The Price Of Fuel In China
Participants at Shanghai's Challenge Bibendum take a close look at ways to develop cleaner, more efficient, safer transportation.
Oliver B.Patton
Washington Editor
SHANGHAI - This city of 16 million appears to be an unlikely place for cutting-edge automotive technology. Traffic flows through its streets like a riptide. Buses, trucks, vans, cars, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians vie for territory according to the law of survival: Hold your ground and don't flinch.
A family on a bicycle - father pedaling, mother sidesaddle behind him, nursing an infant - threads the highway hazards with no more apparent concern than you'd have turning on your windshield wipers. Fumes from engines that are a couple of generations away from modern emissions controls sting your eyes and clutch at your lungs.
There's tremendous vitality in all this motion, reflecting China's hustle and remarkable economic growth. But there is little evidence of niceties that are taken for granted in the West, such as right-of-way, safety technology and restrictions on engine emissions.
Like practically everything else in China, though, that is changing.
Since it started its shift from central planning to market economics in 1978, China has more than quadrupled its gross domestic product. It is now the world's sixth-largest economy and is third in international trade activity. It is the largest automotive market in the world and the third-largest car producer. It recently passed Japan to become the world's second-largest petroleum consumer, an appetite that helped raise global fuel prices to record levels this year - and, its oil consumption is expected to triple by 2020. China is building 5,000 miles of new highways each year. Most freight moves by truck, and China is the biggest truck tire market in the world - original equipment tires are mostly bias-ply, creating a huge market for fuel-saving radial technology.
In the space of 25 years China has acquired the problems that Western nations developed over 100 or so years: traffic congestion, dangerous emissions and a daunting safety problem. The sulfur content in Chinese fuel, for example, is 5,000 ppm, compared to 500 ppm for diesel in the U.S. - and ours will go down to 15 ppm starting in 2006. China's road accident mortality rate is as much as 30% higher than the U.S. rate. A third of these deaths are suffered by bicycle riders: One in four Chinese owns a bike, while one in 74,000 owns a car.
China is awake to these issues, and to the possibility of accelerating its learning curve by adopting measures that already are in place in the West. Officials describe efforts to improve the environment with regulations to bring emissions into line with Western standards, for example, and to leapfrog to advanced technologies such as hybrid propulsion, bio fuels and hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Like many other countries, China sees hydrogen as the ultimate fuel. Speaking at a symposium on "sustainable mobility" here in October, Deng Nan, vice minister of Science and Technology, echoed the widely held view that clean, plentiful hydrogen is the likely successor to petroleum. It was plain from the symposium that this is possible, but will take a long time.
The symposium, called Challenge Bibendum, is a regular event hosted by Michelin to showcase efforts to develop cleaner, more efficient and safer transportation. Michelin gets together suppliers from around the world to demonstrate the progress they have made with their alternative-fuel vehicles and other leading-edge technologies. This was the sixth Challenge Bibendum since 1998. Michelin is planning a seventh for 2006. (Bibendum is Michelin's chubby tire-man mascot.)
Michelin's aim - besides associating itself with leading-edge technology - is to serve as a catalyst to get these technologies out of the "waiting room," as CEO Edouard Michelin put it. "The technologies of the future are in hand, but the market is lagging," he said.
Engine technologies tested in Shanghai included low-emission diesels, hybrid internal combustion-electric, fuel cell, solar power and a novel concept vehicle in which Michelin engineers mounted an electric motor inside each wheel - the ultimate direct drive. Among the 150 vehicles were motorbikes, automobiles, pickup trucks and city buses.
Each of the technologies has its pluses and minuses. Hydrogen, for example, can be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity that is stored in a battery and distributed to an electric motor. It can be made from water, and water is the only by-product of the electricity-generating process. The unlimited supply and cleanliness of hydrogen makes it irresistible. Most major vehicle manufacturers have fuel-cell programs under way, and fuel-cell vehicles are being road-tested in a half-dozen countries. At Challenge Bibendum, Ford, Mercedes, GM and Volkswagen were running fuel-cell cars, and the Beijing Coach Co. had a fuel-cell mini bus.
But engineers at the symposium agreed that fuel cells are not a near-term solution for transportation. The infrastructure for delivering hydrogen to filling stations must be developed. Also, the technology is still too expensive. According to Air Liquide, a major supplier of industrial gases, the fuel-cell market now is focused on stationary generators that bear costs up to 8,000 euros per kilowatt. To work in an automotive market, that cost would have to come down to around 50 euros per kilowatt.
For at least the next 30 years, there will be no single answer to the problem of fuel supply, emissions, cost and efficiency. There still will be adequate supplies of fossil fuel during this period, said Edouard Michelin - although distribution is likely to be disrupted from time to time. What is likely to emerge, according to engineers and planners at the symposium, is a variety of niche solutions ranging from ever-more sophisticated internal combustion engines, to hybrid drives combining diesel or gas with electricity, to bio fuels and fuel cells. Also under consideration is liquid hydrogen as a fuel for internal combustion engines. It could almost double fuel economy with zero emissions, said Robert Natkin, a project manager at Ford. The problem: distribution and storage of this volatile fuel.
Hybrid technology will spread, based on type of operation and local conditions. China, for example, is pressing forward with tests of hybrid buses to relieve pollution in its crowded cities. Hybrids will have to overcome such limitations as high initial costs (China offsets this with tax breaks) and restrictions on range. Dohle predicted that these engines will have a 4% share of the global automobile market by 2013.
Diesel will remain the workhorse of commercial road transport for the foreseeable future. Engineers have made tremendous progress in cleaning diesel emissions, and more is to come. Ulrich Dohle, president of diesel systems for Robert Bosch, listed these "megatrends" in diesel engine technology: Injection pressure will increase above 2200 bar; Piezo actuators will boost engine performance; and there will be improvements in combustion technology.
For U.S. trucking executives, the message is that the process of getting power to the wheel is going to get more complicated. Air pollution is increasingly being viewed as a global issue, which will affect the way governments regulate emissions and weigh in on new transport technologies.
"Consumers will have to be more educated about technology and more discerning about how they get around," said Philip Gott, director of Automotive Consulting with Global Insight.
And for the next several decades at least, China's appetite for petroleum will be a factor in the price you pay for diesel.
Emissions Authority continued...
