Burning Water
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have_blue
Veteran Member
EastTexFrank said:
Thank you!
With today's fuel prices, anyone that comes up with something to get you even 10mpg better mileage would be a world hero. All the stuff about inventions being suppressed is total hooey, and always have been.
You get more bang for the buck shooting hydrogen in balloons than for fuel in cars at the moment. Fuel cells could be practical for powering very small, light commuter cars some day, but they won't be helping any time soon.
barneyrb
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Do a web search for Brown's Gas and it will cover this gizmo.
Eric_Phillips
Platinum Member
This whole free ride thing. Think about the fact that you are having to put energy into a system to produce a fuel. In this case you are putting electricity, energy, into water to produce hydrogen, fuel. Crude oil is the same thing. Take some energy, heat and pressure from the earth, mix in a bunch of organic material, Mr. T-rex etc, and you get crude oil, fuel. In this case mother nature provided the added energy needed to convert something to a fuel. The people using solar energy which in itself is free, the collector cost money, can make it economically feasable. If you need to buy energy to make a different energy you loose everytime due to inefficiencies.
Hooey?? Honda, Toyota, and GM don't think so, all three are working on hydrogen powered cars and GM is lagging way behind the other two, ck out all threes websites about them but here's honda's Honda FCX Clarity - Fuel Cell - Official Web Sitehave_blue said:Thank you!
With today's fuel prices, anyone that comes up with something to get you even 10mpg better mileage would be a world hero. All the stuff about inventions being suppressed is total hooey, and always have been.
You get more bang for the buck shooting hydrogen in balloons than for fuel in cars at the moment. Fuel cells could be practical for powering very small, light commuter cars some day, but they won't be helping any time soon.
Last edited:
Egon
Epic Contributor
Iceland is doing work on developing hydrogen fueled engines.
MATR News: Iceland Opens Hydrogen-Filling Station
MATR News: Iceland Opens Hydrogen-Filling Station
John861
Bronze Member
dixie306 said:
By Hooey, I believe he was referring to the urban legends of car companies buying up and burying the inventions that would allow you to run cars on water. There is no conspiracy.
Yes, fuel cells and hydrogen powered cars are viable, and all the automakers are working on them. But, as it has been said, there is no free lunch. A fuel cell is little more than a battery that can store energy for later use. If you have an economical way to "charge" the fuel cell (especially via renewable energy source like solar, wind, etc.) the concept will work nicely.
BobRip
Elite Member
Iceland is using gethermal energy to generate electricity and then using that to make hydrogen. If there is some cheap or free energy source, hydrogen might be OK. But hydrogen is not an energy source, just an energy storage mechanism and not a very good energy storage mechanism. It's energy density is low per unit volume. This means big tanks or short range.Egon said:Iceland is doing work on developing hydrogen fueled engines.
MATR News: Iceland Opens Hydrogen-Filling Station
The extra efficiency of the fuel cells will help hydrogen tremendously. I think we are years (10, 20) away from an economical system. Fuel cells use to use platinum for their elements. This is really expensive stuff. Also the fuel cells that I have seen have lower power densitiy. This means that they will have to charge batteries or supper capacitors from the fuel cells to allow decent accleration. I sure hope it works out.
I think with $4 gas in America there will be some real incentive to research all of these technologies. It is probably to early to tell what is going to happen. Remember a few years back California was requiring companies to sell electric vehicles. This did not work probably because of inadequate batteries.
Boy it would be nice to have big improvements in batteries. However, at present batteries hold about %4 as much energy as gasoline of the same weight. That's a 20 to 1 disadvantage. Batteries have been the weak point of portable electric systems for at least 100 years. Many efforts have been made to improve them and they are better, but have a long way to go.
SPYDERLK
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YES. That is a good real world number after you factor in the energy you lose in making electricity from gasoline via eng/gen. Actual FULL energy from gasoline is 12.7 kiloWatt-hrs per kilogram. Best you can do with batteries is around 150 Watt-hrs per kilogram. That difference is a factor of 85. A decent amount of this difference [20vs85] can be recouped by using the waste heat from gas. Our cars do this some via the heater in winter.BobRip said:
larry
Eagleview
Veteran Member
There is no free ride . They will just set a road tax at $5000 a year to make up for lost revenue .
gemini5362
Veteran Member
hydrogen powered cars has been a technology that is available for years. go to this link to see one of the early pioneers Billings Energy Corporation The post office had a fleet of vehicles for delivering the mail for quite a while to see the feasability of doing that. When you burn hydrogen in a internal combustion engine you get almost no emissions. Billings made a fuel cell that used aromatic hydrocarbons to absorb the hydrogen so you eliminated the danger of it blowing up in an accident. The biggest problem I see is range. The postal vehicles had most of the space in the vehicle taken up by tanks and it only had a range of 110 miles.
jinman
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Egon said:Iceland is doing work on developing hydrogen fueled engines.
MATR News: Iceland Opens Hydrogen-Filling Station
How many of those hydrogen vehicles in Iceland are used to pull 40' 5th wheel motorhomes down the highway at 70 mph? Does anyone use a fuel cell in an 18-wheeler? How about fuel-cell ATVs, personal watercraft, lawn tractors, tractors, and airplanes? We have created unlimited uses for our fossil fuels and now that the price has suddenly spiked, we are feeling the pinch. In the short term, we need more fuel in the pipeline to control prices.
Hey, I love those little cars and alternative fuels, but the problems are a lot greater than that. A single technology is not likely to displace our dependence on fossil fuels in the near term or long term. I'm very impressed by the ability of things like the bullet trains that use ultra low friction to enable large loads to move at high speeds. I think many technologies will come together to produce more efficient machines that take less fuel and yet are able to do the big jobs. It might be a horrible thought to some, but maybe our trucking industry will be replaced almost completely with high efficiency trains. At what fuel price will truckers be forced to park their big rigs? In my opinion, it won't take long. As it is, if you have full fuel tanks on a big rig, you almost need an armed guard to protect your "liquid gold" in those saddle tanks.
honda's answer to this problem is solved by using a electric motor instead of a combustion engine, guys the futures just around the corner with this, ck out BMW's answer http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Uniquely/FutureTechnologies/Hydrogen.aspx While I haven't built one yet, these things folks are making to produce hydrogen makes sense to me, a combustion engine has to have both fuel and air to run, adding hydrogen in with the air flow seems to aid in the combustion of gas. I watched the clip on Iceland and noticed that was a Shell oil station that had the hydrogen fill unit, its going to be interesting to see just how much they charge for it. After the cost of building it, operating cost can't be that great.SPYDERLK said:
EddieWalker
Epic Contributor
The theory that oil came from dinasours and organic material millions of years ago doesn't make any sense to me.
Oil floats on water, yet oil or the solid material that supposedly becomes oil, managed to work it's way thousands of feet into the earth. I don't think so.
Oil was created millions of years ago, but now it's not happening again. Why would it only be dinasours and plant life of that period of time that creates oil, but not plant life and the animals since the dinasours? If oil was created by them, shouldn't it still be created by every one of us when we die and our bodies work their way thousands of feet into the planet? I don't think so.
Dinasours are found in tar pits that existed back then. Did other dinasours decompose, sink thousands of feet into the planet, get turned into oil and then come back up to the surface to trap those dinasours that have been found in the tar pits? I don't think so.
How many dinasours and how much plant matter had to be used to generate a million barrels of oil? How man billions of of barrels of oil are in the planet? How many barrles of oil have been pumped out? Estimates keep growing because of all the new discoveries. It seems that every year there are new discoveries of huge oil fields.
Do the math, it's a rediculous amount of oil that we have and the amount of organic material to create the oil is an absurd number. It's so extreme that it would take almost every animal that died to generate so much oil. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
The burning water thing sounds just like what is going on with corn. Use massive amounts of energy in the forms of diesel fuel to create small amounts of ethenol.
Eddie
Oil floats on water, yet oil or the solid material that supposedly becomes oil, managed to work it's way thousands of feet into the earth. I don't think so.
Oil was created millions of years ago, but now it's not happening again. Why would it only be dinasours and plant life of that period of time that creates oil, but not plant life and the animals since the dinasours? If oil was created by them, shouldn't it still be created by every one of us when we die and our bodies work their way thousands of feet into the planet? I don't think so.
Dinasours are found in tar pits that existed back then. Did other dinasours decompose, sink thousands of feet into the planet, get turned into oil and then come back up to the surface to trap those dinasours that have been found in the tar pits? I don't think so.
How many dinasours and how much plant matter had to be used to generate a million barrels of oil? How man billions of of barrels of oil are in the planet? How many barrles of oil have been pumped out? Estimates keep growing because of all the new discoveries. It seems that every year there are new discoveries of huge oil fields.
Do the math, it's a rediculous amount of oil that we have and the amount of organic material to create the oil is an absurd number. It's so extreme that it would take almost every animal that died to generate so much oil. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
The burning water thing sounds just like what is going on with corn. Use massive amounts of energy in the forms of diesel fuel to create small amounts of ethenol.
Eddie
MikeD74T
Veteran Member
dixie306 said:
Hydrogen is simply a low energy fuel, albiet a very clean one. It has a very large flammable range and for now must be compressed to high pressure to carry enough to be useful. The main reason hydrogen will displace electric cars is because refuelling is faster than recharging, important where long distance travel is desired. You wouldn't make very good time if you had to stop for 3 of 8 hours to refuel/recharge your vehicle.The technology to produce hydrogen onboard a moving vehicle isn't unlike the chase for perpetual motion. Doubtless it will someday be possible, if not feasible. Iceland will be successful in producing & distributing hydrogen because they have endless & essentially free heat in sufficient quantities to disassociate water into H2 & O on a large scale. I'm at a power plant that produces over 1200 megawatts of electricity per hour. We buy our hydrogen by the truckload. If it was cheap or easy to produce as some of the current gadget makers would have you believe we'd be doing it. MikeD74T
gemini5362
Veteran Member
jinman said:How many of those hydrogen vehicles in Iceland are used to pull 40' 5th wheel motorhomes down the highway at 70 mph? Does anyone use a fuel cell in an 18-wheeler? How about fuel-cell ATVs, personal watercraft, lawn tractors, tractors, and airplanes? We have created unlimited uses for our fossil fuels and now that the price has suddenly spiked, we are feeling the pinch. In the short term, we need more fuel in the pipeline to control prices.
Hey, I love those little cars and alternative fuels, but the problems are a lot greater than that. A single technology is not likely to displace our dependence on fossil fuels in the near term or long term. I'm very impressed by the ability of things like the bullet trains that use ultra low friction to enable large loads to move at high speeds. I think many technologies will come together to produce more efficient machines that take less fuel and yet are able to do the big jobs. It might be a horrible thought to some, but maybe our trucking industry will be replaced almost completely with high efficiency trains. At what fuel price will truckers be forced to park their big rigs? In my opinion, it won't take long. As it is, if you have full fuel tanks on a big rig, you almost need an armed guard to protect your "liquid gold" in those saddle tanks.
I believe the hydrogen fuel that they are talking about in the article about iceland is used in internal combustion engines. The seem to be using them in buses so pretty good sized engines but like i posted about the postal service problem the range in the buses was only about 125 miles.
have_blue
Veteran Member
dixie306 said:
Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.
wedge40
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You mean like next summer?have_blue said:Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.
Wedge
Oops, my bad, I'm one of those who believe necessity is still the Mother of Invention and I believe sooner or later, despite our present congress, a way will be found to create a fuel other than gas-oil.have_blue said:Yes, hooey. But you took my hooey out of context. I said the whole "suppressed inventions" thing was hooey, not alternative fuel. I agree that alternative fuel shows promise, and may be feasible when gasoline costs $10 a gallon.
have_blue
Veteran Member
dixie306 said:
No problem, and I too am optimistic about finding a way to sustain our standard of living. There's probably no magic bullet, but I think several energy sources will be tailored to the application. The most potential for "breakthrough" technology would be battery storage capacity, and solar panel efficiency.
Current batteries can get you around 50mi on an overnight charge. When batteries can get you comfortably over 100mi, there will be explosive development to take advantage of it.
Current solar panels are woefully inefficient. Fuel prices have encouraged investment in SP research, and incremental improvements are coming with more and more frequency. When SP efficiency approaches 40%, there will be a stampede to mass produce them, and employ them in a lot of applications.
I'm thinking small 2 person commuter cars with small battery pack that can take you ~100mi on a charge, and can partially re-charge by solar panel while in the parking lot. Even a 500W solar panel collects a lot of power over 8-9 hours.
