I wish the environment would win, but when humans are involved, it will never win out. Remember, the grab for oil is world wide. If it isn't burned cleanly over here, then it will be burned in an irresponsible manner in the third world. Travel to Russia, India and China to see the examples of this.

I believe that, if the US blindly continues to vote to subsidize unviable alternate energy sources, we will collapse (economically) much sooner than at the current rate.

Sorry - since hydrogen does not occur naturally, it is only a mechanism to transport energy - not a source of energy. I.E. you have to use energy to create hydrogen, then you ship the hydrogen somewhere (like the corner gas station) where it is burned to release the "captured" energy.

Well, nuclear (or, as George says, "nu-cu-lar") could provide the energy to run the ethanol plants, light the lights, charge the electric batteries that the electric tractors use, and run the pumps to irrigate the fields.

The refineries just burn some of the oil and gas to provide energy to do the refining. Electricity is used to run their computers so they can play tetris.


This is only in a little lab experiment. The vast majority of hydrogen comes from oil or natural gas.

However, we could use nuclear plants to extract H2 from the oceans, which is probably the cleanest way to get hrydrogen. One way or the other, use hydrogen produces pollution if you look at the whole cycle.

We could also just use our vast coal resources to create fuel for our cars. I like this idea the best.

 

There have been a lot of debate on this thread, and, to respond to all of it would take more typing than I want to do. So, I'll simply throw out what I would like to have happen.

First, the development of the "ethanol as fuel" industry. This is the easiest and quickest to get up and running because much of the infrastructure is already there. Ethanol can be made with anything that has sugar or starch in it so we are not limited to just using corn. The biggest change to the "ethanol as fuel" system would be the power source that runs it. This is where solar, wind and even nuclear power come in to play. I wouldn't mind if there was one in my back yard.

From here, the jump to butanol is a very short one. For those that have not heard of butanol it is a 4 carbon atom alcohol that has 95% of the energy content of gasoline and can be substituted 1 to 1 with it and diesel. Also it is no where near as corrosive as ethanol and can be piped through gasoline pipe lines. BP and Dupont are working on increasing the yield for every unit of feedstock. I have read of genetically engineered "designer" enzymes and even synthetic enzymes. Butanol can be made from anything that grows on this planet. You can read about it here.

http://www.butanol.com/

Now, if we wanted to stop there I believe we could live happily ever after, but there are other technologies that can take us even farther. There is a process for making synthetic gasoline from carbon monoxide. This is done by using catalytic cracking operations that I have no way of understanding, so, I'll leave that to people who do. It has been known for quite some time actually. In the past the carbon monoxide was extracted from natural gas. Now however, there appears to be a way to extract this carbon monoxide feedstock straight from the atmosphere by using a solar concentrator to break down carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. The neat thing about this is that it produces electricity while splitting the carbon dioxide. You can read about it here.

http://www.lare.us/

Personally, I don't want to go to hydrogen fuel because it will be in the form of fuel cells. I don't want to drive a car that hums and is powered by a mysterious black box. I want to hear a V8 engine and be able to work on it myself. This means some sort of liquid hydrocarbon fuel.

Who knows, with an abundance of fuel that is made from the waste products that come out of our cars, the car companies may start making cars that have some style instead of looking like grapes.

BigBlockk

Later.....

 

I don't know the exact figures but the US has used the majority of this 23% within the last few decades. When the 3rd world economies, which may be 2nd world by now, get up a full head of steam these reserves will arguably deplete at a much faster rate.

 

One of the problems with ethanol is its corrosiveness and affinity to combine with water. Because of that, right now, it has to be trucked to the stations instead of using pipelines.

Grapes!! Ha - that's an accurate description.

I wouldn't mind driving an electric daily driver if it meant I could use my Vette on the weekends. I think you could put cards in the wheels of an electric to give it that "big block" sound...