Featured Toyota BEV attitude

I would rather call these synthetic "green" liquid fuels than e-fuels. These start with "green" methanol, which can be used on its own, or upgraded using Fischer–Tropsch (FT) process. Exxon Mobil has a fair amount of intellectual property which is why Porsche is working with them on this part of the process in the Chile pilot plant. Green methanol can be obtained renewably from biogas or biomass including sewage or from electricity water and captured carbon dioxide. Methanol and methanol blends are fairly easy to run as a flex fuel with gasoline, California had a successful experiment in the 1980s, and its even easier with a fuel injected engines. People won't want to convert their old cars though.

Doing FT costs more in equipment and energy. It is cheapest using CO2 from another process (fossil power plants, cement making, steel making), but people want to clean those sources up also so if using it its far from ghg free. Porsche and partners are building this pilot plant to use co2 from the air which is a more expensive process. New Zealand successfully demonstrated synthetic gasoline using the process, but used natural gas to make brown methanol, and the excess co2 from its production to upgrade it to gasoline. I believe the truly green Chilean synthetic gasoline will cost about $20/gallon, but they will work on reducing costs.
Motunui Synthetic Fuels Plant | Engineering New Zealand

I can see stations having one pump for synthetic gasoline, or greener blends, and others for green or brown methanol. Synthetic green gasoline will cost a lot more than green methanol on a gge basis.

I really can't tell from this that toyota is ahead of hyundai in terms of efficient engine technology.
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That F1 mercedes engine gets 50% efficiency. The only way to significantly improve upon the Atkinson tech is turbo charging, electric super charging, or a combination of both as is used in mercedes. Hopefully this tech will trickle down to inexpensive cars, but its a lot cheaper to do an Atkinson like that used by toyota. A key benefit with that dual force toyota technology and similar is that with proper injectors they could run even more efficiently with methanol than gasoline.

 

CARB purview isn't to address just global warming. Their main goal is to improve California air quality. Fossil free fuels address the first, but not the second. Smog events are much rarer in the L.A. basin than in the past, but they aren't gone. No matter what fuel the engine burns, the car will emit some pollution into the local environment. The local conditions CARB works with can concentrate those emissions to unhealthy levels. Zero tail pipe emission vehicles are the only long term solution.

That statement is a bit simplistic. Toyota's 2L Dual Force engine is 40% thermally efficient, and the hybrid version is 41% efficient. The Atkinsonize cycle plays a part, but being Atkinson all the time doesn't net a big improvement. Besides, Mazda sold an Atkinson cycle engine before hybrids were available, and they didn't see major efficiency improvements until their SkyActiv suite.

The Dual Force engines efficiency comes from direct injection, which allows higher compression ratios, and wide range variable valve timing. Which is what the SkyActiv-g uses. Mazda greatly improved their cars' fuel economy with that suite. Vehicle efficiency doesn't equal engine efficiency though. It has a big role, but Mazda also had new transmissions and cut vehicle weight with the suite. Then, at least in the US, Mazda has a different customer base than Toyota; one more concerned with performance than fuel economy. This Team Japan seems to be looking mostly at promoting combustion engines.

Couldn't find a thermal efficiency figure for the SkyActiv-G, but the X is estimated to be 44%.
https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/energies/energies-11-03002/article_deploy/energies-11-03002-v2.pdf (opens a pdf)
HCCI might be a project for this team. They are also looking diesels, going by the report.

I've seen e-fuels used elsewhere as a way to distinguish them from biofuels. Which mainly compete with food crops, or have large environmental costs in deforestation, at this time. Honestly, I was using it here for typing ease.

The plant in Chile is going to start with electrolyzing water. Production cost wise it would be cheaper to stop with hydrogen. There is just the huge cost of the infrastructure for it, before it gets to a vehicle, which has its own added costs. It terms of production and infrastructure costs, green methane might be the cheapest. Just need to convince the public to change for it.

I never expect synthetic gasoline to be accepted immediately. Need to start with low percentage blends first. As the fleet shifts to more plug ins, that percentage can be increased.

I don't have an issue with going with methanol over gasoline. The energy density difference has implications for PHEV extended ranges, but there is an immediate concern. Cars now on the road likely couldn't use it. Considering the time delay before methanol compatible cars get to dealers, there will be some still being used for years.

I know petroleum pipelines need a major overhaul to work with ethanol. Is the same true with methanol?

 

Dismissal of relevance is exactly how mistakes get repeated.

 

All this has to bring the price to the consumer to an attractive point. When a Model Y is twice as much as a Rav4 base model and is promised only after maybe 4 times as long a wait...we aren't getting there. Gotta get to a 10% premium.

 

In combustion engines, synthetic green fuels still result in the emission of NOx, HC's, and CO. They can be reduced, but not negated. In some places, the reduction isn't enough, when the population is increasing.

Besides, CARB isn't supporting just a single technology. FCEVs meet their zero tail pipe emission goal. CARB is probably one of hydrogen's biggest boosters outside of Japan.

 

Atkinsonized play a very big role, it delivers great BSFC in a very wide area of the torque-rpm graphic, while the Otto "peak" of BSFC is in a very narrow/island area. I reckon the battery and the eCVT also helps a lot, but the numbers are here:

Corolla 1.8HSD - 5,1l/100km (46MPG)
Consumption: Toyota - Corolla Hybrid - Spritmonitor.de
Corolla 1.8 gasoline (USA) - 32MPG - 7,3l/100km
Toyota Corolla MPG - Actual MPG from 4,495 Toyota Corolla owners (fuelly.com)

 

It is insanely expensive to provide hydrogen infrastructure to transport, compress dispense from areas of cheap renewable energy to markets where it will be used. The public does not seem to be interested in hydrogen even with governments subsidizing vehicles and giving away free fuel. Very little of the hydrogen used for transport fuel is green at all. Japan is currently making it from Australian coal and saudi natural gas and sequestering some of the carbon dioxide from production while not accounting for the ghg in coal mining or natural gas production and distribution. How much does it cost to convert that natural gas in saudi to ammonia, sequester some of the ghg, ship it to japan, and then convert it to hydrogen and nitrogen. There is nothing cheap about hydrogen except for in very limited geographic regions. Methanol fuel cell cars could use on board reformers or methanol fuel cells. This would likely be cheaper than 10,000 psi hydrogen. Cars would be more desirable.

Rav4 prime has a 14.5 gallon tank and 600 miles of range. Its not much of an engineering problem to give it a 19 gallon flex fuel tank tank and 400 miles of range on methanol, and higher on methanol blends and the ability to use gasoline where there is not methanol infrastructure. M50 could have 1/3 of the energy coming from green methanol and would require 30% more fuel than E10. If E10 is $3/gallon, and "green methanol" $10/gge, M50 would cost about $5.20/gge (1.3 gallons) without any subsidies. China is making it work with brown and black methanol, last year 8% of their fuel was methanol. The flexible fuel standard that would make this possible in the US is actively lobbied against by the hydrogen and ethanol lobbies. It will take less time to get to higher levels of low carbon fuel than trying to go bev and fuel cell alone. It will take time. Brown methanol produces less ghg than gasoline.

45% of pipelines in the US were built before the 1980s. They need major overhauls. If you think in terms of doing it over a decade and it is not that bad. On newer pipelines anticorrosive agents can be added to the methanol and these extracted at the storage facilities or left in. Anyway you cut it transitioning will take money. Methanol in hybrids and phevs can be part of the solution to sustainability. "green" methanol is will be less expensive than "green" hydrogen but we should not fool ourselves, either fuel will likely be made with fossil fuels in most countries for decades.

 

Does Kawasaki or Yamaha have a hybrid motorcycle?

The partnership is about synthetic fuels and making better engines. Not transmissions, hybrid systems, or entire vehicles. Just engines. Which is why I was quoting the thermal efficiency; it is just a measure of the engine alone. The full Atkinson Dual Force engine thermal efficiency is just 1% higher than the engine for non-hybrids. Swapping these engines between the models will result in different performance in the cars, but likely very little difference in fuel economy; the ratings may not even change.

The 2016 and 2022 Camry both use a 2.5L 4 cylinder engine. The one in the 2022 makes 25 more horsepower, and the car is rated 32mpg combined to the 2016's 28mpg. The 2022 has a wider range of variable valve timing, but it doesn't reach full Atkinson cycle. The improvement is mostly from the use of direct injection. Using it results in power and efficiency gains across engine manufacturers. Putting the hybrid engine into the non-hybrid Camry would result in better fuel economy, but the decrease in power may make it unsellable.

This Team is about keeping combustion engines viable in the future. Hybrids will become a bigger part of the fleet, but full hybrids may not be technically or economically viable for all roles represented by the team members. Could a kei car sell with the cost of HSD added to it? Just between Mazda and Toyota, there is a lot of know how to make more efficient engines. They are likely looking to HCCI for gasoline. But that won't help save the engine without a carbon neutral fuel. Which is why the first announced engine project for the team is a 1.5L SkyActiv diesel designed for biodiesel.

That is my point. Synthetic gasoline costs more to make, but production costs are just one part of the equation. A cheap to make fuel isn't a solution if we need to completely replace infrastructure and vehicles before it can be used.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was thinking PHEVs with EV ranges over 50 miles, and closer to 100. A hypothetical short range BEV with range extender.

Methanol has less than half the energy of gasoline by volume. An engine designed for it should be more efficient though. So M100 would likely mean have the tank range compared to gasoline. Larger tanks may be easy to have on the car. Then perhaps the public would accept shorter ranges by the time M100 fuel and PHEV100's are available. Could also do blends with ethanol for increased energy density

45% of pipelines in the US were built before the 1980s. They need major overhauls. If you think in terms of doing it over a decade and it is not that bad. On newer pipelines anticorrosive agents can be added to the methanol and these extracted at the storage facilities or left in. Anyway you cut it transitioning will take money. Methanol in hybrids and phevs can be part of the solution to sustainability. "green" methanol is will be less expensive than "green" hydrogen but we should not fool ourselves, either fuel will likely be made with fossil fuels in most countries for decades.[/QUOTE]Long term, methanol sounds like the best solution. Short term issue is compatibly of the current fleet, which can be around for over a decade.

When it comes to amount of work done per unit of carbon released into the air, plug ins seem to still have the advantage.

Forgot to add that CARB has a technology neutral approach to reducing carbon emissions in the form of higher MPG standards. Where did Toyota stand on those?

Virtually all the places talking about an ICE ban such measures in place. Seems the car industry always fights against increases to reduce fossil fuel use. Well, we might be at the point where just reducing the emissions is enough.

Hybrids help, but it looks like Toyota mostly used them to keep selling their gas guzzlers. Did they really have to wait for a model's redesign to offer more efficient technologies? In the US, Toyota is one of the last car companies to offer more efficient engines and transmissions. Years after the competition released those technologies on the market.

Most of Toyota's carbon free effort went into hydrogen FCEVs. A solution with a real high price tag to be implemented. Unsurprisingly, they haven't panned out. Now countries are starting to wake up to the fact that fighting global warming now will require drastic steps. The threat of ICE bans has gotten Toyota talking about synthetic fuels only recently. And the OP here has them using a small part of the global market, some areas of which get cars second hand, as a rationalization to keep major investment into engines.

 

HAS... that is now, lesson learned from the mistake of the past... which you keep evading.

 

Perhaps you should plainly state what the past mistake was.

 

Like you pointed out, CARB looks to the zero emission goal, without considering the cost to society / expensive tech only repairable at a dealership. The hydrogen Lobby and CARB pander to each other. Their relationship resulted in a handful of cars that can't drive out of the one state that the hydrogen Lobby ran roughshod over. The hydrogen lobby as John says, knows their audience. It's CARB - not the much less expensive / more practical EV's. Not perfect, not for everyone, just a better choice between the two.

 

The ZEV program; which I assume is the current one being alluded too, and not the EV1 era one; and attending subsidies, also does encourage BEV adoption. In the beginning, it also helped plain old, non-plug-in hybrid sales. Hydrogen ICE cars even had the same standing as PHEVs under it, and hydrogen would fall under that carbon neutral fuel umbrella. Yes, it mostly comes from natural gas, but most synthetic fuels will start out coming from a fossil fuel or have to be blended with one in the beginning.

Heck, there is a chain of diesel stations in California that sells 100% second generation biodiesel. It probably happened there because of CARB. I'm pretty sure all the gasoline sold there is E10, at least. Those two fuels have their issues, but besides hydrogen, what other potential carbon neutral fuel was available. The world's first synthetic gasoline plant is just being built now. California experimented with methanol blends, but that got squashed because of politics, with the hydrogen lobby doing part of the squashing.

We've waited too long to face global warming. Now that it seems that a drastic action is needed, Toyota and allies now start making public noise about hydrogen engine cars and synthetic fuels. Hydrogen refueling infrastructure has been slow because of the higher than predicted costs. Synthetic fuels might be decades away from production levels that actually have an impact. I like the idea of green synthetics, but don't see them having a big presence in the car and truck market until there is already a majority of plug ins on the road.

Toyota bet fuel cells and hybrids. The latter has a role to play in reducing emissions, yet Toyota had to be pushed into offering a PHEV that customers wanted by the appearance of multiple aftermarket PHEV conversion companies. Even then, the PiP wasn't the big step above such conversions it should have been. Its specs should have been closer to that of the Prius Prime's. Which, while a great PHEV, isn't far removed from others' first PHEVs. It also sounds like Toyota Japan would have given us a shorter range Prime if not for the intervention of Toyota USA.

 

The 2 versions of the dynamic force engine have 13:1 and 14:1 expansion ratios. The 13:1 "Otto" version runs most of the time in Atkinson model this is the same expansion ratio and peak efficiency (40%) as the gen IV prius . DI does not work well with very late intake valve closing as it doesn't have time to inject and mix the charge, using Port injection also allows it to work well here. DI allows the engines to produce more power per unit volume, and increases the efficient range of the engine. The bulk of the difference is HSD, not that these new engines can't get into atkinson mode.

Yes using real numbers is important to understanding and perhaps there will be breakthroughs on the costs of MTG to make it more competitive. Still i would expect investments would need payoff in 20 years, as flex fuel using methanol will probably make more sense then.

There are around 20M flex fuel vehicles in the US, these can use M50 as is, most new cars could use M15 instead of E10. California put in methanol infrastructure in the 1980s, this was not ripped out, and can be maintained to be used. When thinking about investments in infrastructure for methanol 40 years is a reasonable time period. These better storage facilities and pipelines can be used for other liquid fuels if it doesn't happen, so they will not be stranded unless a country goes all electric and hydrogen. It is very likely in the next 20 years methanol blends will be less expensive than gasoline. Cost per likely gallon over that time frame is quite low. Methanol can also be used in range extended fuel cell phevs, if they have a reformer, or fuel cells that can directly use methanol.

China and europe and doing major biomethanol projects, that are not zero but much lower land use and ghg impact than bioethanol.

I could see a Texas and California experiment. Neither state really like ethanol. One interesting idea for a plant is using a combination of switch grass and wind electricity to produce methanol. switchgrass grows much better than corn in texas, and it is a native plant, and the state will be building excess wind in the winter, so there is enough in the summer. Many people would pay a little more per gge for M15 with higher octane than E10, and california could tax M50 less than E10 which would get all the flex fuel drivers their buying the lower priced lower ghg fuel.

China is already 8% methanol for transportation fuel. Europe may get there soon. It is past time to get the US regulations to mandate flex fuel so transition is easier in the future.