Why are we as Americans so afraid to change? even if it is a change for the better? the
world has been using oil coal and other petroleum products to power just about
everything
that moves for the last 150 years. yet most cars in the united states only get 10-20
miles a
gallon and even the "good" ones can get only a petty 20-50 miles a gallon. so why do we
put up with the inefficiency when there are far better alternatives out there? Such as
hydrogen, which was discovered hundreds of years ago. Hydrogen has long been known
for its explosive propeties (with air) and abundance in the universe (in other forms
i.e.
water on earth, and its form in space is a gas). Hydrogen can do just about everything
conventional fuels can do but better.
Hydrogen can be "packaged" in several ways, as a fuel gas in a H2/02 powered engine or
the newly devised solid state pellet of hydrogen isotopes that contains about the
equivalent
of 5000 cubic feet of hydrogen and is broken down and releases gas into the second
chamber where it goes to the engine for use. There are many ways to get pure hydrogen
out of many compounds using methods such as electrolysis and chemical reactions. One of
the easiest ways is using a chemical reaction. Simple chemicals (aluminum,sodium
hydroxide, and water) can be reacted in the home to produce heavy hydrogen to power
your furnace or your hot water heater . No electrical power at all is required. The
reaction
also gives off a tremendous amount of heat. Even the waste heat could be captured for
heating the house. The resulting sodium aluminate is harmless and could be collected at
recoiling centers for complete acid/base neutralization. This way is a simpler way than
electrolysis produce hydrogen for heating the home, because in a automobile it would be
harder to do.
Electrolysis is another way to produce hydrogen electronically. It is a way that I
am more familiar with because I do it quite a bit in my room and have done several
experiments with it. Electrolysis will produce a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to oxygen out of
water. higher voltages will give you faster collection. With a 12-volt battery it took
around a half an hour to get a quarter of a mountain dew bottle filled with a catalyst of
a
small amount of Baking Soda. I used it because it was cheap and I knew it worked.
Another time I used a 75 volt / 2 amp power supply with a catalyst of 2 drops of
sulfuric
acid to a pint of water and the result was very differing from the last time. I filled
the
whole mountain dew bottle in less than 6 minutes. All of that gas came from a little
less
than a drop of water(when I light it off there was only a little spec of water on the
inside
of the bottle)I can only gasp thinking that that was only 75 volts and voltage can get
into
the billions of volts. Although electrolysis is not the most efficient way to produce
hydrogen it certainly deserves recognition for working and I am sure sometime soon
someone will discover a way to produce the same amount of H2 and O2 with less power
and time either with a new catalyst or a more efficient power supply.
One reason that hydrogen power has not taken off is that there are thousands of jobs in
the petroleum and coal fields. Really who would want to own a car that requires about
20-30 cents per mile in gas expenses when you could basically pull up to the water hose
every month and fill your tank with something about 20 cents every 2000 or so miles?? So
demand for petroleum products would sky dive and thousands of jobs would be lost and
no one except the water company, car alternator/generator company and the battery
company would profit from it. People would also so angry about losing their jobs over
such a change and boycott the automotive companies making hydro-cars and cause havoc
for the people trying to "upgrade" us to a better system of working. I mean everything in
a
car has changed but the engine stays essentially the same. It's commonly known that
large
oil companies have been paying off the auto makers to keep all cars under the 40 mile
per
gallon range. There are a few exceptions and all they really changed was the size of the
car. Every engine has the capability to get a hundred miles per gallon and up with
modifications to the carburetor and other internal parts of the engine. Only half of the
gas
that goes into the chamber actually gets burned and the rest goes right out your tail
pipe,
and they call them efficient??
You would figure that when NASA uses it in the space shuttle for fuel to lift a 122 foot
long craft plus a gigantic fuel tank (the solid boosters help also) it has to be working
right.
And no one ever whines about pollution either unless they are totally nieve because the
only pollution from the shuttle (besides the boosters) is water vapor. It takes a lot of
energy to get water from water to H2 and O2 and it takes a lot of energy to get it back
to
water also, in other words a spark (which is a very hot burning spec of flint but it
doesn't
hurt us because it doesn't have a very long life and is small) or a flame and it takes it
on an
explosive ride back to water vapor. It is weird that way I guess because, if you burn a
cup
of gasoline you can't just capture the soot (carbon) and residues and other
"by-products"
and apply electricity to it and instantly have what you started with. So basically
hydrogen
is a forever renewable resource that is non-polluting
Politically oil is the source of all evil. We went to war for it and said it was for
another
reason, yeah right. If we where ever to switch suddenly from petroleum to an alternative
energy like hydrogen we could expect an immediate political or military threat because
that is just like making the oil corporations go bankrupt, instantly. It would be
especially
hard on a country that has oil for its main export like Kuwait or Iraq, And it would be
the
stock market crash all over again for us also. It will probably take a very dramatic
threatening event to make us switch from fossil fuels, like running out of them.
The world will eventually realize the potential of hydrogen and put it out there, but it
may
come very late like when gas will cost 3.95 a gallon but it will happen, it just has to.
People will have no choice but to change or, well, walk. It is time that we upgrade, we
do
not drive "Horseless Carriages" anymore so we shouldn't use ones fuel. We call ourselves
"high tech" when we are using hundred year old technology in our "high tech" things.
Airplanes have gone from the "June Bug" to the F-22 fly by wire fighter in around a
hundred years so why can't cars and heaters and powerplants do the same??
As a globel society we need to upgrade.
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