have been saying all along: just use the electricity directly.

The energy density of fossil fuels is just too great. The battery of a Tesla stores as much energy as 2.5 gallons of gasoline. That's 1000 lbs of Tesla battery vs 20 lbs of gasoline. Tesla was able to make their cars work through more efficient electric motors and reduced rolling friction. We're no where close to making electric planes, locomotives, or earth moving equipment that are 100% battery powered. The batteries would just be too big.

Not to mention the amazing other uses for crude oil: lubricants, solvents, fertilizer, plastics. Crude oil is an absolutely amazing substance.

The ICE then promptly dumps 60-70% of the gasoline's potential energy into the environment in the form of heat and emissions, and EVs can also capture energy that would otherwise be dumped as heat from the ICE car's brake rotors. So in terms of useful work extracted from that energy, that battery holds the rough equivalent to 8-10 gallons of gasoline, of course at the cost of weight, space, degradation, refueling time, etc.

For aviation there is the added advantage with fossil fuel that you burn it as you go. A battery stays the same weight. A 747 can burn 400 tons of fuel on a long haul flight. That makes the plane a lot lighter increasing range meaningfully.

Trains are better unless you need to cross an ocean

It depends by which metric you mean "better". For a collection of executives that cost in the order of six figures an hour, it makes sense to put them on a plane and get them there as quickly as possible, even if it sometimes means chartering a jet. Is this stupidly polluting? Of course. Does this figure into the incentives? Not really. Could it figure into the incentives if clean fuel was available? Plausibly.

> We're no where close to making electric planes, locomotives, or earth moving equipment that are 100% battery powered. The batteries would just be too big.

https://www.forconstructionpros.com/equipment/earthmoving/ba...

https://www.constructionequipment.com/earthmoving/news/55042...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/06/17/...

https://electrek.co/2024/05/30/takeuchi-electric-compact-exc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiSfUE7r0sU

While the energy density of fossil fuels is exceptionally compelling, battery technology is catching up rapidly. You don't have to drive fossil fuel use to zero immediately, simply drive it down as fast as possible in parallel across use cases (housing, light vehicles, heavy vehicles, rail, etc). China has already hit peak oil, for example. Oil will remain for some time for use cases where there is simply no other option (long haul aviation and chemical engineering), but that is a much smaller TAM than today (~100M barrels of oil/day).

Tangentially, the IEA and OPEC are currently publicly arguing over the future of oil demand due to the inflection point we’re at globally.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/iea-trims-2024-oil-d...

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

"The continued momentum behind electric cars is clear in our data, although it is stronger in some markets than others," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. "Rather than tapering off, the global EV revolution appears to be gearing up for a new phase of growth."

Clean fuel is foolish until we're no longer burning hydrocarbons for electricity.

Even at that point it will probably be foolish because the demand for oil will then be so low that the few niche machines that use it will have a miniscule impact on the environment.

One issue could be that many of these startups are venture funded. So they don't need to quickly find a solution that works and then scale up.

As a result they might spends too many resources on something that just doesn't bring a net benefit in the end.

I understand that some of these technologies need large upfront funding but there needs to be a better vetting in place about their success probability.

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