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Fuel-cell Vehicles for Americans
hey writes "An article titled Fuel-cell vehicles run clean, but is their future clear? in the Japan Times says Honda is leasing fuel-cell cars to individual Americans. The article mentions: 'Honda officials said it is easier for the automaker to start leasing in the U.S. because there are more hydrogen gas installations there than in Japan.'"
If it takes more oil to obtain hydrogen in proper form than just refining it to diesel or gasoline and using it in an internal combustion engine, is it going to help? We will still be dependent on foreign oil. Maybe we could power the fuel cell producing plants by burning soybean oil in modified disel generators? There is a John Deere diesel generator I saw that was modified with a heat exchanger to heat up used soybean oil and run it through the engine after it warms up, requiring disel (fossil fuel) ot only be used to start up and shut down. We could get that oil from Texas, or maybe Alaska.
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I forget where (possibly wired, but I couldn't find the article, at least not without getting a debt collector after me), but I recall reading that the most cost effective methods (in other words, the ones that will most likely be used for a while) for refining the fuel needed for fuel cells created almost as much pollution as the vehicles themselves would be emitting using gas power. Wish I could find the article again, it was a rather interesting look on the situation.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
On the contrary: we've got plenty of H2O here. We welcome you to take the H2 away from us, as long as you let us keep the remaining oxygen.
No wait... you can have the full H2O as well (some fish and heavy metals included).Some of the adverse environmental impact is already in place in the form of water rentention dams, and with modifications these dams could be producing electricity.
I few months ago I attended a lecture at the University of Kentucky by Jack Spadaro (http://www.jackspadaro.com/), an accomplished mining engineer who helped draft much of the (poorly enforced) regulations for surface mining in the United States. At one point in the lecture he claimed that if all of the currently installed water retention dams in the West Virgina were converted to hydroelectric dams West Virginia could meet all of its power needs without using a single lump of coal.
As for wind power, I agree that it only works in certain areas, requires large tracts of land, and can be unreliable. But modern wind turbines have significantly reduced noise by improvements in production techniques and aerodynamics, and are no more noisy than traditional power plants (Buffalo Mountain in Tenneesee is a prime example). Also, the bird deaths at sites like Altamont should be seen in context - proportionally automobiles, radio towers, and skyscrapers each kill more birds than wind farms do, and newer wind turbines are designed to prevent birds from perching/nesting on them and rotate at slower speeds. I would suggest going here (http://www.cogreenpower.org/Wind.htm) for more information on the subject.
Storing Materials (For example, Gasoline), and using it to produce energy is primitive and inadecuate. What we need is better, smaller batterys. So, we have a form of energy (Electricity), that is clean, easy to store, cheap, and that is portable across different aplications (That is, you can power allmost anything with electricity, engines for different aplications, a radio, a computer, a cellphone ...), and the most important is: You can produce electricity in lots of different ways, from nuclear power, hidroelectric facilities, wind, solar power, using oil, etc.
So, we have a virtually unlimited resource (Since it's present in nature, is renovable, and can be produced in many ways, some of them are not renovable, but some are).
The only problem with this technology are batteries, because they are not sufficiently evolved, we just need to put more effort into producing better batteries, and in creating a standard so you can plug any batterie in any device.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Well in my opinion we should be looking for the "technological silver bullets" becauase that is were the future resides. Bush is worried that the US economy would be wrecked by taxing energy consumption, then what does he think a disastrous war that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars is going to do.
I use to think that people were naive if you thought the war in Iraq was about oil and now I think you are naive if you think it wasn't about the control of oil and contracts in oil field development. Lets just put it this way, the war in Iraq was not about WMD and it wasn't about terrorism.
It is good tho to see Bush acknowledging that our dependance on oil is a national security. Amory Lovins has been saying this for years. In fact, our dependence is not unlike a chemically dependent junkie who will do things to get his next fix that he would not normally do.
Regardless imagine if the money that was spent in Iraq was spent on the development of new demand and supply side technology such as hybrid vehicles, cheap diode lighting, solar sail lighting, better building techniques and terrestrial and extraterrestrial solar energy production, safer and cleaner nuclear, wave energy and of couse the holy grail of fusion energy.
Further the taxing of energy consumption would not create economic disaster as Bush states and as you note in the UK. It would harm certain segments such as traditional energy suppliers but creates and fosters others industries that are self sustaining and pay long term dividends. It would create a whole new economy dedicated to supplying new forms of energy and using what we have more efficiently.
There aren't any decent jobs close to where I live.
What about people like us?
Should I give up my 12.5 mile away job in IT and go work at McD's around the corner?
Or move to the area near work, which is mostly commercial and doesn't have many houses?
Be serious!
And telecommuting isn't all its cracked up to be. If it was, it would be WAY more popular, because of companies wanting to save space and employees want to save time and money travelling.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It still won't work - the electric grid maintains a set amount of capacity at any given time. It CANNOT store electricity for use at peak-use hours, therefore when everyone gets home at 6:02pm and plugs in their cars... we still have brownout conditions. I believe you're overlooking the sheer number of vehicles out there on the road, and the huge amount of energy (currently in the form of petrochemicals) they use to go about your business.
Now, we could build up the grid to the point that it could handle those spikes... but as electricity cannot be effectively stored in significant "quantities", all that extra capacity is wasted. I know I can't afford a pebble-bed reactor...
http://www.bloomberg.com/ reports: ....
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow Visits U.S.'s Biggest Oil Supplier: It's Not Saudi Arabia
`It's not well known in the U.S. the degree to which the U.S. is dependent on Canada for energy,' John Manley, a foreign affairs and finance minister under former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said in an interview.
Canada's oil exports to the U.S. averaged 2.12 million barrels a day in 2004, or 10.3 percent of daily U.S. consumption, compared with 1.64 million barrels from Mexico and 1.56 million barrels from Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration