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[Sean Mirrsen]

Not quite, seeing as most marshrutkas round here run on natural gas.

[HideousBeing]

It's nice and cheap electricity atm 

Maybe people just need to start riding motorcycles? (or scooters, but meh)

[Virex]

Maybe it's just a crazy coincidence.  I dunno, but we're gonna run out of oil at this rate.

Luckily we have natural gas to make up the difference.

Isn't compressing natural gas to a high enough energy/volume for vehicles almost as hard as hydrogen.

Nowhere near it. Liquid LP gas exists at a pressure of less then 3 bars, which is easily reached. Hydrogen stored in lab cylinders is usualy under a pressure of 2200 PSI, or roughly 150 bar and they're working on 10.000 psi, or 690 bar, cylinders¹ and even then the energy density's still pretty low. Metal hydrides are probably a better way to go, but they have their own handling problem. They generaly contain less then 7 wt% hydrogen (excluding support), meaning you need quite a lot to store a feasible amount of hydrogen...

[eerr]

Maybe it's just a crazy coincidence.  I dunno, but we're gonna run out of oil at this rate.

Luckily we have natural gas to make up the difference.

Isn't compressing natural gas to a high enough energy/volume for vehicles almost as hard as hydrogen.

Nowhere near it. Liquid LP gas exists at a pressure of less then 3 bars, which is easily reached. Hydrogen stored in lab cylinders is usualy under a pressure of 2200 PSI, or roughly 150 bar and they're working on 10.000 psi, or 690 bar, cylinders¹ and even then the energy density's still pretty low. Metal hydrides are probably a better way to go, but they have their own handling problem. They generaly contain less then 7 wt% hydrogen (excluding support), meaning you need quite a lot to store a feasible amount of hydrogen...

Thus leaving you with less energy/kilo than gasoline...

[Virex]

Now you get why I'm more in favour of using methanol/ethanol/glucose as fuell for fuell cells

[Nikov]

Now you get why I'm more in favour of using methanol/ethanol/glucose as fuell for fuell cells

This sounds incredibly stupid and yet I am going to assume you know more about this than I do and I simply need the process explained.

Also I am of the opinion that if "X were so great, why do we still do Y" always has an answer, and that answer is never "evil ________ conspiracy".

[Virex]

It has to do with the CO₂-hype mainly. Ever since chemists made fuel cells run on hydrogen, everyone has been after them, since hydrogen only produces water and no other pollutants, which sounds awesome. And if something could work and sounds awesome it's easy to make a hype about. Combine that with the fact that other fuels produce CO₂ (or other nasty stuff like SO₂ and NO_x) and you get why people are really attracted to hydrogen.


I'm not saying the other fuel options are without problems. Mostly, you need biomass to produce them instead of water and electricity (though given enough energy you could also make them out of water and CO₂ directly), which means you need algae banks or something. You could make it out of coal as well (hell you can even make normal petrol out of coal, but I don't think fuel cells like that too much), so you can already set up the infrastructure while the biomass lags behind.


Do note that the technology is in no way useless. It's just that I think it's not that usefull in cars, where you need a high energy density to be efficient. It could work very well for ships or remote buildings for example.

[kuro_suna]

Maybe it's just a crazy coincidence.  I dunno, but we're gonna run out of oil at this rate.

Luckily we have natural gas to make up the difference.

Isn't compressing natural gas to a high enough energy/volume for vehicles almost as hard as hydrogen.

Nowhere near it. Liquid LP gas exists at a pressure of less then 3 bars, which is easily reached. Hydrogen stored in lab cylinders is usualy under a pressure of 2200 PSI, or roughly 150 bar and they're working on 10.000 psi, or 690 bar, cylinders¹ and even then the energy density's still pretty low. Metal hydrides are probably a better way to go, but they have their own handling problem. They generaly contain less then 7 wt% hydrogen (excluding support), meaning you need quite a lot to store a feasible amount of hydrogen...

Natural gas and LPG aren't the same thing, natural gas is methane while LPG is a mainly propane and butane as well a some other light hydrocarbons. Natural gas and LPG have to be carefully separated since natural gas won't liquefy without cryogenics and LPG will freeze at the pressures needed to transport natrual gas by pipe.

[Virex]

Hmm, good point. My minds immediately slipped to LP gas when I saw a reference to vehicles. Apparently natural gas cylinders typically operate at pressures of approximately 200 bar...

[Nether]

I still think hydrogen is the way to go.
Think about it.
You take water and break it apart into hydrogen and oxygen.
Burn the hydrogen and what do you get?
More water.

It's a nice idea, and it's great because we already have gas pipes. But how are you going to put this into a car for example? The amount of space needed to get that car with enough hydrogen is enormous!

I think we should go for electrics mostly. We just have to find a few ways of expanding the green methods.
(Should we break free of the shackles of the gas industry we'll just threefold our shackles to the electricity compagny's)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Technology always gets smaller as it gets better. If you had asked thirty years ago about putting computers inside cars, you would have been laughed at and lost all credibility. There are already hydrogen fuel cell buses, normal cars are but a matter of time.

[Virex]

There were electric cars more then 100 years ago. Just because a technology is promising doesn't mean it won't be overtaken by a more efficient one. (combustion engines in this case)

[sneakey pete]

Technology always gets smaller as it gets better. If you had asked thirty years ago about putting computers inside cars, you would have been laughed at and lost all credibility.

Mate, its 2010 now, you might need to update your sense of time. Try 40 years, 30 years ago, the 80's, the idea of computers in cars probably sounded like an attractive, yet slightly hard, propisition. and they did do it in the mid 80's.

As for alternative fuels, i think that the sheer volume of crap that we'd need to turn into fuel would be prohibitave. I think i read somewhere that the entire corn crop in the USA wouldn't be enough to power all the vehicles for a year, let alone feed everyone.

As well as that, the longer people hold off using ethanol, the longer smart people can secretly use it for a power boost. Cars can be retuned to run on it with a 15-25% power gain (works best with turbocharging), but with a lower milage than standard. Like a cheap kind of race fuel.

[Nether]

Technology always gets smaller as it gets better. If you had asked thirty years ago about putting computers inside cars, you would have been laughed at and lost all credibility. There are already hydrogen fuel cell buses, normal cars are but a matter of time.

Buses have quite the amount of extra space in them. I've done calculations for school projects on these things. They are currently a no go and unless we can find a method to keep the compressed energy in the car without using heavy products. Small chance, there are only that many hydrogen atoms capable of linking to specific metals for storage, and compression uses heavy containers and is dangerous. The only option I see is to find new and stronger alloys so that we need less weight for the same strength.

[Aklyon]

This sounds kinda like DF if you know about Texas' attempt to rewrite history textbooks for political-ish reasons. (They tried to mandate something ridiculous and now their stuff is exploding)