Ganga Prasad G. Rao
http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar
‘Twas approaching midnight hour, Christmas eve. A lonely truck, probably carrying frozen turkeys from Thanksgiving, snaked its way through the mountain side. The road was tortuous, even dangerous. An entire mass of snow lay directly overhead the road. As he drove through the valley, the driver’s heartbeat quickened and his eyes turned wider from years of driving experience. He hoped the rattle of his pre-CAA era 6-wheeler would not disturb the peace of the snowflakes lying deep in the snow and ice-mass. He heaved a sigh of relief after negotiatingthe perilous section of the road. Avalanches were not unheard of in these parts. Unknown to him, a draft of relatively warm wind,swepta speck of soot from his exhaust pipe and carried it upslope. As it rose along the mountain side, it was engulfed by a larger mass of air, in fact one in the mood to …Snow! Ice crystals coalesced around the soot particle and it came down upon the bulging, almost heaving mass of snow on the steep sides of the mountain…..
…..A couple hundred feet below, Fred and Tom, automobile engineers by profession, but self-proclaimed environmental engineers in spare time, had just finished tightening the screws on a cylindrical, ceramic-lined contraption in their garage. From the looks of it, it was meant to be attached to the exhaust line of freight trucks. Apparently, the engineers, who happened to wear Santa Green caps, were nastily angry with freight vehicles farting cancerous diesel soot in to the lungs of their young ones. After much thought, and, ‘trial and error’, they came up with their yet-to-be patented ‘Golf Snowball Kart Apparatus’. The Golf Snowball Kart was meant to fit in to the exhaust system of diesel road freight vehicles. It was in essence a ceramic-lined cylinder containing innumerable pea-sized carbon-spherules that were continuously ‘wetted’ by a fine spray of a surface adhesive dissolved in a volatile organic fluid. The spray served to capture soot contained in the flow of exhaust gases through the cylinder on to the surface of the spherules. As the truck engine started,the cylinder rotated on its long axis, and the carbon spherules picked up soot from the exhaust flow and gained size while falling repeatedly over the sides of the rotating cylinder. When they turned the size of a golf-ball, a size-filter pushed these ‘heavy-weights’ up the duct in to a secured compartment for physical retrieval at truck stops. Fresh spherules entered the cylinder to maintain surface area requirements. The process was continuous and counter-current and automated, requiring no driver handling or supervision.
If there was a tinge of pride and ego in the engineers, it was all too pardonable. For they had, sophistication be damned, developed a reasonable means of achieving control of cancerous diesel soot from road freight vehicles. As they raised beer mugs to cherish their daughters’ health, talk meandered from how their ‘retrofit’ could bring about control of soot from freight vehicles worldwide and even be part of a global environmental strategy. The banter led, predictably and inexorably, to the ‘dyed-in-yellow, scum of the earth’ environmental economists, who for all their ‘expertise’, had permitted the Global warming conspiracy to escalate and spread its sooty tentacles to the Arctic and the Antarctic. Surely, Environmental Engineers could put one over their Economics cousins?
With that thought, and in to their fourth mug of the evening, Fred challenged Tom to try his hand at environmental policy. Not yet appreciating the potential of their invention, Tom casually suggested a ‘Give and take, 2-way Street’ deal. “A 2 way deal? Fill me in. Our Senator is sorta friend of my in-law; he could pull strings for us in the corridors of power” guffawed Fred. Tom was not known to be greedy, garrulous or, for that matter, romantically-inclined, but four mugs of beer can work magic. Besides, opportunity knocks but once.Luck, be a lady tonight!
A stranger sight was never beheld in Small Town, Frigida. Tom, his mug of beer in hand yet dirty with grease, invoked all the intelligence bequeath to him by his forefathers, and began lecturing with his pointer at the garage drawing board choc-a-bloc with engineering math and drawings of the ‘Golf-Kart Snowball’ apparatus. He expanded on how the Government would offer a ‘hand-sheikh’ deal to the OPEC Sheikhs – a deal in which the current EV mandate, requiring a phased introduction of EV automobiles, would extend to future years and even enlarge, but at an ‘endogenous’ pace – a pace determined by the Sheikh’s willingness to curb soot from diesel-fuelled freight trucks. Why, Tom even put up a simple relation that the Sheikh would have to contend with:
%EVSHAREt = αt -β*(PAHTONS/ARTM)t-1
where, at any time, t,%EVSHARE represented the mandatory fraction that EVs must constitute in new automobiles sales, PAHTONS the aggregate tons of PAH Golf Snow balls collected from Golf-Kart ‘bins’ ("$ Saaantaaa $"), and RTM, the Aggregate Road Ton-miles from all trucks - Golf-Kart, or otherwise.Not immediately anticipating the line of Tom’s argument - even beer is alcoholic after the fourth mug – Fred wondered what the incentives were, and who would fund the conversion of an entire fleet of dirty diesel trucks.
Tom explained the expression was merely a quantitative relation within a larger, if implicit ‘Zero-Sum’ strategy, between automobile gasoline demand and freight diesel fuel demand. Essentially, the Government would offer the Sheikhs some ‘rope’ in the form of slower EV penetration in return for the capture of diesel soot from freight trucks (Privately though, Tom wondered whether the EVs were re-charged on ‘dirty power’… and Fred feared that an American Consortium had won the right to creating and maintaining the Arctic Northern Shipping Passage!). The curtailment of diesel exhaust from retrofitted freight trucks would bring about a reduction in air pollution mortality and an increase in longevity of its citizens. To get the deal going, ‘Obama the Just’, would offer a ‘sweetener’ to the Sheikhs in the form of Lithium Commodity Fund Units, LCFUs, (lithium being the ‘heartbeat’ of EVs) which represented a convenient way of participating in the rise of EVs in the automobile space, as compensation for the unilateral incursion in to the Gasoline market. Anxious to arrest the CO2 trend before it melted the thick ice over the Antarctic rocks and exposed them to the mercy of Canadian Juniors, the UNEP too would pitch in with Certified Emissions Reductions, CERs, in amount equal to the tons CO2 avoided annually from the switch to EVs – a switch the pace of which the Sheikh would decide himself.
The Sheikh could remain invested, switch or redeem LCFUs and the CERs, the proceeds from which could be applied either to retrofit trucks with the ‘Snowball Golf Kart’ apparatus, and/or to exclusively discount diesel to retrofittedfreight trucks. In effect, the Sheikh, arguably the most powerful ‘supply persona’, was offered the opportunity to control fuel demand as well, albeit in a manner compatible with the goals of the Government and the UNEP. He could now influence incremental gasoline demand by determining the extent of EV penetration in to the auto market, while controlling freight fuel demand both by offering discounts on road diesel to ‘Golf-Kart’ equipped trucks,and by underwriting the retrofitting of ‘Golf Snowball -Kart’ equipment to freight trucks.
“Have the Sheikhs decide their own fate? Yup, Sounds interesting….and practical!.....“I am all ears”. Tom, ever so sensitive to exploitation, mumbled to himself “Luck, Be a lady tonight, …. Twice over”,before continuing with his exposition.
As Tom imagined, the Sheikh would optimize profits from both gasoline and diesel markets, depending on current and perceived direction of prices in those markets, the state of the economy, and the economics of freight haulage. He would also move dynamically between CER and LCFU units anticipating price movements due changes in stage of economic expansion, the fraction of automobile fleet constituted by EVs – both presently and prospectively, and the intensity of their use – a function of the price of power recharge. Aware the EVs would otherwise encroach deeper in to his traditional stronghold in automobile gasoline market, the Sheikh would perforce seek PAHTONS by applying theLCFU/CER redemption proceeds to a Golf Snowball Retrofit program while concomitantly offering a diesel discount to induce the preferential use of retrofitted trucks.
Tom was indeed making sense. Sensing Santa in the neighbourhood, Fred pushed another mug toward Tom. As he picked his fifth mug of beer, Tom thought wistfully….If only they came this easy….
Quickly back to his senses, Tom envisaged, that in bust times, the Sheikh would prefer the ‘benching’ the dirty truck fleet, and apply CER/LCFU proceeds to retrofit them with ‘Golf-Kart-Snowball’ apparatus. Diesel discounts, if any, would be largely limited to retrofitted freight trucks plying along the rail network (the discounts being necessary as much for the Sheikh to capture soot and restrain EV growth as it was for the truck haulers to compete with Rail freight priced to ensure full utilization of its physical network in poor economic times). In boom times, the Sheikh would cash out, first from the zooming Lithium market and next from the booming CER market. The proceeds would be applied to fund a fuel discount program for retrofitted trucks at the expense of the retrofitting program, thus obtaining large reductions in diesel soot necessary to limit EV penetration in the ensuing period.
2:22am! Hmm, Time to wind up the talk, but first a final gulp. Surprised at how good a policy it turned out to be, an animated Tom explained how the incentive, on one hand, to bench and retrofit dirty trucks, and, on the other, to ply them with discounted diesel in preference over dirty trucks served as instruments for the Sheikh to tweak the environmental performance of the road freight sector, and the means to manage the product mix from his refineries. He cautioned that the rate of EV penetration would vary period to period, and from Boom to Bust - sometimes up, sometimes down, but at all times minimizing the combined impact of GHG emissions and diesel soot – an outcome agreeable to the Government and the UNEP. And as the Sheikh danced the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ in the CER, LCFU, EV and Freight markets, the truck fleet turned cleaner, a lot cleaner….and citizens breathed fuller and healthier. And the Golf balls? Tom would rather the Environmental Administration arranged to collect and verify them for accuracy, and dispose the same in scrubber-equipped thermal power plants, if admixed with an oxygen-rich combustion enhancer.
Fred stared,still reeling from Tom’s genius,and wondered if it would all work the way he foresaw it. In that instant,he heard adistant rumble and the ground shook under them. The wind whistled and whooshed at their garage doors and windows. Fearing an avalanche, the two opened the door gingerly to take a peek. And just as they heaved a sigh of relief and were to close the door, a gust of snow billowed in and filled their empty mugs on the table!
Merry Christmas!
