Tomorrow's battery medium

Or the NYT.

That search returns any combination of those 3 words in any location on a document. It could be 3 unrelated sentences, and still return a valid hit. It also returns hits for each of the 3 words used individually.

A better way is to search for the exact phrase as in: which returns 8,650 hits.

Or, perhaps just grouping the "fuel cell" together as in: which returns 941,000 hits.

If "fuel cell breakthrough" is commonly discussed, Google Trends usually has something of interest: but not this time. Zilch.

Ok, how about just "fuel cell"? From 2004 to today, looks like a steady decline in people mentioning fuel cells.

Interest in "fuel cell catalyst" isn't doing much better:

Interest in "fuel cell vehicle" also peaked in 2008, but then died:

If you're thinking of investing, perhaps a "steam car" would do better?

Bummer...thought you might have mentioned Vanadium pentoxide or some such..

• ASSumes the "blackbox had no undesirable modifications BEFORE the "security" blanket mod.

Don't know about 'distribute' but it's commonly used in steelmaking (the big blast furnaces generate some, which is employed to do various tasks around the mill).

Have you seen an ocean lately? Oceans sre about 66% hydrogen atoms. There are lots of technologies to generate H2 gas, and none of them have to be efficient yet, because usage is small. That will change.

Chemical engineering has a past with petrochemicals. and a future with hydrogen.

There weren't any sources of 100 octane aviation gas when the first high- compression engines were being tinkered with. The three great accomplishments of Jimmy Doolittle were a WWII air raid on Tokyo, the instrumentation of flight (no vision required), and the introduction of 100 octane fuel. Interesting guy, worth looking up a biography.

A century from now, no one will know 'where is the gasoline going to come from', but the hydrogen question will still have the same answer.

Robert Baer wrote in news:kYAwD.380990$YL3.279670 @fx48.iad:

If the chip gets remotely activated and has yet to be...

Perhaps it is you doing the ASS-fuming.

tyle.

here here there is still few cities that distribute gas, it has a been a

Boston could use that kind of thinking where half a town blew up.

How about adding water, and maybe fiber.

There is a world of difference between natural gas and town/coal gas. Natural gas is very common in the US. "Town gas", not so much.

Replace the lithium with sodium. The sodium ion battery is cheaper than using lithium. Lithium is the rarest element in the Sun. On Earth, sodium is a thousand times more abundant than lithium. Alan F.

Fiber certainly. The plastic tubes are much smaller than the old pipe ID's.

The water would taste funny, after decades of NG.

In the bits that we can get at.

The lithium-6 and lithium-7 nuclei aren't all that stable, so while some lithium was produced in the big bang, it wasn't all that much, and it tended to get destroyed in a lot of stars, but others do produce it.

Because the lithium atom is lighter than sodium, you can use to store more energy per unit mass than with sodium, but less than with hydrogen (which is very abundant).

Natural gas smells funny because the distributors add trace amounts of tertiary butyl mercaptan (essence of skunk) as an olfactory warning signal. It's easy to get rid of.

drogen.

Saying that doesn't make it a reality. The efficient production of hydroge n on a large scale doesn't do any more to solve the carbon issue than does the battery electric car. The biggest difference is that electric cars are practical today and will be much more so tomorrow.

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Yes, but that doesn't mean there will be a practical answer for hydrogen pr oduction, just that long ago gasoline will have stopped being used.

Rick C.

hydrogen.

gen on a large scale doesn't do any more to solve the carbon issue than doe s the battery electric car. The biggest difference is that electric cars a re practical today and will be much more so tomorrow.

me from',

production, just that long ago gasoline will have stopped being used.

It's hard to see how a H2 driven energy distribution system could ever get off the ground. Coal & gas are mined, hydrogen can't be. At best it's just energy converted from one form to a less practical one at significant cost.

Converting it from seawater using sunlight is a nice idea until you look at the numbers. Practical it is not.

It all makes hydrogen car research the ultimate scam.

NT

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h hydrogen.

rogen on a large scale doesn't do any more to solve the carbon issue than d oes the battery electric car. The biggest difference is that electric cars are practical today and will be much more so tomorrow.

come from', but the hydrogen question will still have the same answer.

n production, just that long ago gasoline will have stopped being used.

t off the ground. Coal & gas are mined, hydrogen can't be. At best it's jus t energy converted from one form to a less practical one at significant cos t.

It's hard for TB to see anything, because he doesn't know how to look.

The sole advantage of hydrogen is that it can be stored, but that's importa nt enough to be generating quite a lot of interest.

t the numbers. Practical it is not.

Why would anybody start with seawater? The atmosphere distills it for you, and delivers tolerably clean water as rain - quite enough to deliver all th e hydrogen we are likely to need.

Climate change denial is the ultimate scam. Hydrogen car research is as muc h future-proofing as anything else. It may not pay off, but there are lots of ways of getting away from burning fossil carbon for fuel, and it pays to keep an eye on all of them.

You do have to have something that you are working on before the other guys in the area will talk to you about what they are doing.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You really are an idiot.

t off the ground. Coal & gas are mined, hydrogen can't be. At best it's jus t energy converted from one form to a less practical one at significant cos t.

at the numbers. Practical it is not.

So what are the numbers?

I won't say using hydrogen is a bad idea, but it certainly is not ready for prime time. Yeah, it requires converting energy from one form to another, but so does *every* power source for cars. Gasoline *uses* power for refi ning, cracking, etc. I've seen various numbers for the electricity used, b ut here is an interesting one.

Perhaps using gasoline to power cars is the ultimate scam. If refining fue l takes so much energy, we may well be ahead using electric vehicles when r efineries are shut down.

I think price is the best way to consider the "cost" or efficiency of energ y. Bottom line is I can drive a BEV with a fuel cost of around $0.04 per m ile. The fuel cost of running a gasoline vehicle is presently around $0.10 per mile. So clearly there is a net energy savings somewhere in the proce ss.

Someone here once did a calculation of end to end efficiency comparison bet ween the source and end points for gasoline and BEVs. But that only consid ered the amount of energy input at the beginning and the energy reaching th e car. Significant amounts of energy must be used in the process and it is likely much greater in gasoline produced for cars.

Rick C.

Electric cars are practical and efficient as long as you have clean, cheap electricity. (They are very popular here in Norway.) However, they suffer from long filling times, even with the fastest chargers, and shorter distances per fill. The next generation of solid state batteries in a couple of years will improve both these significantly, but worsen the biggest problem of all - you need to get the electricity to the charge points.

Small electric cars today have ranges in the region of 150 km on 30 kWh batteries, and charge overnight at home or in about an hour at fast charge stations. For town use, these are fine. But to compete with petrol you want perhaps 600 km range - that's 120 kWh - and charging in under 5 minutes. That is a 1.5 MW charge current. An electric "petrol station" with 4 simultaneous charging points would be 6 MW. That is a /massive/ power requirement, requiring a huge investment in infrastructure of supply lines and power generation, as well as being able to handle switching such loads on and off. The only practical solution will involve huge battery banks at the charge point, that can be charged up using a lower constant load and supply the peak currents for the charging. That would greatly ease the supply problem, but need a very large and expensive battery bank (plus cooling, safety, etc.) and give you a 25% drop in efficiency.

This is where hydrogen wins. You can make it by electrolysis at the power plant, store it in tanks, transport it in tanker trucks, pump it into cars in a couple of minutes. Just like petrol. Of course, unlike petrol you need to keep it at very high pressure and it's not easy to make tanks that keep it without leaking (though hydrogen leaks are not an environmental problem).

However, it will probably make more sense to use other methods of transporting the energy rather than pure hydrogen. Ethanol generated synthetically from CO?, water and electricity would be ideal as it would go straight into today's cars and infrastructure - but there is no efficient process for it at the moment. Methane is easier to work with than hydrogen, methanol can be used in fuel cells, and formic acid is being researched. There are plenty of options in theory - the challenge is efficient production (without using fossil fuels).

And of course you need efficient and clean electricity generation. With a good enough transport medium, you can build solar power stations in the middle of the desert dedicated to producing hydrogen (or methanol, or whatever). Such production stations are ideal for unstable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. And thorium power stations will work well anywhere, when countries are willing to take the step.