Future of transportation and the future energy sources

As mankind, we always have a need for transportation. Delivering goods and people, hopefully in better ways than using only our own feet. It doesn't matter if you believe in climate change or not, in the future, we'll have to change our tools of transportation in ways we might not even yet be familiar with. One of the main reasons is that oil is necessary for most fuels and even though we are not currently running out of oil, we'll run out of oil one day.

One common solution is to start using mass transportation instead of private vehicles. Currently we could choose to travel with a bus or a train instead of taking our own car, but I'm not all into this solution. Owning a private vehicle gives you so much freedom compared to being tied only to mass transportation. Mass transportation shouldn't be forced on people, as personally, I appreciate freedom. Not that kind of freedom which should be delivered with bombs, though.

Electric vehicles

We are currently witnessing a great increase in amount of electric vehicles. Tesla is a name known by most of us, Volvo is aiming to start producing only electric (and hybrid) vehicles by 2019, most major car manufacturers are producing their own electric car models.

Even though there are numerous approaches to electric cars, the long term success of electric cars is tied to improvement of battery technology. Long charging times, short driving radius (not that short, though), possible lifetime of the batteries and future lack lithium are possible threats in the electric car market.

Electric cars are at their best when the energy is produced with clean and efficient ways. Solar, wind, nuclear.. these are all good examples of good energy sources to fill up the batteries in your car. Low efficiency and high polluting energy options are no good for anything, while still being better than having an empty battery.

In long term, using lithium batteries will face difficulties when price of lithium (and other needed minerals) is increasing while overall production of lithium batteries is increasing. Electric cars are competing with all other battery operated machines, starting from mobile phones and laptops.

Hydrogen cars

Hydrogen cars are less known and less common, but may have a grand market in the future. Hydrogen can be produced in environmental friendly ways, especially if solar power and such are used, as hydrogen is mostly a way to store the energy.

Now back to the grand future. It is possible, if something miraculous pops up with the hydrogen car technology. Hydrogen is hard to store for long times, hydrogen production is not very efficient and it's flammable. Not ideal for cars, as nobody wants a car which is has an extra threat in accidents. I'm pretty sure all those exploding cars from movies are hydrogen cars.

In best case, hydrogen could be one solution for turning renewable energy into a vehicle fuel, as it wouldn't require huge leaps in the battery technology which electric cars require, but currently hydrogen cars have a worse looking future than electric cars.

Biofuels

Most biofuels can be used in current cars, sometimes requiring small adjustments. So called biodiesel and ethanol can be produced from different kinds of organic waste, giving off less total emissions, but in a larger scale we may see how food is grown to be turned into biodiesel or ethanol, while people are starving.

Ethically produced biodiesel and ethanol can help to reduce environmental impact of transportation, they can currently be more expensive than using only traditional fuels. At least in Finland, cars using high ethanol content fuel (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) is cheaper than traditional gasoline, but driving on ethanol fuel consumes fuel faster and not it isn't suitable in all cars.

As traditional fuel prices go up, biofuels will have their moment to prove themselves, but at worst we'll see high increase in deforestation in aim to increase amount of biofuel production.

Oil produced from air and water with solar energy

This is something I wish to be the future. The basic idea is to produce oil from carbon dioxide in the air and hydrogen from the water. The best part in this solution is that we could use current vehicles with this technology and the oil could be used in everything else oil is used on, not only as a fuel.

The process is still used only on research units, and not in large scale production. The price of oil produced this way is estimated to be higher than the current oil price is, but when technology improves and/or oil price increases, it'll be competitive and in best case, using this kind of oil will be preferred over drilled oil. No more damage done to the environment by oil drilling, only large scale solar plants producing oil.

_{You can read more about this technology in here}

All photos from Pixabay