What will the fuel of the future be?

[midtown328i]

What do you think the world will start using to power cars once we give up on gasoline? Would you rather have electric and have a quiet whir as your exhaust note? Or would you rather use something that is internal combustion like hydrogen?

[Jar_e_d is]

we aren't going to be giving up petroleum for a VERY VERY long time!.....But by the time we do I bet Hydrogen will be what we are using, once we figure out that whole fussion thing.

[midtown328i]

Didn't BMW already have two 7 series that were running on hydrogen.

[BMWhartgeM3]

they had a fleet of them, they went around the world acctually, and the cost to convert them, is very very small, shell already has one in germany.

[Kompressor]

Fuck hydrogen. I went to this presentation a couple years back from Ford. The guy said it would actually increase pollution most of the time if it was used today.

[ScriptY]

Hydrogen heh, what about that crap bush was talkin about powered on water...that sounds very economical unless we suck all the water out of the ocean, but thats not gonna happen

[Mpower20044]

same thing....

[Jar_e_d is]

Originally Posted by Kompressor

Fuck hydrogen. I went to this presentation a couple years back from Ford. The guy said it would actually increase pollution most of the time if it was used today.

that's because right now they use petroleum products to seperate the hydrogen, but once we get fussion down we will be able to take the H out of H2O.

[midtown328i]

Does hydrogen have the ability or the potential to give as much power to an engine as gasoline can?

[Mpower20044]

I think it does. I had to do research on more economy safe ways of powering vehicles. From what I read there wont be an electric hybrid or hydrogen car or truck to reach the speeds of a gas powered car or truck for another 10-20 years atleast.

[MorningCruiser]

Well, if we try hard enough we can make it so that we can seperate hydrogen from the atmosphere, and then free fuel for everyone...

But since I cannot see that happening, hydrogen will be the future anyways...

[marcostognozzi]

Anyway Alcohool will come before any other, just see Brazil we developed
Alcohool-Gasoline cars and everybody who has one just drive with alcohool
low cost and reneable, it comes from Sugar Cane... You don´t need offshore plataforms just some big farms and tractors...
Oh and that provides more HP´s for the car than the gasoline.

[Neo]

I actually did a presentation on this over the summer for my mini-mester Envir. Sci. course. We're most likely going to switch over to Hydrogen Fuel Cells because they're the most efficient & effective in terms of polution, recyclability, usability (they can be used in just about anything), and productivity. If everyone focused on fuel cells then in theory we could easily generate more than enough hydrogen. I actually came up with a nice lil solution where we use windmills, coal deposits, solar energy, and nuclear energy to power the electric converters that seperate the hydrogen and oxygen. That way we'd have an almost unlimited supply. If you think about it, windmills and solar farms work almost all the time and the energy needed to produce hydrogen is minimal. The only things stopping it are popularity and lobbyist activities by big oil corperations. Trust me gents, HFC's are the way of the future and they aren't going anywhere.

As to the guy who is listening to Ford... remember they're still using pushrods.

Edit: Oh yeah and fuel cell tech should begin to mainstream as early as 208-2010. As for oil... well we're already close to peaking and with India and China developing as fast as they are we'll run out sooner than predicted. The most recent estimates I've seen say we'll peak in 20-30 max and be totally out of oil within 70 years max.

[domoarigato]

I think vegetable oil will be the next fuel. It can be used in high-compression engines, i.e. diesel, with some modifications and can always be extracted from varying vegetables. That would be the least expensive alternative to converting millions of existing gasoline-powered cars to diesel-type engines running on vegetable oil.

[Glucas21]

All you have to do to make a Hydrogen powered car more powerful, is inject the hydrogen into the engine as a gas instead of a liquid. When you do this you can simply increase the pressure with which the gas is put into the engine and you effectively have a forced induction engine.