The carbon slayers

[LaCroix]

Would mean that power lines need to be seriously upgraded if you were to have a net of such stations. That's pretty serious construction work.

Well, consider that if you have good car batteries, you can also have a BIG battery (like the gasoline undergound tank nowadays), that can be big as a freight container or even more since there is no need to move it, and use that to recharge the cars. The Big Battery will be always under charge from normal power lines, and if its level goes down too much, the guys can call in a battery truck (instead of a gasoline truck) from another station.
If power is cheap enough, moving trucks around remains cheaper than building better power lines.

You seem to underestimate the power spent. Even the volt has a 16kWh battery - and this is only good for 60km electric-only range. For a functional electric car, you need at least ten times that range.

This pack takes ten hours to charge on a normal US power outlet (120V 15A). This means that for a nominal turnaround of ten cars per hour in a station (VERY low end), you need one hundred batteries on charge at all time - at an output of 1500Amps continous.

Remember, we need about ten times that pack's capacity to have a real electric car - which brings that power up to 15 kA.

Now multiply this with the number of GasElectro Stations in your town and you will see that there is dire need for better power lines.

Also, a 'Power truck' is less efficient that a fuel truck - you cannot pump electrons, you can only couple the two batteries (very dangerous when they are big - it's basically a short circuiting - put a screwdriver on your car's battery to visualize it, and then imagine a container-sized battery ), and then they will level out. This means that you can only fill a battery to half the truck's capacity, the truck stays half full.

[someone_else]

Also, a 'Power truck' is less efficient that a fuel truck

That depends on the power density of the battery. If the power density is more than double the power density of the gasoline alone (oxygen used ignored since it comes from the atmosphere), then the power truck is more efficient than the fuel truck.

There are circuitries that keep the amount of juice running through them under control (to have a constant and manageable energy release), so it won't be the same as short-circuiting.

I hope you can reach better battery draining efficiency by playing with voltage and other stuff.
Otherwise you can call Nanostuff to the rescue and handwave it away.
But I really lack the expertise in this field, so that's really up to you.

[Uncluttered]

Back to the topic of carbon capture.

If you carbonized the biomass into inert charcoal, you wouldn't need fancy containers.
It would be inert. You could bury it in the ground, or make small mountains out of it.
You can also use it for terra pretta, or a soiless growth medium for aquaponics.

Moving to the topic of Electric cars. I'd like to chime in, because I've built a few.
I even have been on an NEDRA electric drag racing team.
I've also worked on some early lithium battery management systems, for big lithium packs.

The fact is, EV's are great cars, but if you live far from a metropolitan area, you will want a plug-in hybrid.

If the folks like me, in metropolitan areas, used mostly electric power, there would be plenty of petroleum, or biofuel or whatever for rural usage.

lastly. I've always been a fan of electrified highways. Take a few sections on toll road highways, and electrify portions, such that a car driving over it, receives an electric charge.

You don't need to electrify the whole highway, just a few hilly sections. When the car draws power, it's less important to charge, as it is to allow the driver to accelerate freely up the hills.

Many of these systems were proposed in the 70s, but rejected, because the driver couldn't be billed.

However, nowadays, we have the computer technology, to quickly bill the driver. We can use something like an EZ pass transponder, and a black box connected to the motor controller/charger measuring power draw.

[Starglider]

Also, a 'Power truck' is less efficient that a fuel truck - you cannot pump electrons, you can only couple the two batteries (very dangerous when they are big - it's basically a short circuiting - put a screwdriver on your car's battery to visualize it, and then imagine a container-sized battery ), and then they will level out. This means that you can only fill a battery to half the truck's capacity, the truck stays half full.

This is incorrect. If the 'donor' battery has a slightly higher design voltage than the 'recipient' battery (e.g. slightly more cells in series), they will indeed level out voltages but with a state-of-charge much higher in the recipient battery than in the donor battery.

Note however that typical rechargable batteries have a charge efficiency of only 80% to 90%. That means 5 to 10% of the input energy is lost to heat in the charging process and a further 5-10% in the discharge process. You inherently lose 10-20% of the input energy by using a battery in the car instead of say cantenary wires on an electric train, this scheme is adding another 8-16% loss in the charging station battery (when used instead of grid power) and now you are suggesting a further 7-14% loss in the 'battry truck' (not including energy used to power the truck itself). It probably makes more sense to simply crane the full battery off the truck, swap the connections and crane the discharged one back on. Particularly because thermal limitations probably mean that the truck would have to hang around for a long time (a lot longer than it takes to pump fuel) to transfer charge from one battery to another. Of course these massive storage batteries would also be either ridiculously expensive (li-pol) or very low energy density (lead acid) with current technology.

It seems vastly more sensible to me to just build more grid capacity, which is actually pretty cheap if you can override/ignore all the planning/approval bullshit.

[LaCroix]

Thank you for providing more precise percentages.

Still, we both forgot that in this scenario, we have the truck delivering excess energy from one station to another, so we have this process twice over, with all the losses. Of course, to put it into the car batteries, we're adding another discharge/charge step into the loop, but this would be inevitable in his proposed 'huge battery' setup.

Li-pol or anything is out for this storage batteries - batteries of the size that they could reasonable power such a station would be horribly expensive, and Lithium isn't the most easy to come by ingredient, as it will be needed in the car's batteries as well (where weight really matters).

Lead-acid will be very heavy, a kWh nearly 30 kilos, and we are talking about a truck battery in at least double digit MWh size to be even viable for a few hours (at about 150-200kwh per car battery charged,). Turns out 1 MWh is 30 tons + truck - have fun having a convoy of those rolling to your station all the time...

Maybe NiCd/NiMH, but I don't know how these will fare under constant charge-discharge. As far as I remember from my RC days, they have a memory problem. This would be bad. But these are the most sensible choice.

Still, in my opinion, the grid is the only option.