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Welcome to the ICE age

When the first electric cars started quietly and conveniently moving people from A to B about 130 years ago, who would have imagined that in 2018 we would be grappling with the challenge of having to find an alternative? Generations have become accustomed to driving battery electric vehicles (BEV) but today, as we run out of lithium, we are on the cusp of a dramatic transition with more and more people opting for cars powered by internal combustion engines (ICE).

In this article, I find out from the experts the real facts behind shifting from the AMPage – the era of BEV - to the ICEage – the advent of the internal combustion engine. What does this mean for us as consumers, for society, and for our planet?

Consumer acceptance To understand what the coming ICEage means for consumers, I spoke to Bob Thomson, the smartly-dressed and avuncular Director of Marketing for Anderson-Morrison Motors NZ .

“I have real concerns about consumer acceptance of ICE-age cars,” explains Bob in his office at the Moorhouse Avenue dealership of the global automative giant Anderson & Morrison Motors. “Are people going to want the smell and inconvenience of refuelling with volatile and potentially carcinogenic liquid fuel? We’re told the risk when refuelling is very low but still it’s a concern many people have.”

Bob goes on, “But it gets worse. I had a customer in the showroom last week and she wasn’t the first to ask me about the combustion gases from ICEage cars. I explained that it’s mostly harmless nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide. After all, nitrogen already makes up 78% of the air around us, we all exhale carbon dioxide, and we’re made up of more than 50% water already. But she’d done her homework and she asked me about carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, hydrocarbons and particulates.”

Bob sighs, shifts in his seat uncomfortably and glances out of the window. “She’d read that these could be bad for your health and asked me where the gases were expelled from the car. ‘It’s fine’, I said, ‘they escape from a pipe at the back of the vehicle so you don’t breathe them in’. ‘What about the people in the car behind you?’ she asked.”

As our brief interview wraps up, Bob explains that after safety concerns, the next issue for customers considering buying an ICEage car is often the vibration. “As a manufacturer, AMM has put a lot of work into dampening the noise and shaking from the explosions and reciprocating metal parts that are an unavoidable part of this new technology. I’m sure that as ICEage cars become more common place people will get used to the unexpected noise at start-up and the cars will get quieter. For instance, in some of the premium models coming onto the market it’s still going to be possible to take a hands-free call while driving – just like you do today in your BEV. The sound proofing technology will trickle down to more budget models in time.”

As I left Bob he was taking a call from the dealership insurers, anxious to discuss the risk to customers and staff of carbon monoxide poisoning in the showroom.

Impact on your wallet To get a different take on the possible implications of consumers moving away from the conventional BEV fleet, I caught up with Sophie Matthews, Professor of Economics at Christchurch University in Canterbury. Sophie explains, “Like most working kiwi families, we budget for the big expense in owning an BEV: battery replacement. Battery degradation is now so well-understood and predictable that most households can budget for replacement years in advance. But we expect to see much more spent on unplanned maintenance of ICEage cars along with a much higher turnover of ICEage car ownership as reliability concerns kick-in once the warranty expires. Overall, our projections suggest that car ownership costs will climb steeply and, for some, this will cause real financial hardship.”

Another potential kicker for consumers is the degradation in efficiency of internal combustion engines over time. “Most new ICEage cars are guaranteed for up to 100,000km but there’s no escaping the fact that from the moment you drive off the car yard the efficiency and performance starts to decline. Today, consumers can easily follow the degradation of their BEV battery by just looking at the dashboard. But it’s much harder to measure efficiency loss in ICEage cars without the expense and complexity of a rolling road test rig. It’s like the boiling frog,” says Sophie, “if you heat the water slowly, the frog doesn’t notice and jump out. With ICEage cars, consumers will be buying more and more fuel and releasing more and more emissions just to travel the same distance but they probably won’t notice.”

Community considerations Sophie, who grew up in central Otago, has been modelling the likely economic impact of the ICEage on rural communities around New Zealand. “There will be winners and losers,” she explains. “Many small towns and settlements in New Zealand have grown up around their BEV charging points. In the early days of BEV, the relatively limited range meant that travellers had to stop and charge up quite frequently. That’s why we have the amazing network of awesome cafes and eateries distributed so evenly around our countryside that we enjoy today. People can - and do - stop just about anywhere to charge up their car and grab a coffee or lunch.”

Sophie’s research assistant hands us both a flat white before Sophie continues. “What many people haven’t realised yet is that you need a heck of a lot more capital to build a refuelling station for an ICEage car – large bunded tanks, pumps, safety gear. Most small communities won’t be able to afford one. Combine that with the fact that ICEage cars will have a longer range from the outset, and it seems highly likely that refuelling points will only be installed in areas of relatively high population density. Given the capital required, I think we’ll see a lot of ICEage refuelling points owned by the multi-national corporations that control the rest of the fuel supply chain and it’s hard to see how small businesses and communities won’t lose out. They’ll be bypassed in economic terms if not in terms of the environmental impacts of ICEage cars.”

Geopolitics in the ICEage We’re joined in Sophie’s sunny office by her colleague Tim Daniels, Professor of Geopolitics, and Jessie, his guide dog. Jessie settles quietly next to Tim as we exchange pleasantries about the weather and the state of the All Blacks squad. “ICEage cars are going to impact massively on global politics,” says Tim. “As the fleet of ICEage cars expands we’ll see exponential growth in demand for petroleum products derived from refining crude oil to fuel and lubricate them. Global reserves of crude oil are concentrated in some of the world’s most politically unstable regions such as the Middle East. Instead of having a transport system based on distributed energy generation, we’re going to become increasingly dependent on a small number of states that can supply global demand. We will see colossal shifts in the distribution of wealth and power.”

Grid anxiety Around the developed world, electricity generation and distribution has evolved in step with BEV. We take for granted the resilience that comes from a power grid that can draw from BEV batteries at times of peak demand and top them up again overnight when demand is lower. I talked to Gridworks Chief Operating Officer Juliet Mackenzie to find out more about the implications of our transport fleet shifting to ICEage vehicles.

With a high speed delivery Juliet explains, “Electricity demand is very spikey through the day and through the year. For decades now the electricity supply companies have offered consumers attractive deals to sell ‘surplus’ charge from EVs back in to the grid for example in the early evening after returning from work. Other people minimise their exposure to peak rate charges by drawing on spare charge in their BEV battery. Either way, we’ve become extremely adept at utilising the megawatts of distributed power sitting in BEV around the country to help smooth out the spikes.”

Juliet pauses and leads me across her office to a map of New Zealand’s proposed grid upgrade. “It may seem counterintuitive that the shift from BEV to ICEage cars is going to put more strain on the grid but that is the case,” says Juliet. “Although total annual demand for electricity will diminish, we’re going to have to invest in generation capacity and distribution infrastructure to manage the spikes. That means more power stations, more pylons and ultimately a less stable grid than we’ve enjoyed in the past. And to make matters worse, to reliably provide power for the spikes we’ll need generation capacity that is independent of weather and can come online rapidly. That means gas-fired power stations.”

The new energy distribution paradigm Over decades we’ve grown used to access to the power for our vehicles being distributed via the electricity grid to charging points at our shops, community centres, cafes and even our homes. With the advent of the ICEage, liquid petroleum products will become a much more siginficant part of the overall energy mix in New Zealand. To find out what this will mean in practice I headed to Hagley Park one frosty Christchurch morning to meet up with Brent Smith, the owner of a new petroleum start-up called Scottish Petrol and a keen early morning jogger. Brent was visiting New Zealand from his base in Inverness, where he has been raising capital for a new type of offshore installation for drilling for crude oil.

“Right now we’re in a wee bit of a chicken-and-egg situation,” says Brent. “No-one wants to invest in drilling technology until the refineries to process the crude oil are in place. The refineries won’t start springing up until the international super-tanker fleet – needed to shift crude from the oil fields to the refineries - has grown. Aye and once that’s all in place, we’ll need to see investment in the retail distribution network. Globally there are one or two countries looking at reticulated systems for distributing refined fuel but in most cases there’ll need to be fleets of road tankers. This is great for the emerging petroleum sector as these vehicles in themselves will create demand for fuel. It’s exciting times laddie.”

With that, Brent promptly stands up, shakes my hand and continues his morning jog around the park.

Climate change Much has been said about the potential impact of the arrival of the internal combustion engine on the planet. We know from use of jet-powered ships and aircraft that the gases produced from burning liquid fossil fuels can lead to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. To find out the latest on this hot topic, I tracked down Dr Richard West in his laboratory at the New Zealand Insitute for Climate Science in Wellington.

Richard has been studying climate change for 30 years and has no doubt that burning fossil fuels is a major contributing factor. “We’ve been modelling climate change for decades now and have seen the effect of using fossil fuels in jet-engined planes and boats. If Joseph Etienne Lenoir and Nikolaus Otto had come up with the internal combustion engine before the likes of Robert Anderson and William Morrison got busy making BEV, we might all have been driving ICEage cars for the past 100 years. Thankfully that’s not the case or we’d have gigatonnes more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we already do today.”

Given that the world is running out of lithium, what alternatives are there except flipping the fleet to ICE? Richard explains, “People won’t give up their cars so we’re going to have to take this epic gamble that massively increasing use of fossil fuels isn’t going to have the impact that all our climate models say it will.”

Sadly, the impact of this seismic shift in our transport system won’t only effect the global climate system. At a local level, the air that we breathe will diminish in quality with a range of noxious gases and particulates likely to accumulate especially in urban areas. Rachel Goldstein – mother of lively 3 year old twins Erin and Alexi - lives in California, where state incentives for saving lithium by shifting to ICEage cars have been in place now for several years. I caught up with her by phone. “As more and more of my neighbours have ditched their BEV for ICEage cars the place has gotten way more noisy and polluted. From 5am every morning you can hear engines firing up and some days the smog by midday is unbearable.” Rachel tears-up as she goes on, “I don’t want my kids growing up with all these exhaust gases around them but what can you do? The authorities tell us the risks are small but I want to know why we can’t just find some more lithium and hang on to our BEV?”

Other environmental impacts “We’re going to have to dramatically increase exploration for oil deposits if we stand any chance of keeping up with projected demand for petrol.” I’m talking to Mandy Pringle, policy manager at Environment Wellington – a not-for-profit environmental charity. Sipping lattes on the waterfront on a chilly but unusually still Wellington morning, with the sun glinting off Lambton Harbour, it’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the the risks Mandy sees in ICEage cars.

She goes on, “That’s going to mean drilling in increasingly hazardous and environmentally fragile areas. A bit of a double-whammy as the risk of leaks and spills will increase in areas that are particularly poorly placed to cope with them. We’ll see new oil tanker routes opening up through sensitive areas and new coastal oil refineries along with a distribution network that serves a rapidly expanding retail market for fossil fuels. These all pose oil spill risks and we know how deterimental they are to the environment.”

Mandy takes another sip of her latte and adds, “And brake dust. I’m really worried about brake dust. You see, regenerative braking in BEV captures some of the ‘waste’ energy from decelerating and uses it to recharge the battery a bit. This results in less wear on the brakes. ICEage cars don’t do that. Instead, they rely mainly on friction between the brake linings and a rotors and turn the kinetic energy into heat. In the process, the linings and rotors wear down. The dust from worn brake linings can accumulate on the road network until you get a rain event and then it’s washed into the storm water system. Growing evidence points to the harm that the copper often used in brake linings can do to aquatic life. And then there’s the risk of oil leaking from the lubrication system of the ICEage cars and the question of what you do with the waste oil when it’s changed as part of routine servicing.”

Early adopter? To get a first hand experience of this new technology I rented an ICEage car for a week and tried to use it just as I use my BEV. Living in Canterbury and it being winter, the first thing I noticed was not being able to pre-warm the car in the garage. On a couple of particularly frigid mornings I was tempted to ignore the large sticker on the dashboard warning me of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the end, I just shifted the car out of the garage and let it run on the drive to warm up for a bit.

A must for any ICEage early adopter, I downloaded the PumpIt app so I knew exactly where I could buy petrol. At present there aren’t many filling stations and they’re mostly located on gloomy industrial estates because no-one really wants to live next to a large tank of explosive liquid with cars coming and going 24 hours a day. Compared to plugging in at home it seemed a bit inconvenient having to go out of my way to fill up but the pumps looked very much like a fast charging station. One important difference is that the fuel will flow out regardless of whether the nozzle is ‘plugged in’. I think that, along with the flammability, is why you need to be over 16 years old to refuel.

When I handed the car back at the end of the week and drove away in my BEV I became aware of an annoying interior rattle that I hadn’t heard before. I was reflecting that I wouldn’t be able to hear it in an ICEage vehicle thanks to all the other noise going on when I realised it was the keys for the loan car – I’d forgotten to drop them off. I turned the BEV around, handed over the keys and said to the man behind the rental counter, “When they can make them as convenient and easy to use as an BEV I might consider buying one.”

Afterthought The following sunny Sunday afternoon, accompanied by the quiet hum of my battery-powered lawn mower, I began to wonder whether internal combustion engines would one day be miniaturised and find their way into garden tools like mowers, hedge trimmers and weed eaters. But as my wife pointed out, it seems highly improbable that anyone – least of all the neighbours – would tolerate the noise pollution.

#electric vehicles #electric cars

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