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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (135493)	6/3/2004 4:02:51 PM
From: Valley Girl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks for linking me to this thread. I'll just link my previous post: Message 20190773 I must disagree with you that hydrogen is "the ultimate source of energy" - it's a carrier, not a source for anything other than fusion. It will have to be produced either by reforming methane (a bad idea, since it wastes the energy that goes into the CO2 released) or by electrolysis, which requires a source of electricity. Some environmentalists seem to get tangled up in this one; I saw a proposal to use the fuel cells in hydrogen-powered cars as spare electrical generation capability. And of course the hydrogen to fill the cars was going to come from electricity! Doh! Re. LNG, I expect we're about there. Because environmental activists have been blocking virtually any other type of electrical power station, we've been building gas-fired plants even though there's no way the gas to power them is going to be available for long enough to make them attractive using strictly North American supplies. Re. the prior post, note that there are gas-to-liquids technologies available that can turn gas, at an energy cost of course, into something more appropriate as a vehicle fuel. Finally, don't forget that gas production is going to be peaking along with oil in the next 5 years. Solar heat can be used to generate power, but it's very unattractive from a land-use perspective, as large arrays of mirrors are needed to focus the diffuse energy into a small enough space to be useful. PV looks like a better bet; modern panels pay back the energy cost in 2 years, and by covering existing structures such as homes, shopping malls, and parking lots we could collect enough to seriously dent our electricity needs. Unforunately, unless you project large increases in fossil-fuel energy costs, the cost in dollars isn't paid back for 10-20 years, making them unattractive from an economic point of view. Wind power has issues, but works and pays back the energy cost in less than a year. Plus it's better from a land-use perspective, since done carefully you can still farm the land where a wind farm sits. Still uneconomical, though. Utimately I think we'll use those sources, and possibly a revived nuclear industry, to generate electricity and use that to create biomass-based transportation fuels (e.g. methanol) or hydrogen. Coal we should save as a feedstock for chemicals and plastics.