Corona said:
There was an episode of Scientific American on PBS a while back where they looked at possible storage technology for hydrogen fuel cells. I think they are closing in on some solutions.
I agree the current technology of fuel cells is depressing. But, look where automobiles were a century ago...slow, noisy and very expensive. For a while, even, it was not even clear which would be more practical; electric or gasoline cars. That changed pretty quickly.
Honda is running fuel-cell cars in a couple municipal fleets in the Southwest (gotta keep those cells warm, or they don't work!), and they have been popular.
I also keep hoping someone will make a technology breakthrough on fusion power. The estimate is still 40-50 years away for a commercial reactor. When/if those become a reality, I expect that will create a societal change on par with the Industrial Revolution.
C
[curmudgeon]
You forgot steam - I think that steam-powered cars (don't know what they burnt to make the steam - wood?)
Yeah, researchers are considering metal hydrides, but these still take maybe 660 pounds of metal to hold an amount of H2 equivalent to a regular car's tank of gasoline (6-8 pounds of hydrogen). The neatest idea is to store the hydrogen in the interstitial spaces between water molecules in ice (250 pounds for one tank of fuel equivalent), but that one is in very early stages. Current processes require pressures of 36,000 psi (not a typo), although there is a process that could possibly require only 1450 PSI. I don't know how long it takes to refuel.
This is why California's horrendous mandated targets for percentage of zero-emissions cars that companies must sell have failed miserably - it's really hard to build a car that weighs the same as a current car, that goes as far on a tank of fuel, is as temperature-insensitive, and costs the same, without the manufacturers losing their shirts on each one, using alternative power sources. Who wants to buy an electric car that goes 70 miles (if you leave the AC off), and takes 8 hours to recharge? Gasoline is a simple solution that is hard to beat from a performance-per-pound perspective. And, as you aluded, it has a 120 year head start in technology development. Although it may (and my opinion, must) eventually happen, I think it will be a while (~20 years, my mostly uninformed guess) before we see people other than Ed Begley and the Sierra Club, and short-range commercial fleets with central refuelling points, buying fuel cell cars.
I remember that there was some effort to create a fuel cell car that runs on gasoline (I know - doesn't sound right, does it?). The fuel undergoes some sort of a catalytic breakdown which frees the hydrogen, which is then used in a fuel cell. The only problem is that the remaining component of Gasoline is mostly carbon, which is vented as CO2, although, being more efficient at extracting energy, the car still released less CO2 (according to the SciAm article, gasoline cars only use 33% of their chemical energy). The main advantages were that fuel storage is easier, and you can use existing distribution infrastructure (another big stumbling block for fuel cell acceptance). Don't know whatever came of it.
What's the old saw about fusion? "It's the energy source of the future - always was, and always will be." It's funny - about 40 years ago, the estimate was that fusion was only 20 years away. Now, it's 45-50 years away. Hopefully, that trend will reverse. ;-) Agreed, though, that it will have a fundamental impact on society if/when it happens, assuming the commercial hurdles are surmountable (in the late '40s, people said that nuclear fission was going to supply electricity that was "too cheap to be worth metering").
[/curmudgeon]
I think that considering that 80-90% of your posts make me laugh out loud, I'd have to say that your talents are wasted on aviation.
