EEstor passing Independent Tests

EEStor, the Cedar Park Texas based designer of supercapacitors, passed a milestone independent test by Texas Research International which certified that the purity of EEStor's powder averaged 99.92% purity. The purity of the chemicals is crucial for creating their economy-changing energy storage product.
If EEStor can create their supercapacitor at a decent price and having sufficient safety, the whole peak oil crisis will change.
Their energy storage device, not technically a battery but a capacitor, will make total electric cars feasible. They pack nine times the power of lead-acid batteries and can be recharged in minutes, although using special high voltage chargers, home recharging will take longer. As soon as some of these cars hit the market, our need for oil will start to lessen.
With the need and demand dropping, the price of oil should start declining. (Yes, yes, I know China and India - blah, blah, blah. But China and India aren't going to be buying a lot of oil at $130 a barrel once their governments stop subsidizing. They will be shifting to electric as well. China has a lot of coal and doesn't seem to be shy about burning it.
So, it's a happy thing that Eestor's product passed the test. Hopefully we'll see a real product demonstration from them soon.

Why the CAFE Fuel Standards Don't Matter Anymore

The US government passed the "Energy Policy Conservation Act" in 1975 which mandated a Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) for all a car makers products. The intent was to raise the fuel efficiency of cars.
Many electrons have been spilled in the blogosphere about how to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The Republicans typically say, "Let's drill off-shore and in that big cold state up North." The Democrats say, "Let's just raise the CAFE standards." The current energy bill proposes a target of 35 mpg by 2020.
Well, the CAFE standards don't matter anymore. Here's two reasons why:
1. With gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, SUV sales are tanking already - down 50% this year. It doesn't matter what the CAFE standards are, people are buying more fuel efficient cars. In the last year the fuel efficiency of US cars has gone from 20.2 mpg to 24.4 mpg.
2. The plugin electric cars are coming. By 2020 the concept of miles per gallon will be moot. We will have gone electric. The pace of battery technology is accelerating and will provide a huge economic advantage to electrical cars. With new Lithium-Ion batteries and EEStor's super-capacitor, the trend will be towards electric cars. Chevy's over-hyped Volt and the Japanese plugins will get here in 2010. They will probably have the bugs worked out of them and be practical by 2015. By 2020 most passenger cars will be electric, trucks may take another decade.
So congress should quit wasting time about whether the CAFE standards should be 35 or 37 mpg in 2020, it won't matter.
What's the mpg of an all electric plugin car anyway?

Biogasoline Breakthrough Using Cellulose Feedstock

Researchers have made a breakthrough in creating biogasoline from renewable cellulose like switchgrass and trees. The final product is almost indistinguishable from gasoline made from crude oil. Most energy research has been focused on converting corn and cellulose to ethanol, but ethanol has several problems:
1. By volume ethanol only has 70% of gasoline's energy, so cars will only go 70% as far on a tank
2. Ethanol cannot be transported by pipelines since it collects water in the pipelines so this makes distribution more expensive
3. Pure ethanol cannot be used in cold climates
4. Cars must be modified to use ethanol
Using biogasoline gets around all these problems.

We don't need to produce all our gasoline this way, but even if we could make 10-15% it would take pressure off the price of gasoline.
This new biogasoline could tide us over until eestor's "batteries" are available in the Chevy Volt and we go all electric.