Fuel cells are starting to hit the market today (a coleman product was mentioned in the article, there are a few others out there). I would expect that by the time that Bush is on his way out the door to his last Airforce 1 ride, he might be driven from the airport in a hydrogen powered car.
So what sort of fuel taxes would hydrogen be subject to in Europe? I would think that hydrogen derived from clean sources (solar, wind, bio-hydrogen) should be exempt from any sort of pollution taxes.
It would certainly speed the changeover if you have 0.50euro hydrogen competing with 1euro gasoline and the hydrogen gets you further.
There's no reason to make potable water as a requirement for the process. You can make a hydrogen plant on the coast and use the Pacific Ocean as intake.
Remember, this is taxpayer funded hydrogen pumps that get put up before cars get sold. When the station owner has lines 5 cars long on his hydrogen pump he'll put in a 2nd on his own dime or his competitors will. 30k, if there's demonstrated demand, isn't a lot of money for a business to invest. Beyond that that's 300 highway miles, not 300 mile diameter circles. Cities usually have at least one highway running through them and some sort of loop to go around them. NYC has I-95, I-78, I-87, I-278, and I-495 (at least that's as many as I remember and I've probably missed some spurs). That means that in terms of driving distance the government bought pumps are going to be a lot closer to each other in major metropolitan areas but even out in the middle of rural america you're still going to be able to get from one station to the next to fill up.
Wait, let's double the funds and slash the distance in half. That's $40M for 150 highway miles. It's no 0.78% of the $5B that the article writers want to spend for govt. paid for pumps.
Heck, let's double and half again, $80M for 75 highway mile distances. That's fairly reasonable since you're never going to be more than 38 miles away for a fill station and you're only going to need those fill station for long trips anyway as hydrogen can be made at home over the evening when the grid isn't stressed.
The fact that the engine itself is twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine might have factored in their plans. The other thing you're ignoring is that you can get hydrogen from multiple sources, only some of them requiring significant electrical inputs, others having major transport problems that hydrogen solves.
bio-hydrogen (from a certain type of algae that is sulphur starved) is one type that doesn't need a lot of electricity (just a properly controlled environment and photosynthesis takes care of the rest)
orbital power satellites (which will be long-term practical after we get a space elevator) is one type that has transport problems as microwave transmission in heavily populated areas is a safety hazard. Beam that power down to a remote location and create hydrogen there for further terrestrial transport and you have something.
Actually, in 2000, there was a discovery of hydrogen producing algae. Today they're looking for $10M in venture capital and hope to come to market in 2-5 years. Bio-hydrogen probably beat soybeans for producing fuel, both because fuel cells are twice as efficient as an ICE and because a hydrogen crop comes in twice a week while soybeans have a much longer growth cycle.
There is one big benefit to hydrogen in that it's multi-fuel capable. Yeah, you need hydrogen at the cell but you can get it from natural gas, ethanol, methanol, water, or bio-gas (and I'm sure I haven't exhausted the list). So if you're next to the biggest Tyson's chicken plant in the state, your hydrogen might come from Tyson's chicken scat hydrogen processors while if you are in corn country it might come from ADM's hydrogen subsidiary. The big benefit is that nobody can ever again dominate the energy markets because indirect competition easily substitutes and thus no supplier can generate market power.
Then how did Coleman get to the point where it's shipping fuel cell product? Why does Shell Oil have a subsidiary called Shell Hydrogen? Why is GM devoting $1B to a system set up for deployment decision in 2006 and widespread use by 2009? Yes, there are short sighted people who don't look past the next quarter but those people are nowhere near dominant across all the US.
The article proposes spending 5 Billion in a boondoggle to convert a pump at all service stations nationwide to go to hydrogen. For commutes, you can get a converter powered off of your N. Gas line and fill up in the evenings. For trips, you can create a nationwide network of fill stations along all highways for about $19.5M dollars if you space them 300 miles apart. That's 0.39% of the article estimated cost. I suspect the other numbers are similarly inflated.
This article was a troll. Trolling for dollars that is.
I can see jumpstarting the infrastructure by subsidizing enough filling stations to allow people to travel nationwide using just hydrogen. That's a reasonable escape for the infrastructure catch-22 and it isn't that expensive on a national basis. Why gas station owners have to have $30k stuffed in their pockets for each station they own to switch over once that happens is beyond me.
Hydrogen can come from many sources. I'll bet that Tyson and other food giants are going to use hydrogen (from animal and/or plant wastes) as a secondary revenue source for example.
There's no reason for there to be *one* solution to the sourcing problem.
Once we get a space elevator up, I'm guessing microwave transmitted orbital solar power stations will provide a lot of the answer but we've got to get through the next 30 years first.
Let's say the article isn't puffing hydrogen station retooling and it costs $30k per station. Take the number of highway miles in the US and divide by 300. That's the number of hydrogen stations needed to ensure that you'll get from one fill station to the next if you decide to take a national trip. After some rough calculations that's about 650 filling stations at a cost of 19.5M USD. That's a far cry from the 5 Billion laid out in the article (0.39%). Yes, the article authors are right. It's easy to waste govt. money.
Most of the filling stations will switch over on their own once a skeleton infrastructure is put in. From the filling station owner's perspective, spending the 30k has to get him some measure of return. If he's the only fill station around for a hundred miles, he knows that every hydrogen car driving by will top off with him. If everybody's got a hydrogen pump, that pump needs to generate enough revenue to displace one of his gasoline pumps.
If he's going into a market with only 650 national competitors with maybe 1 or 2 local ones, it makes sense and people will start to go for it. As the number of hydrogen cars rises, more will switch over because while the number of competitors is rising, the number of hydrogen car visits is too.
Past a certain point, gasoline infrastructure will start to go away as we all get our stuff (lawn mowers, cars, generators) working on hydrogen. Eventually we'll have a few bitter old timers wailing about having to trek far to get some gasoline.
I'm thankful he did so little market distortion. Hydrogen cars can start coming off the assembly lines in 6 months if you reduce the required range and cost specs sufficiently. The federal government can do that with the stroke of a few pens. But then where are we? We have a stable market for crappy, expensive fuel cell cars. It's much better to wait a few years for when people are starting to talk about deployment (GM's talking about deciding on deployment in 2006 and widespread deployment by the end of the decade) and get decently priced, competitive quality fuel cell cars.
In interviews, the GM fuel cell folks have pretty much said that if things mature on time, they will use fuel cells to replace their 6 cylinder ICE platform and that platforms tend to run in about 20 year cycles. The decision date is in about 3 years.
In other words, fuel cells will not show up in one car nameplate but across a wide range that share the same platform.
The practical solar plant is likely to be orbital and transmit via microwaves to some downlink station with plenty of water and nobody around for a long distance. Crack your water there and transport the resulting hydrogen to where it's needed. Coming around 2025 to a planet near you.
Abortions don't just 'happen'. People are kept ignorant of alternatives, caregivers have more control over aspirin intake than over this particular elective surgury, and abortion providers fight tooth and nail against laws that provide for fully informing the mother of the reality of the situation. Abortion rates can come down via education.
In *every* industry, lower costs and you get higher demand. Secondary revenue sources like selling fetal tissue for experimentation (no, I know that's not technically what happens, it's just effectively so) and harvesting stem cells allows for subsidized abortion costs as a significant source of profit is the scientific community, not just the fee paid by the mother. Lower the cost and like clockwork abortion demand will go up at the margin.
Pro-abortion forces are trying to shift scientific funding so that embryonic stem cells get more money than adult stem cell research. They have bogus FUD campaigns about how stem cell research has more promise when all the practical stem cell treatments discovered to date are from adult stem cells.
the pro-abortion side cloaks itself in the mantle of science but what they're really after is protecting their lifestyle choice and making sure their enablers at the clinic stay in business. That's just wrong.
If I could use my own stem cells and not have a lifetime of immunosuppresive therapy or I could write a fat check to the pharma industry every month to cover my meds, I know which route I'd choose.
This is a no brainer. If you can, use your own cells. It's disgusting that some people actually talk down the idea of using your own stem cells in order to create/preserve a secondary revenue stream for abortion clinics.
Fortunately, the small value of the property (which can be registered for just a few dollars) would lead to such small revenue streams that it wouldn't be worth the hassle of collecting.
Nah, the world isn't that simple. The oil companies are all heavily invested into hydrogen. I just saw the CEO of Shell Hydrogen on the Nightly Business Report last night. The oil boys don't like bowing and scraping to despots any more than the next guy. With the technology maturing, they're all getting ready to make the transition and ensuring that they'll continue to be players in the next age.
I'm sure that they'll be marketing them all over the planet. It's a major car platform. It's not ready yet though. I doubt that they'll be pointing out the generating ability of the cars in the UK though because the whole country is already wired, isn't it?
The point is that this stuff is actually getting close to being practical for transport without further subsidy. They're openly talking about deployment in 5-7 years with mass changeover starting the middle of the next decade.
It's neat stuff because depending on the reformer used, the cars are highly adaptable as to what fuel they use. They can get hydrogen from gasoline, methanol, ethanol, natural gas (methane), or straight hydrogen among other fuel sources (one car show recently featured a hydrogen fuel cell car powered by borax, no kidding). All this means that not only will the ME potentates get knocked off as the kings of energy, but nobody else is going to be able to climb into their vacated chairs as the newfound ease of switching to other fuels kills energy suppliers ability to threaten destructive price spikes.
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Fuel cells are starting to hit the market today (a coleman product was mentioned in the article, there are a few others out there). I would expect that by the time that Bush is on his way out the door to his last Airforce 1 ride, he might be driven from the airport in a hydrogen powered car.
So what sort of fuel taxes would hydrogen be subject to in Europe? I would think that hydrogen derived from clean sources (solar, wind, bio-hydrogen) should be exempt from any sort of pollution taxes.
It would certainly speed the changeover if you have 0.50euro hydrogen competing with 1euro gasoline and the hydrogen gets you further.
There's no reason to make potable water as a requirement for the process. You can make a hydrogen plant on the coast and use the Pacific Ocean as intake.
Remember, this is taxpayer funded hydrogen pumps that get put up before cars get sold. When the station owner has lines 5 cars long on his hydrogen pump he'll put in a 2nd on his own dime or his competitors will. 30k, if there's demonstrated demand, isn't a lot of money for a business to invest. Beyond that that's 300 highway miles, not 300 mile diameter circles. Cities usually have at least one highway running through them and some sort of loop to go around them. NYC has I-95, I-78, I-87, I-278, and I-495 (at least that's as many as I remember and I've probably missed some spurs). That means that in terms of driving distance the government bought pumps are going to be a lot closer to each other in major metropolitan areas but even out in the middle of rural america you're still going to be able to get from one station to the next to fill up.
Wait, let's double the funds and slash the distance in half. That's $40M for 150 highway miles. It's no 0.78% of the $5B that the article writers want to spend for govt. paid for pumps.
Heck, let's double and half again, $80M for 75 highway mile distances. That's fairly reasonable since you're never going to be more than 38 miles away for a fill station and you're only going to need those fill station for long trips anyway as hydrogen can be made at home over the evening when the grid isn't stressed.
I thought clouds cooled things down by reflecting sunlight. Silly me.
The fact that the engine itself is twice as efficient as an internal combustion engine might have factored in their plans. The other thing you're ignoring is that you can get hydrogen from multiple sources, only some of them requiring significant electrical inputs, others having major transport problems that hydrogen solves.
bio-hydrogen (from a certain type of algae that is sulphur starved) is one type that doesn't need a lot of electricity (just a properly controlled environment and photosynthesis takes care of the rest)
orbital power satellites (which will be long-term practical after we get a space elevator) is one type that has transport problems as microwave transmission in heavily populated areas is a safety hazard. Beam that power down to a remote location and create hydrogen there for further terrestrial transport and you have something.
Actually, in 2000, there was a discovery of hydrogen producing algae. Today they're looking for $10M in venture capital and hope to come to market in 2-5 years. Bio-hydrogen probably beat soybeans for producing fuel, both because fuel cells are twice as efficient as an ICE and because a hydrogen crop comes in twice a week while soybeans have a much longer growth cycle.
There is one big benefit to hydrogen in that it's multi-fuel capable. Yeah, you need hydrogen at the cell but you can get it from natural gas, ethanol, methanol, water, or bio-gas (and I'm sure I haven't exhausted the list). So if you're next to the biggest Tyson's chicken plant in the state, your hydrogen might come from Tyson's chicken scat hydrogen processors while if you are in corn country it might come from ADM's hydrogen subsidiary. The big benefit is that nobody can ever again dominate the energy markets because indirect competition easily substitutes and thus no supplier can generate market power.
Then how did Coleman get to the point where it's shipping fuel cell product? Why does Shell Oil have a subsidiary called Shell Hydrogen? Why is GM devoting $1B to a system set up for deployment decision in 2006 and widespread use by 2009? Yes, there are short sighted people who don't look past the next quarter but those people are nowhere near dominant across all the US.
The article proposes spending 5 Billion in a boondoggle to convert a pump at all service stations nationwide to go to hydrogen. For commutes, you can get a converter powered off of your N. Gas line and fill up in the evenings. For trips, you can create a nationwide network of fill stations along all highways for about $19.5M dollars if you space them 300 miles apart. That's 0.39% of the article estimated cost. I suspect the other numbers are similarly inflated.
This article was a troll. Trolling for dollars that is.
I can see jumpstarting the infrastructure by subsidizing enough filling stations to allow people to travel nationwide using just hydrogen. That's a reasonable escape for the infrastructure catch-22 and it isn't that expensive on a national basis. Why gas station owners have to have $30k stuffed in their pockets for each station they own to switch over once that happens is beyond me.
Hydrogen can come from many sources. I'll bet that Tyson and other food giants are going to use hydrogen (from animal and/or plant wastes) as a secondary revenue source for example.
There's no reason for there to be *one* solution to the sourcing problem.
Once we get a space elevator up, I'm guessing microwave transmitted orbital solar power stations will provide a lot of the answer but we've got to get through the next 30 years first.
Let's say the article isn't puffing hydrogen station retooling and it costs $30k per station. Take the number of highway miles in the US and divide by 300. That's the number of hydrogen stations needed to ensure that you'll get from one fill station to the next if you decide to take a national trip. After some rough calculations that's about 650 filling stations at a cost of 19.5M USD. That's a far cry from the 5 Billion laid out in the article (0.39%). Yes, the article authors are right. It's easy to waste govt. money.
Most of the filling stations will switch over on their own once a skeleton infrastructure is put in. From the filling station owner's perspective, spending the 30k has to get him some measure of return. If he's the only fill station around for a hundred miles, he knows that every hydrogen car driving by will top off with him. If everybody's got a hydrogen pump, that pump needs to generate enough revenue to displace one of his gasoline pumps.
If he's going into a market with only 650 national competitors with maybe 1 or 2 local ones, it makes sense and people will start to go for it. As the number of hydrogen cars rises, more will switch over because while the number of competitors is rising, the number of hydrogen car visits is too.
Past a certain point, gasoline infrastructure will start to go away as we all get our stuff (lawn mowers, cars, generators) working on hydrogen. Eventually we'll have a few bitter old timers wailing about having to trek far to get some gasoline.
I'm thankful he did so little market distortion. Hydrogen cars can start coming off the assembly lines in 6 months if you reduce the required range and cost specs sufficiently. The federal government can do that with the stroke of a few pens. But then where are we? We have a stable market for crappy, expensive fuel cell cars. It's much better to wait a few years for when people are starting to talk about deployment (GM's talking about deciding on deployment in 2006 and widespread deployment by the end of the decade) and get decently priced, competitive quality fuel cell cars.
In interviews, the GM fuel cell folks have pretty much said that if things mature on time, they will use fuel cells to replace their 6 cylinder ICE platform and that platforms tend to run in about 20 year cycles. The decision date is in about 3 years.
In other words, fuel cells will not show up in one car nameplate but across a wide range that share the same platform.
And why, oh why would you want to own it? If you want to run your own, try hydrogen producing algae.
The practical solar plant is likely to be orbital and transmit via microwaves to some downlink station with plenty of water and nobody around for a long distance. Crack your water there and transport the resulting hydrogen to where it's needed. Coming around 2025 to a planet near you.
I can understand not wanting to associate with Stalin or Hitler lovers but these guys, strange as they may seem to you, aren't moral monsters.
Abortions don't just 'happen'. People are kept ignorant of alternatives, caregivers have more control over aspirin intake than over this particular elective surgury, and abortion providers fight tooth and nail against laws that provide for fully informing the mother of the reality of the situation. Abortion rates can come down via education.
In *every* industry, lower costs and you get higher demand. Secondary revenue sources like selling fetal tissue for experimentation (no, I know that's not technically what happens, it's just effectively so) and harvesting stem cells allows for subsidized abortion costs as a significant source of profit is the scientific community, not just the fee paid by the mother. Lower the cost and like clockwork abortion demand will go up at the margin.
Pro-abortion forces are trying to shift scientific funding so that embryonic stem cells get more money than adult stem cell research. They have bogus FUD campaigns about how stem cell research has more promise when all the practical stem cell treatments discovered to date are from adult stem cells.
the pro-abortion side cloaks itself in the mantle of science but what they're really after is protecting their lifestyle choice and making sure their enablers at the clinic stay in business. That's just wrong.
If I could use my own stem cells and not have a lifetime of immunosuppresive therapy or I could write a fat check to the pharma industry every month to cover my meds, I know which route I'd choose.
This is a no brainer. If you can, use your own cells. It's disgusting that some people actually talk down the idea of using your own stem cells in order to create/preserve a secondary revenue stream for abortion clinics.
Wow, the legal culture really *is* turning the US into a 3rd world nation.
Wouldn't toilet seat gross weight limits indicate discrimination against the grossly obese and be banned by the ADA?
Think cell phones in the USA where you get billed for incomeing calls and you have a closer analogy.
Fortunately, the small value of the property (which can be registered for just a few dollars) would lead to such small revenue streams that it wouldn't be worth the hassle of collecting.
Nah, the world isn't that simple. The oil companies are all heavily invested into hydrogen. I just saw the CEO of Shell Hydrogen on the Nightly Business Report last night. The oil boys don't like bowing and scraping to despots any more than the next guy. With the technology maturing, they're all getting ready to make the transition and ensuring that they'll continue to be players in the next age.
I'm sure that they'll be marketing them all over the planet. It's a major car platform. It's not ready yet though. I doubt that they'll be pointing out the generating ability of the cars in the UK though because the whole country is already wired, isn't it?
The point is that this stuff is actually getting close to being practical for transport without further subsidy. They're openly talking about deployment in 5-7 years with mass changeover starting the middle of the next decade.
It's neat stuff because depending on the reformer used, the cars are highly adaptable as to what fuel they use. They can get hydrogen from gasoline, methanol, ethanol, natural gas (methane), or straight hydrogen among other fuel sources (one car show recently featured a hydrogen fuel cell car powered by borax, no kidding). All this means that not only will the ME potentates get knocked off as the kings of energy, but nobody else is going to be able to climb into their vacated chairs as the newfound ease of switching to other fuels kills energy suppliers ability to threaten destructive price spikes.