I'm guessing that they got a better grant/subsidy offer than what was available for Coventry (Baginton) aerodrome. Coventry would have been closer to Tata/JLR's other plants.

Seems possible from the media reports that mega loads of taxpayers money might go in as well.

Interesting to watch the extended term outcome.

Edited By V8Eng on 19/07/2023 13:21:31

I hope the new battery site has a decent fire brigade ,just in case they have a battery fire,I saw an electric car on fire on you tube and it would not go out until it was craned into a tank of water, I wonder how long it will be before insurance companies increase premiums for domestic garages especially integral ones,&storage of electric scooters and bikes?

For those awfulising about Lithium battery fires in cars etc. Have you ever been involved with a petrol or Diesel fire in an IC engined car? I have…

Lithium iron phosphate batteries don't have the thermal runaway issues that lithium cobalt based ones do. They also don't contain large quantities of cobalt, manganese or nickel, which are all expensive elements.

As for range, My Dacia Sandero Diesel will do 650 miles on a tank if driven gently, but dad's Morris Marina wouldn't manage 300. That's no better than the best current EVs.

Edited By Mark Rand on 19/07/2023 16:22:01

Posted by Ady1 on 19/07/2023 13:39:10:

I just can't see these things replacing combustion engines at the moment

Good for pootling to Asda and back though, and general city work

As usual, everything-in-moderation seems to be the sensible way forwards

Hi Ady1,

I don't think you're far wrong.

As I understand it (and I beg to be corrected of course) the current Euro 6 compliant diesel engines are pretty good, apart from the particulate emissions. A crazy idea maybe, but what about a particulate filter (something more sophisticated than perforated fibre) that you empty like the ash pan from a stove. OK, too simple an idea maybe, and I'm sure the automotive boffins have considered it. Or possibly not?

As usual, everyone's jumping on the EV bandwagon without first securing the infrastructure and implications for those millions unable to charge at home. Not to mention the low life stealing the trailing cables for the copper.

Also, what happens at 5 o'clock when everyone (you know what I mean) gets home from work and plugs in. Ooops, the lights go out.

Further thoughts. At very high temperatures water (steam) reacts with metals to produce metal oxide and hydrogen, this is what caused the Fukushima explosions, so they must have to control the temperature to make it go the other way. Complicated stuff this high temperature chemistry.

Duncan –

Ah, but you can use an arc-furnace for iron-ore smelting – that's what the Canadians, Californians, Swedes and Germans were doing over 100 years ago. It seems the cost of electricity might have been the main problem, plus of course in many countries with plentiful coal, distilling that to coke yields a lot of useful by-products and uses it almost directly.

You still need a reducing agent though, and lime flux to help separate the slag. That is mostly silica as a lot of iron-ores are basically iron-oxide rich sandstone: that from Abbotsbury, in Dorset, proved too siliceous to be economical.

The original method was developed in Italy by a certain Stassano, at his plant in Turin, and patented in 1898.

It entailed pulverising the ore, flux and "carbon" and forming the mixture into briquettes, and was capable of producing high-grade pig-iron for conversion to steel and refining that – naturally, in electric furnaces.

So it still uses carbon, but my book does not tell me the nature of the carbon, whether coke or graphite; in a chapter dealing comprehensively with electro-thermal metallurgical processes and their furnace types.

[Another chapter describes progress in developing battery-electric vehicles, including small vans and lorries. Direct petrol-electrics – not "hybrids" – had been tried but the only successful ones were omnibuses built by Tilling-Stevens, which had a quoted "overall commercial efficiency" of 79%. Also, we learn, battery cars were allowed in London's Royal Parks where the internal-combustion engine was banned!. BEVs? You-Les? They'll never catch on!]

.

Ref.

Various authors; Modern Electrical Engineering, Vol. 5 [of 6]; ed. Prof. Magnus MacLean; The Gresham Publishing Company, London. Date not given, post-1914 by a cited paper, but probably pre-1920. pp236 et.seq.

…….

Old Mart –

I know the M5 link and old military site you mean as I normally use that route when driving to and from the Midlands and North. Yes, I'm sure I noticed a new junction in what was a gateway anyway, near the traffic-lights; and I wondered why. However, is the over-expensive roundabout you cite actually the one on the hill, just above the motorway junction, to serve the University of Bristol's huge 'Gravity' property-speculation? Or have they gone and built another?

(They've gone roundabout-happy on the Fosse Way too, building one merely to serve an HS2 building-site for which an ordinary junction should have sufficed.)

No, not fully green but probably using far less carbon than the conventional blast-furnace because it is only the amount needed for the ore. It still needs huge amounts of electricity though, whether using carbon or hydrogen.

The problem for the extreme eco brigade is they've turned it into a religion, a crusade

These things always attract a distinct subset of society, with a curious mindset

Extreme politics or religion never succeed and are never successful because the silent majority are never extremists

it seems to be a state of mind some people are susceptible to, but most people aren't, an awful lot appear to be relatively well educated people

They latch onto religion, or politics, or a social belief, and they want everyone else to do their system

The most famous anti-smoking anti-drinking vegetarian in history tried to impose his religion on us in the 1940s

But life is always best and at its most sensible when it is pursued in moderation

BEV’s are a compelling argument at the moment for many folks, I guess that’s why there are nearly two million on our roads. Fueling costs are half that of petrol and you don’t have to drive to a petrol station to fill up. Just plug in when you get home and recharge overnight at a low tariff. Most BEV’s have a range of 250 to nearly 400 miles so for those that only drive the UK average of 140 miles a week it’s a no brainer. The only thing slowing more rapid growth is the sticker price on the car – but prices are coming down. The cost of buying petrol or diesel cars though is going up. Parity is expected to be reached in just a couple of years. It’s not just happening here if course, look at Norway and Sweden.

And the elephant in the room that many don’t seem to understand is that the biggest car market in the world is China. As an example, until recently 50% of Volkswagens sales were in China. They have a real problem with air pollution in China and they don’t want ICE vehicles any more.

Bearing in mind that many parts of the world have announced the ban on the sale of new ICE vehicles can any car manufacturer afford to have two production lines going forward. One for die hard Petrol drivers and another for alternative energy vehicles? BMW, Mercedes and Porsche seem to think so and are lobbying hard to enable them to keep selling petrol cars in the EU. Their plan seems to be to convince politicians that burning “E” fuels is pollution zero. It remains to be seen whether politicians fall for it. One things for sure, the oil industry hasn’t finished pulling strings in the background yet and aren’t about to give up without a serious fight.

I wouldn’t bet on who’s going to win, at least in the short term, but if the oil industry succeeds in slowing or halting alternative energy personal transport then the public will be the losers because we all know how bad burning anything is for both human health and the environment. And that doesn’t include past and ongoing issues like oil spills that conveniently get forgotten in the discussion between competing technologies.

If you missed something, so have I, because I was summarising from a book published a century ago describing a process developed a decade previously.

The electrodes were of graphite but they would be insufficient as a source of carbon, so more (probably pulverised coke) was added with the iron-ore and limestone.

Yes, it still produced carbon-dioxide but a lot less than a normal coke-fired furnace would, because only enough is needed for the ore-reduction. Not as fuel as well. At the time that was not seen as a problem (although the dangers of high atmospheric CO2 levels were being recognised around then).

So it still needs a source of heat and reducing-agent, and about the only non-Carbon based chemical that would supply both now without creating carbon-dioxide is Hydrogen, so where does that come from? It would not produce CO2 but may well form a lot of nitrous oxides, and they'd presumably need cracking by, for example, urea ('Ad-Blu ' !) which breaks the gas to nitrogen and oxygen.

No easy answers, wherever you look!