Other fuel alternatives ?

Question

Man can fly to the moon, land on it, and come down safelty in the 70's when technology wasnt nearly as great as it was today. more than 30 years later cant man find a environmentally friendly source of fuel . Isnt there something that man can use in its vehicles that dont hurt mother earth. PLZ DONT PUT BIO-DIESEL- it is better but it isnt perfect or ELECTRICITY- which needs fuel to run or HYDROGEN which is extremely unsafe.

actually I dont mind Hydrogen.

Answer 1

Any fossil fuel will add a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere. It does matter how much energy we derive from the fuel, but even if we were burning it completely and using it exceedingly efficiently, we have an irreducible level of CO2 emission,unless we convert the fossil fuel to hydrogen and carbon and store the carbon unburned.

When we use a bio-fuel in theory we are just returning to the air CO2 previosly stored by photosynthesis. But our efficiency in getting that bio-fuel to provide power would have to be greatly improved. Many efforts appear to consume as much energy as they deliver.

If we were converting methane into hydrogen AND storing the carbon unburned, we might send the carbon back to carry a new load of hydrogen. Well, we could instead use nitrogen in place of carbon. In that case we would use electrical power to bond 3 hydrogen to one nitrogen atom (NH3 is ammonia).
The purpose of using ammonia instead of hydrogen is that ammonia compresses and stores as a fairly energy dense source of hydrogen.
Unlike hydrogen, ammonia will stay inside a container, not migrate through a metal container the way hydrogen does.

There is a loss of energy in converting hydrogen to ammonia,but no more than the energy lost in compressing it into high pressure containers.

Converting water into hydrogen then ammonia would offer a way to make wind power 'more reliable' and allow nuclear generation to run at capacity without dumping energy into a lake. But converting ammonia back to hydrogen is not yet clean... some of the hydrogen appears to remain stuck on the nitrogen and may be wasted as nitrogen is dumped. Nitrogen with hydrogen attached is a GHG.

Answer 2

Here are some other, less talked about alternatives:

1) flywheels - a good energy storage medium, with less energy loss over time then batteries. It's not for sports cars though because of the gyroscopic affect. but for bigger vehicles, where stability is and advantage...

2) compressed air. The talk has to be big, and made of expensive materials like carbon fiber. it couldn't be put into regular cars, the car has to be built around the tank, but it really does have some potential.

4)wind up - no seriously, energy storage in torsion springs, like a big version of those old mechanical watch springs.

5) outboard energy storage, (using a power cord). trolleys did it successfully 70 years ago, but I think we can do even better then that today.

6)nuclear - oh that would make a great car, and you would love it, and it would last a lifetime. never fill up on anything, it's just always there, ready to go. and when the nuclear rods are spent, they can be reprocessed. it's expensive, very expensive, and scary to people.

Answer 3

For transportation electric is easily the best solution.

Biodiesel is good, but there's a limit to how much agricultural land we can devote to growing biofuels. The more is used for biofuels, the less is available for food crops, and the higher the price of food.

Hydrogen is great, theoretically. Practically it has serious problems. Electrolysis is currently far too inefficient - it takes way more energy to break the water bonds than you get by burning the hydrogen. You can get hydrogen from natural gas, but the process releases as much CO2 as burning gasoline. Even if you find a good way to get the hydrogen fuel, you have a complete lack of infrastructure for its transportation and storage.

Electric is a great solution. While some greenhouse gases are still produced because much of our power grid still relies on coal and other fossil fuels, because large power plants and electric motors are so efficient, EVs create fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gas cars and even hybrids under the current US power grid (52% coal powered). Plus you can always make the power grid greener by replacing the coal power plants with nuclear and renewable energy sources. And the infrastructure (power grid) is already in place.

Answer 4

I hate explaining this over and over, but it appears I must.
Gasoline, diesel, or ethanol for that matter is a great fuel for a couple of reasons. One, it's energy dense. Burning a little fuel will yield a lot of energy. Two, and maybe more important, is it's an easily contained liquid. Pump it into a tank, store it, then burn it. Easy. Electric cars have a couple of problems associated with them. One is the batteries. Not as dense an energy storage medium. Two, the time it takes to recharge. Hydrogen is GREAT! It has a VERY high energy density, after all, they don't launch rockets to the moon with diesel! But it's almost impossible to store. If someone could figure out how to put a hydrogen storage tank on a car, all we'd need to do is have a solar panel on our roofs, convert water to hydrogen and off to work we go in our hydrogen powered cars. So, all you brilliant people out there get to work on hydrogen storage methods.

Answer 5

There is nothing as good as fossil fuels. The plants through photosynthesis takes in CO2 and gives us back the oxygen quickly. The plant holds on to the C where all the energy which was received from the sun is stored. So the leaves fall off and wash down the rivers to the delta where it deteriorates into gas ,oil ,and after a time coal. It is not the animal fossil's but the plants.

Answer 6

Let’s see liquid nitrogen, could be used, as well as compressed air. Liquid nitrogen having the advantage of being a liquid which takes up less space then compresses air. If you build a car to run on compress air like the air car getting ready to be produce in India, it could easily be converted to use either compressed air or liquid nitrogen. With liquid nitrogen you’d use an expansion tank to convert the liquid nitrogen to a gas and use it just like compress air.

The hydrogen made today is mainly made from coal or electricity which as you point out used fuel. Yes I know you can make hydrogen from wind turbines, solar etc, but right now it’s not. So many of the same problems that you have with hydrogen you’d have with liquid nitrogen or compressed air. Although emission wise you’re ahead with compress air and liquid nitrogen when compared to hydrogen or gasoline or diesel.

But, compress air and liquid nitrogen aren’t fuel, you would have to look at them more as a battery then fuel, but they are safer then most fuels we are using, and could easily be ‘recharged’.

We could use ethanol, but I have a big problem used a food crop for fuel. If I remember right one fill up uses enough corn to feed one person for a year. Of course if we got rid of the protection we have on sugar we might be able to bring in a lot more sugar, and of course you’d have to deal with the corn lobby and the sugar lobby, sigh.

We could harvest methane from land fills and use that as a fuel. Although you’d still wind up the CO2, methane is much more powerful as a green house gas then CO2, if you buy into man-made global warming, but it is a fuel we could exploit.

We could easily build more dam for the production of electricity and store the electricity either as compress air, liquid nitrogen, hydrogen, etc, but you’d have to deal with all the environmentalists, and local government, and federal government. We could put up wind farms and produce electricity, but again you have environmentalists, and local government, and federal government to contend with, and even when you find a good place you better hope some senator’s view doesn’t get ruined.

Right now my money is on compressed air, liquid nitrogen and bio-diesel. With heavy money in the short term on compressed air, followed by in the long term bio-diesel.

Answer 7

The world's cleanest running car is coming out next year and is run by compressed air. It claims it will be cheaper than the hydrogen car.

"After fourteen years of research and development, Guy Negre has developed an engine that could become one of the biggest technological advances of this century. Its application to Compressed Air Technology(CAT) vehicles gives them significant economical and environmental advantages. With the incorporation of bi-energy (compressed air + fuel) the CAT Vehicles have increased their driving range to close to 2000 km with zero pollution in cities and considerably reduced pollution outside urban areas.
The application of the MDI engine in other areas, outside the automotive sector, opens a multitude of possibilities in nautical fields, co-generation, auxiliary engines, electric generators groups, etc. Compressed air is a new viable form of power that allows the accumulation and transport of energy. MDI is very close to initiating the production of a series of engines and vehicles. The company is financed by the sale of manufacturing licenses and patents all over the world."

Answer 8

Actually, there is absolutely nothing wrong with gasoline, it is just the way that engines burn it, gasoline gets burned just way to fast to properly burn all of the gasoline which is why we get the harmful emissions, if it was burned completely then we can just drastically lower the amounts of the emissions. We can just have a separate chamber where the combustion takes place, therefore when we step on the gas, the throttle opens releasing some hot gas, and when we are coasting, we can continue to burn it completely. But apparently that wouldn't seem likely that automakers will do such a thing. I strongly believe in ethanol, because it is year round easy to find and seems as practical, and probably cheaper than gasoline, and apparently it emits less hydrocarbons, but you knew that!

Answer 9

1. Electricity (from solar panels)
2. Nuclear power (just find a way to dispose of it)
3. Ion engines (good for space travel, better than rocket fuel)

Answer 10

Nuclear Power for the world wide grid and hydrogen fuel cells for the cars along with solar cells to help.