Category Archives: Energy

Energy, Security

Eine Kleine Pumpe-Duse Diesel

Leave a comment

Audi has announced that it is starting to use four valves per cylinder in its newest diesel powerplant, available in the sporty A3 and A4 models…except in the United States. Alas, Americans still have no Audi diesels and will have to settle with VW and Daimler-Chrysler for the time being if they want modern diesel engineering. Remember when little gas engines with 16-valve cylinder heads were all the rage in the early 1990s? Diesel is finally getting some of the same engineering attention. Tiscali has a nice blurb about the engines that will ship next month in the UK:

Pump-injector fuel injection and piezo technology combine for the first time in the new 170PS 2.0 TDI engine for A3 and A4. The new four-cylinder, 2.0-litre TDI unit is the first in the Audi range to combine ‘pumpe-duse’ or ‘pump jet’ direct diesel injection with the piezo crystal injector technology from the 2.7-litre V6, 3.0-litre V6 and 4.2-litre V8 TDI engines. It is said to deliver power, torque and acceleration to rival a six-cylinder TDI but with four-cylinder fuel economy.

Awesome. Audi scores again. This company is definitely making some of the best cars in the world right now. Tiscali makes an interesting comparison in another article about the A3:

The Audi is licked by the BMW on performance but has the edge on economy and emissions.

Economy and emissions ARE performance! I know, this still is not the common view, but look what happened to Intel when the market shifted to efficiency as a primary measure of CPU performance. AMD walked away with the market and now Intel is soon to be talking about huge layoffs and reorganization (mark my words) to figure out how to figure out where to get their mojo back. They hired a marketing exec as new CEO to help, yet it’s not a failure of marketing that did them in, it was a failure to add a measure of efficiency to their product metrics. Engineers understand this, but the marketing culture did them in. Ironic, no? Raw power without factoring input was the problem, so marketing power differently is not going to help any more than, say, marketing an SUV to people who care about mileage. But I digress…

So sad that the American market is closed to the pumpe-duse. Maybe things will change this October 15th (September 1st for California because they refused to grant an extension to the petroleum companies) when the ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) EPA regulation goes into effect. Rediculous that the US is still adding sulfur when biodiesel does a better job and is less toxic to humans and the environment.

I am not a doctor but even I knew by 1994 (after diesel trucks in Europe nearly killed me with their exhaust) that the cases of respiratory damage (e.g. asthma) in proximity to roads with diesel traffic would decline significantly if the sulfer additive was banned altogether!!!

The EPA has some rather shocking data that supports my personal experience:

The Agency will require a 97 percent reduction in the sulfur content of highway diesel fuel from its current level of 500 parts per million to 15 parts per million.

[…]

Once this action is fully implemented, 2.6 million tons of smog-causing nitrogen oxide emissions will be reduced each year. Soot or particulate matter will be reduced by 110,000 tons a year. An estimated 8,300 premature deaths, 5,500 cases of chronic bronchitis and 17,600 cases of acute bronchitis in children will also be prevented annually. It is also estimated to help avoid more than 360,000 asthma attacks and 386,000 cases of respiratory symptoms in asthmatic children every year. In addition, 1.5 million lost work days, 7,100 hospital visits and 2,400 emergency room visits for asthma will be prevented.

If you dig around in the details you might also find that delay of implementation of the new standard is was allowed by the Bush Administration to help US petroleum and engine companies off-set the cost of moving away from a fuel additive found damaging to human health. There is also the particulate matter issue, but good luck trying to figure out which of the handful of mostly academic studies is worth citing and who was behind them. I personally know of a construction crew that started running biodiesel and their worker sick leave almost completely evaporated.

Strange twist, no? Biodiesel could easily replace sulfur now, just like it has in Europe (e.g. B5 is the standard in France and VW specifically mentions that it does not void their engine warranty) and would be a boon to jobs, especially in rural areas, and health/productivity in urban areas.

Interesting security and economic trade-offs, especially if you try and calculate the cost of externalities to the petroleum industry.

Now, how do I import one of those AMDs, I mean Audis?

Energy

Honda Diesel by 2009

Leave a comment

Reported by USATODAY, Honda is aiming to release a diesel vehicle that meets US Department of Energy Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions standards:

As for the diesel, Honda Vice President Ed Cohen said the timing is right to bring a new breed of quieter, smoother, cleaner engines to the USA. They achieve 30% better mileage than comparable gas engines. Volkswagen and DaimlerChrysler also have made a commitment to diesel in the USA.

Their technology is called the 2.2L i-CTDi and is already said to be more efficient, with more torque and less noise and emissions than gas and even the hybrid engines. Watch a nice Honda introductory video here, and read a comparison of honda engines (from Dec 2004!) here.

Energy

Solstice

Leave a comment

Go bikeBob Lutz is an interesting guy. He takes the reigns of Pontiac and the first thing he does is kill off all the plastic cladding on cars like the Grand Am. I hated that stuff too. Then he puts down the gauntlet and says Pontiac is going to make cool cars again, the kind of vehicles that are no-nonsense affordable and fun; the sort of thing people get excited about actually driving and it is supposed to cost less than $20K. Can you believe it?

Ah, the Solstice. Along with a whole line of interesting models being released under Lutz’s guidance, this car really stands out and says “let’s hit the road!” My only complaint is that it gets a middling 28mpg.

Pacific Coast Highway here we come…

Vroom vroom

And just in case you are the sort of person that likes to put serious cash into your tank, check out the high-performance GXP drifter model. There’s already a tuner forum. Personally, I hope Lutz will put some more emphasis on power-consumption ratio versus power-performance (not likely, given his Viper and Merkur roots), but this is at least a clear indication of how strong leadership can make a brand.

Another good example of this was when Carlos Ghosn of Renault stepped in and revitalized Nissan in 1999. The Z, four-door pickup, and Titan all came out of his amazing rebirth of the company image and product line.

Energy

Replace concrete with petroleum waste?

1 Comment

The Guardian suggests that concrete is to become such a big issue in terms of cost and environmental impact that petroleum waste will seem friendly and cheap by comparison. First you have to consider the problem:

Cement is one of the most environmentally hazardous materials in the world, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the entire weight of the global airline industry. According to the Sustainable Development Commission, 4% of Co2 is caused by aviation. Depending on how conservatively you do the sums, cement-based building materials, including concrete and asphalt, account for between 5% and 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

And then, here is a possible solution, proposed by UKM, a partner of Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant that holds the patent to the proposed material:

When crude oil is “cracked” into its components, the top of the refinement process produces petrol, followed by diesel, light fuel oil and then heavy fuel oil. At the bottom of the barrel lies a “fraction” of blackened waste material. It is hard and sticky and of scant economic worth.

“The standard way of dealing with this low-grade oil is to mix it with light fuel oil to make more heavy fuel oil,” says Robinson [director of UKM], sketching a diagram of the process on a notepad. “It gets burnt off and doesn’t have to be treated as a waste. But that burning causes further CO2 emissions that cause global warming. In our wildest dreams we don’t think we will replace concrete. But in certain applications where concrete isn’t as good, like in heavy industrial roads or in salt water environments, we can replace it. That would in itself be fantastic for the environment.”

Something tells me that even if this is a solution to today’s concrete problems (pun intended), it might introduce far greater problems to resolve tomorrow.

I’m no petroleum waste expert, and thus maybe I’m wrong about the future hazards. I guess if nothing else at least we can see Shell trying to solve some of the same issues as those mentioned by worldchanging.org.