[Flipside]

Hey, that's pretty cool

Electric cars are not environmentally friendly because of our poor battery technology.

[Zuljin]

Originally posted by Nico


No?
Do you see many stations to resupply electric cars? No? Why not?
I let you guess.

That aside, there's quite a lot of GPL cars in europe. That's already a step forward if you ask me.

It's going in the right direction atleast, if a little slowly.
One of the reasons that it goes so slowly is that I doubt the petrol companies are willing to let go it's golden-goose called "petrol" that easy.
The other one is as said performance, but then again I don't know the cababilities of the car either.
But performance is always something that can be enhanced, so thats just a temporary issue anyway

[Grey Wolf]

A hydrogen-oxygen redox reaction can be pretty effective. What do you think the main booster of the space shuttle runs on?

Of course, the solid state engines are more powerful there, but still.

[Nico]

you don't run a car with a rocket, tho

[Grey Wolf]

Same basic concept. Difference is, there you're running it as a reaction drive, using basic Newtonian physics, where in a car you'd probably use some sort of piston or turbine setup.

[Ghostavo]

If you could find a more efficient (economic) method of getting hydrogen, cars run with hydrogen would have a much better chance against petrol.

That is the irony, 70 percent of the planet's surface is covered with a substance that has hydrogen but we cannot get it easily!

[Grey Wolf]

Actually, water is a very good source of hydrogen. You can harvest it with a 9V battery

[Ghostavo]

And is it profitable to get it in large quantities?

Of course not.

[Grey Wolf]

Actually, electrolysis is the standard method for getting hydrogen for industrial purposes. It's also the standard method for obtaining sodium and chlorine (from molten NaCl and brine, respectively).

[Nico]

Actually, getting hydrogen is very easy, the pb is to store it, it's very... hargh, I don't have the word: it takes a lot of place if you compare to the petrol needed to generate the same amount of energy.

[Ghostavo]

But like I said, you can't get it easily in mass quantities like you can with petrol.

How much would be the consumption of H2 in comparison to petrol by the way?

[Rictor]

In theory, what happens when the water starts getting short? There isn't an infinite amount of it. Anyone know around when we could start seeing water shortages if the whole worlds accepts hydrogen fuel as the fuel of choice?

[Grey Wolf]

You wouldn't. The output of a hydrogen-oxygen redox reaction is water.

[Flipside]

That's the thing Rictor, water is the result of the reaction, you extract the Oxygen and Hydrogen from water, the Engine rejoins them, taking advantage of the energy change to power the car. It's completely non-loss iirc

[Ghostavo]

There is only one problem, where are you going to find the energy to extract the hydrogen from the water? The car becomes "electric" from a certain point of view.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Rictor
In theory, what happens when the water starts getting short? There isn't an infinite amount of it. Anyone know around when we could start seeing water shortages if the whole worlds accepts hydrogen fuel as the fuel of choice?

Well, 70% of the surface of the planet is covered of water. I'm pretty sure that's more than the available petrol
But anyway, you can get hydrogen in the air too, and probably in other organic materials, and in space, in the sun, on various gazeous planets, in some other rocky planets atmospheres, and even in the "vacuum" of space, but it's really scattered around. Never gonna run pout of hydrogen, or that means the end of the universe ( isn't 99% of the materials in the universe hydrogen, actually? ).

[Grey Wolf]

That's about right. You don't get anything other than hydrogen until a star fuses the hydrogen to form helium, and you don't get anything heavier than that until later stages of fusion. And IIRC, you don't get anything past iron without a supernova.

[Flipside]

iirc it's something to do with Ethanol, you can fractioanlly distill it from yeast etc, so it's organic, and quite easy to split or something?

[Setekh]

Originally posted by Impurial
Picked this up, hope it isn't old news:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/14/1081838784511.html

Just one question, doesn't 'Hydrogen + Oxygen + Fire = BANG' ?

Hey dude, good to see you 'round these places. Funny, just out of curiosity, why'd you post this here?

[Bobboau]

I can't wait untill I can get my own fuel cell vehicle.