Posted to News on 3rd Apr 2008, 00:00
Measuring the environmental costs of going green...
As I write, the cost of crude oil has just hit $1.14 a barrel. And there's no sign of the price coming back down any time soon. The pundits are predicting a price peak of around $1.50 through the year, and are warning to expect a minimum hovering price of $1.50. Driving up to friends at the weekend, I was struggling to find petrol prices below £1.10 per litre, and those in the know seem to think that we could well be paying £2.00 or more by the end of the year. That's a pretty frightening prospect. So perhaps it's finally time to do the environmentally responsible thing and switch over to a hybrid vehicle. At the very least, I'd be able to get in and out of London without contributing to either the planet's greenhouse gases or the Mayor's coffers.
>But it turns out the case for the alternative power sources is not quite so clear cut after all. Hybrid vehicles rely on battery technology, and although there is the promise of lithium-ion technology on the horizon, the major car manufacturers currently seem to favour of nickel-metal-hydride. But the nickel-metal-hydride batteries could have a major environmental cost. Huge amounts of pollution are generated in the mining and refining of nickel. And when the batteries finally come to the end of their working lives, all that nickel has to go somewhere. The car manufacturers might have committed to collecting and reprocessing that nickel, but what quantities of greenhouse gases might be generated during all that transportation.
>Also, to be efficient, hybrid cars need to be lightweight, and increasingly that is coming to mean construction based on the use of higher levels of exotic metal alloys and - the clincher - plastics. Yes, oil based products; we're back to square one.
>Okay, I thought, let's not panic. There's always the push for biofuels. Already the government is leaning on fuel suppliers to start mixing bio-ethanol into petrol supplies, so that by 2010, 5% of all petrol and diesel will contain biofuels. That must be a step in the right direction. Well, no. Although bio-ethanol is very clean burning fuel, the primary waste product of the fermentation process used to create ethanol is carbon dioxide. Another problem is the massive quantities of crops (and the associated land) that are needed to get even a modest yield of fuel. Using those crops as fuel instead of food is an environmental issue in its own right. There are technologies in development which aim to get the yield up and the CO2 waste down, but the problems are still considerable.
>So, in these days of harmful emissions and high fuel prices, it turns out that trying to do the environmentally responsible thing could actually be doing as much damage as it prevents. Which means that, bizarrely, there really is an environmental cost to going green. Go figure.
Mark Simms, 3 April 2008
