OPEC says there's plenty of oil.

[LeMans]

Originally Posted by 4.9 EF Futura

No oil = no LPG dude.



Whoah, these are very different things. The real beauty of oil is that it is a source of energy. It's there - the energy is waiting for you - all you gotta do is pump it out of the ground and refine it. Hydrogen is not a source - it is a carrier. You need to put energy into it in order to get any energy out of it. You consume 30% of the input energy in "charging" this carrier... so for every unit of hydrogen energy, you're already 1.3 units of input energy worse off. And you still have to convert the hydrogen energy into kinetic energy.

See how easy it can be to gloss over a major problem?



OK well im certainly not able to verify the accuracy of the material which i have referenced, but the estimate for global conversion for cars/trucks in the above link was $350,000,000,000,000.

The 2001 gross domestic product of the USA was $11,750,000,000,000.

So if every single cent of US production was diverted to this task (i.e. if every american company did nothing but produce cars -i.e. not even produce food to feed the people making the cars), we would still have a $338,250,000,000,000 shortfall.

So get Russia, Japan, China, Australia and the UK to join in...

Still a $313,441,300,000,000 shortfall... and that's diverting every part of the above countries' GPD to converting the global fleet of cars to run on hydrogen.

To say it's prohibitively expensive is somewhat of an understatement.... even using rough figures...

I don’t think that I’m necessarily arguing against this, but I’m not sure that I quite understand the purpose of this argument either. To prove that petrol is better than hydrogen? Or that the human race should return to the caves rather than use an alternative because it’s all too difficult?

It did however prompt me to do the research on the efficiencies and yes hydrogen is about 50% less efficient than petrol ground-to-consumption by today’s technology. But when there is no oil, 200% of nothing is still nothing.

I think the fundamental difference between the two views though is how lateral one is prepared to think. Who says, for example, that all cars must be immediately replaced at $20,000 to $100,000 each? I’m sure that very safe simple composite cars could be built right now at under $5000 if they were built at a minimal profit and not upgraded to a new model every year. Or we could simply repace the engines in existing small cars at, say $2000 a shot. And it wouldn’t be such a big backward step if we initially had to have only one car per household, as we did in the 1970s.

I'm sorry, but I just don't share the pessimism and the view that there is no more improvement left in technology.

PS. What is the average life of an average car (not including classics)? Is it 20/30 years (when did you last see a 1975 Datsun 180B)? If so then we are currently replacing every car in Australia roughly every 20/30 years and adding some on top of that too.

[MO]

4.9 EF Futura......I was trying to be funny....lpg=leg propulsion is great.