A potential breakthrough in the war against high gas prices.

[owequitit]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070518/...WItd9Rh_WyBhIF

Just stumbled across this little news bit.

It is intriguing because it uses relatively available, inert metals, and requires no storage or transportation of pure hydrogen.

That could be very promising, because two of the largest potential hurtles against hydrogen use up to this point were transporting and storing the gas.

Since it is so volatile and reactive, those were MAJOR issues.

We will have to wait and see if this goes anywhere.

[Gemini]

Interesting....we'll see

[gloryaccordy]

Aluminum is already expensive enough...

My question is... where does the bulk of fossil fuel get burned? Is it in cars or in power plants?

I'm just not ready to give up my internal combustion engines yet.

[Ralphie]

I'm just not ready to give up my internal combustion engines yet.

X2!!!!

Im going to rock IC engines till they are banned in the USA

[Phempa]

if this happens, in 100 years we will have to invade Guinea and take all it's Bauxite.

[owequitit]

Aluminum is already expensive enough...

My question is... where does the bulk of fossil fuel get burned? Is it in cars or in power plants?

I'm just not ready to give up my internal combustion engines yet.

They said that even with existing high grade gallium, the process would be competitive with gasoline at $3 per gallon.

How true that is, I don't know. But that is what they are claiming.

[wlfpck]

Aluminum is already expensive enough...

My question is... where does the bulk of fossil fuel get burned? Is it in cars or in power plants?

I'm just not ready to give up my internal combustion engines yet.

Majority of fossil fuels are used in power plants to generate electricity.

[owequitit]

if this happens, in 100 years we will have to invade Guinea and take all it's Bauxite.

Then I guess we better start walking again, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.

If we develop hydrogen fuel cells, or any other alternative fuel technology, then it will come at the expense of some other resource, or pollution.

We have to get the energy to produce the electricity used to produce the fuel from somewhere.

If we dam up a river, we alter thousands-millions of acres of habitat.

If we burn fuels, we create pollution.

If we build solar panels we consume vast amounts of real estate, and still have some production wastes left over.

If we use wind, we are completely dependent on the winds that day. With large amounts of power consumption, that isn't feasible either.

Realistically, the most promising power form for output vs input is Nuclear. But everybody has this misconception that tons upon tons upon tons is produced by 1 power plant every year, and that just isn't true.

Our total produced nuclear waste isn't nearly as big as the special interest groups want you to think it is.

So, there is no such thing as a perfect solution.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chemically, I am tempted to dig back into my Chem text books to see what the cominations might look like.

It would depend on how long each "fill up" would last. Potentially, you are creating 2 hydrogen atoms for every water atom, and the depending on how many water atoms can be changed by 1 aluminum atom, it may not be on a 1 for 1 basis.

Then when you consider the amount of aluminum that we consume annually anyway, we could probably recoup a fair portion of our annual usage through recycling, although metal recycling is fairly prevalent nowadays.

The main promise of this technolgy is the elimination of the need to store/transport the gas in concentrated quantities, which pose a severe explosion hazard.

If one several thousand pound hydrogen tank went up, it would probably level a fairly large area.

[Accord R33]

X2!!!!

Im going to rock IC engines till they are banned in the USA

Cool. ill be the guy flying by you in my 1000hp hydrogen powered car.

Besides the technological hurdles, this is another MAJOR factor working against ANY kind of alternative fuel. People are too stubborn to accept change. I firmly believe the human race would be THOUSANDS of years ahead of where it is today, if people were only willing to try new things, and didn't try to argue against every new advance that develops.

[owequitit]

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pe..._dcu_nus_a.htm

Here is a breakdown chart of light distillates such as diesel.

In this category, On Highway transportation consumes about 30X more than electrical generation.

That would be caused by the fact that the majority of our economic transportation occurs in trucks.

Here is the master site, with all kinds of cool statistics and information on consumption and usage.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_top.asp

Here is an interesting presentation...

It gets into the market dynamics of the US and Europe, how the changing markets have effected output, and demand, and also goes into the effects of the Katrina and Rita on market flow.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/p...005/index.html

[Accord R33]

Potentially, you are creating 2 hydrogen atoms for every water atom, and the depending on how many water atoms can be changed by 1 aluminum atom, it may not be on a 1 for 1 basis.

water is not an atom, its a molecule....i assume that is what you mean?

so you get 2 hydrogen atoms for every water molecule. It depends how many aluminum atoms it takes to split the hydrogen and oxygen of the water molecule. its very possible that "gas mileage" would be excellent.

[owequitit]

Cool. ill be the guy flying by you in my 1000hp hydrogen powered car.

Besides the technological hurdles, this is another MAJOR factor working against ANY kind of alternative fuel. People are too stubborn to accept change. I firmly believe the human race would be THOUSANDS of years ahead of where it is today, if people were only willing to try new things, and didn't try to argue against every new advance that develops.

I don't believe that.

Most technologies that would have put us "thousands of years ahead" either didn't produce the results they promised, or didn't produce the results they promised on the scale they promised.

People do accept change readily. They just need the proper motivation.

In most cases, money talks and bullshit walks.

You wouldn't have been able to get an alternative fuel word in edgewise 20 years ago, because it couldn't be done cheaper than gas.

We are just now starting to sorta kinda maybe reach price parity with some of the cheaper versions of alternative fuels.

Plus the fact that when people taut new technologies, it is always 100% promise and 100% gain.

That is unrealistic at best. In most cases, the downsides associated with a new technology that wasn't accepted outweight the upsides, even though the creators felt there was no downside.

When oil hits $5-10 a gallon and it costs $150-$200 to fill even the most efficient car, then people will be very receptive to change.

[NAiL05]

Whats that one car Honda made thats running on Hydrogen. It has been tested for a few years on some island in japan. Cleanest burning car and gotta love water out of the tailpipe.

[owequitit]

water is not an atom, its a molecule....i assume that is what you mean?

so you get 2 hydrogen atoms for every water molecule. It depends how many aluminum atoms it takes to split the hydrogen and oxygen of the water molecule. its very possible that "gas mileage" would be excellent.

Yes, I mistakenly replaced "molecule" with "atom."

And yes, that is exactly what I was saying.

Basically, aluminum naturally inhibits oxidation by forming a surface layer that prevents the reaction from occuring further.

That is why aluminum does not rust. It can corrode, but not "rust."

The gallium (as stated by the article) prevents this oxidation inhibiting layer from occuring, thus allowing the aluminum to oxidize fully.

This process breaks the covalent bonds between the Hydrogen and the Oxygen, releasing the hydrogen to atmosphere, since the oxygen is utilized in the oxidation process.

This would all have to be accomplished in a fairly controlled environment, because pure hydrogen doesn't typically hang around long before it reacts with something else.

I am interested in this and may spend some time with it later tonight when I am done lesson planning.

I am almost thinking that one aluminum atom would be able to break down multiple water molecules though. That would increase the power density of this quite a bit potentially.

[Accord R33]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

I think the open source software community is a great example of this. There is FREE software available (e.g..linux), far superior to proprietary software (e.g..windows), and people completely ignore it because its unfamiliar, and they are unwilling to change there ways.

In effect, third party software developers choose not to take the Linux operating system into account when developing new software, therefore hindering the advancement of computer software.

I understand this is only a single, vague example, but I'm sure you could trace this mentality back through the millennia.

One more example i can think of is the corporate world. Major corporations are EXTREMELY hesitant to even the slightest change (with good reason), but im sure there could have been a multitude of technologies that would have arose had certain decisions been different.

How about a "natural" example. Take the AIDS virus, one of the most dynamic virus' known to man. the AIDS virus can change and mutate itself far better than our immune systems, and our medical technology combined. It cant be stopped, simply because it adapts and accepts change so quickly.