Burning Water

[gemini5362]

hydrogen powered cars has been a technology that is available for years. go to this link to see one of the early pioneers Billings Energy Corporation The post office had a fleet of vehicles for delivering the mail for quite a while to see the feasability of doing that. When you burn hydrogen in a internal combustion engine you get almost no emissions. Billings made a fuel cell that used aromatic hydrocarbons to absorb the hydrogen so you eliminated the danger of it blowing up in an accident. The biggest problem I see is range. The postal vehicles had most of the space in the vehicle taken up by tanks and it only had a range of 110 miles.

 

[jinman]

Iceland is doing work on developing hydrogen fueled engines.

MATR News: Iceland Opens Hydrogen-Filling Station

How many of those hydrogen vehicles in Iceland are used to pull 40' 5th wheel motorhomes down the highway at 70 mph? Does anyone use a fuel cell in an 18-wheeler? How about fuel-cell ATVs, personal watercraft, lawn tractors, tractors, and airplanes? We have created unlimited uses for our fossil fuels and now that the price has suddenly spiked, we are feeling the pinch. In the short term, we need more fuel in the pipeline to control prices.

Hey, I love those little cars and alternative fuels, but the problems are a lot greater than that. A single technology is not likely to displace our dependence on fossil fuels in the near term or long term. I'm very impressed by the ability of things like the bullet trains that use ultra low friction to enable large loads to move at high speeds. I think many technologies will come together to produce more efficient machines that take less fuel and yet are able to do the big jobs. It might be a horrible thought to some, but maybe our trucking industry will be replaced almost completely with high efficiency trains. At what fuel price will truckers be forced to park their big rigs? In my opinion, it won't take long. As it is, if you have full fuel tanks on a big rig, you almost need an armed guard to protect your "liquid gold" in those saddle tanks.

 

[dixie306]

YES. That is a good real world number after you factor in the energy you lose in making electricity from gasoline via eng/gen. Actual FULL energy from gasoline is 12.7 kiloWatt-hrs per kilogram. Best you can do with batteries is around 150 Watt-hrs per kilogram. That difference is a factor of 85. A decent amount of this difference [20vs85] can be recouped by using the waste heat from gas. Our cars do this some via the heater in winter.
larry

honda's answer to this problem is solved by using a electric motor instead of a combustion engine, guys the futures just around the corner with this, ck out BMW's answer http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Uniquely/FutureTechnologies/Hydrogen.aspx While I haven't built one yet, these things folks are making to produce hydrogen makes sense to me, a combustion engine has to have both fuel and air to run, adding hydrogen in with the air flow seems to aid in the combustion of gas. I watched the clip on Iceland and noticed that was a Shell oil station that had the hydrogen fill unit, its going to be interesting to see just how much they charge for it. After the cost of building it, operating cost can't be that great.

 

[EddieWalker]

The theory that oil came from dinasours and organic material millions of years ago doesn't make any sense to me.

Oil floats on water, yet oil or the solid material that supposedly becomes oil, managed to work it's way thousands of feet into the earth. I don't think so.

Oil was created millions of years ago, but now it's not happening again. Why would it only be dinasours and plant life of that period of time that creates oil, but not plant life and the animals since the dinasours? If oil was created by them, shouldn't it still be created by every one of us when we die and our bodies work their way thousands of feet into the planet? I don't think so.

Dinasours are found in tar pits that existed back then. Did other dinasours decompose, sink thousands of feet into the planet, get turned into oil and then come back up to the surface to trap those dinasours that have been found in the tar pits? I don't think so.

How many dinasours and how much plant matter had to be used to generate a million barrels of oil? How man billions of of barrels of oil are in the planet? How many barrles of oil have been pumped out? Estimates keep growing because of all the new discoveries. It seems that every year there are new discoveries of huge oil fields.

Do the math, it's a rediculous amount of oil that we have and the amount of organic material to create the oil is an absurd number. It's so extreme that it would take almost every animal that died to generate so much oil. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

The burning water thing sounds just like what is going on with corn. Use massive amounts of energy in the forms of diesel fuel to create small amounts of ethenol.

Eddie

 

[MikeD74T]

honda's answer to this problem is solved by using a electric motor instead of a combustion engine, guys the futures just around the corner with this, ck out BMW's answer http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Uniquely/FutureTechnologies/Hydrogen.aspx While I haven't built one yet, these things folks are making to produce hydrogen makes sense to me, a combustion engine has to have both fuel and air to run, adding hydrogen in with the air flow seems to aid in the combustion of gas. I watched the clip on Iceland and noticed that was a Shell oil station that had the hydrogen fill unit, its going to be interesting to see just how much they charge for it. After the cost of building it, operating cost can't be that great.

Hydrogen is simply a low energy fuel, albiet a very clean one. It has a very large flammable range and for now must be compressed to high pressure to carry enough to be useful. The main reason hydrogen will displace electric cars is because refuelling is faster than recharging, important where long distance travel is desired. You wouldn't make very good time if you had to stop for 3 of 8 hours to refuel/recharge your vehicle.The technology to produce hydrogen onboard a moving vehicle isn't unlike the chase for perpetual motion. Doubtless it will someday be possible, if not feasible. Iceland will be successful in producing & distributing hydrogen because they have endless & essentially free heat in sufficient quantities to disassociate water into H2 & O on a large scale. I'm at a power plant that produces over 1200 megawatts of electricity per hour. We buy our hydrogen by the truckload. If it was cheap or easy to produce as some of the current gadget makers would have you believe we'd be doing it. MikeD74T

 

[gemini5362]

How many of those hydrogen vehicles in Iceland are used to pull 40' 5th wheel motorhomes down the highway at 70 mph? Does anyone use a fuel cell in an 18-wheeler? How about fuel-cell ATVs, personal watercraft, lawn tractors, tractors, and airplanes? We have created unlimited uses for our fossil fuels and now that the price has suddenly spiked, we are feeling the pinch. In the short term, we need more fuel in the pipeline to control prices.

Hey, I love those little cars and alternative fuels, but the problems are a lot greater than that. A single technology is not likely to displace our dependence on fossil fuels in the near term or long term. I'm very impressed by the ability of things like the bullet trains that use ultra low friction to enable large loads to move at high speeds. I think many technologies will come together to produce more efficient machines that take less fuel and yet are able to do the big jobs. It might be a horrible thought to some, but maybe our trucking industry will be replaced almost completely with high efficiency trains. At what fuel price will truckers be forced to park their big rigs? In my opinion, it won't take long. As it is, if you have full fuel tanks on a big rig, you almost need an armed guard to protect your "liquid gold" in those saddle tanks.

I believe the hydrogen fuel that they are talking about in the article about iceland is used in internal combustion engines. The seem to be using them in buses so pretty good sized engines but like i posted about the postal service problem the range in the buses was only about 125 miles.

 

[have_blue]

Hooey?? Honda, Toyota, and GM don't think so, all three are working on hydrogen powered cars and GM is lagging way behind the other two, ck out all threes websites about them but here's honda's Honda FCX Clarity - Fuel Cell - Official Web Site

Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.

 

[wedge40]

Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.

You mean like next summer?

Wedge

 

[dixie306]

Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.

Oops, my bad, I'm one of those who believe necessity is still the Mother of Invention and I believe sooner or later, despite our present congress, a way will be found to create a fuel other than gas-oil.

 

[have_blue]

Oops, my bad, I'm one of those who believe necessity is still the Mother of Invention and I believe sooner or later, despite our present congress, a way will be found to create a fuel other than gas-oil.

No problem, and I too am optimistic about finding a way to sustain our standard of living. There's probably no magic bullet, but I think several energy sources will be tailored to the application. The most potential for "breakthrough" technology would be battery storage capacity, and solar panel efficiency.

Current batteries can get you around 50mi on an overnight charge. When batteries can get you comfortably over 100mi, there will be explosive development to take advantage of it.

Current solar panels are woefully inefficient. Fuel prices have encouraged investment in SP research, and incremental improvements are coming with more and more frequency. When SP efficiency approaches 40%, there will be a stampede to mass produce them, and employ them in a lot of applications.

I'm thinking small 2 person commuter cars with small battery pack that can take you ~100mi on a charge, and can partially re-charge by solar panel while in the parking lot. Even a 500W solar panel collects a lot of power over 8-9 hours.