Posted on 02/08/2007 12:58:09 PM PST by aculeus
How about ... conquering the Middle East and taking their oil away?
All of these arguments primarily point out how efficient oil is as a source of energy. Its only real drawback is that it is presently controlled by insane people who want to kill us.
So kill them first and take it for ourselves. Problem solved. Probably cheaper than most of the alternatives, too.
This option, which we never even discuss, is the very first one that would have occurred to most civilizations in history. Never in history has so much tribute been voluntarily paid by the strong to the weak.
'Hydrogen highway' bad route, group says; Alternative fuel championed by governor flawed
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1284737/posts?page=1
We use a "water welder" to braze with on the production floor. It's far less expensive than acetylene and oxygen.
One of the engineers at the company that sold us the unit has a 12v prototype in his Ford Escort wagon. He has been using it for some time with no problems.
Distilled water is all it takes.
For example, I don't believe that any nuclear plant in the US has costed out at a lower cost per KWH than the conventional capacity it replaced or supplanted.
Nuclear is more expensive per KWH than coal or natural gas, it's true, but not that much more.
Furthermnore, the cost of generation via coal and natural gas isn't fully captured in market prices. Coal has a massive environmental costs that are not priced. Dependence on natural gas carries massive securities costs (since so much of it is produced in the Mid East). If coal and natural gas were taxed so that its price would reflect these unpriced costs ("externalities" as economists call them), nuclear would be cost effective.
Ya learn something everyday around this place.
"Unfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age."
"The idea of hydrogen as the fuel of the future dates back to Jules Verne, and by the 1930s was a staple of science fiction."
"The Trouble with Hydrogen Cars"
This guy sounds like a promoter of the oil companies or has some other problem.
The way to not be concerned about carbon production is to generate hydrogen from WATER using nuclear energy.
All energy production processes are inefficient. The moron doesn't say that the efficiency of turning oil into gasoline is probably 30-40%. Meaning, you need to use energy to produce energy. This is not rocket science. It is basic thermodynamics.
As a former research engineer in fuel cells, I can vouch for most of this article.
The author fails to mention that phosphoric-acid fuel cells have enjoyed moderate success in certain stationary applications, where a reformer can be used to convert a natural gas fuel to hydrogen.
However, he is correct about mobile applications. He also didn't mention their poor ability to respond to a sudden need for power, and that a fuel cell probably will not last more than 5 years. Not to mention the consequences of an accident involving hydrogen gas.
I vaguely remember from HS chem class the process of turning coal into coal-gas (used to do it at a local power plant years before). I can't remember why, except for possible convenience, since part of the lesson was on not getting something for nothing, calorie-wise
Try reading the whole article before calling the author a moron. While he may be a moron, and you may disagree with his conclusions, he addressed your point quite fully.
Thank you for at least recognizing that hydrogen is not an energy source. It is an energy storage mechanism, essentially a battery.
My automotive 'money' is on Flex-Fuel vehicles. Ethanol is never going to be much more than a trade-off to produce from an energy standpoint, but its use will tend to dampen the price spikes in gasoline.
The theoretical basis for an automotive hydrogen cycle does not yet exist. Caveat: When I say doesn't exist, I mean from an efficiency & safety standpoint. Therefore there's no way anybody can put a timeline on the development of the technology. It's akin to saying they'll cure all cancer in 'X' years. It's bunk.
In the final analysis petroleum is pretty cheap to pump from the ground. If any viable alternative to petroleum is developed, the price of petroleum will fall. It's that simple. Part of any pricing component of oil will be the price of the alternative fuel.
(1) Conventional liquid petroleum production may have already come to a peak. Or maybe not for two or three decades. But that's not all that far away. Unconventional sources of petroleum are more abundant (tar sands and oil shales) but these are expensive and problematic to produce. So petroleum might be an ongoing problem.
(2) Done properly, nuclear could power our civilization for thousands of years. Big engineering challenges harnessing nuclear for transportation, however. Nuclear -> hydrogen? Battery-powered cars?
(3) Coal. Abundant. Very dirty. Can be converted to liquid fuel. (The details of how it's mined are rather ugly. I'm not sure I believe in human-caused global warming, but the climate science community seems to think it's a big problem.)
(4) Hydro is limited. Not a lot of suitable rivers are left undammed.
(5) Natural gas has reached peak production in North America, or so I've read. To keep domestic supplies high, it will need to be imported. Unfortunately, this requires use of liquified natural gas tankers, which are frightening targets for terrorists. Currently (if memory serves) there are only a couple of terminals in the US for this stuff.
May I add two more:
(6) Wind: Abundant, not very expensive to exploit. But intermittent, cannot be used beyond maybe 15% of electrical grid capacity because it becomes too difficult to control the power grid beyond that point.
(7) Solar: Abundant, but very expensive. Intermittent, so can only be used for peak electrical power generation. One good application is for people in remote locations. But not even the hippies at Sierra Club expect renewables to do more than maybe 20% of our power. They instead envision "efficiency" to solve our energy problem. I.e., we'll learn to do without energy.
Read ALL the article. The author gets into the storage, transportation & energy conversion of hydrogen. The obstacles are enormous.
And electricity, more energy going in the plug than out the tip. Also known as Brown's gas welder.
There are only so many ready-to-use energy sources found on this planet. Those that can readily and efficiently be burned are oil, coal and wood.
Alcohol is a possibility but far from perfect, as even the eco-worshippers are starting to realize that big oil would only be replaced by big corn.
Almost everything else is simply inefficient. There are still thousands of people hoping for all-electric, battery-powered cars. All this electricity would require either burning a whole lot of fossil fuels or a lot more nuclear power plants, not to mention the likelihood of future electro-cars turning into flaming Dell laptops by the side of the road or electrocuting rescue workers and garage mechanics with their high energy density. The article you posted blows holes in the promise of cheap, plentiful hydrogen. Solar cars are basically balsa wood, carbon fiber and bicycle wheels.
Truthfully, the best thing we can do is to make an immediate effort to use oil more efficiently, make more efficient gas and diesel engines, and exploit non-OPEC sources of oil while we continue to look for workable improvements.
There ain't no perpetual motion machine.
Since 2000, less than 1/2 of 1% of our Natural Gas has come from the Middle East inluding Egypt and Algeria.
Lie. I've rebutted this so many times I'm tired of doing so. I quit reading at this point.
I remember the hell we went through with the 17 inch disconnect on the Space Shuttle trying to stop hydrogen leaking from faulty seals. If we had that much trouble with Space Shuttle seals how is Bubba down at the gas station gonna deal with them? H2 really is a tricky beast. We have plenty of near term solutions such as conservation, diesel/electric hybrids, diesel from coal, etc. Methane is incredibly abundant in methane hydrates...a longer term solution.
>>This could most efficiently be done simply by mandating ...<<
Mandating?
No thank you.
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