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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pgerassi who wrote (124120)	9/18/2000 1:30:57 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572512

Please. The problems may be solvable, but saying that carrying around 25 liters of liquid Hydrogen, along with a refrigeration system, and routinely transferring said liquid in your local filling station, is easier and less dangerous than running 2 lb of propane/butane in your car AC is a little, er, hyperbolic? (leaving aside the dubious analogy of a VW gas heater, sheesh). Do you want to claim the costs of running H2 in automobiles will be comparable to running gasoline while you're at it? All this fancy H2 technology is at prototype stage at best. Lots of things look cool in prototype and research, but turn out to be not really practical when you try to scale it up. That's been the case with even relatively minor tweaks on the IC engine, like Sterling or Wankel, or even simpler things like water injection. Talking about replacing the whole transportation infrastructure this way is perhaps a bit premature? Then, there's the underlying problem of where the energy to produce the H2 comes from in the first place. Coal? Solar? Nuclear? Natural gas? Or lord help us, oil? All of these present problems. Cheers, Dan.

To: pgerassi who wrote (124120)	9/18/2000 1:39:28 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572512

Hydrogen economy. I have a lot of trouble with this. Hydrogen is, at best, a way to store energy. Since there are few hydrogen reserves outside of gas giants and stars, every gram of hydrogen has to be created, either through reforming hydrocarbons or through electrolysis of water. While there are a few interesting technologies for this, one that TI worked on used what were basically spherical solar cells, the current methods are probably no more efficient that the present system of IC vehicles when you consider it as a system. And it may have worse ecological effects, concentrating the production at central facilities means you also concentrate the heat, and heat pollution can have significant local ecological effects, just look at the environmental effects that large cities have from this. And if you are reforming hydrocarbons, then you still have the CO2 emissions. And then when you calculate in the dealing with cryogenics (or hydrides), the extra materials and manufacturing and energy costs of the handling systems, etc., etc., ad nauseum... Not that I am totally down on alternate fuels, I really like those fuel cells that directly use methanol for example, but most of these systems that I have looked at over the last 30 years or so have some major weaknesses. The reason why gasoline is still used is that there has yet to be a system that has enough advantages to outweigh the disadvantages to the point that they get adopted. And if you were to try to force adoption through legislation it will fail. The best you could hope for would be to shift interest through selective taxation, but that has to be done carefully, look at the difficulties in Europe right now.