On Tuesday, June 6, 2006, at 07:11 PM, Jim Webb wrote:
> I saw a couple of goo-goo-eyed news stories and thought "yeah, right"
> and
> followed up on some research into the proponent and Brown's gas... OK
> - it
> was about as simple as I thought. Break the bond in H2O and you get,
> viola,
> 2 Hydrogens and 1 Oxygen. Mix 'em and burn 'em and Shazaam! You get
> power
> and water! Imagine that!
Even if you can get cheap energy to liberate the hydrogen -- you need a
good number of cubic feet of the stuff to move the car along for mile
after mile, right? So either you gotta have a giant container -- or
you must compress the H2 and store it in a pressure vessel. . . And
that leads us to -- how much energy will it take to run the compressor?
Ooops, there goes some more of your efficiency.
I've said this before, but not on this particular thread: About ten
years ago I bought a GMC Jimmy (a.k.a. Blazer) out of the fleet of the
local natural gas utility. The vehicle has a 350 SBC that runs on
87-octane gasoline -- or, a click of the switch later, compressed
natural gas. I've got darn near nothing bad to say about it -- and
wish I could still get the compressed gas to run the vehicle. The gas
company quit maintaining a filling station so i couldn't buy the gas
any more, and installing a compressor here at the office, while
possible, was cost INefficient so I didn't. The gas company doesn't
even have any CNG vehicles any more.
We hear talk about hydrogen being a good fuel, but it won't work 'til
there's a distribution network. Hey, there was already a pretty good
network for natural gas -- pipeline all over the place! And that fuel
didn't work out because of the cost of compressing and using it. And
as Jim mentioned in his note (which part I deleted), H2 is pretty
destructive to work with -- more so than nat. gas. What makes the
powers-that-be think H2 will be accepted when plain ol' natural gas
didn't make it?
Jon Wennerberg
Seldom Seen Slim Land Speed Racing
Marquette, Michigan
(that's 'way up north)
|