SeeingEyeBlog

I hope I can afford one of these. I’ll take mine in Thunder Grey. You can hook up your iPod to it too.

It’s powered by a gigantic lithium-ion battery consisting of thousands of cells. The good news is it’s a zero emission vehicle (it doesn’t even have a tailpipe). The bad news is it still relies on electricity off the grid, which uses oil from our enemies.

A pie-chart on the Tesla website displaying U.S. Oil Demand by Sector, shows 63% taken by Transportation, and only 3% by Electricity Generation. But if we start to use battery-powered electrical vehicles, then it will only shift that oil demand from one sector to another, keeping the overall demand more or less the same.

For that reason, I think we should decommission our old oil/coal power plants and open new nuclear plants. By that time, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will be a viable option and will dominate battery-powered vehicles. But for now, I’d love to own a Tesla Roadster.

My family and I go skiing every year in Lake Tahoe, making the trek from Southern California up the 395 highway. On the return trip, we usually make a detour through Death Valley, where many interesting photographic subjects lie. One one of these trips, we visited the old Harmony Borax Works.

Borax mining in the mid- to late-1800s was what started the Death Valley economy, and, having been there, is probably the only reason anyone ever decided to live in Death Valley. Borax was mined on the surface of the valley, but needed to be dissolved in boiling water, and then cooled, in order to purify it. The ambient temperature was so hot in Death Valley that the water wouldn’t cool down enough for the borax to recrystallize. Unable to purify it on site, they hauled the raw borax South, to Mojave. That’s where the image of the 20-mule team comes from.

So how does this relate to the Chrysler Natrium? The Chrysler Natrium was a concept car that used a certain hydrogen fuel cell that carried its hydrogen not in compressed form, but as Sodium Borohydride (NaBH4). (See this article from 2002). A direct borohydride fuel cell takes in a stable white powder and generates electricity, water vapor, and borax (NaBO2). The genius of the system is three-fold:

• First, the hydrogen is stored in a chemically stable compound. All that is necessary to separate the H2 is to dissolve the powder in water. Compare this to a compressed H2 tank which would explode in a crash, not to mention expensive and heavy.
• Second, remember my first paragraph about where Borax is found? Death Valley and the American Southwest in general have some of the largest deposits on the planet. Death Valley is to Borax what the Middle East is to oil. So we become the net providers of this new fuel, and decrease foreign oil dependance (as a percentage of fuel needs).
• Third, unlike other hydrogen systems, the Sodium Borohydride needs no custom infrastructure analagous to gas stations in order to be adopted. Borax is essentially soap–laundry detergent. It’s on the grocery store shelves right now in a slightly modified form. So just add packets of NaBH4 tablets to the inventory of the 7-11 you already buy your gas at. The infrastructure is already done. Better yet, the waste product NaBO2 can be traded in each time you buy a new tablet, so it can be sent back to be reconstituted into NaBH4. Trading in old Borohydride could lower the price of the new fuel powder.

So where did the Chrysler Natrium disappear to? The above linked article proudly announces that Millennium Cell was one of the partners in the venture, but today Millennium Cell is focused on laptop batteries. The Chrysler project was obviously abandoned, but why? My guess is that it system worked a little too well, which made oil companies nervous, which caused a lot of top-level shakedowns at Chrysler in ‘02 after they revealed the Natrium. The automotive/oil ship is too big to tack. For my part, I can’t imagine a better scenario where your tailpipe is spewing water vapor and soap. What other vehicle can be washed with its exhaust?

In light of my previous posts about my own car troubles, I’m wishing for a billionaire like Paul Allen or Steve Jobs to pump some serious capital into developing the system for cars. My motives are not fueled by global warming panic or oil company paranoia, I’m just sick of paying $90 to fill my gas tank every week, and I think the technology is viable and smart given the current international economic situation.