Conventional gas-powered cars starting to match hybrids in fuel efficiency

The new Chevrolet Cruze Eco can reach eye-popping fuel economy levels of more than 50 miles per gallon on the highway, which even in this era of hybrid-electric cars stands among the best.

But here's the real trick: The Cruze Eco is neither a hybrid nor electric. It runs on that "old" technology, the conventional gasoline engine.

Although hydrogen, electric and other alternative cars have garnered more hype and significant federal subsidies, the best immediate hope for restraining the nation's fuel consumption might be some new vehicles that, although powered by conventional engines, run efficiently because they have been stripped of unnecessary weight, streamlined to move smoothly and equipped with gas-sipping engines.

This year, General Motors, Ford and Hyundai began selling cars with conventional engines that achieve 40 mpg or more on the highway, exceeding the fuel efficiency of some hybrids, because their mechanics and shapes have been optimized.

To achieve the efficiency of the Cruze Eco, for example, engineers dropped its weight by 200 pounds, installed shutters to close off part of the grill at higher speeds to reduce wind drag, added a rear spoiler, cut the car's height by one centimeter and adopted an efficient turbocharged engine.

The result is a car that, with a manual transmission, is rated at 42 mpg on the highway by the government but can achieve more than 50 mpg under the right conditions, reviewers say. Likewise, the new Ford Focus, with its "super fuel economy" package, is rated at 40 mpg and the Hyundai Elantra gets the same fuel economy, standard in all models.

With the recent spike in gas prices reawakening consumer interest in fuel economy, the new cars are expected to be particularly appealing, in part because they are typically less expensive than their hybrid counterparts.

"The buzz has been all about electric vehicles and hybrids, but to me, the real buzz should be about the old internal-combustion engine," said Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of Edmunds.com, an automotive Web site. "It ain't dead yet."

At least since the oil shocks of the 1970s, American politicians have been infatuated with developing alternative sources to power the nation's auto fleet. The George W. Bush administration pushed a hydrogen car; now Congress and the Obama administration are laying out billions of dollars for the development of electric cars.

But the new fuel-efficient gasoline cars, critics say, raise doubts about government efforts that favor any one technology over another. If subsidies are to be made, they argue, they should go to efficient cars, no matter what their power source. Moreover, when the fuel economy of a best-selling gas car is improved even incrementally, it can have much larger effects on the nation's oil consumption than an alternative-technology model that doesn't sell well.

Experts expect alternative fuel technologies to take hold eventually, but hybrid cars still represent only about 3 percent of U.S. car and truck sales. And the latest generation of electric plug-in vehicles hit the market only recently.

"When you take some of the most popular vehicles in the U.S. - say, the Ford F-150 pickup - and improve them by just a few mpg, the effects can add up very quickly," said John DeCicco, a faculty fellow at the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute at the University of Michigan. "Much more so than with a niche car."

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'Risk/reward equation' used in building gulf well, BP worker testifies

A BP drilling engineer involved in the planning of the Macondo well declined to testify before a federal investigative panel Friday, invoking through his lawyer his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Mark Hafle, who was involved in some of the most heavily scrutinized decisions about the well, became the third BP employee to invoke his constitutional right not to answer questions from the panel. Hafle had testified in an earlier round of hearings.

As Friday's hearing proceeded, another BP employee who wrote one of the most widely derided e-mails to surface in investigations of the Deepwater Horizon disaster testified under oath and gave a more benign explanation of the document.

In an e-mail four days before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, drilling engineer Brett Cocales addressed one of the most controversial decisions in the construction of the Macondo well, saying in part, "who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."

In the e-mail, he went on to defend the decision based on "the risk/reward equation."

Congressional investigators have cited the decision as evidence that BP might have cut corners to save time and money. Testifying before a separate federal investigative panel in Houston on Friday, Cocales said, "Those are my words."

But he said they had nothing to do with financial considerations.

Cocales said he was weighing engineering risks associated with alternative approaches, and he thought less risk was associated with the course BP took.

At the time, he said, he thought the "worst-case scenario" was that BP would have to do remediation work on the well, not that safety would be jeopardized, he testified Friday.

But he acknowledged that there "was still a risk of channeling" - a term that refers to gaps in the cement lining between the steel well pipe and the rock formation that could give gas a path to escape.

At issue was the number of devices called centralizers installed to center the pipe in the well. Halliburton, a contractor to BP, recommended 21 but BP used six. In a report to BP two days before the explosion, Halliburton warned that with as many as seven centralizers the well could have a "SEVERE" gas flow problem.

Cocales on Friday became the fourth BP employee to testify that, before the blowout, he did not read that warning.

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Nuclear energy has environmental pluses; safety remains an issue

I thought nuclear reactors were an absolute no-go for environmentalists. But I keep hearing them touted as a clean energy source. What are nuclear energy's green credentials?

Some environmentalists are indeed coming around to nuclear energy. That's because the nuclear fission process produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions, unlike the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. (Those two fossil fuels accounted for about 70 percent of U.S. electricity in 2008. Nukes made 20 percent.) Also, fission produces neither sulfur dioxide nor nitrogen oxides, the fossil-fuel pollutants that cause acid rain.

Advocates are fond of noting that nuclear power provides 70 percent of the country's "carbon-free" energy. But nuclear energy isn't really a zero-carbon system, since you still have to build power plants, mine and enrich uranium, and transport processed fuel, all of which typically rely on CO2-emitting fuel sources. Even when the entire life cycle is taken into account, however, nuclear energy warms the planet much less than coal or natural gas. The comparison with renewables such as wind and solar (which also generate emissions in the manufacturing phase) is less cut and dried.

While it's commonly accepted that nuclear energy has a relatively dainty footprint, the question of whether new reactors would be the most cost-effective way to lower electricity-related emissions is still hotly debated. The fuel itself is relatively inexpensive, at least for the time being. But as noted in Time, recent price estimates for a large plant in Florida came in at $12 billion to $18 billion, and that's before you consider the nuclear industry's history of major cost overruns.

Some analysts say alternative methods would yield much more climate-saving bang for our buck than nuclear power. For example, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute argues that we should be investing in general efficiency measures and "micropower," a catchall term that includes cogeneration of heat and electricity, plus renewables other than big hydropower operations.

What about safety concerns? Admittedly, there's a fright factor with nuclear power. But in the 31 years since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, there haven't been any emergencies in the United States that remotely approached the severity of that incident, though there have been some close calls.

The government's Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a set safety goal for every reactor in the country: The chance of an accident that results in radioactivity being released to the environment must be no more than one in a million, as determined by probabilistic risk assessment. But even the longest of odds will never satisfy everyone, especially after the cataclysmic drilling accident in the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, a number of leaks of radioactive water have stoked environmentalist ire, although nearby residents were not exposed to dangerous doses of radiation.

Meanwhile, nuclear proliferation risks remain a prohibitive concern for many experts. And many environmentalists continue to give nukes the stink eye because, as the Lantern noted in an earlier column, after 50 years we still don't have a long-term plan for storing high-level commercial nuclear waste.

But long-term disposal is a problem we're saddled with no matter what: Whether we ramp up nuclear energy production or shut down all our plants tomorrow, we'll have at least 62,500 metric tons of used nuclear fuel to deal with.

Atomic energy also generates other environmental concerns. Like conventional power plants, a nuclear site cranks out electricity using steam-driven turbines. Cooling those operations often requires a whole lot of water, the drawing and releasing of which can affect aquatic wildlife.

Uranium mining can also damage the environment. Mining and milling operators must deal with mill tailings, the radioactive material left over after the uranium has been extracted from the ore, as well as waste rock and radiologically contaminated equipment.

For all this, it's worth noting that uranium is a very efficient energy source: One ton of natural uranium can produce the same number of kilowatt-hours as 16,000 tons of coal or 80,000 barrels of oil.

The Lantern doesn't find herself particularly freaked out by atomic energy. The long-term waste conundrum seems more pressing: After all, isn't the notion that you don't bequeath problems to your descendants a major tenet of environmentalism? At the same time, global warming is itself a dire legacy, and every energy technology has its pitfalls. So if nuclear power can play a role in cooling our planet, the Lantern thinks it deserves to stay on the table.

Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com. Read previous Green Lantern columns here.

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