Creative Solutions to Air Quality

But solutions aren’t limited to electric cars. Clean fuels are available for traditional internal combustion engines. It turns more engines can run on ammonia with little modification. (It cuts their range in half.) Ammonia can be easily manufactured from nitrogren in the air via a number of chemical recipies (and energy sources, including coal and solar). It combusts cleanly into nitrogen (a major component of the atmosphere) and water; no dust or global warming gases. The health and storage hazards of ammonia are comparable to storing gasoline. (Keep in mind Earth’s early oceans were made up mostly of ammonia, so this compound has been in the natural environment for a very long time.)

Converting traditional internal combustion engines to run on ammonia is one of many possible alternate fuel conversions that offer an economical way to conserve the world’s investment in internal combustion engines while solving the greenhouse gas and PM2.5 emissions issues.

Since we cannot expect every truck or industrial disel engine to be converted to electricity, flexible fuel technologies are economically very import. (Although Staples is running 100% electric delivery trucks on the streets of Los Angeles, and UPS and even the left-wing hippies at Fox are running hybrid gas-electric truck fleets out here because of the fuel savings). Since it is cheaper to design in support for alternative fuels at the factor, future hybrid truck engines could have an added ammonia sensor that would automatically convert the engine to this (or other clean) alternative fuels, although this will require some incentives from policy makers.

We hear a lot about hybrid fuel cells. As the documentaries Who Killed the Electric Car and it’s sequel Revenge of the Electric Car (watch now) point out, the promise of fuel cells just over the horizon was supposedly used by the automobile industry to lobby the Air Resources Board to drop it’s clean car requirements in the 1990s as unnecessary. (Fuel Cells or hydrogen powered cars may eventually become inexpensive, but there remains the problems of a delivery infrastructure. Electric cars don’t have this problem; you just need an AC outlet. Flex fuel, hybird, and plug-in hybrid cars similarly don’t have this issue, since they can still use traditional infrastructure).  This is pointed out in the documentary, where former GM electric car owners point out that they could easily recharge their electric car, but have no idea where they would get hydrogen fuel. Fuel-cell cars have come under criticism recently by the likes of Tesla-founder Elan Musk, who argue that they are bondoggle and a distraction when viable electric car technology is already here.

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