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Car of the Future
Autoweek has this summary of what GM, at least, thinks a fuel-cell car will eventually look like. No engine compartment!
The more extreme enviroweenies think we'll never see fuel cells because the oil companies will conspire to prevent their production. Hell, before 9-11 they may have been right. Now, though, I think pretty much everyone in places of power around here (not just in the government) have quietly come to the same conclusion about the Middle East that we did about Europe 60 years ago... It's Time for Them to Go.
There are any number of ways to make hydrogen. One of the more promising methods was to "crack" gasoline using electrochemical methods. This would've leveraged the huge petroleum infrastructure we've built over the past 100+ years.
It would've also perpetuated our reliance on foreign (i.e. middle-eastern) oil, and therefore I believe has been quietly deprecated by the powers-that-be. Certainly I'm not hearing any noise about it from any car or oil industry circle. Instead they seem to have decided to just build out a hydrogen infrastructure. This gives the oil companies a buy-in (if they're smart), because that'll be who builds it. It also leverages utility companies, coal, and natural gas industries, because all the other ways of generating hydrogen require electricity (you crack water instead of gasoline). We have plenty of coal and natural gas, thank you.
Oh, we'll still need oil. Nearly all modern materials require it in some form or another, and certain kinds of transportation (aviation in particular) won't adapt well or quickly to fuel cells. But by removing oil from our ground transportation equation, it stops being a single lever anyone can jiggle to screw with our entire economy. The rest of the world, especially Russia and South America, will be able to easily supply our needs, and we get along just fine with them.
At that point, perhaps in ten years, perhaps in twenty, we will finally be able to remove Islam from its aberrent place on the world stage and allow it to continue its historic slide into poverty and obscurity. The f-d up thing is, the Islamofacists rising to power in the Arab world now probably won't mind at all. Abitious, mean, ignorant old men have ever chosen power and easy women over clean water, live babies, and a healthy populace.
Dont know what you mean about letting Europe go. I think now more than at any other time is the time to take a leaf from the European book. The EU is a remarkable thing truly remarkable. Keep your eye on it.
Posted by: BagoWicks on January 14, 2003 10:38 AMYes, but the Europe of today is emphatically not the Europe of 1935. One of the unspoken goals of WWII, only recently raised in history books, was the removal of Europe as the primary source of global instability. The Marshall plan, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact accomplished this goal.
Posted by: scott on January 14, 2003 10:43 AMI'm afraid that the proponents of "alternative fuels" such as hydrogen and natural gas are stymied not by politics, but by simple physics.
Consider hydrogen. Dangerous as hell to store or transport--- imagine having a good sized bomb under your bum driving down the road. Gasoline, action movies to the contrary, does not explode easily... it has a very specific fuel-to-air ratio. This also ignores the fact that producing hydrogen for use as a fuel requires *electricity*--- it doesn't eliminate fossil fuel dependency, it merely moves it from the fuel tank to the power plant.
Natural gas is an alternative, but it is also difficult to store and transport, and also has one problem of its own.... namely it produces one fourth the energy of an equivalent amount of oil.
The gasoline fueled internal combustion engine automobile did not start out as a monopoly. There were *countless* alternative energy sources for vehicles on the market at the same time, ranging from electrical to steam powered. Countless variations and improvements have been introduced since the. They all fell by the wayside because the old black gold delivered the goods better. Safer, more efficient, better power, and cheaper.
They may come up with an alternative fuel someday that can compete, but you'll pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
Posted by: RHJunior on January 20, 2003 10:11 PM* Hydrogen, as I understand it, can be stored in such a way that it is no more dangerous than gasoline. While gasoline may not be as explosive, it is (again, in my understanding) much more energetic than hydrogen when it does explode, plus it burns for a far longer period of time.
* By centralizing the fossile fuel dependency, it makes it easier to control and regulate. However, the thrust of the post was not reducing our dependency on fossile fuels per-se, rather eliminating our dependency on foreign oil.
* Natural gas may be less efficient than oil, but the US has it in abundance. It also burns more cleanly, and (as I understand it) requires less (any?) refinement.
* As noted in the essay, if 9/11 had never happened I feel the future for alternative fuels would've remained quite dim. However, we now have a political goal that overrides the simple economic or engieering one. Islamic fascists and fanatics are a primary threat to world stability. They are effective because they are financed by billions of dollars of oil money. We must deal with them because we require oil for our economy to function.
By eliminating our need for middle-eastern oil, we eliminate the primary source of financing for terrorists. By eliminating our dependency on middle-eastern oil, we no longer require the region to be friendly to us, thereby relegating the entire area to the strategic backwater it was before the discovery of oil.
Posted by: scott on January 21, 2003 08:09 AM