- Joined
- Mar 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,883
main_board said:Yes, carbon dioxide is a given. What I was hinting at with reducing emissions is switching off hydrocarbons altogether. Well, not all at once clearly, but we're clearly going to need to sooner or later. Having engines that completely combust their fuel is really important, but you're only choosing the lesser of two evils and that will eventually not be enough.
Too bad about the hydrogen engines, eh? Right now people who've got them think they're doing such a good job for the environment. Unfortunately, most hydrogen gas these days is produced by stripping the hydrogens atoms off hydrocarbons, producing....can anyone guess....carbon dioxide! I guess they are atleast doing a public service announcement letting people know about the technology's potential and future. Thats always a good thing.
Personally, I think we should all go the way of the Danish with wind, wind, and more wind power!! Unfortunately, there are some unbelievable rules in place to protect "union brothers" in the energy industry preventing citizens from becoming self-reliant. At least thats how it works in Canada. Stupid politicians.
Cheers!
Yeah, some combination of unions and politics killed off the solar panel initiative in California last year; it was pretty sad.
Even if you make the hydrogen with solar/wind/hydro or nuclear power and electrolysis, there are still serious unresolved safety issues... pressurized hydrogen tanks are prone to exploding, and hydrogen leaks very easily because it's such a small molecule, and if you have a pinprick leak in a pressurized hydrogen line and it gets ignited, it will burn at some very high temperature and become a little blowtorch with an invisible flame! There may be some solutions to this, like storing the hydrogen in some solid or liquid buffer where it can be released slowly through some process, but it's still not really ready for public consumption.
A lot of people seem to be unclear on the concept of energy generation versus energy storage-- hydrocarbon fuels happen to both be a reasonable way of safely transporting high chemical energy in a vehicle, and also be something you can pull out of the ground that already has a lot of chemical potential energy. Ethanol, for example, that you make from corn or something, is a similarly good way of transporting energy in liquid form, but the energy to make it has to come from the sunlight used to grow the corn, and the energy it took to convert the corn to ethanol, and such. Hydrogen is not as good a way to store the energy, except for the fact that burning it doesn't produce CO2, and you still have to put a bunch of energy into producing it... And if you're needing to use solar/wind/hydro/geothermal or nuclear to not burn hydrocarbons to get the energy in the first place, it's important to ask whether for your particular task, what the trade off is between using that to make some chemical fuel like ethanol or hydrogen, or just putting the electricity directly into a battery... Hybrid cars are great, but they should *all* be able to be plugged into electric car charging stations so that they can avoid using the chemical fuel when they can! If you hack your prius to plug into the wall at home, you can make short trips without needing to start the engine at all!