Lopsided Energy Bill: $4 Billion for Natural Gas Vehicles, $400 Million for EVs
By John O'Dell July 28, 2010
Oilman-turned-natural-gas-promoter T. Boone Pickens seems to have a lot of friends, or at least a few powerful ones, in Congress.
Despite a presidentially expressed desire to see at least 1 million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2015, Senate Democrats in their latest attempt at an energy bill that can get past Republican opposition have included just $400 million for further EV program development versus $4 billion for natural gas vehicles and fuel programs.
Early rumors had the bill eliminating any new funding for electric cars after last year's $2.4 billion appropriation for EV and advanced battery development, so $400 million is something. But at a 10:1 ratio to natural gas promotion???
Pickens, who isn't shy about contributing to politicians who can help him and who has spent more than $50 million of his own money (almost pocket change to a billionaire) promoting his Pickens Plan to spur use of natural gas, is heavily invested in the stuff and stands to make loads of money if Americans switch from gasoline to CNG. He's major shareholder and co-founder of Clean Energy Fuels, the country's biggest retailer of compressed natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LGN).
His promotion seems to have paid off and while we don't dislike natural gas (afer all, we drive a CNG-powered Honda Civic, the only factory-built CNG passenger car sold in the U.S. right now), we wonder at the thinking behind the Senate measure outlined by staffers today and slated to be introduced later this week by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev..
Agreed, natural gas is plentiful in North America and would help us reduce dependence on imported oil. So is, and would, electricity.
But natural gas also is a fossil fuel that creates CO2 when burned, and while it is much lower in smog-causing pollutants than gasoline, it is only about 20 percent lower in CO2, so widespread use as a transportation fuel isn't going to do much to slash the nation's carbon footprint.
Electricity could do that - if the power were to be generated by clean solar, wind or even nuclear energy instead of coal or natural gas (as is the norm for about 70 percent of U.S. electrical production - 50 percent from coal and 20 percent for natural gas).
But the biggest potential problem with natural gas has only recently been recognized by many outside of the energy recovery arena - while there's lots of it, it is recoverable only by hydraulic fracturing of the deep rock strata that confines it, and that's a process that may threaten drinking water supplies.
Not a very good tradeoff - we can go without transportaton fuel a lot longer than without water, which already is in short supply in the Western and Southwestern U.S.
We're not suggesting that natural gas be abandoned and that electric vehicles and EV infrastructure get all the money, but the balance in the new bill seems awfully lopsided.
Most of the $4 billion for natural gas would go to natural gas vehicle purchase incentives ranging from $10,000 for passenger cars to $64,000 for large commercial trucks. The measure also would povide fuel companies $50,000 to install natural gas pumps, set aside $200 million for loans to builders of natural gas cars and fund a number of Energy Department R&D grants.
On the electric side, the $400 million would be used to help up to 15 early adopter communities - the communities to be determined through an application process - promote EV use through buyer incentives and development of regional charging inrastructure. $10 million has been set aside as a prize to be awarded to the developer of an EV battery with 500 miles of range - close to four times the best range of today's batteries.
The bill also requires the Energy Department to develop a national EV development and infrastructure deployment plan - a marvelous idea someone should have come up with years ago.
The bill, pared down substantialy from earlier proposals to make it more palatable to the GOP (there's no provision for a carbon cap and trade system, for instance) has plenty of problems In additon to its lopsided devotion to natural gas.
But that's the norm now in our increasingly polarized and dysfunctional congress - no good idea can escape unscathed. If the mono-voiced GOP doesn't gut a measure, the cacaphony that calls itself the Democratic majority probably will.
Still, it is better than nothing and that's probably all we can hope for these days.
And T. Boone, we're sure, is quite happy.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
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Click here to comment on this entry.Most of the supposed near infinite gas reserves in the US are so much hot air:
'The resource hasn?t been misrepresented but the probable component has not been properly explained as a much smaller component of the total resource; I guess they just didn?t read the PGC?s report carefully enough. If you take the proved reserves plus the report?s probable technically recoverable number, we have something like 25 years of natural gas supply in North America, which is quite a bit. It?s a lot. I don?t say any of this to give shale gas a bad name.'
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6785
They have trashed the accounting standards for NG as thoroughly as for finance, so that it is child's play to exaggerate reserves and get the odd few billion in subsidy.
Much more here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/174575-the-oil-casino-sec-heading-for-monte-carlo-part-i
Let's use natural gas for our heavy truck fleet (18-wheelers, etc.) and electricity for lighter vehicles like cars and light trucks.
Automakers and heavy-duty vehicle manufacturers are making fuel cell and battery electric vehicles. Why incent a fuel that they are moving away from? It's like incenting transistor radios in an iPod world.
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John, do you want to send your articles to me before publishing? I'd be happy to proofread.
To the point, though. "it is only about 20 percent lower in CO2, so widespread use as a transportation fuel isn't going to do much to slash the nation's carbon footprint.
Electricity could do that - if the power were to be generated by clean solar, wind or even nuclear energy instead of coal or natural gas"
That, in my mind, is an awfully big IF. Still, aren't electric vehicles still somewhat less polluting than conventional vehicles, even when the electricity they use is from coal plants, because they are more energy efficient?
@Greenpony,
Here is Renault on comparative CO2 emissions:
'When asked about the so-called ?well-to-wheel? balance offered by different types of powertrains Pelata said that an electric car is not always the greenest alternative.
He said an electric vehicle in Europe has an average well-to-wheel output of CO2 of 62 grams per kilometer.
?This figure goes down to 12g/km in France (where much of the electricity comes from nuclear power stations), and grows to about 80g/km when electricity is generated using compressed natural gas,? he said.
When the electricity comes from new-generation coal power stations the well-to-wheel CO2 rises to 120g/km.
Pelata said the electric cars that get their power from a coal plant will be worse than a gasoline hybrid Toyota Prius (110g/km) but better than a clean diesel (135g/km).'
http://europe.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100314/ANE/100319947/1193
Although this is Renault, and so could be held to be biased, the conclusions they reach do not seem unduly favourable to electric to me.
Is natural gas a "renewable" source of energy? If not, there is something very wrong with this bill! I would have thought the whole point of the bill is to promote/facilitate the development of technology that relies on renewable sources. Electricity can come from renewable sources...... but natural gas?
As for the politics, as angry as I am with the GOP, they're not the only ones to blame. Unlike health care and financial reform, which had overwhelming Democratic support, the energy bill doesn't. Many Dems are "compromised" on the energy issue, so its weakening is inevitable.
davemart1, thanks for the lesson. I wonder if Renault calculated the amount of nuclear waste per km electric cars "create" in various countries. Heh.
' The generation of electricity from a typical 1000 MW(e) nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of a city the size of Amsterdam, produces approximately 300 m3 of low and intermediate level waste per year and some 30 tonnes of high level solid packed waste per year.
By way of comparison a 1000 MW(e) coal plant produces some 300,000 tonnes of ash alone per year, containing among other things radioactive material and heavy metals which end up in landfill sites and in the atmosphere.
Nuclear power generation facilities produce about 200,000 m3 of LILW and 10,000 m3 of HLW (including spent fuel designated as waste) each year worldwide.'
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/manradwa.html#note_b
The French reprocess so the amounts are reduced to around 3% of the figures given here.
The coal industry releases many, many times as much radioactivity into the environment as the nuclear industry including storage of waste, as coal contains uranium which is simply emitted from the smokestack. Nasties such mercury and arsenic are also amongst the coal industries tailings.
The amounts and the uncontrolled nature of the waste is so much larger that if you are using renewables and backing them up with coal due to intermittency even if you needed only 10% of the total output to be produced that way the emissions and waste would be many times greater than from nuclear.
Natural gas has it's own issues.
So the answer to your question assuming a once-through fuel cycle for France's 25m cars using 2,800kwh/yr would use around 7.5Gwe/yr, creating 225 tons of high level waste.
Reprocessing would greatly reduce this amount, and more advanced next generation reactors could use this as fuel and reduce the life of the small amount of remaining waste to around 300 years before it was no more radioactive than the ores from which it came.
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