Go Go Green Cars

South Korea has very high aspirations when it comes to being a player in the green car manufacturing space – they intend being one of the top four hybrid/fuel efficient car manufacturers in the world and they are investing billions in this.

Except they may have hit a snag in the fuel cell system they have been preferring to power their view of the future green automobile.

Fuel cells are very efficient at producing mileage – in fact they are about 3 to 4 times more efficient than a regular gas powered car engine – or put this another way, if we all switched to fuel cell powered cars we would drop carbon emissions by 70% overnight. Or in another way – we solve the carbon pollution crisis in one fell swoop.

The problem is that fuel cells use hydrogen as their energy source and this produces ultra low emissions such as water (created by burning the hydrogen with readily available oxygen in the air – H2O) – but where do you get all the hydrogen you are going to need, and we are going to need a lot!

The immediate answer is you get hydrogen from … oil and gas!

Hang on a sec – to power a car cleanly we still have to drill for oil and process it (producing carbon emissions in the process) to get the hydrogen which will then fuel a car that costs me more money to buy?

Why not simply drill the oil, take that and power the regular gas mobile I own and buy now?

The problem is neither approach will work – we are using finite natural resources which will be exhausted and as the supply dwindles, higher and higher gas prices will be the result until the only people who can afford to drive a gas powered car will be the super rich with an antique car collection.

The environment will not wait that long either.

The challenge the South Koreans are now trying to address, along with the rest of the green car R&D world is how to source cheap, clean hydrogen.

Keep It Made In America is a rallying cry being heard across 34 cities as the Alliance for American Manufacturing kicks off a tour across the country promoting Made In America and especially the impact of auto manufacturers going bankrupt.

A staggering 7.2 million paychecks rely on the American car manufacturers alone – more than many countries pay their entire population and the knock on effect on local economies of even small scale lay offs is highly significant. Bowling Green, KY and 200 workers at a local Corvette location are waiting to hear if GM will file for bankruptcy – the effect on the families involved is bad enough but the effect on the local economy of another 200 pay checks not being spent in grocery stores, malls, home improvements and the rest is just another hard nail being driven into smaller, localized economies already struggling with their own issues.

We have to keep positive – Chrysler has already filed for bankruptcy and if GM does, another wave of lay offs are going to happen BUT, and it is a HUGE BUT – perhaps this is what we need to do to get ourselves out of the mess and back on track fast!

The takeover of Chrysler by Fiat will introduce US manufacturers and suppliers to the small car technology that has made Fiat into such a giant around the world with a range of vehicles which are, well to be blunt, very small. Certainly very small compared to the US market!

Small may not suit the US consumer so well, but the technology which produces extremely high gas mileage certainly will and with the economies of scale such a merger is going to produce, prices for greener vehicles will fall (Japan indicates this right now with the new Prius hybrid enjoying 40,000 advance orders for this month alone) and the sooner we get American workers back on the production lines and putting their pay checks back into local economies.