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Technology Stocks : Ballard Power -world leader zero-emission PEM fuel cells -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Peavey who wrote (3530)	12/26/1998 3:34:00 AM
From: Sleeperz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5827

Just like the last oil embargo if there is a fuel shortage the auto makers will make more fuel efficient vehicles. The first Generation Hybrids get 60 MPG. The third generation will probably get 120 MPG. The depletion of petroleum does not mean the end of the ICE. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. An ICE can also burn hydrogen too! The horse was a temporary solution to transporation too. So will the Hybrid and the Fuel Cell as a source of power for transportation. Nothing is 100% non poluting, even you pollute the air. That is called supply and demand, so far there is more supply than demand. Hybrid vehicles will stretch the petroleum resources even more. One is that petroleum as a fuel source is finite, and we will gradually deplete this resource. As this becomes apparent to those blinded by "the lowest price-at-the-pump-in-one-hundred-years", or whatever the oiled shorts are touting today, the price will rise as the supply diminishes. Second is that the hybrid car is a temporary solution. It will truly be 100% non-polluting when there is no gasoline. Water is far more important resource than petroleum. The goverments might insist on alternate fuel sources other than hydrogen to prevent the worlds population from dying. Third, petroleum provides western society far more useful products than mere heat and transportation. The need for the plastics, paints, drugs etc that are created from petroleum might cause governments to insist on alternate power sources to prevent oil from all going up in smoke. CL

To: William Peavey who wrote (3530)	12/26/1998 2:07:00 PM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5827

Bill: You write about fc powered cars as if they were not running on hydrocarbons. They are. Methanol is made from natural gas. Hydrogen is made from natural gas. Yes, one can use photovoltaics to split water to create hydrogen, and when that technology is widespread commercially, then, and only then, will the cost of hydrogen not be controlled by the cost of natural gas. I believe that day will come, but it may well be 20 to 50 years from now. The differential in cost between making hydrogen using solar energy and extracting it from natural gas is so huge that there could be many significant breakthroughs and they still might not be sufficient to make solar splitting of water cost competitive. As long as methanol and hydrogen are derived from hydrocarbons, your point about how we will someday deplete our supply of hydrocarbons isn't an argument in their favor. Keep in mind that natural gas only gets transformed into methanol or hydrogen with the application of lots of energy (it has to be heated to a high temperature, steam injected, and various other energy intensive processes applied). That is why methanol and hydrogen are always so much more expensive per Btu they contain than natural gas is. What that means is that if something happened to make energy prices rise, processing intensive products like hydrogen and methanol would go up in price more than relatively unprocessed products like natural gas. I would think a bull on Ballard might want to lay low on your energy shortage argument until such time as photovoltaics improve.