Alternative Fuels

[jonantice]

Hi all,
This IS the coffee lounge so let's forget about computers for a second and share your thoughts with me about alternative fuels and the related issues. I have come to consider some of you to be well rounded individuals with thinkers on your shoulders so I'll be looking forward to hearing your opinions.
Basically our dependence on the black gold is causing problems such as (arguably) global warming and it supports corrupt regimes, not to mention our dependency on those countries and we seem to be facing rapidly depleeting oil reserves.
I had always thought hydrogen was the way to go but I really can't see that being feasable for the next 30-50 years as far as transportation goes. Ethanol seems to be the best temporary solution to me, if cellulosic ethanol can be developed to the full expectations.
What do you think or what have you heard?

[deanlinkous]

ethanol, good choice since most cars would need little modification to use a mix product and of course some are made for e85 already.

Of course we can all make our own ethanol assuming that we do not get arrested for making moonshine. I have a older car and have considered making some 'shine just to see how it ran.

[fingal]

A hard one for me as it's not my domain, but I had thought hydrogen fuel cells were the way to go. You say not?

I think over reliance on petrol engines is a big problem, and maybe we could learn a few lessons - at least for city transport - from Asia where they use Tuk-tuks .... These can be converted to run on gas, which produces no harmful emissions that I know of.

People may laugh at them, but in fact they're very fast when pulling away from a standing start, though they have a low top speed.

They might catch on, who knows? They can certainly look more stylish than the ones in the Wiki article!

[easuter]

Nuclear fusion seems to be quite an innovative and plausible replacemnet for fossil fuels/nuclear fission technology.

Having a bit of the Sun on Earth is still a bit hard to perceive...

[cayalee]

ethanol is great but the majority of greenhouse emissions come from industry, not cars. we need to solve both problems really. in the UK by far the best way to go is wind power. i did a bit of coursework on it a couple of years back and if i remeber rightly that if we planted wind farms in an area the size of london out in the north sea, we could satisfy our energy needs and growth for the next decade.
we're a very windy little island so onshore wind farming is very feasbale but theres too many "not-in-my-backgarden" folk who campaign against them because they are an "eyesore".
whilst our power source has to change, ultimately it is us who needs to change, and stop awaiting a techno-fix to every single problem we have.
of course the sheer dependance the global economy has on carbon fuels, theres way too much inertia to change soon

[Farmer Mike]

Jonantice, your concerns about dependency and supporting corrupt governments and groups are shared. I wonder if we'd have made more progress if some people hadn't made the issue into an environmental/political cause. I think people want to do something, but not what the main proponents of environment and stopping global warming want to do.

I was interested in bio-diesel, but I don't think much is being done in that arena now. At one time I was seriously considering going diesel for my next car, but now diesel is about as expensive as gasoline.

As far as home goes, we're planning on putting solar cells on the roof of the house to generate electricity and become more self-sufficient.

[fingal]

If anyone is interested, the BBC have been hosting a climate change experiment for a while. Find it here.

They provide Linux software to run the BOINC client. I've had it going since February this year, and it's possible to form a team. The idea is to figure out - using a climate model - what's happening to the planet.

It's not going to stop global warming directly, but once the hard evidence is out there it'll be one more thing the politicians have to act on.

This isn't just a UK project ... people from all over the globe are taking part. Go on, you know you want to.

[smolloy]

I am a physicist, so I know a little about this this debate.

Hydrogen is not the way to go, and I would hope that anyone who suggests it is immediately voted out of office. Hydrogen does not exist in a pure form on the earth -- it only exists as part of the water molecule, and as part of hydrocarbons (like oil and natural gas) -- so it has to be extracted first, before it can be used. The problem is that the extraction process needs energy, and it needs more energy than can then be extracted from the hydrogen in fuel cells. Typically the hydrogen is extracted using energy from coal and gas powered plants -- so it means we have to burn more fossil fuels to power our vehicles!!!

It's best to think of hydrogen powered cars as coal powered cars. Don't sound so clean any more, do they?

Another issue that people tend to disagree with me strongly about is nuclear power, but I should let you know that most physicists agree with me on this,
Nuclear power is the cleanest, most environmentally friendly method of power production we have available to us at the moment. It emits practically no carbon, and less radioactivity (believe it or not!) than coal. The amount of waste it produces is infinitesimal compared to that of coal/gas (when gaseous emissions are taken into account), and the waste can safely be buried underground and kept there for thousands of years (which cannot be done with carbon).

"But what about accidents?" I hear you cry! "What about Chernobyl?"

Undoubtedly, Chernobyl was a disaster, and a tragedy. It still is. But the harsh truth is that the number of people killed/maimed in that horrible incident is vastly smaller than the number of people killed by cars each year. If we are to ban technologies based on the rate of deaths/injuries caused, then we have to bad cars first, and I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that.

The one tricky thing (and it's hardly a small thing) is the worry about weapons proliferation, but this is a worry any way. The big polluters (currently and in the future) already have nukes -- USA, UK, India, China -- and we would go a long way to solving the carbon problem is each of those nations relied on nuclear power as their dominate method of power production.

I understand that people will disagree with this strongly, and I understand their unwillingness to embrace such a potentially dangerous technology, but what are the alternatives?? We don't have time to wait for fusion (it will be ~30 years before ITER is working right), and wind/solar/etc power just aren't well enough developed. For example, solar panels use as much energy to manufacture them as they create during their lifetime -- there is no net gain, so you have not reduced carbon emissions. I think we need to solve the carbon problem now, and that we don't have the luxury of waiting for new, unproven, technologies.

Just my 2 cents. Sorry for writing so much, but this is a subject I know a lot about.

[Zelmo]

Smolloy's comments are exactly what I've heard discussed in classes and on NPR. What I've wondered about, though, is whether we haven't been able to get a net gain from something like hydrogen just because it's a newer idea. We've been using oil so long that we're good at getting energy out of it; might there not be some breakthroughs concerning hydrogen energy that make the process more efficient in the future?

[smolloy]

might there not be some breakthroughs concerning hydrogen energy that make the process more efficient in the future?

You make a good point, and it is true that future advances could completely change things, but there are two problems with this,
1/ As long as hydrogen is extracted using energy generated from coal, the best you can do is to keep things just as polluting as they are now. In other words, the best efficiency you can achieve is 100%, so for every giga-joule of energy extracted from coal will create a giga-joule of energy from hydrogen. You just don't win.
Of course, you could win by finding a source of hydrogen that isn't as tightly bonded as it is in water and hydrocarbons -- but we don't know of any such sources.... which brings me to my next point.
2/ The carbon problem (IMHO) needs to be fixed now. We can't afford to wait for new technologies, and we can't afford to make things worse in the short term (as hydrogen power undoubtedyl would) in the hope of gains in the longer term.
The carbon problem (IMHO) is an emergency, and needs to be dealt with now.