--- Mark Lennan <mlennan@crankyrobots.com> wrote:
> I remember reading an article about a Hydrogen Fuel Cell research
> program at some college that used an MGA as the test subject. From
>
> what I remember it worked out rather well.
> I just did a quick Google and could not find it though...,
The problem with hydrogen as a fuel is how do you get the
hydrogen? It's the most plentiful substance in the universe,
but it's all locked up in water here on earth. Thanks to the
inconvenience of the first law of thermodynamics, it takes more
energy to extract hydrogen from water than the hydrogen itself
can produce when burned. That might be OK if hydrogen was a
more efficient fuel than gasoline, but it isn't. So one thing
you have to resign yourself to is much more energy being
consumed by a hydrogen car than a gasoline car, and until
nuclear fusion becomes commercially practical, or people
come to re-accept nuclear fission as a commonplace source
of power, that means *more* pollution per mile travelled
than now in the case of coal, or *more* fossil fuels being
comsumed per gallon in the case of oil or natural gas.
Now, there are some promising results being obtained in
laboratories using chemical catalysts and nanotubes to
extract hydrogen from natural gas, but guess who's coming
out in opposition to nanotechnology? The same eco-freaks
who want to do away with gas-burning cars in the first
place. They won't be satisfied until everybody is living in
a yurt on a subsistance farm, but they carry a lot of political
pull and are gearing up once more to be the luddites of
the next industrial revolution.
The oil companies would love to sell everyone hydrogen, and
I'm sure that when the technology becomes practical, they'llbe the
ones to do it. But in the meantime, there's no way to do it
for less than the cost per mile of gasoline, so there's no way
to make money doing it (since customers will continue to vote
with their pocketbooks for gasoline over hydrogen) so it isn't
going to happen anytime soon, and that's for the better.
David Breneman david_breneman@yahoo.com
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