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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (80731)	6/3/2000 1:08:00 AM
From: Krowbar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

General Motors forsees hydrogen economy HyWeb, 00-05-29: What the oil and auto industries do today and over the next few years will have a dramatic effect on the kinds of vehicles people drive and how they live and work in the 21st century, General Motors' Executive Director Robert Purcell Jr. told the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association's Annual Meeting, reports Octane Week in its May 15 edition... ...Near-zero and zero-sulfur fuels are the short-term goal for the most promising advanced systems such as lean burn engines and fuel cells, but in the long term, GM sees a much different picture. "In fact, our long-term vision is of a hydrogen economy." "There will also be increasing percentages of transportation fuels from renewable sources in support of efforts to reduce global greenhouse gases." The dominant transportation fuels will depend on the dominant engine technology, according to Purcell, continuing that only the marketplace can answer the question what engine technology will be. GM's "current best thinking" on the fuels needed to power fuel cell vehicles is the following: In the near term, light naphtha refinery streams and liquid hydrocarbons derived from natural gas. Also, methanol, and as production, storage and distribution systems develop, hydrogen... hyweb.de Del

To: Krowbar who wrote (80731)	6/3/2000 8:21:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Methanol-powered fuel cells are very inefficient. Hydrogen fuel cells are efficient in the sense that you get many miles per pound of fuel. However you can barely get a pound of fuel into a garageable vehicle, so <shrug>. But I think our fine Mr. Flury was stretching it when he suggested that methanol fuel cells are efficient. Each molecule of CH3OH is subjected to the equivalent of combustion to yield water, CO2 and one H2 per fuel molecule at best. (That's all done on a hot precatalyst bed before any power is made available to the drive.) That's wasting 97% of the mass of fuel that you're carrying around in order to get at the hydrogen residue, which is the only thing the fuel cell can use. I'll put a direct-injection Turbodiesel with ten gallons of fuel up against a methanol fuel cell vehicle with equivalent power rating and ten gallons of fuel any day.