The problem with both electrics and hydrogen is that they all suffer from NOT being more efficient than other fuel sources, and are only really practical as transmission/storage mediums. As a rule, they usually just mean youâre polluting somewhere else instead of where you happen to be â NIMBY in action. (Not in my backyard)⊠Who cares if youâre polluting at the power plant or extraction station, at least your not polluting your backyard â net change zero.
Hydrogen may be the most plentiful element in the universe, but thereâs a âproblemâ with it â it is NOT naturally occurring on itâs own when in the presence of heavier elements â like say⊠on a iron/silicate body with a oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. Itâs tendency to readily combine with just about any other element makes it very hard to find âstraightâ â sure, itâs in water and natural gas, but it takes the application of energy to extract it⊠said energy requirement being higher than what is produced by the fuelâŠ
Where does that energy need to come from then? Fossil fuels end up the weapon of choice with people having their panties in a twist over nuclear, solar and wind both having increasingly negative environmental impacts and not delivering practical amounts of energy despite all the claims, and your ecology nuts refusing to allow more dams to be constructed.
Of course the four legs good two legs evil leftist-moonbat eco-nuts donât seem to want to let us even do the stuff 20 years ago they were clamoring for us to do. Few years ago they were talking about adding a wind farm off the coast of new england â this was cancelled because the spinning blades might endanger some bird species. Solar farms arenât practical in places like New England (60% overcast) but worse, even in places that get the type of sun and have the raw acreage to make them useful, the drop in ambient temperature in many places has started to be linked to changes in weather patterns to the point of effecting the length of mating periods of many species⊠think about it, youâre stealing light and heat that otherwise would be warming the ground and air, and turning it into electricity instead to be released as heat, movement and light somewhere elseâŠ
Then you have the storage mediums on things like hybrids⊠Lithium? Too expensive which is why most hybrids use NiMH cells â Nickel-metal hydride. Nickel is one of the biggest polluters to refine requiring lots of heavy diesel machinery, caustic chemicals to be processed, and as a rule turns everything withing a mile of the mine into a âdead zoneâ where little if anything can actually survive. While this has nowhere near the impact many of your right wing-nuts would have you believe, it does still add up to most hybrids having a higher pollution footprint than your average gas powered economy car over the first six years of itâs life. The right wing-nuts want you to believe itâs higher than a hummer over the entire life of the vehicle, and their exaggeration and card stacking gutted the âbattery footprintâ arguments credibility â even though it was based in fact⊠they blew the fact out of proportion, tacked on their own lies and agenda, and in the process pissed all over the science behind it.
Really these technologies are not the answer - from needed changes in the infrastructure, to not returning on the investment cost, to many of them being little more than sweeping the problem under the rug, they flat out do not deliver the power needs of 6.7 billion people!
You want a real answer look no further than Brazil; a country that has gone over to a biofuel economy. Biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel can run cleaner with nearly as much power, are easily made from renewable resources, and can also provide more employment. Brazil is so far ahead of the entire rest of the planet on this front so called âfirst worldâ nations should be ASHAMED.
It gets more interesting when we talk waste recovery â Nearly any organic waste can be converted through a process known as thermal depolymerization into a variety of compounds, most notably potable water and a biodiesel that is almost identical in burn and flow to #2 heating oil⊠It ends up way cleaner than natural petroleum as the heavier compounds that pollute natural fuels (sulfur, heavy metals, free carbon, etc) are separated out.
⊠and when I say ANY solid organic waste, Iâm not joking. Weâre not just talking corn and peanuts here â Thereâs a turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri thatâs outputting 500 barrels a day of biofuel and several thousand gallons of potable water extracted from turkey offal (thatâs guts, bones, feathers and other stuff you canât actually sell)⊠The process makes enough of a gasoline type fuel to actually power the process, they burn much of the oil in-house, put the clean water from the process back into the farmyards, and still have enough âcrude bioâ left over to sell on the open market and even sell electricty back onto the grid. The entire facility is not only self-sufficient on power â itâs contributing to the power infrastructure! All using waste that 20 years ago would have been left to rot in a landfill.
The joke on thermal depolymerization is that you drop a 200 pound man in one end, you get two gallons of crude, eight gallons of water and a pound of valueable chemical compounds out the other end.
Though biodiesel isnât ALWAYS the answer, as those of us in the north can attest â for a good 4 to 5 months of the year itâs unusable or requires a supplemental fuel source as in cold temperatures it turns to jello.
But thatâs just the tip of the iceberg on waste recovery â organic waste simply left to rot in landfills produce large amounts of methane as they decompose; a smelly but easily burned fuel. (that doesnât produce odor if you burn it). Simply putting layers of non-decomposing plastic sheeting in place to âtrapâ the gas in a bubble and then piping it out gives us a cheap, affordable source of fuels â and the trapping of the gas and heat underground can be further used for geothermal-like recovery. Once the âfieldâ has processed you end up with an organic soil that can be sold to agriculture and the plastic sheeting can be reused on a new load of waste.
Given the increasing need for clean water and reliable cheap energy as the world population grows, the increase in output of waste materials that population produces â the future near as I can tell is in renewable crop fuels and waste recovery. It certainly does not lie in solar, wind, nuclear, hydroelectric, or pure hydrogenâŠ