Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...next few days. He'll fly to D.C. and meet with Senators, members of Congress and a former Energy Secretary to discuss his ideas. All those parties acknowledge the need for energy independence, he says, but the political untenability of the cost stops them. "We are not ready for hydrogen because of this, we are not ready for ethanol because of that," Grove says. "But what is the cost-effectiveness of something that can make you an independent country capable of making your own decisions?" That's the City College--educated engineer talking, applying rigorous Grovian logic to a complex...
...There are also a host of technological hurdles stand between our current capabilities and a highway full of hydrogen vehicles. Distributing hydrogen to consumers will require an entirely new infrastructure to transport the gas as well as new filling stations. Safely holding hydrogen in cars will require heavily reinforced tanks to prevent the family station wagon from going the way of the Hindenburg. And although hydrogen has a high energy yield per pound, it has an incredibly low mass density, even at subzero temperatures, so fuel tanks need to be unreasonably large to give hydrogen vehicles usable driving ranges. Still...
...turn, the public) tend to conflate two separate problems: finding a safe, steady supply of energy, and finding away to store that energy in a car. Gasoline easily solves the latter problem because it is so easy to transport compared to, say, a lighter-than-air gas like hydrogen. Hydrogen, which is at best a troublesome way to store energy, is being touted as an energy source when the actual source of hydrogen is a fossil fuel. In the end, hydrogen is just a convenient way for handling the energy originally stored in natural gas—except that, given...
...fold. We need a renewable energy source that doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. And we need a way of storing that energy in a form that can be driven around. The latter has few viable solutions: despite intense research, battery technology is still relatively poor, and hydrogen has all the disadvantages already discussed. For the former, we have lots of promising, but highly underdeveloped, ideas, from massive oceanic windmill farms to gasoline-oozing bioengineered algae to corn-derived ethanol (which itself presents a host of under-explained technological challenges and deleterious environmental impacts...
...long as promises of magical hydrogen-derived energy obscure the real challenge—finding an energy source, not just a storage system—then politicians and the public will continue to delude themselves into thinking that the quest for a new energy source is well on its way, rather than in the stage of infancy...