Water essential for eco-cars: Toyota

Bill Reinert is the National Manager of Toyota's Advanced Technology Group in the USA. Part mad-scientist, part absent-minded professor -- yet admitting only to a "double-digit" IQ -- he has a strong emotional tie to Australia ("I was gonna joke and call it Austria"), through his Australian Terriers.

Journalists making the long trek back from this month's North American International Auto Show in Detroit stopped in to meet the personable Reinert, the man who is overseeing the development of Toyota's fuel cell cars and plug-in hybrids in the US.

As the guru of advanced powertrain development at Toyota, Reinert served with the US Navy in nuclear subs, so he claims to have "no fear of nuclear power", but admits that broadscale adoption of nuclear power to overcome the problem of power-generated CO2 is a logistical problem in the shorter term.

Really though, keeping nuclear power friendly to the environment is among the least of the challenges facing a world anxious about CO2 emissions, peak oil production and even the very cost of personal mobility. Reinert believes that for countries like Australia, which share many of the climate characteristics with the south-west corner of the US (California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, etc), the scarcity of water is going to loom large as a hurdle that must be overcome, for a variety of reasons.

Reinert cites a US study by Doctor Tim Barnett concerning "... the desertification of the south-west", in which the author hypothesises that by 2020, Lake Meade and Lake Powell -- "two of the major water resources for the south-west" -- could be dry.

"Certainly below the level of the water intakes for the hydro turbines that supply power to Las Vegas and Phoenix," says Reinert.

"It's not unlike what you're facing now -- because it impacts your agricultural programs, it impacts your city centres, like Los Angeles and it impacts your markets.

"It's a major impact on your markets because if you start to see populations shifting from wherever you're set up to do business to sell cars, then that's something you have to account for.

"The other thing it impacts is energy. It takes water to make energy; a lot of it -- from an electrical point of view."

At this point, Reinert mentions the cooling towers that are used by every power station to cool generators and, as a by-product of that, pump vapourised water into the atmosphere. That water vapour doesn't necessarily condense and precipitate in the same area as the power station. Just ask farmers about heavy rainfall in catchment areas.

"It also takes a lot of water to make bio-fuels. A lot of people think that bio-fuels -- like ethanol here in the United States or perhaps bio-diesel -- are going to save you, but the fact of the matter is here, to make ethanol out of corn -- depending on irrigation -- takes anywhere between 300 to 700 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol you produce. Probably not going to work in Australia; doubt it's going to work in the south-west.

"You talk about switchgrass; yes, you can use switchgrass, but most of the switchgrass crops need to be irrigated, so there's a big trade-off on water."

With switchgrass, there's the further complication that it would be an introduced species in a country like Australia -- and we don't have a happy history of introduced species. Everyone has grown up watching early film footage of rabbit plagues, our native animals are under threat from feral cats, feral dogs, foxes and cane toads. Turns out that plant life is just as risky, which is why Reinert warns against introducing a species such as switchgrass to the Australian environment.

"So introduced species... you plant those in your native area at your own risk. You can't control where a bird's going to eat a seed and then deposit that seed somewhere else. You can't control where the wind's going to take it..."

And as we've all learned, the movement of wind is the least predictable element in meteorology.