In the iconic 1990s TV series The X Files, David Duchovny’s FBI agent-paranormal investigator Fox Mulder has a poster on his office wall. It shows a flying saucer in flight, with the slogan “I Want To Believe”. It perfectly sums up the dilemma the character faces. And while I’m guessing that only a few Hackaday readers have gone down the full lizard-people rabbit hole, wanting to believe is probably something that a lot of us who love sci-fi understand. It would be a fascinating event for science if a real extraterrestrial craft would show up, so of course we want to believe to some extent, even if we’re not seriously expecting it to appear in a Midwestern cornfield and break out the probes any time soon.
By All Means Believe. But Don’t Wreck Your Career
Outside the realm of TV drama and science fiction it’s a sentiment that also applies in more credible situations. Back at the end of the 1980s for example when so-called cold fusion became a global story it seemed as though we might be on the verge of the Holy Grail of clean energy breakthroughs. Sadly we never got our Mr. Fusion to power our DeLorean, and the scientific proof was revealed to be on very weak foundations. The careers of the two researchers involved were irreparably damaged, and the entire field became a byword for junk science. A more recently story in a similar vein is the EM drive, a theoretical reactionless force generator that was promising enough at one point that even NASA performed some research on it. Sadly there were no magic engines forthcoming, so while it was worth reporting on the initial excitement, we’re guessing the story won’t come back.
When evaluating a scientific or technical breakthrough that seems as miraculous as it is unexpected then, of course we all want to believe. We evaluate based on the information we have in front of us though, and we all have a credibility pyramid. There’s nothing wrong with having an interest in fields that are more hope than delivery, indeed almost every technology that powers our world will at some time have to overcome skepticism in its gestation period. Perhaps it’s best to say that it’s okay to have hope, but hope shouldn’t override our scrutiny of the proof. Of course I want a perpetual motion machine, who wouldn’t, but as a fictional engineer once allegedly said, “Ye cannae change the laws of physics”.
An Example Here In 2024
All this introspection has been brought to the fore for me by something very much in the present, the so-called hydrogen economy. It’s difficult to ignore our climate emergency, and among the energy solutions aimed at doing something about it, hydrogen seems very promising.
It’s really easy to make from water by electrolysis, there are several ways to turn it into useful energy, and the idea is that if you can store it for later use you’re on to a winner. We’ve seen hydrogen cars, trucks, aircraft, heavy machinery, trains, and even the gas supplanting methane in the domestic grid, so surely the hydrogen future is well under way, right?
Sadly not, because as many a pilot project has shown, it’s difficult to store or transport, it makes many existing metal fittings brittle, and the environmental benefit is often negated by the hydrogen being generated from higher carbon electrical supplies. We still want to believe, but we can’t claim it’s delivering yet.
Whenever we feature a hydrogen-based story, as for example with this experimental storage tech from Swiss researchers, there is no shortage of comments about all of hydrogen’s shortcomings, and some even accuse us of somehow being the snake-oil salesmen shilling the questionable product. I feel this misses the point, that even though in almost all cases the battery is for now the better option, we cover interesting technology stories regardless of judgements over their eventual success. Hydrogen has enough real science and engineering behind it that its problems might one day be overcome, thus we’d be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t cover it. There are sometimes newsworthy stories upon which we very much take a credible stand based on opinion, but when it comes to pure tech stories such as a hydrogen vehicle we’re simply reporting on the story because we find it interesting and we think you will too. We don’t know that the breakthrough engineering work won’t occur, but we do know that it hasn’t yet.
So when looking at a piece of technology that’s not delivered on its promise, ask for a moment whether there’s a likely “yet” on the end of the sentence without too much of a suspension of credibility. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
It’s perfectly fine to do some investigation on a long-shot probably-crank piece of technology, just in case.
But emdrive was 3000% BS from day one. I can’t understand people who fell for yet another reactionless drive with absolute nonsense Star Trek dialogue describing the mechanism of action. That mechanism was almost immediately proven wrong; after that, supporters defaulted to “We didn’t design the reactionless drive we were trying to design, so obviously we created a totally different physics-breaking miracle drive just by accident.”
Lol, lmao even
Cold Fusion.
The difference with “cold fusion” is that it’s not theoretically or technically wrong per se – just so incredibly unlikely to happen under any conceivable circumstances that making a cold fusion reactor has worse odds of producing a surplus of energy than planning to win the lottery every week for a decade as a financial strategy.
That’s why the cold fusion cranks have been trying in vain to introduce “special circumstances”, like infusing hydrogen into palladium electrodes, to increase the odds of the reaction happening – without a clear theoretical foundation as to why that would have any effect. They then confuse, or abuse, chemical reactions and other phenomena that store and release heat as an indication of nuclear physics happening. They never try to observe nuclear physics directly, because that would prove them wrong.
When other people fail to reproduce the experiment, they simply go: “You didn’t do it right. My device is working right now – but I’m not letting anyone inspect it or even bring a neutron counter anywhere near it because of reasons.”.
A fairly common trick is to simply read two meters measuring two different things at two different times and correlating the readings to get “over-unity” results. For example, a thermometer can still keep climbing up after you stop inputting electrical power to your heater, because all the heat hasn’t reached the thermometer yet, or something is suppressing and delaying the rise in temperature at the sensor – like a drop of water evaporating away. To the person unaware of the trick, this looks like the device is continuing to produce heat even after you pull the plug out of the wall.
Reactionless drives on the other hand just break physics entirely. There’s no reason they would work any more than any other perpetual motion machine should.
Cold fusion is still being actively researched by physicists.
However to avoid the stigma of the old title, it’s now called Lattice Confinement Fusion.
And while something does not work for the original purpose or the purpose people want it to work for (like hydrogen passenger cars), it might work for something else or at different scale.
I would argue this sentiment is one of the pillars of hacking.
If I may offer an assist, hydrogen is a battery, not an energy source. I’m not in favor of them but electric cars make more sense than hydrogen cars. Free lunches are for hobos and Hare Krishnas.
Hydrogen is a chemical and an element. A battery involves much more than just hydrogen, which is what people forget when they talk about hydrogen as a battery or an energy storage medium.
If you put more energy in than you get out, it’s a battery.
In contrast firewood or a random pile of newspapers or what burns in a California wildfire is a fuel source. You get more energy out than you put in. This is not rocket surgery.
Anticipating the objection I will say “Yes, gasoline is a battery.” A supercool wonderful and largely safe battery.
That’s far too sloppy to use as a definition. If petroleum is mined and burned it’s not a battery, but if it’s inefficiently synthesized from carbon and hydrogen it’s a battery?
A battery is a container for energy that is itself not consumed in the process. It merely ends up in a different internal state when exhausted, which may or may not be reversible.
Hydrogen or gasoline don’t fill that definition.
Therefore a copper wire is a battery.
Not.
I mean, it does store energy in its inductance, so it’s just a really terrible battery.
It’s not even that the wire has to store any energy. You get less energy out because of the resistance of the wire, therefore it’s a battery according to the faulty definition.
Eh, in the context of a reply to a previous comment I think the strictest interpretation is improper. The distinction being drawn seems fairly obviously to be between things that increase our available energy, like biofuel or fossil fuel, and things that don’t, like batteries or hydrogen produced from electricity. I don’t agree that this distinction determines what a battery is, and I don’t think hydrogen is necessarily a battery. I do agree that when we use electrolysis to produce it, it acts like a flow battery, and not a very good one. In recent years I think the fuel cell that makes it and the fuel cell that consumes it were each around 50% efficient.
When we make H2 from methane the normal way, it’s a fossil fuel and not all the energy in it came from the grid originally so there’s a gain. In the rare cases someone makes it from methane but lets the carbon out of the process as a powder instead of co2, it’s still a fuel and we still get the benefit of the fossil energy, just not all of it.
Imagine a remote wind farm in the mountains of Peru, that would not be economically feasible to connect to the international grid, producing hydrogen and converting it into methanol, shipping that out to the international markets by pipeline and truck or boat.
Without the intermediate hydrogen, it would not be feasible to extract and utilize that energy, so it does increase our available energy. By the same token, if actual batteries enable us to use more renewable power, they too increase our available energy, so are they batteries or are they not?
“Hydrogen is a chemical and an element.”
Upon reflection perhaps I was a bit short with you. Thank you for straightening me out. A chemical AND an element you say? Weeeell doggie! I would never have known that.
“Hydrogen is a chemical and an element.”
Upon reflection perhaps I was a bit short with you. Thank you for straightening me out. A chemical AND an element you say? Weeeell doggie! I would never have known that.
“hydrogen is a battery, not an energy source”
It’s both. Most hydrogen is gray hydrogen. Gray hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. So it is an energy source (from human timeline perspective since fossil fuels are stored solar energy according to some).
You can also produce hydrogen from electricity, but this has a 20–30% loss. A full cell can be used to convert it back to electricity. Hydrogen storage round trip efficiency is about 40%, so so 60% loss. So it makes a lousy battery.
No, the fossil fuels are the energy source. The hydrogen is just an irrelevant detour along the way to convert fossil fuels into useful work.
With that logic diesel and gasoline aren’t energy sources either. Derivatives of fossil fuels that are used for energy are energy sources and also fossil fuels. Gray hydrogen is a fossil fuel and an energy source.
Both gasoline and diesel do come up out of the ground and get separated from petroleum by fractional distillation. It’s just that there’s more demand for them than can be supplied by distillation alone, so more gasoline and diesel are created by cracking the heavier fractions of oil to convert them.
Hydrogen rarely exists as such in petroleum sources, so it has to be derived, typically out of methane, and therefore is not itself the energy source. In fact some of the fossil fuels have to be burned in order to break the methane molecules apart, so the end result is less energy in the hydrogen than the fossil fuels you started with.
The reason why hydrogen is snake-oil is not because it doesn’t work as such, but because hydrogen is a stepping stone to much better things involving Power-to-X technologies that ultimately yield better fuels and other stuff. In other words, it’s not the hydrogen, but the idea of the “hydrogen economy” that is bunk.
It’s like discovering oil and expecting everything in the society to run on straight up unrefined crude. Sure enough, you can do that – large ocean ships can run on whatever sludge you can pump out of the ground – but there are better ways to do it.
Yeah, the “hydrogen economy” is something that does not make sense unless you just happen to have a large investment in part of the chain. Or you are an oil company trying to buy some vaguely-believable green PR.
Biodiesel makes about as much sense, and has a much safer and more mature array of technologies for use, storage, production, etc. It emits carbon, but if you grow algae to turn back into biodiesel it is re-absorbed as a closed cycle.. And it isn’t a frustratingly low-density gas that has to be stored at terrific pressures to be viable.
Hydrogen power has some amazing applications, like cryogenic liquid fuel for rocketry. I don’t buy into the fuel cell car stuff personally
Solid oxide fuel cells have a real potential to work, but ironically they can also burn other stuff besides hydrogen – you can even run a SOFC stack on coal dust if you absolutely must. Even if the input was hydrogen, you would rather convert the hydrogen to some chemical that stays liquid at room temperature than faff about with cryogenic fuel tanks and get 6 miles to the gallon on liquid hydrogen.
The reason why people rant about hydrogen is the illusion of efficiency, because each conversion step loses some energy, but the main issue isn’t thermodynamic efficiency – it’s cost – you simply pay more in other ways to deal with the problems of not converting the hydrogen. Money is energy, because money is the promise of work: if something costs more, it requires more energy to run a bigger economy to pay for it. It makes no difference in efficiency whether you spend the energy up-front or down the line.
Point being that it’s more conductive to the use of hydrogen to convert it into other stuff right at the point of production than use it as such. We’re going to be generating hydrogen, but it won’t be used as hydrogen – it will be converted almost instantly to more complex chemicals at or near the site of production to avoid all the problems of storage, transportation, explosive tendencies and low energy density. There’s so much more demand for it in these other applications that it seems like a waste to just burn the stuff in a turbine or a fuel cell.
But if it’s mainly used as an intermediate to other fuels and chemicals, can we talk of a hydrogen economy? Especially since there are methods to these chemicals via water gas shift reactions and direct synthesis where the hydrogen may be a step but it never leaves the process. Your car would be fueled by butanol or methanol, or whatever, and the only place where they handle hydrogen is at the refinery that turns water, CO2, and electricity into fuel.
Example:
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-electro-biodiesel-efficient-cleaner-alternative.html
“Biomedical Engineering at the University of Missouri, together with their collaborators at Texas A&M University, have used electrocatalysis of carbon dioxide to create an electro-biodiesel that is 45 times more efficient and uses 45 times less land than soybean-based biodiesel production.”
The value of diesel fuel on the market is about 9-10 cents per kWh while solar power LCOE is at 4 cents per kWh and wind is slightly below that. The conversion efficiency is about 20-25% so this new electro-diesel is only about twice as expensive as using electricity – which is offset by the fact that you don’t need massive batteries for your trucks and tractors.
I sometimes have encounters with aliens in my dreams ….. am I clinically psychotropic?
No, you just need better locks on your bedroom window.
+2 !!
hydrogen has had many problems for many decades – and the physics of it hasn’t changed. Thus the disdain for any article that assumes we are going to move it/pump it around like petrol – that simply isn’t going to happen no matter how many press releases occur.
It’s probably even worse than fusion – which has been 10 years away (and still is) ever since I started reading about it in the 1960’s… At least with that there is a chance that one day we will make it work (in a large industrial setting, not in our car..).
Even if were dogs declaring the imminence of fusion, we’re about to miss the 10 year window.
“After numerous delays, a similar device dubbed the Quantum Drive did successfully make it to space last November. However, a failure in a satellite component unrelated to the drive scuttled that effort. To date, none of the propellantless drive inventions that physicists say shouldn’t work have actually been tested in space, including the infamous EMDrive, which Buhler believes his work may help explain.”
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-veterans-propellantless-propulsion-drive-that-physics-says-shouldnt-work-just-produced-enough-thrust-to-defeat-earths-gravity/
https://thedebrief.org/nasa-scientist-says-patented-exodus-effect-propellantless-propulsion-drive-that-defies-physics-is-ready-to-go-to-space/
You don’t need to put a reactionless drive in space to do a good test – just hang it from the ceiling on some fishing line and demonstrate that it can hold itself out by a few degrees. Or set it in a swimming pool with no wind and watch it sail to the other side. So far none of the claims of a reactionless drive have been able to pass a simple test like that without cheating.
The effect is usually so weak that it’s impossible to test under reasonable conditions, so even if it could work it would be completely useless. However, the ultimate claim reaches far beyond what the test can even prove. The public attention is merely drawn to the small and unprovable effect to divert attention away from the plausibility of the crank’s bigger unbelievable claim.
Even if you take a true effect, the ultimate claim they’re making is along the lines of flying a rocket to the moon on a single AA battery cell. The sustained controversy about whether or not the original effect exists is just a smokescreen. It’s abusing the tendency of people to think ahead that if this might work then that might work, and then pretend that you’re proving the second claim with the first. This is jumping to conclusions – a hallmark of pseudo- and bunk science.
“If you make an induction, and your opponent grants you the particular cases by which it is to be supported, you must refrain from asking him if he also admits the general truth which issues from the particulars, but introduce it afterwards as a settled and admitted fact; for, in the meanwhile, he will himself come to believe that he has admitted it, and the same impression will be received by the audience.” – Schopenhauer, The Art of Being Right.
The big problem with hydrogen vehicles is efficiency. BEV vehicles are just more efficient. As in not even close.
It takes current electrolysis systems 50 kWh (best case, 54 kWh typ) to generate, compress, etc a Kg of hydrogen. This will take a Toyota Mirai 66 miles (105 km). Feed that same 50 kWh to a comparable BEV and you will get 200 miles (320 km). (Based on EPA combined cycle testing)
This is before you consider that you are driving around with a tank full of an explosive gas at very high pressure. (Things like restrictions on tunnel use, etc are just a start)
The big problem isn’t efficiency but cost.
Electricity is far cheaper than the batteries, especially at bulk rates rather than consumer pricing. If you can tap it right at the source, it’s around 5 cents per kWh or less, so the cost of fuel to run the Mirai for 200,000 miles would be around $8000, spread over 10-20 years, versus paying tens of thousands of dollars extra for a car up-front just for the battery.
Of course the Mirai isn’t a cheap car either, but it’s more of a prototype anyhow; the whole point of fuel cells is that they can potentially be cheaper than regular engines, because they’re far simpler and require far less materials. Plus, you can save money by driving less, whereas with a BEV you waste money by not driving it.
It’s $70k new, so those people really want to get rid of theirs. Possibly because there’s like ten places you can refuel them in the entire state.
The Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the 2023 Toyota Mirai starts at $50,190 for the XLE base-level trim with destination fee and popular options. Until December 2nd, you get $35k in TFS Subvension cash bringing its financed price down to an effective $15K with 0% interest over a 72 month term. https://www.toyota.com/socal/deals-incentives/mirai_apr_8aa57f79-dce0-4b03-b1bf-822d1a0d1e5c/?vehicles=mirai
Carfax says The average price for a Toyota Mirai is $14,644
Edmunds has 22 listings of Mirai’s between $3.5-7K.
Mirai’s arent really expensive.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-emission-vehicle-and-infrastructure-statistics-collection/hydrogen
54 light duty retail open with 28 planned
Yes they are. Subsidies don’t reduce cost, they merely switch the payer.
no subsidy needed for the used ones.
Mirai’s arent really expensive.
No matter how much you try to argue.
They were already subsidized when entering the market. Otherwise they wouldn’t be so cheap on the second hand market.
So when you use a coupon at the store, The food you buy isnt any cheaper because the manufacturer reimburses the store?
This Subvension cash isnt the $4500-7000 government funded subsidy, The TFS isnt short for taxpayer funded subsidy, its an abbreviation of Toyota Finance Services, its a manufacturer funded rebate.
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/toyota-offering-40000-off-mirai-hydrogen-fuel-cell-evs
And if every Mirai has gotten this credit (they havent) then the mirai was never as expensive as you thought.
Seriously dude, Theres no need for these mental gymnastics,
its okay to be wrong
Your googlefu failed you, you were ignorant to the reality and blinded by MSRP.
MIRAI ARENT REALLY EXPENSIVE!
Accept it and move on.
So when you use a coupon at the store, The food you buy isnt any cheaper because the manufacturer reimburses the store?
This Subvension cash isnt the $4500-7000 government funded subsidy, The TFS isnt short for taxpayer funded subsidy, its an abbreviation of Toyota Finance Services, its a manufacturer funded rebate.
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/toyota-offering-40000-off-mirai-hydrogen-fuel-cell-evs
And if every Mirai has gotten this credit (they havent) then the mirai was never as expensive as you thought.
Seriously dude, Theres no need for these mental gymnastics,
its okay to be wrong
Your googlefu failed you, you were ignorant to the reality and blinded by MSRP.
MIRAI ARENT REALLY EXPENSIVE!
Accept it and move on.
A word of hope. In my great-granddad’s day, science knew that going faster than 20 MPH would cause people to die from asphyxiation (according to grandma). Mom told me that when she was a child, the idea of men going to the Moon was a laughing matter. This was in mid-July of 1969.
So, sometimes the impossible can be done, if people look for the solution, and not at the problem.
BTW, was that fictional engineer (“Ye cannae break the laws of physics”) traveling faster than light when he said that? 😉
People have been thinking poorly for a long time. A good racehorse can do 30 mph. Skiers can do better than that. For the unskilled, standing in a 50 mph wind is aerodynamically similar to traveling at 50 mph.
The 20 mph argument was regarding closed railway carriages, because they believed the wind would suck the air out. It was more of a business and marketing trick anyhow, between coach makers and railway lines who used open carriages since they were cheaper to build. Other lines started using closed carriages, so of course they went “That’s dangerous!” to fool the public.
The automobile got a similar treatment with people calling it the “explosion engine”, and releasing short trick films where people were killed by exploding cars. A public service announcement by the horse and buggy industry.
Though of course, some cars did explode. There were steam cars that could have a boiler explosion – which were marketed as being the safer alternative to the “internal explosion engine”. That’s the good old trick of accusing your opponent for your own sins.
Having seen these uap/ufo things first hand on more than one occasion, I know they’re real. I don’t pretend to know what they are. Most people are simply unwilling to talk about it or just dismissive. For me, I find it fascinating, it means that the capability is possible, to build something that can fly at tremendous speed and also be highly manoeuvrable. Either at least one military has that technology or it’s something from outside of our world. I’d prefer the latter, if I’m honest, but either way, I hope it trickles down to the general public within my lifetime, I’d love to have a go at flying one of those one day.
The problem with belief is that it taints your judgement.
Wanting to believe is fine.
Letting yourself believe, even a little, changes the judgements you will make.
If you have reached the point where you realize that every single judgement you make is fallible, you can mitigate the consequences somewhat. But most people are too thick headed to let themselves be wrong every single time if it means improving their overall judgement. Being wrong sucks. We avoid it, even if it means lying to ourselves.
It’s also a LOT of work to be constantly checking your beliefs, and then even more work to reevaluate all the other things that get changed when you discover something you believed was wrong.
It’s exhausting.
It’s also an endless circular task, since you can only check your beliefs against your other beliefs.
If you were to take it seriously, you would end up where the existentialists went with doubting even your very senses and getting alienated from the very reality you perceive. I mean, is that really a chair you’re sitting on?
Talking about Molder and ufo stuff , will HaD cover the 3 finger humanoid’s saga? ,it passed the initial “it’s a hoax” phase and now is in “wait we have something here” phase. More scientifics are joining the studies and they are kinda cool. so why not.
As a hardcore fan who threatened the family to strike down with great vengeance and furious anger upon them should someone dare to touch the VCR while I was out with my future wife and has the X-Files theme as the ringtone of my phone I can say I can relate.
I also believed in all that jazz until I realized the snail pace of the speed of light at cosmic scales would make such an alien meeting much less an invasion very improbable for any interested alien race. So like in all other things I maintain or try to maintain a healthy skepticism towards all things until other people confirm whatever is being claimed albeit with the sight set on what the future would bring.
I still watch the show tho. More for its artistic merits than anything else, lots of treasures worth watching.
That’s why the aliens are obviously not from other solar systems, but from our own. They’re the guys who used to live on earth before the last climate catastrophe and had to leave to live in the asteroid belts on planet-X that we can’t see. They’re trying to come back home now – only, we’re here instead – so they have to plot and plan how to take over covertly.
Or is that just trying to rationalize a belief in aliens?
Personally, I enjoy going down the “full lizard-people rabbit hole”…
Not with EM drives, perpetual motion, anti-gravity, super carburetors, or any other technology…
Just the lizard people…
We need a drive for in system, and a drive for galactic travel. Chemical engines (as we know it) just aren’t going to accomplish what we need for ‘fast’ travel. Pie in the sky I know as we know it all takes lots of ‘energy’ (given the classical physics we ‘know’ now), so until something changes … we are going to be stuck here, like it or not. So good to ‘think’ about, tinker with, explore new ideas even if 99.9% are failures. Who would have thought a few 100 years ago that we can ‘talk’ to any-one on the planet in real-time with a device we stick in our pocket….
Plus an artificial gravity well or something, so that when vessel is accelerated to impossible speeds, humans don’t get mashed to a pulp…. More than just being able to go ‘there fast’ problem involved :) .
Not to mention, Einstein’s theory of ‘time’ dilatation the faster you go and those implications… Yikes! Long ways from SF to Reality.
Agreed. San Francisco IS a long way from reality.
That goes without saying :D . They are in a different universe already without leaving planet Earth… At least Science Fiction has some potentially useful ideas that are cool to think about :) . Ha!
Solar power was a technology that ran the board. In the 1970’s it was a very expensive way to generate electricity, often at the wrong time, and impractical to store. A niche solution. Today solar power is the cheapest way to generate electricity and very well integrated with the power tech stack. With storage costs coming down fast, solar + batteries will soon be the best power source.
And a few generations back, gas powered autos had the same arc replacing horses and trains. Hydrogen for power may do so in the future. Today, who can tell, there are several pieces of the hydrogen tech stack that are inferior to existing tech–efficient generation, storage, etc.
Sounds like your rose colored glasses are firmly in place :) .
You need to learn something about cold fusion. It was confirmed in over 180 major labs, and these confirmations were published in mainstream, peer reviewed journals. The DoE has allocated $10 million for cold fusion research this year, which is being conducted at MIT, Lawrence Berkeley and elsewhere. This is in addition to programs at NASA, the Navy, the Army, and the main EU science agency.
If I am permitted to include links, here is the announcement from the DoE and a bunch of other information about cold fusion:
https://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?p=3198
https://lenr-canr.org
“It’s difficult to ignore our climate emergency”
What emergency?
The problem is that people panic due to exaggerated claims by politicians and the MSM.
The numbers do not show any emergency. All the trillions spend will delay any warming by only a few months by the end of the century.
Due to panic hybrid cars and nuclear energy were dismissed. Hybrid wasn’t “good enough” and there was “no time” for constructing nuclear power plants. We are now decades down the road and we could have made plenty of nuclear power plants. Instead Germany went back to coal.
I agree we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But this should be a gradual process of incremental engineering improvements of technologies. At the speed of science and engineering, not the speed of politics.
We will get there in less than a 100 years, but not in 10 years.
Hydrogen??? What year is this?
Hydrogen is already old technology, phased out. It’s can be used to heat your home, but for transportation it was deemed too expensive and too dangerous. The only company that still makes hydrogen cars (Toyota) has ended it’s production. And yes, there are other models, but they are still Toyota power plants.
The reason people call hydrogen snake-oil, is because it is. Gasoline fuel pump is about 30k, hydrogen 1 million, upkeep for gasoline is about 10k a year, and 30k a month for hydrogen. Production costs are roughly 10* that of gasoline and transportation and pumps are crazy expensive. Without subsidies, which only hurt, it’s impossible. Sure, hydrogen technically works, but the shortcoming are so big, you might as well advise to go back to steam powered. At least that would be also very cool.
Even EV tech is already old tech by now and we are on the stepping stones of ammonia engines, which are already getting widely used in ships. My employer has several ships ordered with ammonia power plants.
Toyota said that they expect to release the first ammonia powered cars this year but it will likely be early next year. When that hits the market and what they claim is real, it will be the end of EV’s. No charging times, no hydrogen storage, no more gasoline, no more diesel. If it all works, it’s the perfect system. Long distance driving with fuel up times comparable to gasoline, and what comes out of the “exhaust” is nitrogen, so you drive a car that’s so incredibly green, it makes plants grow faster and that takes more co2 out of the air, so the more you drive, the better it is.
Toyota is still slated to release a 2025 Mirai
Hyundai Nexo does not use a toyota power plant.
Honda CR-V e:FCEV does not use a toyota power plant.
The primary hinderance to Hydrogen fuel cell vehicle proliferation is the limited distribution of fueling stations in the US.
Barring that changing, Its doubtful that Fuel cell vehicles will be widely produced and successful until Direct Ethanol Fuel Cell technology is fully flushed out and implemented. Our existing infrastructure favors liquid fuels.
Additionally, advances in supercritical water oxidation open up a huge potential for waste cellulose derived sugars to take the place of food crop derived sugars in ethanol production. Green Hydrogen isnt nearly as efficient as turning the stalks of our crops into the fuel for our wheels could be in the not so distant future.
We just need to invest in fusion more and traditional fission until the former is practical. AI is going to eat our society if we don’t.