Way of the Future?

[Bambikiller240]

I like warm weather

[zguitar71]

We use Bio-Diesel in our large trucks at work. I cannot tell a difference in performance but I can tell a difference with my nose. The Bio-Diesel is great. It does not smeel like petrolium diesel at all, it smells more like fried food and it does not produce as much soot either. The price is close to petrolium diesel now that it has gone up to $2.65 a gallon. I just read an article about the petrolium companies lobbing to make Bio illegal. I am not sure why I just skimed the reading but they are worried about bio's possible impact to their buisness; so they are scrambeling to stop its production.

Hydrogen can be produced cheaply and effeciently through new solar technology. The man who invented the nickle-hydried battrie (forgot his name) is sinking all his time and money into producing solar cells unlike any other. They will produce power under low light (thick cloud cover, north side of a roof in the northern hemisphere or visa versa for the southern half) and will work even with holes punched in them. Conventional cells are trashed when they are penitrated. These cells are flexible and are being produced in his factory currently. They can be used like roofing materiel, which is how he designed them to be used. The plant is making them in sheets that are about one foot wide and one mile long (sounds crazy but it is true). He is also working on ways to process hydrogen from the solor cells with low enviromental impact and low cost. He claims to have figure out the way but keeps the process garded until he can get it pattened. He also has made a metal alloy that asorbs hydrogen like a sponge and will not release it when ruptured or explode from impacts. Auto companies are looking into using it as materiel for parts on a car like the bumpers whick would double as fuel storage.

The technology is here to use hydrogen but the government and auto companies are reluctant to convert because the entire infrastructure for this contry (US and relating to the auto) is based on petrolium.

[e_racer1999]

honestly, i'm sick of petroleum and the industy's greed. however, i love classic cars, and they seem to be running on gasoline these days. the person who develops a decent alternative to fossil fuels that has little or no negative impact on performance will be my hero

[MikeW]

Hydrogen can be produced cheaply and effeciently through new solar technology.

The easiest way to produce hydrogen is by splitting water molecules using electrolysis. This consumes a lot of electricity which typically comes from burning hydrocarbons. I agree, cheap solar (photo-voltaic) cells would go a long way to solving the problem. However, with basically free electricity from the sun we might as well convert over to pure electric and eliminate the extra step of producing hydrogen. The problem there, of course, is battery capacity and life. Another problem with hydrogen right now is the missing infrastructure to sell it. That's why hybrid cars are doing so well since the petroleum infrastructure is in place.

The electric infrastructure is also already in place. My personal opinion is that the eventual solution will be pure electric with standard replaceable battery packs. You charge your car overnight at home. For long road trips, you pull into a battery station and swap your depleted battery for one that's already charged up and ready to go.

[Mr Camouflage]

This guy has said goodbye to internal combustion in all forms, and is building an electric 240z

http://users.wpi.edu/~sethm/

He's already built an electric pick up truck, (or ute in aussie language)

[Bambikiller240]

Seth is a member of our 240z.org mail list.

[1 Bravo 6]

Government tax incentives to farmers to increase herds of cattle, sheep and especially .....PIGS would solve all problems.

Machinery similar to that used for milking could be attached to the obvious part of the animals anatomy and, after inducing the animals to an extreme case of flatulence, channel the gasses into huge holding tanks for later distribution to "GAS" stations.

Rick.

[Fun_in_my_z]

Shoot, Make ya some high grade corn wiskey.....Like the dukes did

[Bambikiller240]

Government tax incentives to farmers to increase herds of cattle, sheep and especially .....PIGS would solve all problems.

Machinery similar to that used for milking could be attached to the obvious part of the animals anatomy and, after inducing the animals to an extreme case of flatulence, channel the gasses into huge holding tanks for later distribution to "GAS" stations.

Rick.

Hey Rick, you forgot to mention POLITICIANS as another source animal. You wouldn't even need to alter their diet (from their normal quantity of tax dollars), as they already generate large volumes of flatulance.

[e_racer1999]

^^kinda like a hot air car.....

[Zedrally]

This guy has said goodbye to internal combustion in all forms, and is building an electric 240z

http://users.wpi.edu/~sethm/

He's already built an electric pick up truck, (or ute in aussie language)

Wow, this is better than expected, any further news on his progress?

MOM

[Inf]

Natural gas/propane/etc are all petroleum products. Moving to them is not an escape from our reliance upon petroleum.

Technically, the fuels that come from organic sources such as alcohol from corn are pretty clean. Of course, I remember reading that the massive demand the world has for fuel far exceeds the amount that could be produced from land capable of supporting the agriculture.

Also, I remember seeing an episode of Top Gear (British automobile show) in which they converted a car to run off some gas (Methane?) that was produced from collecting farm animal crap and processing it somehow. Same problem as above really : supply. The food for making that dung has to be grown somewhere as well, not to mention costs associated with processing it into a fuel.

*skip to the end if you wish to avoid a long winded line of thought

Fuel cells(and power from combustion utilizing hydrogen) are quite nifty and all that. They are not a 'free lunch' so to speak like politicians and the media like to often claim. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, it does indeed take more energy to split hydrogen and oxygen up from water than you would get from burning them. The big problem is, where do we get the energy to do this? It is not capable of being a self sustaining process from an energy standpoint.

At this moment, the energy we use for electrolysis and getting hydrogen in the first place comes from power plants (coal/nuclear fission/hydroelectric, etc, etc etc) which are all either not capable of producing massive amounts of energy(hydroelectric, solar) or create harmful byproducts (whether released to the air, or concentrated in nuclear waste. Take your pick).

The latest theory i've heard involves deploying large satellites into orbit to generate power with solar cells and transmit the energy down to a specific point on the earth via a laser of some sort and use that energy for electrolysis or some similar process (i'm no chemist). This seems like a fairly clean idea, however I am skeptical about this being able to produce nearly enough power for us to generate enough fuel to get off of our oil dependence... at least in our lifetimes.

My personal opinion is that we will be locked into our reliance upon fossil fuels until/if we can generate a sustained nuclear fusion(nuclear reaction the sun produces) reaction here on earth to generate power. The energy we could technically get from the fusion reaction from hydrogen to helium would be much more than the amount of energy required to extract that amount of hydrogen from other sources. Helium is a harmless substance, and would be pretty much all that is leftover afterwards. This would probably not be done in cars, or homes but in huge reactors like we have today. This energy however would easily 'trickle down' to consumers: the power generated at this reactors would be used to extract hydrogen from water that can then be used for fuel in our cars either by combustion or via a fuel cell (either one would not produce any emissions).

Nuclear fission, like we use today for power generation, works upon the principle of splitting heavier atoms which results in a lot of nasty nuclear isotopes leftover. Our current solution to this is to "sweep it under the rug," or more specifically, bury it underground and just not worry about it.

Nuclear fusion is what goes on inside a star. When the temperature of the hydrogen reaches a certain threshold temperature (about 100,000,000 kelvins IIRC), the atoms are moving so rapidly that they can strike and overcome the "strong"(?) force that would otherwise make the two nuclei repel from each other and 'fuse' into a larger atom. This releases a tremendous amount of energy. The big hurdle right now is our understanding of plasma dynamics : no containment vessel we could construct out of materials could withstand 100,000,000K, so we must keep the plasma constrained by powerful magnetic fields. There are plenty of sites with information about this for the curious, if you google for info on tokamak reactors and/or nuclear fusion. Fusion is fairly safe, if the containment vessel failed it would not be the end of the world or anything. Maybe for an operator who was near the reactor though. I'm not a physicist or anything, but that is my understanding of it.

This is most likely still a long long way off. There has been a lot of promising research done into this however. There are several reactors around the world that are currently capable, and often do, perform these fusion reactions, but at present they are not self sustaining. It will most likely just be a matter of time though.

In short : I think hydrogen is the critical piece of how we could someday be free of our fossil fuel dependence, however it is not as simple as the media and politicians make it out to be.