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May 25, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Alternative fuel for thought
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The world's reliance on crude oil as the fuel for transportation has to end, according to nearly a dozen speakers at the Future in Review conference this week. That's not exactly a novel idea these days, but there's plenty of debate surrounding the question of how people will consume energy in the future, whether it's electric cars, hybrids, biofuels, or something else entirely.
"The world's energy system as it is fundamentally unsustainable," said Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global environment and energy correspondent for The Economist during one panel session. "The needlessly dirty and inefficient ways we use fuels today make it unsustainable."
So then, what's next? There was no consensus on a solution, but plenty of ideas about what is needed. The next source of fuel for the transportation world must be clean, efficient, dense, abundant, safe and, most importantly, cheap.
"The politics of the energy business in the U.S. has been, 'let's make sure it's cheap and let's don't worry about having the next generation of sustainable supply,'" said Randy Foutch, president of Foutch Consulting and oil industry veteran. But at this point, both industry players and government officials have to look ahead because the means to get something done is there if the will can be summoned, he said.
Organizers of the Future in Review conference here try hard not to have a common theme, with sessions ranging from biomimicry and the future of AIDS to rocket science and global investment trends. Likewise, the participants and attendees hail from a wide range of backgrounds: information technology, finance, government, academia and venture capital.
The Economist
But the technology world is increasingly turning its efforts toward finding alternative ways to power homes and automobiles in hopes of curbing global warming, reducing dependence on the Middle East, and getting rich. That was reflected in the sessions inside the Hotel Del Coronado, where the event is being held, and in the cocktail-hour discussions afterward.
Before even getting started on alternative fuels, technologists and engineers should be finding new materials for building cars, said Nate Lewis, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
"You can't fight physics," Lewis said, questioning the logic of building a 3,000-pound car to haul around 300 pounds of passengers. "The transportation industry will go to lightweight high-strength materials," which will produce cars that need less fuel to move about town.
And while they're at it, figuring out how to make the good old-fashioned combustion engine more efficient would be a good idea, Vaitheeswaran said. "Efficiency itself is an alternative fuel." Hybrid cars like Toyota's Prius are a nice first step toward that idea, but they don't really solve anything fundamentally because they are still dependent on gasoline for most of the time, he said.
Several panelists and speakers supported the idea of all-electric cars. For one thing, they are much more efficient than gasoline engines, Lewis said. They also aren't locked into one future source of energy or another, since the electric car doesn't care whether its charge was produced by burning gas, solar power or a nuclear reaction, said Martin Eberhard, CEO of electric car maker Tesla Motors.
"If you can store the energy in an electric form, you have complete independence of the source," Eberhard said. Gasoline-powered cars, on the other hand, were designed to run nothing but unleaded gasoline or perhaps diesel fuel from the start, giving drivers only one way to move the wheels.
Tesla has been on a whirlwind publicity tour showing off its Roadster, which it parked on the lawn outside the Hotel Del Coronado on Wednesday. The Roadster is an all-electric vehicle that gets its power from a conventional wall socket and stores it in lithium-ion batteries. "We can make a difference by proving that tech is there to produce a viable electric car, and that people want to buy it," said Elon Musk, chairman of the company. Also on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got a look at the Roadster during a visit to Silicon Valley.
Others want to focus on ways to improve existing car engines. Martin Tobias, for example, has started a company called Imperium Renewables that is trying to develop refining technology for "plug and playable, hot-swappable hydrocarbons that could replace oil," as he put it.
Biodiesel-fueled engines have been gaining support as a relatively simple way to take existing diesel engines and run them on a cleaner fuel derived from corn, palm oil or other plants. The problem is that a government push behind ethanol hasn't really produced results, and some worry about the risks of basing the fuel economy around a crop that could compete with the food supply.
There is another push these days to explore using genetic engineering to produce plants with a higher fuel content than those used for food, or to develop types of algae that can produce a lot of energy with a small footprint, Tobias said. J. Craig Venter, in a speech kicking off the conference Tuesday night, said he's also looking into developing algae and microbes that could be used as fuel sources.
All of these ideas are still in the relatively early stages, but momentum is growing. As countries like India and China begin to consume energy at the levels used by the developed world, and the love affair with the automobile rages on, there appears to be little choice.
"There's no way in hell we're going to persuade 300 million people to get out of their cars," Vaitheeswaran said.
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Yellow if the new Green: Meaning lining the corn producers pockets with green money.
We have already seen the way to go, the guys from Purdue university have figured out a way to harness a metal reaction to water and make Hydrogen and you only make what you need, no gas stations or planning needed, now if the energy companies would get off there a$$ and get behind this we can all drive hydrogen cars
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline.
The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.
http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html
Autos are going electric. When you substitute electric for gasoline, you gain enormous economies. Disregarding battery costs, an electric gets from 3.5 to 5 miles per kilowatt
hour, for vehicle weights 4,000 to 2500 pounds.
The cost of an average kilowatt hour is 8.5 cents. $3.00 gasoline costs about 5 to 12 times as much per mile. We have enough spare electrical capacity available right now to power our entire
gasoline powered fleet (which would require about 11% of our total electricity). Therefore, lightening up the cars in this low cost per mile enviromnent is money poorly spent. It makes no economic sense.
Iran with nukes controls oil and threaten the world.
Gas now cost over half of the minimum wage. leads to large scale gas thieves.Kids in middle night carrying rubber hoses. Gas station drive offs
Ask yourself this if all those countries that control most of Oil tell America that they don't want to sell us Oil Because they Got China and India as customers now.
Could lead to Socialism in America and all the oil and wall street people could come under state control.
Every dollar you spend 20 cents go to Support people that want to hurt you through terrorism .
Gobal warming
Remember America not like Europe We don't got large train Systems to take the place of large scale Fuel shortages.
Yes its true and yes its possible. If i had the time and money to survive for a year(and the tools to measure) I could GIVE you a easy to implement technology that would run YOUR CAR on water without much cost and a completely free fuel source.
As for the video above, the government bought him out and payed 100+million to put his technology into hummers for the army and promise(probably in blood) that he wont give the technology away to anyone else.
With these new supercapacitor packs, we could see within ten years all-electric cars that--because we finally eliminated the space-wasting engine compartment--have a lot of interior space but with smaller external size (imagine a car with the interior space of a Honda Accord but smaller externally than a Honda Civic!). And unlike fuel-cell vehicles, these electric cars can take advantage of the electric power grid now in place or take advantage of cheaper solar power panels coming in the next five year (again, thanks to nanotechnology).
Water is the better and safer storage of power, the promise water has as an alternative fuel has been unlimited using a simple process of using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen only when required, where the hydrogen power to drive a car engine will also recharge the battery that originally did the electrolysis splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen and also the hydrogen will be only produced when needed just before starting the engine and the electrolysis process will be switched-off when switching off the engine at the same time. This hydrogen-run engines will run cars, SUVs, trucks, buses, trains and airplanes so cheaply and successfully that not other alternative fuels would ever be needed but these technologies will be suppressed owing to big business money and political scams from Oil Producers and other vested interests. They might even commit murder to suppress these inventions from propagating and flourishing successfully.
Please watch related report of the Water Car Inventor who had been murdered:- Link:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU&mode=related&search =
Improving efficiency will be an important part of the energy soltion, whatever your purely economic argument looking not beyond the consumer suggests.
Best Wishes,
-Ben
There are 2 questions that need to be answered. What will be the mobile energy carrier that replaces gas/oil and what will be the energy source that is transferred into that fuel source?
The answer is Solar Transfer technologies to capture the energy as efficiently as possible and hydrogen and electrically charged batteries for the mobile fuel carrier.
If you have legitimate reasons why we should re think our strategy let us know.
here's a list of pros and cons:
1) Biomass - I believe the food vs fuel issue eliminates ethanol as a serious contender. However, biodiesel is viable if algae, (50%+ oil by weight), is used since it doesn't require arable land. Also, diesel is approxomately 30% more efficient than gas engines.
2) Hydrogen - assuming you overcome technical issues, (storage, collection..etc..,), the tanks would still end up too big for a passenger car.
Here's why: liquid hydrogen ,(densest form), is approxomately 1/10th the weight by volume of gasoline. So, if 1 gal hydrogen = 1 pound
then 1 gal of gas = 10 pounds.
Now, hydrogen produces 3x the power per gram compared to gas. So, you would need a tank 3x the size of a gas tank to go the same distance.
Possible for buses but not passenger cars.
3) Electric - batteries are expensive and don't go very far by themselves.
4) Hybrid - gas/diesel electric can help. A plug in variety could further boost mileage. What I don't get is why not focus more on having an engine to assist/charge the battery rather than have a battery assist the engine?
THE WORLD ECONOMY CANNOT HANDLE A MASSIVE AND FREE ALTERNATIVE FUEL. THATS TEH PROBLEM WITH WATER. YOU CANT TAX IT.
Just do the search on youtube.com "Cars that run on water" and you'll find that its been done plenty of times and is perfectly viable. Im working on mine as I write this. Hopefully I can give it to you for free
Those bubbles you see in the water are HYDROGEN and OXYGEN. and it took hardly any power...
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by BSChemistry
May 11, 2008 7:59 AM PDT
- The Conservation of Energy and the First Law of Thermodynamics Can?t be Ignored.
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Reply to this comment
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See all 59 Comments >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics
The Iceland produces hydrogen from hydrothermal energy. The cost of production is cheap because is only a combination of Capital investment and Plant Operation Cost and FREE (geothermal energy).
To produce Hydrogen we have to spend a lot of Energy.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/thermo/electrol.html
By providing energy from a battery, water (H2O) can be dissociated into the diatomic molecules of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2).
H2O => (H2) + ½ (O2) -285.83 kJ @ temperature 298K (Eo = 1.229 V)
The efficiency of water electrolysis is not 100%.
This event will occur on any conductive surface. When the proper amount of energy is applied, however, certain materials such as high surface area metals are more efficient and consume less energy to produce a given amount of hydrogen. The precious metal platinum has shown great activity for water electrolysis, attaining over 50% efficiency. Using electrodes composed of QSI nanometals, QSI has achieved up to 80% efficiency at lower current flow rates (100 mA/cm2) and approximately 60% efficiency at higher rates (1000 mA/cm2). The feed water of the electrolyzer must be distilled or deionized water, which is not cheap too.
Using ready to go technology with 80% efficiency and the electrode current density of (100mA/cm2), the water electrolyzer is not very compact and efficient, and the electrodes don?t last forever.
Installed in a car, the energy sourced from the battery has to be replaced by alternator, which in return used car engine energy with an efficiency of 25% to 30% of the burned gasoline. Producing free electricity from the Regenerative Braking System, or from Thermocouple Electrical Power Generator using the heat of exhaust system, is a different but not a simple story.