Teslas in North Dakota. Intelligent Wall St. conservatives know electric vehicles of all types will soon replace fossil fuel vehicles of all types. Even coal barrons like Joe Manchin should know this

 Just look at the license plates on their trucks. Those employed at fracking  drilling sites & pipelines in Pennsylvania are mostly from Louisiana. 

Same as the “man camps” of gas fracking drillers “employed” in Pennsylvania: 

“The first oil boom in the Bakken, about 13 years ago, attracted roughnecks and roustabouts who lived in dreary “man camps” and fled back to the Gulf Coast states when the first bust came along a few years later. But petroleum has showered a lot of prosperity on the Bakken, too, and plenty of families stayed, their ranks growing as oil prices rebounded.” 

Maybe because nobody really wants to live in a shithole like Louisiana. 

 EVERY home building contractor is going to want a Ford F-150 Lightning. VIDEO BELOW.

Ford also makes a small family homeowner hybrid that competes with Toyota’s Prius, sort of. I have a Prius V that Toyota stopped making that I use like a small pickup truck. The  Ford Maverick Hybrid Pickup Truck  is available now.  

“EVs will be soaking up electricity,” said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota’s vast distances. “So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online.”

As many parts of the country attempt to shift their energy production away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other renewables, what’s happening here shows how the electric car revolution might play out in parts of the country far less friendly to either clean cars or clean energy.

The automakers, which have pledged to move largely to electric vehicles over the next decade, will have to overcome cultural hurdles to convince consumers to buy them. The major social spending bill before Congress would increase the subsidy for purchases of EVs from the current $7,500 up to $12,500, if the cars are built in the United States by union labor. But in North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore.

A provision in the bill to encourage the transition away from coal to solar, wind and nuclear generation was dropped at the insistence of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). And as a crucial climate conference proceeds in Glasgow, Scotland, coal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning.

Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

But a carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant’s exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells.

Jacobs isn’t sure how many electric vehicles will come to North Dakota, but if their image rubs off on his industry, that’s fine with him.

“A lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth because, you know, we’re polluting the air, ruining the landscape,” said Jacobs, 59. “It would make it more friendly.”

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.

“True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”

His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”

MORE AT WASHINGTON POST

Where electric cars could help save coal 

In states like North Dakota giving up gasoline might not mean giving up fossil fuels

Why a Tesla X?

So how does an electric vehicle hold up in North Dakota? Where do you charge it? How does it compare to “regular” cars? Through this project and the DriveElectricND brand, we have a remarkable opportunity to promote EVs and their uses throughout North Dakota. We’ll be blogging, posting, sharing insights and thoughts about driving and EV from various perspectives.

MORE AT:

DRIVE ELECTRIC NORTH DAKOTA

EVERY home building contractor is going to want a Ford F-150 Lightning. 

The base model costs about $40,000 about 1/2 of what most contractors spend on pickup trucks. 

Ford also makes a small family homeowner hybrid that competes with Toyota’s Prius, sort of. I have a Prius V that Toyota stopped making that I use like a small pickup truck.  The Ford Maverick Hybrid Pickup Truck available now. 

“Drive The Ford Maverick Hybrid - The Least Expensive New Pickup You Can Buy!”