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California Drivers Can Tank Up WIth Hydrogen
Country_hacker writes "News site TBO.com is reporting ChevronTexaco has opened a hydrogen fuel station in Chino, California, and has plans to open five more. Servicing three (or more) Hyundai SUVs, these prototype fueling stations are a part of a five-year cost-sharing program put on by the Department of Energy. Could this be the 'egg' in the alternate fuels 'chicken or egg?' scenario?"
hmm.. it's easy for me to run outta gas (Never actually done it) but how easy is it for tow-trucks to retrofit to fuel up vehichles on the road-
Hey! no more sucking on the hose when I siphon gas!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Something like this could be really good for Korea (Hyundai is a Korean company) if it took off. This country desperately needs to look at alternate fuel sources. Air pollution here is pretty bad. If this was commercially successful, it could mean some improvements over here.
Unfortunately, nobody's trying to hatch it. The "egg", of course, is the electrical grid, and despite the previous programs to promote electric vehicles there appears to be little support for plug-in hybrids which could "refuel" on non-petroleum energy almost anywhere for little additional trouble or expense.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
After reading this page about a worst case scenario of what could happen after we run out of oil, I've come to wonder if its claims that we don't have enough platinum on earth to make fuel cells feasible for cars is true. Does anyone know either way?
One thing is a confirmed fact though, they cost a lot to make 1 million US$, and they may come down to $100,000 in 10 years. What a bargain!
I sure hope they can make fuel cells work, but everything I've read seems to indicate that best case, it's not a done deal quite yet.
hydrogen fuel takes energy to make, so we'll still buy plenty of oil to make the hydrogen. Getting the US nuclear power industry going again in a big way is the only (short term, eg decades rather than centuries) way to dramatically reduce our dependency on oil. PS for those who modded parent troll, where do YOU think most of Al Qaeda's funding for 911 came from? Hint, it was neither Iraq nor Afghanistan...
But what you've missed is that it takes as much energy in fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol as is released when you burn it. The benefits of ethanol as a renewable energy source are very debateable. I'd bet bio-diesel is a lot more energy positive though.
It is going to be extremely difficult for any renewable source to take hold until all the non-renewable sources are gone.
Not true. We're probbably never going to run out of fossile fuels, it's just going to become increasingly expensive to get them. Not all fossile fuels have equal costs in getting them out of the ground and into a useable state. Canada for instance has a trillion barrels of oil in the form of tar sand. They're very costly to extract into a useable form though. The point is that as fossil fuels become increasingly expensive renewable sources will become econmically viable. The costs associated with renewables will also likely only go down as more money+research gets pumped into them from the profits of usage.
This is actually one of the reasons that OPEC doesn't want high oil prices. High oil prices only encourage investments in other energy sources, which eventually only undermines oil prices.
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