Relief at the pumps: Revolutionary hydrogen fuel could cost just 90p per GALLON (and it will run in existing cars) | Mail Online Read about this yesterday on Yahoo but forgotten to post it up. Its not expected for a while (3 to 5 years) but no matter what the price is when/if it does eventually come out its still going to be much cheaper! And the best bit - it will run on standard petrol cars if i read rightly?
petrol is NOT expensive because it costs loads to produce. petrol is expensive because the goverment tax the shit out of it. why? because they can. because they know people need it and will still pay whatever price they put on it. what makes you think for a second they wont tax this just as much?
on the Yahoo news yesterday they had calculated how much it would cost with current taxes and it worked out at about 65p a litre overall. Still can't find the bloody article though
That's mighty interesting, I'm going to have to quiz one of my lecturers about it and see what he thinks... -edit- ah the Daily Mail. I'll wait for a real paper to disclose the story or another believable source first.
At least it's sustainable and clean, which means we don't have to all switch to gay electric cars. It's funny, I was only discussing artificial petrol with a mate a few days ago.
Electric cars are a dead end, they aren't the future. They might provide a few intermediate years but the petrochem companies have far too much political clout and provide far too much revenue for the Govt to let go of. Something like this or even normal hydrogen fuel cells is far more likely because the infrastructure and interests are already there to provide it. Shell will be equally happy selling this on their forecourts, but they can't sell electric because we've got that at home (and it'd take too long anyway).
19p a litre 'petrol' in development - Yahoo! Cars "Though a figure of 19p per litre has been suggested, it is expected that the motorist would pay around 60p per litre with the addition of Government fuel tax."
It's clean, sustainable in the grand scheme of things is probably jumping the gun considering the amount of energy it takes to split hydrogen from whatever it has bonded to.
I saw a program a few years ago about Jesse James trying to break an alternative fuel sound record. He had to use a huge big block engine in a streamlined body just to get to 200mph. So it isn't a straight swap for petrol. If we're going to use it as a primary fuel lots of development is going to have to go into getting more power out of it or just putting bigger engines in cars. Also, as for it being sustainable, surely the power put into breaking apart the oxygen-hydrogen bonds in water to get the hydrogen will be exactly the same as the energy you get out from combusting it with oxygen in the cylinder. Add to that the mechanical inefficiencies and the energy used to transport it and it's far from sustainable. What we really need is a truely sustainable way of creating electicial and most of our problems are solved, for the time being.
Good point. Hopefully they're spending the next 3 to 5 years figuring out a way of getting the hydrogen more efficiently.
Where is the magic energy to produce all this hydrogen going to come from? Magic, that's where. Although if you have loads of free hydrogen you can combine it with atmospheric CO2 to make synthetic methanol, which really is a liquid fuel just like petrol (and doesn't evapourate through steel tanks like hydrogen does). As a long term energy solution a hydrogen economy makes less sense than just murdering the useless 96% of the population.
Yay, someone who knows the first thing about molecular physics. In the same way that power for electric cars has to be generated by burning something, somewhere, harvesting Hydrogen takes large amounts of energy, again which have to come from somewhere. Untilo someone perfects a Fusion/Fission generator the vast majority of us are stuck with petroleum distillate.
Yeah, it know that! Haha. But the joules per mole of hydrogen is a lot less that that of petrol. So you need a lot more of it to get the same power out of an engine. I could look up facts and figures but they're probably lost somewhere in piles of redundant A-Level chemistry.
