Zero Pollution Motors Bringing the Air Car to the US - But How Does It Work?

ZPM Air Car

Compressed air engines aren’t new, they’ve been around since the 1920s, but they’re just now getting the mainstream notice that will allow them to flourish.

Back in Feburary, Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) announced that they’d be offering their compressed-air engine Air Car in the United States starting in 2010. They’ve been pushing back the date for when they’d start accepting orders for the car, and it’s finally settled at “Mid-2009″.

All this talk about the Air Car, but how the hell does it work?

The air car is actually surprisingly simple. Instead of mini explosions forcing the pistons up and down like in a traditional internal combustion engine, the Air Car just uses the compressed air in it’s tank to power the pistons. That’s it, mostly. Compressed air only powers the engine up to 35 miles per hour. Anything over that, and the car burns a small amount of fuel to heat the incoming air which expands the volume of the air and so, increases the power.

According to ZPM, 1 tank of air + 8 gallons of gas = 848 mile range. Pretty impressive.

Of course power is reduced compared to an internal combustion engine, that’s why the car needs to be much lighter than most of the cars on the road now. The engine and almost the entire car is built from aluminum or other lightweight materials. ZPM’s Air Car weighs only 1874 pounds.

The carbon fiber tank in the air car can hold roughly 3200 cubic feet of compressed at 4500 psi. Carbon fiber is used because, while it’s extremely strong, it’s more likely to split apart instead of explode if punctured.

The beauty is that the infrastructure for air cars is easy to set up, unlike hydrogen or natural gas. Gas stations would just need to install an air compressor or two and the appropriate nozzle to fill it. The ZPM Air Car also has an on-board compressor that can be plugged in to your home outlet and refill the air tank in about 4 hours.

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4,000 Gallons of Gas Stolen In Wisconsin, Citgo Customers Suspected

According to WauwatosaNOW, a local news website for Wauwatosa, WI, the district manager of Open Pantry Citgo in Wauwatosa has reported that he is missing approximately 4,090 gallons - $19,374 worth - of gas. Ruling out a technical discrepancy, the fuel supply company responsible for delivering gas to Open Pantry Citgo apparently checked and re-checked their wiring and readout systems, finding them in perfect working order. The fuel was apparently stolen over an estimated 6 week period, from July 16 to August 13, indicating the likelihood of several, smaller transactions as opposed to one large heist. Unable to produce any other rational explanation, the local Citgo’s district manager suspects that customers were the culprits, someone devising a way to force more fuel from the pumps then should have been allotted. In related news, the majority of Wauwatosa residents apparently hold advanced degrees in mechanical engineering.

Original Story At: WauwatosaNOW.com

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The Real Price of Oil: Dollars, Gold, and the Price of Tea in China

Oil, it’s the lifeblood of our society. It’s given us the freedom and wealth we have today. It’s given us automobiles and machinery and greased the wheels of the industrial revolution. It made old Jed a millionaire. But oil’s in trouble, the price is up and everyone thinks they understand it. But what if the price of oil wasn’t really up? What if it were just an illusion?

“The price of oil is skyrocketing, and that means gas prices are up…”
That’s about the limit of what most Americans know and understand about the whole oil situation. But there are more complex issues at work, and they involve more than just Middle East politics and China.

The American Geological Institute (AGI) recently released a report looking at the price of crude oil in relation to the U.S. dollar and the price per ounce of gold. It highlights a fact that probably makes some folks at the Federal Reserve very nervous.

This graph makes it easier to understand:

The bottom purple line is the price of a barrel of crude oil per ounce of gold (if you wanted to use gold to pay for a barrel of oil). As you can see, that line is stable, and has been for the entirety of the graph, which is about 7 years.
The top two lines are the price of oil in relation to currency (blue is the Dollar and the red is the Euro). Those lines show that the cost of oil has been going up in relation to currency only. What this chart makes obvious is that the value of oil has not been increasing in real terms, currency has just been decreasing in value.

To put it another way, if the US Dollar were still based on gold (as it was until Nixon eliminated the Bretton Woods system in 1971), then the price of oil would be just as stable as that purple line in the chart is.

So oil is worth the same, and the US dollar is just worth less. Maybe we need to shift our focus away from war and drilling; and towards a better economic policy at home.

Here is the AGI data report

And here’s the summary from the AGI report:

The steep increase in the price of crude oil in the United States remains a headline issue, along with the falling US dollar. The drop in the dollar has caused concern in oil-producing countries which use it as the economic basis for the commodity, and often their currency. The chart below shows the spot market price of crude oil per barrel (BBL) in US dollars and in euros from 2001 to today. The price of oil has grown faster relative to the dollar than to the euro. Yet, a portion of the rise in oil prices is due to the fall of the value of the dollar. The graph also shows the number of barrels of crude oil per cost of an ounce of gold, demonstrating the parallel growth in commodity pricing.
If the US dollar had remained strong in the global economy, oil might, in theory, be around $65 per barrel. However, oil is priced in dollars, and oil prices continue to rise. The impact of increased oil prices can not be ignored in the US economy, and, in turn, can further weaken the dollar. Resource economics is a complex feedback loop where today’s resource boom is driven by many external factors. This complex system bears watching by all geoscientists.

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