happy and angry
Member
Please take your slippery slope fallacy and stow it. Thanks!
The end of high powered cars?
- Thread starter Sergius64
- Start date
oaklandopen
Member
i've thought numerous times of getting a tdi and converting it to run off used cooking oil but im not sure im ready to jump on the VW boat....not really a fan. and i've known too many to have some sort of electrical problem (mostly with the lighting systems)
Your Canadian, Take your opinions about US policy and Stow It.
Wagonbacker9
Member
- :
- 2004 'Hoe
fixed! lol
happy and angry
Member
Fixed.
In order:
1. I expressed no opinion about US policy, I expressed opinion about the use of a logical fallacy to criticize US policy.
2. If I was to express an opinion about US policy, this one in particular, I would be within my right to do so. Ain't freedom wonderful, kid?
The discussion you entered into is about US policy.
You are right, We do still have freedom, for now.
I'm no Kid. I'm your Daddy.
happy and angry
Member
My aren't you a bright one! You picked up on that all on your own, too, didn't you?
I hold out hope that you never father children, kid.
HOBDisease
Member
- :
- 07 Black Mica MS3
Just leave us alone...we KNOW how fu<ked up we are right now.
happy and angry
Member
I'm not saying you're ****** up right now. I'm not even being critical of US policy. I have expressed not one single opinion about US policy or the state of your union, as it were. I'm being critical of one person who thinks using a logical fallacy to defend a position is smart and another who can't distinguish between my being critical of faulty logic and my having a raging hate boner for the US.
HOBDisease
Member
- :
- 07 Black Mica MS3
A raging hate boner lmao... I don't mind listening to others' opinions about my country, I have nothing against that. I didn't mean to jump in the argument between you two, I apologize.
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Its actually like $2-$3 dollars worth of electricity to fill an electric car versus about 10 times that much for gasoline cars. The nice thing about electricity is its so flexible. We can burn anything, use solar power, wind power, anything and turn it into electricity. The best solution is a proposed grid which would allow people to sell back electricity for short periods of time which would not only create growth of homeowners with solar/wind power, it eliminates the need for incredibly wasteful peaker plants which are only used for about 15 minutes at a time and very infrequently.
happy and angry
Member
All good points, but I have three major issues with electric cars.
1.) The batteries in them require precious metals that are in short supply. Also, they are precious metals that are needed in other industries. We are supplanting one finite resource for another.
2.) A huge portion of the electricity generated in the US is still coal based, and it's incredibly dirty. "Clean" coal still isn't very clean.
3.) It will require major infrastructure changes to effectively support it. Infrastructure is expensive.
I've said this before, but I'd rather more time and money be put into researching hydrogen as a fuel. Not even as a fuel cell, either, simply as a fuel. The BMW 740H they released a few years back burned hydrogen in a motor that could run on gas or hydrogen. It could, for the most part, use similar infrastructure for fuel delivery, require minimal retooling of vehicles, provide the same sort of convenience gas currently provides, is actually renewable (some bacteria give off hydrogen as a byproduct of metabolizing cellulose, for example), provides more energy by volume than gas, and most importantly would not require significant changes to current lifestyles (public buy-in is important for any solution to stick), The current problem is hydrogen production not being cost effective yet.
what happens when everyone owns these elactric cars that need to be pluged in every night. power consumption will be through the roof on the city basis. coal is cleaner and more efficent and cheeper then other forms of power production. it would be nice if we could build some more nucular plants. we want to have these cleener forms or electricity solar and wind but what good is it if we cant but up the power lines to transmit to where its needed and noone wants to have them or nuculear plants in there back yard no one wants to see the big power lines required to transmit the power needed.
that BMW 740 that burned hydrogen is worthless (my reasoning when i get off work need to find my documantation)
INTERESTING READ
http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_110155/article.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448648,00.html
that BMW 740 that burned hydrogen is worthless (my reasoning when i get off work need to find my documantation)
INTERESTING READ
http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_110155/article.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448648,00.html
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OK i can use that reading for some of my reasoning why that BMW 740H sucks
OK hydrogen is obtained from two methods. one way is through electrolysis, the other way is stripping it from hydrocarbons. most hydrogen has been obtained through stripping, which is not all that clean emission wise. insted of releasing the emissions at the car it is released in the refining process. now electrolysis is only as clean as the way the electricity is producer to preform said task. and here in the united states less then 10% of our energy comes from renewable resources. so even if we are using the clean method of producing hydrogen its still pretty dirty because it was produced off of burning hydrocarbons. we have not even got into the storage of hydrogen 2 ways one is pressurise and use as compressed gas. which requires a lot of space to get any useable milage out of it or up the pressure and then comes more dangers. converting to liquid requires 1/3 the energy to convert from gas to liquid, that dose not even get in to storing it liquid hydrogen needs to stay below -423 deg F. The BMW 740h needed 45 gallon tank to get 120 miles out of it.
OK hydrogen is obtained from two methods. one way is through electrolysis, the other way is stripping it from hydrocarbons. most hydrogen has been obtained through stripping, which is not all that clean emission wise. insted of releasing the emissions at the car it is released in the refining process. now electrolysis is only as clean as the way the electricity is producer to preform said task. and here in the united states less then 10% of our energy comes from renewable resources. so even if we are using the clean method of producing hydrogen its still pretty dirty because it was produced off of burning hydrocarbons. we have not even got into the storage of hydrogen 2 ways one is pressurise and use as compressed gas. which requires a lot of space to get any useable milage out of it or up the pressure and then comes more dangers. converting to liquid requires 1/3 the energy to convert from gas to liquid, that dose not even get in to storing it liquid hydrogen needs to stay below -423 deg F. The BMW 740h needed 45 gallon tank to get 120 miles out of it.
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Amen sir. Hybrids are a joke. They are just a band-aid on bullet wound. Sure they will help with the transition to something else, but the sad fact is a prius zipping down the highway at 75-80mph doesn't get better mpg then we do at that speed. AT 65 its only marginally better. The chevy volt is a good idea, as it uses a gas generator to power an electric motor. This is the way electric locomotives do it. Most of the modern class 1 railroads are claiming they can move 1 ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of fuel and they are right.
Electric cars would be better. The amount of fuel a power plant spends to to make enough electricity to send your car 100 miles is much less then the amount of gas we use now. The cost is much lower. If we all went to electric cars over night the grid would fail. But if we upgrade over time it wont cause any problems. The power grid is always being upgraded anyway. Electric cars could easily be complimented with solar power. My car sits in a sunny parking lot all day. But electric cars do have their share of issues.
Hydrogen solves all our problems. No emissions, and it is more or less renewable. It should be noted while hydrogen can be dangerous, there are ways to use it safely. It is also a common byproduct of nuclear power plants so there are more then 2 ways to come across it. At the moment it costs us more energy to produce it then we obtain burning it, but like anything else, that will change as technology advances. With more development and upgrade infrastructure it really is a no lose solution.
The great thing as stated is that you can convert most gasoline cars to run on it. That means the guys with the hot rods, the 1965 sting rays, the porsches, and even those wack jobs with their MS3s can keep their beloved cars and get the performance they want out of them. Face it. Americans have a pretty intense love affair with gasoline cars. The sound, the power, the performance. And I will be honest, while I want to save the planet, i don't want to give up my MS3. Converting it to hydrogen would be a great solution down the road.
EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention. Someone mentioned clean coal in regards to electric cars. There is no such thing. There is coal that is cleaner then what we have now, but it will never be a truly clean source of energy. If you want to read somethign scary, research the radiation levels found outside coal plants. They can be far higher then what you find around a nuke plant. And read about how many metric tons of toxic cancer causing waste they produce each year. Again the figures are scary.
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I see what you're saying and agree to a point...but there are other sources of hydrogen that would be easier to store and easier to deal with. I can't find my sources for this since it's been a while since I cared to research the topic, but there are organometallic metal-hydrides that, with the addition of water, give off hydrogen gas. The byproducts (organometallic metal-hydroxides) can be "recharged" chemically giving you back the original metal-hydride. If I remember correctly, the metal-hydride could come in a pellet form and was, for the most part, safe to handle.
happy and angry
Member
While I agree with you that current means of hydrogen production are not feasible, I never once advocated for staying with current means of production. I mentioned that there are bacteria that digest cellulose (plant matter, of which we have plenty of waste from corn and wheat to recycle) and produce hydrogen as a byproduct of that metabolic process for a reason. If that process can be made to happen efficiently enough to make it a viable fuel source, it removes the need to actively strip hydrogen from hydrocarbon chains. We won't need to expend energy to produce hydrogen, simply to compress it to liquid form which is no different than the need to refine gasoline or ethanol.
Your other complaints are complaints about the limits of a new, emerging technology. It actually took 30 gallons to do 120 miles according to Edmunds review of the car, and while that's still not good compared to a fully mature technology like gasoline, it's better than you're saying. It's also pretty good considering the fact that BMW made an enormous compromise in their design as it was entirely a proof-of-concept endeavor. They were unable to maximize efficiency of the motor for either fuel source in order to ensure the engine could do both. Someone else has discussed storage with metal-hydrides, so I'll skip that.
So, you level some legitimate concerns as well as some overstated concerns, but look at the upsides and potential. There is an entirely renewable, energy free source of hydrogen if it can be made to be efficient. It offers similar behaviour and performance to existing fuels. If it's produced biologically we skip several energy expensive steps in the production of the fuel, which ups efficiency.
We use gas as a fuel because it is hydrogen dense. The whole usefulness of a hydrocarbon chain is to provide a convenient vehicle for burning hydrogen. Carbon also burns but not as effeciently or energetically as hydrogen. And gas as a fuel is useful because the energy expended creating it came from geological processes that we didn't have to invest in. If we can farm hydrogen from recycled left over plant matter and bacteria breaking it down, we've effectively done the same thing, where the majority of the energy needed comes from solar (growing plants) and biochemical. We don't need to spend a lot of energy harvesting either of those. We don't have the inherent energy loss of burning coal to produce heat to heat water to create steam to turn a turbine to produce energy. Entropy sucks energy out of every single step of that process, wasting a lot of the energy stored in coal just to convert it to a source we can use.
Energy conversion is an expensive process in its own right, and it's one reason why I don't like looking at electric as efficient. Current sources of electric are not clean. They are getting cleaner (but don't make the mistake of thinking of them as "free" or "safe". more on that later) but they remain dirty right now. This is why I said I want more money spent researching hydrogen as a fuel. It avoids many of the problems other sources of energy have (entirely renewable and not dependent on limited supplies of crude or precious metals, for example), and if its own pittfalls can be surmounted via technology, I think it has the most upside with the least downside of all currently proposed technologies.
Anything we use for fuel is going to have a cost associated with it. Wind farms change weather patterns. Solar power if used very wide spread has the potential to do the same. Hydro-electric changes current patterns and river systems. Even burning hydrogen as a fuel is going to give off a lot of water, a minor greenhouse gas in its own right, that will have to come down somehow which is also going to affect weather patterns. We can't really avoid that. But I'd like our choices to make good long term sense, and right now I don't think that electrics/hybrids or ethanol make good long term sense. One depends as heavily on a non-renewable resource as gas, and the other redirects staple food crops away from the hungry. We're investing a lot of money into two technologies that are looking like short-term, intermediate solutions. I'm not a fan of that.
Solar, wind and hydro power are clean. Thermal is clean as well and virtually unlimited with virtually no impact to the planet. No pollution from these. (not counting the cost of manufacturing the equipment, but thats the same with any energy source) Nuclear is also clean, as nothing other then steam is released into the air, and only about 3-5% of the nuclear waste is the really bad stuff and much of that can be recycled. The rest is all low to mid range contamination and is safe to put into a land fill. The low level waste from nuke plants makes up 90% of the radioactive waste but only about 1-2% of the radiation. Most nuclear plants store their spent fuel (the bad stuff) in pools on site.
As for hydrogen giving of water vapor as a green house gas... that is an easy fix, condense it and collect it. It will be basically distilled water, almost safe for drinking. Could be used for any number of things.
I agree 100% we are investing money into technologies that are short term solutions to an overriding problem with hybrids and solutions other then hydrogen. Electric could be long term if the power was generated by a true renewable source.
Also I think the biggest thing people misunderstand about moving away from petroleum based fuels just that. The issue isn't running out of gas for our cars. Sure that will happen but it should be quite clear we can power cars with other things besides oil. The problem is all the other uses for oil. Medicine, manufacturing, aerospace, plastics, rubber, etc etc. Much of these things are dead in the water without oil. Think of all the machines in factories around the world which use oil based products to lube their working parts. Now imagine we run out of oil and those machines can't be lubricated properly. Sure some plastics are made without oil, but most of them are petroleum based. If we loose our ability to make plastics we are fuct. The only reason this issue centers around cars is because they consume more oil then any of these other areas.
-Pete
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