Name: What’s the best fuel for your car?
Uploaded: 2021-05-06T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Historically, most cars have run on gasoline,

but that doesn't have to be the case in the future.

Other liquid fuels and electricity can also power cars.

So, what are the differences  between these options?

a fossil fuel extracted from deep underground.

The energy in gasoline comes from a class of molecules called hydrocarbons.

There are hundreds of different hydrocarbons in crude oil,

and different ones are used  to make gasoline and diesel,

which is why you can't use them interchangeably.

Fuels derived from crude oil are extremely energy dense,

Oil spills cause environmental damage and cost billions of dollars to clean up.

Air pollution from burning  fossil fuels like these

And transportation accounts for 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions,

almost half of which comes  from passenger cars burning fossil fuels.

These emissions warm the planet and make weather more extreme.

In the U.S. alone, storms caused by climate change

caused $500 billion of damage in the last five years.

something so destructive can't be the best fuel.

The most common alternative is electricity.

Electric cars use a battery pack and electric motor

instead of the internal combustion engine found in gas-powered cars,

and must be charged at charging stations.

With the right power infrastructure, they can be as efficient as gas-powered cars.

If powered by electricity generated without fossil fuels,

they can avoid greenhouse gas emissions  entirely.

They're more expensive than gas-powered cars,

but the cost difference has been shrinking rapidly since 2010.

The other alternatives to gasoline are other liquid fuels.

Many of these can be shipped and stored using the same infrastructure as gasoline,

They can also be carbon-neutral  if they're made using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,

meaning when we burn them, we release that same carbon dioxide back into the air,

One approach to carbon-neutral fuel is to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

and combine its carbon with the hydrogen in water.

This creates hydrocarbons, the source of energy in fossil fuels,

but without any emissions if the fuels  are made using clean electricity.

These fuels take up more space than an energetically equivalent amount of gasoline,

Another approach is to make carbon-neutral fuels from plants,

which sequester carbon from the air  through photosynthesis.

But growing the plants also has to be carbon neutral,

which rules out many crops that require fertilizer,

a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

So, the next generation of these fuels must be made from either plant waste

or plants that don't require fertilizer to grow.

Biofuels can be about as efficient as gasoline, though not all are.

For a fuel to be the best option, people have to be able to afford it.

Unfortunately, the high upfront costs of implementing new technologies

and heavy subsidies for the producers of fossil fuels

mean that almost every green technology is more expensive than its fossil-fuel-based cousin.

This cost difference is known as a green premium.

Governments have already started subsidizing electric vehicles

In some places, depending on the costs of electricity and gas,

electric cars can already be cheaper overall,

The other alternatives are trickier, for now.

Zero-carbon liquid fuels can be double the price of gasoline or more.

Innovators are doing everything they can to bring green premiums down,

because in the end, the best fuel will be both affordable for consumers