"H-Prize" Announced 394
An anonymous reader writes " The House passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel creating the "H-Prize",allowing scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes. The Department of Energy would put together a private foundation to set up guidelines and requirements for the prizes. Anyone can participate, as long as the research is performed in the United States and the person, if employed by the government or a national lab, does the research on his own time.
Best political Quote: "If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create." said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C."
Work With Bountiful Source (Score:5, Interesting)
It's long been known that oil (petroleum or organic) would fuel fire. And it was discovered that refining it lowered it stability and made it explosive. But where was an abundance of oil? Why, also underneath the ground.
The fact of the matter is that our energy concerns can't be solved by anything that requires more energy to make (insert corn ethanol reference here) than it produces.
So now we need to figure out how to use hydrogen and many car companies have done that but the form that hydrogen abounds in is gas--not liquid. And most hydrogen powered cars require refilling a compressed hydrogen tank. But to make this hydrogen requires electricity and this electricity requires some fuel or energy to make in the beginning
I think the real challenge here should be "just hydrogen" as an alternative fuel but instead "anything we got a lot of lying around in a ready form."
Re:Awesome! (Score:1, Interesting)
You must have been the other person that saw it!
Oh, they understand alright (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I think they understand it just fine. The Whitehouse administration has been in bed with the oil industry from the beginning. The whole 'hydrogen economy' promotion is just an attempt to make it look like they are taking action towards energy independance and alternative energy source development, as to divert interest/funds for alternative energy research towards their fossil-fuel industry cronies.
The most tragic thing about this whole scenario is that it diverts resources away from alternative energy source developments which could have an impact in the immediate to short term future (like wind, solar and hydro-electric power, gas electric hybrid cars, and energy conservation) in favour of a pipe-dream that even the proponents admit is decades away.
The administration is shameless
I agree - why no decentralization of energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
>at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.
Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?
What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ [iogen.ca] ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.
Lately I've been doing a lot of googling on biodiesel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel [wikipedia.org] ), ethanol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol [wikipedia.org] ), and even wood gas generators (pyrolysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis [wikipedia.org] )
From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.
Steve
Re:A good start. (Score:3, Interesting)
The tube trains are unbelievably slow, they're hot all year round, to the point where there's warnings at the entrances.
In spite of this, it's still far more convenient then a car (even without factoring in the cogestion charge).
You don't mention what part of the UK you're from, but a 30 minute commute that's 90 minutes by public transport is an indication the PT is broken there too.
Public transport has it's place, but the convenience and freedom that comes with personal transportation is not something many people want to part with, and nor should they in my opinion.
If this sort of attitude is typical, then its no wonder that the UK's greenhouse emissions are rising & you're not going to be able to meet your requirements under the kyoto treaty.
Re:Where do you GET the Hydrogen? (Score:5, Interesting)
diversity and decentralization (Score:3, Interesting)
We need electrical cars, fuel cell cars, hyrodgen cars, ethanol cars, and a whole slew of others so that the open market can thrive. Cars themselves should run off different sources as well. Charge themselves with solar when available. If they sit outside have some small wind turbines. I'm sure there is a way to convert the energy of falling rain drops if we think about it hard enough.
The first argument is always that we have to retro fit all our gas stations. I don't understand why this is such a big deal. I think we have gotten so used to the centralized controlled gas industry that we have lost touch. If a new stick of gum comes out the stores put it on the shelf. I'm hoping alternate energies will start up a grass root movement of new gas stations that off all sorts of fuel alternatives. A little push from the goverment wouldn't help either.
What we end up with is like the coke\pepsi model. Coke produces the recipe, and then individual bottlers make it throughout the country. When you buy a coke it was probably made pretty close to you.
Lastly we need to think about ways to generate things like ethanol by using renweable sources like solar panels. They can collect solor energy slowing, but then use it to produce more explosive energy sources. Fuel cells can run off natural gas which is plentiful and then use that electricity to create the ethenol. For instance there are self running sewage plants that extract the methane gas and run it through fuel cells to power the plant.
Products just lying around are really easy to work with sure, but they are rarely clean and renewable.
If we team up different energy sources and create a more diverse "energy ecosystem" then we'll be better off.
Inheerently evil to use energy? (Score:5, Interesting)
And honestly, I don't understand - well maybe i do - why it is that people get all flummoxed at the idea of removing human transport devices from the global warming equation. Yes, yes, for now, it is just pushing the problem up the chain, but is that the job of the car makers?
If a car is fairly efficient, and it is no longer spewing out global warming gasses - what the hell else do you expect car makers to do? Not everyone - some could - but not everyone could survive driving a euro golf cart around because it wouldn't hold kids or baggage, etc.
If the car manufacturers are going to make devices that can run 100% clean and are saleable to the public meeting demand, then if you ask me, its high time we start coming up with energy solutions that are not dependent upon unstable thocracies and kingdoms in the middle east, hockey playing blue-nosers in north america, or corrupt countires like Mexico and the rest of central America. The car makers hold up their end, its someone else's responsibility to hold up the other end.
And honestly, we see that China is - amazingly enough - going to lead the way with pebble-bed reactors... 1 for each city or more. It is utterly remarkable to me that a communist county has the stones to get this problem figured out while a country like the US is handcuffed by granola munching tree huggers... except for the founder of the Sierra Club... he gets it.
Re:A good start. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you believe everything your government tells you?
While quite a rosy picture [defra.gov.uk] is being painted by defra, it appears they have been forgetting [guardian.co.uk] to include boats and planes in their emmission counts. Oops.
I agree that the UK is generally better then the US. But that's not something I'd be particularly proud of.
10 Million? At Least 1 Billion (Score:2, Interesting)
WAY TOO SMALL. A JOKE.
This just goes to show how Congress is out of touch. Just what do they think a company is going to be able to do with 10 Million? No way that would cover the development costs. This is a joke, too bad the members probably don't know how rediculously low this is for the kind of manpower that is needed. A 500 Million prize might have a shot. 1 Billion and I could bring on the right people for long enough, and equip them - and I'm not talking thousands of staff. Hundreds, yes.
Just for perspective, the avg daily PROFIT, for Exxon Mobil, the 4th quarter, ended Dec 31, was $199.6 million, EACH DAY. Revenues were $1.09 Billion, per day. Each Day. Don't forget, there are two other oil companies almost as large as ExxonMobil - Royal Dutch Shell and BP (British Petroleum)
Exxon Mobil numbers for 1st Quarter: Profit: 173.6 per day, Revenue: 997.8 per day
Re:A good start. (Score:2, Interesting)
They're not included because we can't do anything about them. Aviation treaties limit the amount of taxation you can apply to commercial air and boats tend to registered to other countries that don't give a hoot about the environment, or safety or anything much apart from their flag fee.
Both situations are clearly daft, but until the international community as a whole agrees to do something about it, you won't see any improvement.
Protesting a plant != fear of nuclear power (Score:2, Interesting)
This was <cough> some years ago. Chernobyl and Three-mile Island have since demonstrated his point.
Re:A good start. (Score:2, Interesting)
Not strictly so. You could, for example, stop out of town office parks that weren't serviced by a rail link. The planning laws are there for a reason, but they're so abused that you end up with exactly the sort of situation you describe. I worked in one out of town office centre not so long ago, after an office relocation. What really rankled was that there was a bus shuttle service from the overflow car park, but not from the train station. The overflow car park was 200 yards from the office, the train station 20 minutes walk.
Putting businesses back into the centre of towns would be good for the local economies too. The town we were nominally based in is one of the South East's most deprived with a remarkable prevalence of drug problems. Every other shop front was boarded up.
10 minutes walk away was our office, housing several thousand highly paid people who could have been buoying up the local economy. Instead the company installed a shop, and a range of canteens to make sure you never actually had to go into town.
What we need is an S-Prize (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh, they understand alright (Score:3, Interesting)
1. As long as we're not generating carbon dioxide during the stripping process, then we will be generating less greenhouse gas. Consuming hydrogen as a fuel produces water only. If the stripped hydrocarbons are a more tractable form of carbon than CO2 then we've at least cut back on emissions.
2. When alternate energy sources finally catch up, we will have the infrastructure in place already to use hydrogen as a transfer mechanism. Rather than trying to tackle the entire problem at once, by solving the energy-transfer problem now, we set ourselves up to make quick and effective use of cleaner, cheaper energy sources in the future.
Mythbusters Did It (Score:3, Interesting)
They also demonstrated that an unmodified diesel engine will run quite nicely on filtered used French fry oil.
The problem is that although this is feasible right now, it's not really possible for widespread use and hydrogen will probably cost more and get less mileage than a gallon of gas right now. Unless we nuke Iran and gas shoots up to $8 a gallon, anyway. The french fry oil does have potential and we're pretty close to the right price point for various nifty diesel fuels to be competitive with gasoline.
They're talking about repealing the tax on gasoline, but I'd suggest taxing the bejesus out of gasoline and dumping the proceeds into alternate energy research. Especially solar and fusion.
Re:A good start. (Score:3, Interesting)
I envision a system of smaller vehicles, possibly 6- or 8-passenger vans, where each vehicle is given dynamic tasking based on requests through an internet portal. When a passenger needs to get to work, they submit a travel request to this portal and the system determines which of the fleet vehicles can most closely accomodate the request. That vehicle's path is then altered to include the new request, and all the current passengers' times of arrival are adjusted to support the additional passenger. Ideally, this would be 100% automated, with a computer controlling the vehicle completely. However, that solution puts working-class people out of jobs, so maybe it's better to have a person driving the vehicle and a computer telling the person where to go. With the increasing inclusion of navigation systems and communications systems like OnStar in automotive product lines, it's not a big step to integrate a two-way communication link between the vehicle and a central computer.
By increasing the flexibility of the system, more travellers are attracted to using it. By increasing the number of vehicles, more jobs are created. By organizing the travel of large numbers of people into optimized paths, traffic congestion, fuel usage, and pollution are reduced. There will always be people who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedom for such benefits, but as the system becomes more optimized and more attractive, it becomes more efficient.
Re:A good start. (Score:2, Interesting)
Cars have given us freedom to choose jobs within, roughly, a 90 minute road commute - which can be a very large area. This is good for the worker - many more jobs to choose from, so you can optimise your choices. And good for companies too, for the same reason - they can pick the best workers for their needs rather than having to put up with the ones who live locally. And as the world has gained more and more different skill sets, that has become more important. When 90% of workers were semi- or un-skilled, they were more or less interchangeable: as long as there were 100 free workers in the area, ypou could find 50 thyat you need. But if you need one of the only 10 skilled flange-wobblers in your mega-city, they may have to travel a long way to your facility. Or move house - except that their spouse has a job where they live now, which brings in 50% of the household income.
I have experience of this as a governor of a specialist school, when we need to recruit new senior staff. Being a specialist school, there are not many about. Nearly all the applicants, and all the appointees, have had journeys of over 50 miles to the school, and non-moveable spouses. Without cars, we would have had to appoint inferior head teachers.
So we will not switch on a large scale to public transport for the trip to work unless we are willing to give up a freedom which most of us value highly - and one which has probably contributed to the economic growth of our countries. The correlation between wealth and number of cars runs a bit both ways: more wealth allows us to buy more cars, but more cars allow us to fine-tune our economy. When you are talking about annual growth rates of 2-3%, an extra 1% growth because you can place people better shows up. And remember this growth is compound.
Gas Stamps (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is why, along with the gas tax, there should be Gas Stamps. These would work like food stamps: you could use the gas stamps to pay for gas. Gas stamps would be given out to the same people who receive food stamps, so the added government bureaucracy would be minimal. With gas taxed to $7 a gallon, the government would have plenty of funds for the gas stamps.