Up around the bend

While we ponder perpetual motion …

The long quest to promote environmentally friendly “alternative fuels” for our cars and trucks (and buses) has been stymied for various reasons over the past 50 years. The grand strategy started with fleet vehicles, to create the demand necessary to achieve economies of scale and bring costs down.

Homo faber—Man the Toolmaker— has tried a bunch of things over the decades that haven’t worked out (yet), but it appears mankind is finally beginning to learn from those failures. Turns out humans are educable after all.

Starting in the

1970s, electric vehicle advocates kept promising the next big breakthrough was

“just around the corner.” We waited. And waited. But automakers couldn’t break the

50-mile range barrier.

In the 1980s, ethanol made gains, but that was about farm, not energy, policy. Ethanol propped up the price of corn, and it was easy to simply blend it into gasoline. But as a stand-alone fuel, it had dubious environmental benefits. Further, a liquid gallon of ethanol takes a vehicle about 70 percent as far as a liquid gallon of gasoline.

Along came compressed natural gas (CNG) in the 1990s. CNG provided better environmental and potential economic benefits. The higher vehicle cost could be offset by lower fuel cost, but only if enough miles were traveled and enough fuel was burned. In the early 2000s, when shale gas flooded the market, dropping prices, the argument got stronger.

However, compressing enough natural gas into a tank to give the vehicle appreciable range takes a big tank and therefore a big vehicle. It did, and still does, work for fleets that return to refuel at central locations.

And let’s not forget hydrogen. We’ll just say it’s the fuel of the future and always will be, if you know what we mean.

But today is the present. (You’ll notice our grasp of time.) The market finally picked a winner, and the chicken dinner goes to electric vehicles. However, if EVs are the direction we want to go, incentives for both vehicles and infrastructure are necessary.

According to the paper, over the next five years $54.1 million from the federally funded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program is available to build charging stations every 50 miles along Arkansas interstates. This will make it possible for everyday Arkansans to travel from one corner of the state to the other without fear of being stranded.

And Ozark Regional Transit is killing two birds with one stone by pursuing an $18 million project that will provide recharging for its fleet in the future while making it available to consumers today.

The state is kicking in an additional $1 million to provide rebates to install charging stations in urban areas, but not at taxpayer expense. Funds for the effort come courtesy of Volkswagen, who got caught fudging its emissions numbers.

Today, the three-legged stool of vehicle availability, infrastructure development and demand is being driven not by fleet demand (although that’s helping), but by consumers.

The destination is still a ways off, but the corner has been turned.