Miscellaneous > The Lounge
Should the US government do anything about the financial crisis?
worker201:
--- Quote from: Lead Head on 28 October 2008, 19:55 ---I don't really see a future for hydrogen cars. The two main ways to get hydrogen are to get it from water - require more electrical energy then you'll get from hydrogen, or to crack it with natural gas which is not helping the fossil fuel problem.
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Bad news, kid - the amount of energy used to refine oil is also much higher than what you can get out of it. But we're paying those premium prices to turn point energy sources into mobile energy sources. Windmills and dams are great, but you can't put them under the hood of your car.
--- Quote from: Lead Head on 28 October 2008, 19:55 ---I think plug in hybrids will be have much more success (essentially an electric car, but with a smaller then usual battery pack, and an engine directly coupled to a generator. Should go 50 miles on battery per charge before having to start up the engine.
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I read a pretty neat article in Wired about that. Your car has this battery in it. Parking spaces have these little battery chargers in them. If your battery doesn't have enough juice to go where you need to go, you just stop by the battery changing station, and 5 minutes later you have a fresh fully-charged battery. Instead of paying per battery, or per kW to charge the battery, you pay a monthly subscription fee. Kinda like a cell phone plan, where you pay $49.99/month for unlimited minutes. The whole thing is controlled by a computer that keeps track of your battery power, networks with the charging stations, and sends you a text message when it needs a fresh battery. Pretty cool idea - but the system the inventor described would only be efficient if everyone was using them.
My uncle, who works in the oil industry, thinks that the future is going to be commuter vehicles - really small cars, like those unbelievably tiny cars from Europe, that get moped gas mileage and can just about hold you, a cup of coffee, and a briefcase. People will use these for the daily commute, and then have a normal-sized vehicle for family outings and recreation.
SiMuLaCrUm:
--- Quote ---I read a pretty neat article in Wired about that. Your car has this battery in it. Parking spaces have these little battery chargers in them. If your battery doesn't have enough juice to go where you need to go, you just stop by the battery changing station, and 5 minutes later you have a fresh fully-charged battery. Instead of paying per battery, or per kW to charge the battery, you pay a monthly subscription fee. Kinda like a cell phone plan, where you pay $49.99/month for unlimited minutes. The whole thing is controlled by a computer that keeps track of your battery power, networks with the charging stations, and sends you a text message when it needs a fresh battery. Pretty cool idea - but the system the inventor described would only be efficient if everyone was using them.
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That is actually really clever.
The only thing I can see with hydrogen is the price. Wouldn't it be more expensive than gas?
worker201:
--- Quote from: SiMuLaCrUm on 29 October 2008, 01:50 ---The only thing I can see with hydrogen is the price. Wouldn't it be more expensive than gas?
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That depends. How expensive is gas? You can make hydrogen by arcing a huge electrical current across a bucket of water - the water is pretty cheap, but the electrical current required is like running your house for a month. The other way to get hydrogen is to pull it out of natural gas the same way you pull gasoline out of oil.
In case you don't know, here's how gasoline is made. First you have to find crude oil, and usually it is in a crack deep underground, so you have to drill down to get it. In the case of offshore oil, sometimes the place you have to drill is under 1000m of water. After it comes up, it goes to the refinery. What the refinery does is heat the crude until it becomes unstable, which is called cracking. Depending on how much you heat it, you get different products - kerosene, lube oil, gasoline, butane, propane, etc. How much does this cost? Hard to say. Use this equation if you want a rough estimate:
($/gal gasoline) - (taxes&profit) * 42 = ($/barrel crude oil) + (refinery costs)
1 barrel = 42 gallons
It seems like the refinery costs would be a lot, but since they already exist, and they do so much volume, they basically become zero, so the current cost of gasoline is based largely on the price of crude oil.
If you make your hydrogen from natural gas, it should be just as easy as making gasoline from oil, since its the same process. And the US has huge natural gas reserves, with more to be found all the time. Actually, natural gas occurs right alongside the oil, and we usually just flare it off because its value is so low. Imagine that - a great energy source being thrown away because only the oil matters. That kind of logic is why high gas prices were such a good thing.
SiMuLaCrUm:
So according to the US, oil > natural gas, despite the huge supply the US has. That makes no sense, if the US knows natural gas is abundant, and that it could be used to cleaner alternatives, then why the hell is oil still king?
worker201:
Because everything is already in place for oil. Think about it - we have been making gasoline-powered vehicles for like 100 years. Back when we started, we didn't know what natural gas was, it just seemed like an annoyance. And just like in the intro to "The Beverly Hillbillies", crude oil did bubble up out of the ground in Pennsylvania back then. Things are a little different now that you have to go a couple miles down to get oil locally, but the refineries and the gas stations and the storage tanks and the "unleaded fuel only" signs on your dashboard are already in place. It's a fuck of a lot easier to do what you did yesterday than come up with a new plan for tomorrow.*
* = haha, conservatives are lazy!
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