Just an odd diddy I thought about and realized today. I was paying attention today about this cause I was playing a lot of Gran Turismo 5 and I got into a talk with a girl about cars and gas mileage usage…. Then fuel cell technology came up.
basically, we are moving to electric vehicles in the short run, but in the long run, a lot of talk is out there about fuel cells. The process of harnessing energy from the combustion of hydrogen…. As a viable source to power vehicles. A lot of talk and money is going into this technology. It’s green, powerful (maybe even more explosive than gasoline), in ready supply, doesn’t suffer from that burnout that electric cars go through when the charge dies, and it’s readily available….. Sometimes.
See, there are a few ways to get hydrogen…. Gasses from landfills, waste…. There electrolysis which removes hydrogen from water (inefficient but in ready supply)….. And steam methane reforming…. The process of removing hydrogen from natural gas fossil fuels…. Yes folks… Using the same resource, that is NOT renewable as we are using today in cars. Granted, it utilizes a turnaround return on product of natural gas 2x what we have today… Essentially making cars DOUBLE efficient… But… It’s still the process of mining and oil and stripping our world of a resource we are quickly running out of.
Can you guess which one the big oil companies are backing and which one is being lobbied for? I’ll give you a hint… Its not the process of taking hydrogen from water…..
In fairness…. At least if it gets started, we can still have powerful muscle cars that make girls drop panties in the back seat, beer guzzling tailgate parties…. And eventually we will run out of gas and then hopefully have moved on to pulling hydrogen from landfills …. Or at least harvesting human life sources…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_reforming