2006 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 23-25, 2006

http://web.umr.edu/~icnsc06/ or http://ieeeicnsc.org



PLENARY LECTURE
Energy Dependence and CO2: Nearest-Term Opportunitiesor a Dramatic Reduction

Paul Werbos, National Science Foundation

There are three main clean and sustainable alternatives to carrying hydrogen in your tank, to power your car. All three are very serious, and all three merit more active attention and support.

In the first alternative, we STILL use a hydrogen-based fuel cell to power our cars, exactly as the hydrogen economy people say to do. We still try to capture the high efficiency of the fuel-cell car. But instead of carrying hydrogen gas itself in the gas tank, we carry a hydrogen CARRIER - a chemical fuel which contains a lot of hydrogen, and releases it efficiently on-board a car. There is a lot of research on possible hydrogen carriers, but there are only two which have been well-tested over decades: methanol and ammonia. Ammonia is carbon-free, and would allow us to zero out CO2 emissions, but it has the same chicken and egg problem that pure hydrogen does. (Some people want to use it for dedicated truck fleets, which is OK.) But methanol offers us an IMMEDIATE transition path, a way to beat the chicken-and-egg problems. It doesn't zero out CO2, but methanol fuel cell cars should emit four times less CO2 per mile than today' cars - and thus they are a major part of the Middle Way strategy. Our challenge is how to get these cars onto the free market as soon as possible, without excessive costs of government intervention.

Electric cars are supposedly well-known - but few people seem to appreciate just how promising they are. Around 1980, many people were turned off by the boxy little cars sold by enthusiastic and naive new companies - but the electric car later introduced by GM had a longer range, good performance and generated consumer enthusiasm. It cost too much for GM to produce it back then - but the push to hybrid cars has cut most of the costs. Hybrid car engineers do know how to add a "plug" so that owners can recharge the batteries at night, instead of using the onboard gasoline engine. This would allow them to get to work or to stores, based on electricity, even in the event of a sudden cutoff of gasoline. The benefit to national security would be huge, and it would be a step towards an electric future.

Thermal batteries are yet another possibility. If fuel-flexible advanced Stirling cars should make it big in the market - with efficiency something like 50 percent instead of 60 percent for a good fuel cell system - then we will have the infrastructure to let us start thinking about a totally different way to carry energy in our cars, cheaper and with longer range than batteries allow, with zero CO2. R&D now could allow this by 2030.