Earth-Friendly Fuel Is Needed

I just watched the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?". It's really despicable what GM did to the EV1's, really beyond despicable! Battery power has it's place for sure but I have serious doubts the earth can sustain half a billion vehicles running large metal-acid based batteries any better than gas power. These billionaire oil and vehicle corporations buy up the patents on green technology so they can kill and bury it. Too much profit to be made with dirty power, battery and hydrogen are too expensive to build and have no residual profits. Hydrogen is expensive and dangerous but not nearly as technologically difficult as they make it out to be.

 

Seems to me that any so called ''green fuel'', when combined with a hugely increasing world population will screw up the planet anyway. How much of the worlds surface would be needed to grow enough hemp to provide fuel for 9 or 10 billion people? On top of that, there will need to be a huge increase in food production.
Unless we control our population somehow, we're in trouble no matter how many green policies governments adopt.

 

No "grown" fuel should be considered green because it will emit carbon and take away from food resources.

Green fuel would be solar and wind generated and have no carbon or toxic emissions. Solar collector power plants can be built in deserts, it's the best place for them anyway. Solar power potential is unlimited considering a satellite dish size parabolic mirror can catch enough energy to melt steel.

Portable energy storage is the biggest problem, we either need clean non-toxic, non polluting batteries or Hydrogen cells or tanks. Enough for over half a billion vehicles. If batteries cant be manufactured without the factories polluting the environment then it will have to be hydrogen. Even if hydrogen takes more power to manufacture, I'd rather have 4 clean solar collector plants in my neighborhood than 2 solar plants and a toxic battery factory.

 

Lots of great ideas on here. Geothermal heating and cooling for homes and buildings uses a fraction of energy then conventional units. A roof with solar panels will give all the energy needed to run geothermal pumps. Battery factories are far less polluting then millions of vehicles running on petrol. Hemp is a renewable resource. Batteries can be recycled and reused. Growing energy is a valid idea. Think the same field of soybeans grown in hemp. The hemp plant has so many different uses vs. soybeans. And the yields far greater per acre.The energy lobby is our great foe. They think they own the world and our energy future.

 

Big tip to everyone here. White roofs, although not as normal as black roofs reflect a ton of sunlight and cool your house and use up to 15 percent less electricity in your home!
Seriously, black rooftops are very wasteful!

 

Depends where you live, here in Canada we're trying to HEAT our homes 9 months out of the year. So yeah; white roofs if you're south of the Mason Dixon line, black roofs to the north...

 

You might want to consider what they are not telling you about all those battery powered cars, and what they are not telling you about hydrogen fuelled cars.

First of all, all those batteries need to be recharged between use. That means that during seasons with peak consumption of electric power, "brown-outs" will be more frequent. The demand for electric power will be much higher. Add to that the fact that since the tsunami in Japan, Germany has stated that by 2022, they will no longer be using nuclear power to provide for the demand. And, more countries are looking into that now. That means more power being generated by conventional means. Coal fired plants? Petroleum fired plants? Wind power? Water power?

Wind power that seems to be the wave of the future has a problem as well. Not only are people finding that they have a problem getting to sleep with the 'WHOOSH, WHOOSH, WHOOSH, WHOOSH" of the blades as they come around, but even before the units are scheduled for maintenance, they begin to leak lubricant and drip that into the ground. It becomes gallons of oil each day raining down into the ground below as seals wear out. Then, if you look at the tornadoes we've had lately, what happens if a force 5 hits them? How far are those blades going to get blown, and what kind of damage are they going to do?

Ever wonder why the "Hydrogen power experiment" by the auto industry was designed to fail? Sure, hydrogen is dangerous. So is gasoline ( put a spark of any kind in the vapors and see what happens ). But, hydrogen is very easy to produce. You can process it in your own back yard with little more than some PVC pipe and a cheap pump. I'm using it to fuel my kitchen stove. And, during daylight hours, you can produce it almost free. For that matter, we do have the technology to produce Hydrogen for just a few cents a gallon. Why aren't we using it?

In "TECHNOLOGY REVIEW", in about '07, an article quoted an industry expert as saying: "A hydrogen powered engine will produce more carbon dioxide than currently available gasoline powered cars." Now, could someone explain to me how you can possibly produce any carbon dioxide in an engine if you are not burning any carbon to begin with? And, then, storing it in tanks that have extreme pressure and temperature when "reversible metal hydride" is capable of storing more hydrogen (by volume) at room temperature, with just a few bars of pressure, with no "leak off". Obviously, we've been fed bad science about hydrogen, and the "experiment" was designed to fail from the start.

 

Need better seals or designs. Most gears that need oil or grease are permanatly sealed. WE used to have to oil fan motors and grease bearings regularly. Not any more. They are permanently sealed in housing.

Carbon dioxide will be produced by burning coal to produce the electricity needed to produce the hydrogen. Not CO2 from the hydrogen powered motor. But thats still negligible when compared to the CO2 produced from oil refineries, drilling, and gasoline engines. The only byproduct of hydrogen burning is water!
Thats cool you use hydrogen for cooking. I need to figure out how to use my hot attic to heat water for the house. I'm thinking of plumbing water up into the attic and letting it store in black PVC tubes. OR plumb the basement hot water heater to a attic hot water heater for storage. It's alwasy hot up there.

 

We can not condemn EV's and green vehicles because of bad utility company infrastructure. That's another issue, obviously they need to be weened off coal and invest in green power production and continue research and development of green tech instead of hoarding their billions and burying new tech like heartless monsters.

 

The fan motors have gone over to something called "OIL-LITE". It's a bronze compound that has graphite impregnated into it as the lubricant. Not usable when talking about the huge bearings they have in the modern wind generators. You don't realize how big they are when you see them in operation, but look at one on the truck enroute. Over-width, over height, and overweight. There's a huge difference between that and the fan motors as far as bearing requirements.

Actually, a solar array is quite effective, in daylight. Does a fine job of powering the bank of electrolizers. Currently working on a means of making the electric power far more efficient. No CO2 produced at all.

Plumb your cold water up to the attic. Run it through the pipes there and let it pre-heat. Then, you can either plumb the water heater there, or plumb the pre-heated water back down to the water heater. Summertime saving could go over 50%.

Depending on where you live, you might want to keep the water heater down below. If the attic gets cold in winter, you might want to install a by-pass that goes straight to the water heater, and a drain for the water in the attic. If the attic freezes, you don't want water up there to freeze and burst the pipes.

 

The thing is you have to think of the entire picture. lets start with solar power, to get the materials to build a solar cell you need to build large mine which destroy large chunks of land, dumps hazardous chemicals into the local ground water and leftover sediment often end up building up in rivers and often completely stop the flow of water, leaving lakes dry and animals and plants thirsty. Not only that but it requires vary large amounts of energy to build the solar cells, more than the cells will usually produce in years. Wind power is the same, large mines for materials and require more energy to build than they usually produce. Now lets look at tidal energy, once again requires large mines and you also have to think that you are using the energy from the tides. the tides determine much of what happens on this beautiful earth and to be able to support the human race, you will have to harness alot of tidal energy, which i am afraid that by messing with the tide we will face worse consequences than we are now. its Hemps turn now, while you would need some materials to build a facilty to extract said oil and ake it useable, i think old refineries and other power plants could be used and modified saving quite a bit of material and energy, also hemp grows in the ground, i think this is the most important part. being a plant hemp uses carbon dioxide to produce its food and expells oxygen. That is never a bad thing, also hemp has many other uses so not only are you getting your energy from a natural source but now you also have a source of cloth plastic and paper in the same plant saving countless tree's.

 

You could use the same argument with alcohol. And, you can use fruit as well as grain. They've even come up with a way to produce it from wood fiber. It will burn much cleaner, but will still produce carbon dioxide. That oil from hemp is still carbon based. In order to work on reduction of the CO2, you have to get rid of the carbon. That leaves hemp out of the picture.

 

what i am saying is you have to think about more than just carbon emissions we are doing alot more damage to this planet than just carbon emissions. and yes you could use wood fiber, but once again that could be outdone by hemp. if you use the land that farmers are currently being paid not to use it would not require killing any tree's and hemp produces more fiber per square acre than wood. read the rest of my post and you'll understand that saving our atmosphere does no good when we are destroying the planet right down here.

 

Well, we still have to clear massive amounts of land to grow hemp. Hard to compare as I don't see how coal and oil destroys the planet "right down here" (aside from oil spills), so I can't say whether hemp will be any better.

 

well then sir you must be blind, here in alaska i see what coal mines do first hand, do some research coal mines wreak havoc wherever they are there are some salmon spawning grounds here that will now be dead forever. If you had read my post you would see i suggested using the land that is already cleared that farmers are being paid by the u.s. government not to farm on, not to mention hemp can replace certain other crops. Sorry if i seem rude this is just a very important topic for me

 

Not rude at all, you provided the answers I was looking for in your post. Thanks. I still don't think hemp fuel is the answer, even if it is an improvement.

 

I'll stop your quote right there,you're full of misinformation.

Almost all large scale solar plants do not use PV cells, they use simple mirror reflectors made of glass and metal. they focus on metal pipes or tanks and boil water for a steam turbine. It's a very simple process, very scalable, using very common material capable of producing a large amount of power.

 

Well said, couldnt agree more! Carbon emissions seem to have become the ''cool'' thing to be concerned about, as long as something doesnt emit C02 its suddenly fine.
I dont think there is any point in worrying about carbon emissions until governments start to deal with the biggest root cause, which is human population growth!

 

Well we're dealing with neither at the moment. Can't we deal with both?

 

Well, one (population) causes the other (C02). So stopping population growth would go a long way towards dealing with emissions, as well as a lot of other things. (Food and water scarcity, other types of pollution, resource scarcity, energy requirements etc etc!)
Thats not to say dealing with population growth would be easy, or even possible. But if we dont find a way to control our own population, the planet will find one for us eventually, and it I'm sure it wont be pleasant. Alot more education is needed, I guess.
But anyway, trying to deal with C02 emissions while ignoring the issue of population seems utterly futile to me.
Peace