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Non-Tech : IMPCO Technologies (IMCO), formerly AirSensors (ARSN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Oravetz who wrote (202)	7/22/2000 10:30:11 AM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 298

"My guess is that hydrogen will not reach the same level of acceptance in the transportation industry as oil until 2050," says Karl Jessen, director of energy and Internet strategies at the Yankee Group consulting firm. "Unless of course we have a major ecological or energy crisis in the next few years." It's difficult to store hydrogen in small spaces and there is no infrastructure to deliver it to a mass market. This has compelled the automakers to look at alternative fuels from which they can extract hydrogen. The contenders are propane, methanol, and gasoline. These are stored in a vehicle in much the same way as gasoline and a specialized apparatus called a reformer is used to strip out the hydrogen. The drawback with propane is that while it would significantly reduce pollution it won't eliminate it completely. One carbon atom will have to be released to free every four hydrogen atoms. The same goes for methanol. And reforming hydrogen from gasoline does almost nothing to help the environment, as one carbon atom is released to produce every one and one-half hydrogen atoms. Furthermore, adding a reformer raises the cost and substantially increases the weight of the vehicle, which goes a long way to making fuel-cell cars less competitive than their gasoline counterparts. "Unfortunately, we won't see pure hydrogen-based fuel-cell vehicles for some time," says Jason Mark, senior transportation analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The automakers will first introduce natural gas- and methanol-based vehicles. Gas stations are just not equipped to deliver hydrogen and we estimate that it will cost about $200 billion to upgrade them." redherring.com