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Confused about PHEV, Hybrids, etc...

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gnuarm:

--- Quote from: tom66 on August 06, 2022, 09:44:03 am ---
--- Quote from: gnuarm on August 06, 2022, 06:03:06 am ---I don't follow.  Why can various manufactured fuels use only renewable energy?  Biofuels use some form of crops, but that carbon was just absorbed from the air, so releasing it again does no harm.  Hydrogen involves no carbon at all if you don't use hydrocarbons as your hydrogen source.  That can be water. 

Are you just making the point that these are not currently commercially practical?

--- End quote ---

More or less.

Biofuels have land use offsets.  If you chop down parts of the Amazon rainforest to make bioethanol, then you released more carbon over ten years than you did just burning fossil fuels.  In the longer term biofuels can be carbon neutral, especially if they are produced on land that's otherwise not that useful.  There are still concerns about offsetting food, which is more essential than energy.  But I have doubts that in any case we could get enough biofuel production to replace all fossil fuels, without turning the earth into a dust bowl again.  Also algae biofuels, the former love of the likes of Exxon, seem to be making little progress.
--- End quote ---

You are thinking of crops like corn which do use arable farm land.  My understanding is most biofuel research is in crops that would use land that is not good farm land and so would not compete with food crops.  You have to keep in mind that for fuel, the crops have to be very, very inexpensive. 



--- Quote ---Hydrogen is almost exclusively produced from steam reforming of natural gas and the emissions profile of a hydrogen car powered from said "blue hydrogen" is worse than a diesel/petrol car.  There are lots of additional costs with hydrogen for vehicles, the high gas pressures requiring cryo storage and pumping, the high cost of fuel cells, the low overall efficiency, and the relatively high cost of the fuel itself, despite subsidies.
--- End quote ---

There is nothing that says hydrogen must be produced this way.  If the renewable energy is inexpensive enough, electrolysis of water becomes economical. 

I don't disagree that hydrogen has a dismal future as an automotive fuel, but it's not because hydrogen can't be carbon free.



--- Quote ---Synfuels are just not produced at a large enough scale for practicality yet - and there is a lot to work out to get the process efficient and scaled up.  I would say synfuels are probably the most promising technology for applications where electrification is impractical, for instance aircraft, portable generation, etc. 
--- End quote ---

You can say similar things about BEVs.  There aren't enough chargers for long trips, there aren't enough chargers for apartments and condos, batteries cost too much, range is too short...  the list goes on. 

Yes, we have to convert many forms of transportation to eliminate the carbon and it's being worked on.  Nothing happens overnight... except sleep. 



--- Quote ---So of the technologies available I don't see passenger cars going anywhere but battery powered EVs.  There will be a greater proportion of hybrids in the future, and plug in hybrids will still be popular.  Hydrogen won't be any more of a technology demo.  For trucks and trains, it's harder to say, hydrogen could make some sense there but electrification is also quite likely.  For aircraft, maybe hydrogen will be investigated, but due to latency in the industry I expect the dominant technology will either be synfuel or biofuel for quite some time.

--- End quote ---

I don't disagree.  I run into hydrogen advocates on Quora who just can't grasp that hydrogen is still a long way off, even if there are many cars on the roads today.  Having prototypes is not remotely the same as having paths through all the road blocks. 

The real problem for hydrogen is the simple fact that BEVs are here, today and are only improving.  Hydrogen will require multiple billions of dollars to be invested in infrastructure in addition to research.  With the clear path forward for BEVs, I think that investment will not be forthcoming.  Now that BEVs are becoming entrenched, there are no significant problems for hydrogen cars to solve.

nctnico:
There are still huge problems for BEVs to solve. Raw materials is one of them. But also cost of charging infrastructure. In the end there is really is no use to try and figure out what the definitive solution will be right now. There are too many wheels in motion. Remember: BEVs came and went before! A large part of the popularity of BEVs is based on hype.

Looking at the future I see a lot of movement to make hydrogen the new oil. What is the use of converting hydrogen to electricity only to store it in a heavy battery that gets lugged along in a car? Also from a raw materials POV running a car on hydrogen makes a lot of sense. The amount of platinum needed for the fuel cell starts to approach the amounts that are presently used in catalytic converters. Bottom line: it makes no sense to discard cars on hydrogen at this moment.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 06, 2022, 12:47:02 pm ---The majority of front and back yards are not used for growing food. Turning that into revenue streams for the owners would be a great thing.

--- End quote ---

That's really high on the "Hasn't got a clue" scale. Practicalities aside, people have those yards to do things in. Sit and watch the world go by, have a quiet drink or smoke at the end of a long hot day, somewhere for the pets and kids to play, somewhere to do some exercise, somewhere to eat, somewhere to have a party, a BBQ, some people deliberately plant wildlife friendly plants in the (probably forlorn) hope of preserving enough biodiversity to stop local ecosystems collapsing, or just some pretty flowers, perhaps a few fresh herbs for the kitchen. Suggesting that people would welcome an additional tiny revenue stream by replacing all that and more with a likely monoculture of fuel plants at the cost of quality of life is, well, farcical.

nctnico:
Having attempted to grow all kinds of stuff in my back yard (check on quite few items Cerebus has listed and more -no drugs though- :-DD ), I know first hand that it is extremely hard to get to some kind of production level quantities of anything. So far potatoes have been most succesful. Farming is a profession not to be taken lightly. You need a fairly large piece of land and machines to get to a sufficiently large scale.

Where I live they designed a neigbourhood specifically for people to have food crops in their garden (with some promotion as well). Recently I overheard a conversation from someone who lives in that neighbourhood: it turns out the whole 'growing food' thing is a massive flop. It takes too much time to do it right. Some even hire people to take care of the garden or just rent it out so others can use the land  :palm:

tom66:
There's good reason we moved from a society where ~50% of people were employed in agriculture to one now where less than 1% are: mechanisation, the Haber process and a significant level of scientific rigor.   I have an enormous amount of respect for farmers.  But, yeah, it's not something you do at home.  Not on any reasonable scale, unless you're prepared to work 12 hours a day doing it.

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