8 ms·

$1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions?

89 points by binarymax 16y ago

twidlit 16y ago
This is too good to not think that it has drawbacks or serious concessions required. But the fact that its applicable to existing internal combustion engine makes it more feasible than electric powered vehicles.
BoppreH 16y ago
Three important questions remain unanswered: 1) How expensive is the equipment to produce this synthetic gasoline? 2) How pollutant is the process? 3) What is the energy yield compared to the oil-based gasoline?
- pqs 16y ago
  Also, how much energy we need to create this new gasoline. Do we need to burn petrol to obtaine energy to make it? At the end, the article compares this gasoline with electricity, meaning that electric cars don't polute when consuming energy, but this energy must be created before somewhere, using oil, coal or uranium. So, what do we need in raw materials and in energy to create a liter of this new gasoline?
  - DennisP 16y ago
    Use breeder reactors and we'll have all the energy we need. Breeders with integral fuel cycles have little proliferation risk, fairly short-lived nuclear waste in small quantities, and extremely good passive safety. They can be fueled by the waste from light-water plants, and there's enough of that sitting around to last us a couple centuries. We had one working in the 90s and Clinton shut it down. (Source: Prescription for the Planet by Tom Blees)
    - protomyth 16y ago
      I thought some legislation passed under Carter made breeder reactors illegal in the USA.
      - DennisP 16y ago
        The one we had working was at the Argonne national laboratory. Perhaps you're correct about that law, but it didn't apply to government research programs.
- noonespecial 16y ago
  I definitely got the feeling its another of those pie-in-the-sky research projects we hear about and wonder a decade later what ever became of them. Sure the gas could cost a dollar-fifty but its $500/oz right now and it assumes limitless free hydrogen to encapsulate in our nano-thingees. But hey it could happen right? Forgive me my cynical skepticism, but call me when its at the gas pump.
  - Swannie 16y ago
    Hmm, I'm not so cynical. The research has been done by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These guys are just down the road from Oxford University. The facility it one of the top research facilities in the UK. That gives these claims some weight. Whilst the price is probably "back of envelope", I'm pretty sure the science is sound.
    - quanticle 16y ago
      The principle might be sound, but I'm skeptical about the yield. Lots of chemical processes work at small scales but fail when they're implemented at full refinery/chemical plant scale. This is doubly true for nanotechnology. They've demonstrated that the process works at small scales. Whether it'll scale sufficiently to work in a refinery is anyone's guess.
- dmlorenzetti 16y ago
  A conventional further objection to using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles is its low (relative to gasoline) energy content per gallon. According to Richard Muller's "Physics for Future Presidents," even in liquid form hydrogen has about 1/3 the energy per volume. Muller also notes that storing liquid hydrogen requires a much stronger, heavier tank than for gasoline. Maybe these "micro-beads" can contain liquid hydrogen, given the researchers' claim they can use their fuel in an unmodified car. In that case, look for 1/3 the range. If instead their microbeads contain compressed hydrogen gas, Muller estimates a car could go in the neighborhood of 10-50 miles between fill-ups.
- vhackish 16y ago
  Also I'm curious what it is made from - the atoms have to come from somewhere, right?
wcoenen 16y ago
The $1.50/gallon claim doesn't appear in their own press release. They are just announcing their own launch. http://www.cellaenergy.com/uploads/press/Filling%20up%20with%20hydrogen%20now%20a%20real%20possibility.pdf http://www.cellaenergy.com/uploads/press/Filling%20up%20with...
- VBprogrammer 16y ago
  Nor, worryingly, does the claim that it can be used in existing engines.
  - Someone 16y ago
    Well, gasoline is gasoline… Oops, they aren't claiming it is gasoline, either. This is a nice example of how popular journalism works, though. 'it is sort-of liquid and it burns fairly cleanly' is sufficient to gets a press that forgets to discuss: - where to get the energy from to make the stuff. - what we will do with whatever is left over after burning the hydrogen in these hydrides (If I google 'hydride' I get the strong impression they aren't made from pure hydrogen atoms.) - whether that other stuff is rare or abundant, cheap or expensive.
  - Swannie 16y ago
    Infact the vague implication is that it can be used where existing vehicles are running on compressed hydrogen.
iwwr 16y ago
Where does the energy come from? Is it just a more efficient fuel package (or additive)?
- gvb 16y ago
  It looks to me like it is a more efficient/convenient fuel tank. The article says "our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline." It also says "micro-beads". That implies they have a new metal hydride material/manufacturing processes that stores hydrogen. IC engines can burn hydrogen "without modification" (replace the fuel injector-based system with a gaseous carburetor system). Being able to store hydrogen compactly, safely, and efficiently would be a big breakthrough. Having said that, hydrogen is an energy storage method more than an energy source - you have to create hydrogen using some other energy source, e.g. solar, wind, or (currently most commonly) from natural gas (not quite as "green"). Ref: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydride * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
  - Cushman 16y ago
    Gasoline is an energy storage method.
    - iwwr 16y ago
      Gasoline is already stored energy.
terhechte 16y ago
Also, that article is full of redundancies. The phrase "The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme" appears twice. Alas I concur in that it sounds too good to be true.
- ratsbane 16y ago
  Yes. The phrase "at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford" also appears twice in this 256-word article. The large gap between two concepts - "high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying" and "$1.50/gallon gasoline" with no attempt to explain how you might get from one to the other - increases my skepticism.
yason 16y ago
The thing is that the human kind has been feasting the last 150 years on energy that is sort of a compressed accumulation of solar energy from the preceding millions of years. Further, it's been so cheap to dig coal and pump oil that the cost of energy hasn't had the time to really be an issue yet. For any imaginable scale of human history, consider that a one-time opportunity. It has been observed that the global oil peak was apparently reached a few years ago which means that from now on each year will see slightly less oil produced than the previous year. That gives the tangents of monotonically but slowly diminishing supply and monotonically but perhaps not so slowly rising price. Natural gas is running out as well. Known alternatives, such as hydrogen fuels, electric cars, solar energy, nuclear power, are and remain alternatives. They're either energy containers (such as hydrogen) or represent energy production that just doesn't scale to replace the humongous amount of W/h that we've so far been able to extract from oil almost too easily. It's out of the scope of this rant to even start about the countless things made possible by oil, but I think I should mention industrialized mass-production of food which is prevalent in modern countries. Fertilizers and pesticides are mostly made of oil and natural gas. Take away food from people and bad things start happening. That means that the standard of living, for better and worse, is going to radically change in the coming decades. It doesn't take much more than a pike in the price of oil to cause financial and social havoc, such as the one in the 1970's. Maybe we'll get fusion reactors up and running in 2050 but by then I suspect the world has changed already. We should start taking this into slow but very serious consideration instead of wearing blindfolds and waiting for some scientific research centre to hand over to us the alternative energy source that is the silver bullet which allows us to continue living like the way we do now.
- barrkel 16y ago
  This is how capitalism works. As oil's price rises, the expected return to investing in alternatives increases. That's what drives research ultimately, not "blindfolds". If you think oil is running out faster than its price warrants (ie you think serious work on alternatives isn't being done), you're free to buy oil futures, since it seems you think oil doesn't have its future scarcity priced in sufficiently today.
  - 16y ago
ax0n 16y ago
Most ICE's will run on pretty much anything as long as you nail stoichiometry and it burns at approximately the same speed as the hydrocarbon chains found in gasoline. It's actually pretty trivial to retrofit a normal car to run on liquid propane or natural gas. You can even run them directly on hydrogen gas, but pure hydrogen's far too volatile to be dragging around in a passenger vehicle. Interested to see where it's going.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Here is a car running on wood with a woodgas convertor: http://www.langsdemaas.nl/hetvervoer/geefgas1.jpg http://www.langsdemaas.nl/hetvervoer/geefgas1.jpg During the war years and the recovery period immediately afterwards gasoline was so scarce in Europe that this was a fairly common occurrence.
SmokenJoe 16y ago
Creating hydrogen has always been an energy intensive task. It is impractical to make it from electrolysis and is now usually made from natural gas. Burning it may not create carbon but making it usually does. Pure hydrogen will infiltrate most metal making it brittle and cause premature engine failure it is in contact. Hydrogen is not safe long term for engines that have not been redesigned for it. The price is without a reference I doubt any ligitamate company would claim it as it would be trivial to shoot down.
jacquesm 16y ago
There have been so many articles about innovations in the energy sector that went absolutely nowhere in practice but that were announced with great fanfare and media coverage that for me the bar has been raised to the point where I'll literally believe it when I can buy it and not a day before. Solar cells with fantastic properties and prices, windmills that produce more power than there is in the wind using configurations that have been tried long ago and discarded for very good reasons, magical conversion processes taking 'ordinary household substances' (to lift a phrase from FightClub) and turning them in to gasoline at lower-than-current-pump prices and on and on. Cars can be made to run on just about anything, almost anything containing carbon can be converted in to petroleum and by extension to its derivatives. That does not mean the process is either efficient, cheap, non-polluting, safe or even feasible in bulk. These announcements happen with a frequency of about one per month (what was one of the hypes last year again? Solar Cells from human hair ???) never to be heard from again. You can safely put this right next to the 'cure for cancer', 'a cure for aids', 'free unlimited energy' and a whole bunch of other things that humanity would very much like to have. If it's really that good and applicable it'll be on the shelves and someone will be raking in money hand over fist, they won't be talking about, they'll be selling it.
- reader5000 16y ago
  On the one hand this is a good thing because it indicates a growing mass awareness of the urgency of the situation. On the other hand humanity can't help but respond to urgency with a generous helping of charlatanism so yes I suspect this trend will only grow.
- stonemetal 16y ago
  I think my favorite technology that never was is the sunflower. It was a sterling engine with mirrors for solar concentration.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I spent some time improving on that concept using a stationary receiver: http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/concentrator/ http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/concentrator/ One of the most fun projects I did back in those days. I still have the Stirling engine :) (a tiny one, store bought) I thought that having the Stirling engines on a mobile parabolic mount was a design weakness and figured out a way to do it better.
cubicle67 16y ago
Hey, have you guys seen the Jaguar C-X75? It's only a concept car, but it's a (apparently) fully functional one. http://www.caradvice.com.au/96384/jaguar-c-x75-preview/ http://www.caradvice.com.au/96384/jaguar-c-x75-preview/ It's all electric (581kW (780hp) and 1600Nm) but can charge via twin turbines - yes, of the jet engine variety! Ove advantage of them is that (again, apparently) they can run on just about any fuel out there; it it burns they'll run on it. Normally Jaguar isn't really my thing, but this, well, this is different :)
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I'd hate to stand behind that thing at a traffic light (though I'd love to sit in it ;)), unless they bring down the EGT somehow that's going to be decidedly unsafe. That's one slick car! But I'd like to see a more consumer oriented prototype aimed at the mainstream market along the same principles. The Jaguar / Land Rover companies are actually a subsidiary of Tata, an Indian company.
- omarqureshi 16y ago
  except its too expensive to make and will not be hitting mass market anytime soon. Nor were the Top Gear presenters allowed to drive it.
- icegreentea 16y ago
  Whoa that's super cool. Coupling a turbine to electric seems to get around one of the problems of turbines in land vehicles. Basically, fuel efficiency at low speed is atrociousness . It was one of the arguments against the Abrams tank when it first came out, and it's only really through your ridiculously super developed logistics system (really, it's one of the shining examples of what the US Military can do super well) that you can keep your tanks running at will.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    The very reason the Abrams uses a turbine is for logistical flexibility. It can burn petrol, diesel, jet fuel or (at a pinch) methanol.
ck2 16y ago
Yet another "5 year plan" http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 16y ago
More information and a link to the research paper here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/cella-energy-hydrogen-fuel-storage-in.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/cella-energy-hydrogen-fuel-...
cagenut 16y ago
Is there any way to see which 57 people voted up this article? Can anyone who did so please explain how it made it past any of their b.s. filters? I read HN for the high quality content its curation system bubbles up, an article like this making it to the front page is a bug in that system.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Hope.
samatman 16y ago
Did some digging around to figure out what's actually going on here; my background as a chemist includes some time working in biofuels. This technology is micron-sized beads of ammonia borane encapsulated in various plastics. So far, they've figured out how to store hydrogen and release it at least modestly safely. They're working on varying the plastics so that they can recharge the beads with hydrogen; so far nothing they can demonstrate. Problems: they can't recharge it, yet, it would be hella toxic if it caught on fire, and you'd have to handle it using powders-handling equipment. They gloss over this, saying it's "like a liquid", but it isn't; in particular powders are vulnerable to static charge, which in the case of metal hydrides wrapped in jellied gasoline is a Bad Thing. That, and it's a hydrogen delivery mechanism, making it a chemical battery, not a fuel per se. One still needs to make the hydrogen. This research, IMHO, is more likely to lead to better batteries than to a replacement internal combustion fuel for gasoline engines.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  I think better batteries are more important than car fuel (especially since we already have cars that run on batteries).
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Could you let me know if I'm thinking about this correctly? My understanding is that... 1. Most battery technologies use hydrogen as the fundamental energy storer. The low energy state is Xx H_N, where Xx is some vehicle molecule, and the high energy state is Xx H_(N-n) + n H. Energy is stored in the battery by converting from the former to the latter, and it is released by doing the opposite. 2. One of the primary challenges of making a feasible battery is that the n hydrogen molecules form into hydrogen gas, which is bulky. To fit the hydrogen into a reasonable volume, it must be either compressed to very high temperature, cooled to very low temperature, or attached to a carrier molecule. 3. This technology seeks to solve the problem by putting the hydrogen in molecules of ammonia borane, H_3 N B H_3. Is any of that right? What is the purpose of the plastic encapsulation?
  - samatman 16y ago
Swannie 16y ago
A more technical look at the subject: http://www.ongreen.com/news/stfc-rutherford-appleton-lab-spin-seeking-develop-and-commercialize-novel-solid-state-hydrogen- http://www.ongreen.com/news/stfc-rutherford-appleton-lab-spi... If you have access to academic journals (university accounts etc.) then the paper can be found here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp107871v http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp107871v
schwit 16y ago
Ranks right up there with zero-point-energy on the believability scale.

89 points by binarymax 16y ago

This is too good to not think that it has drawbacks or serious concessions required. But the fact that its applicable to existing internal combustion engine makes it more feasible than electric powered vehicles.

BoppreH 16y ago

Three important questions remain unanswered: 1) How expensive is the equipment to produce this synthetic gasoline? 2) How pollutant is the process? 3) What is the energy yield compared to the oil-based gasoline?

pqs 16y ago
Also, how much energy we need to create this new gasoline. Do we need to burn petrol to obtaine energy to make it? At the end, the article compares this gasoline with electricity, meaning that electric cars don't polute when consuming energy, but this energy must be created before somewhere, using oil, coal or uranium. So, what do we need in raw materials and in energy to create a liter of this new gasoline?
- DennisP 16y ago
  Use breeder reactors and we'll have all the energy we need. Breeders with integral fuel cycles have little proliferation risk, fairly short-lived nuclear waste in small quantities, and extremely good passive safety. They can be fueled by the waste from light-water plants, and there's enough of that sitting around to last us a couple centuries. We had one working in the 90s and Clinton shut it down. (Source: Prescription for the Planet by Tom Blees)
  - protomyth 16y ago
    I thought some legislation passed under Carter made breeder reactors illegal in the USA.
    - DennisP 16y ago
      The one we had working was at the Argonne national laboratory. Perhaps you're correct about that law, but it didn't apply to government research programs.
noonespecial 16y ago
I definitely got the feeling its another of those pie-in-the-sky research projects we hear about and wonder a decade later what ever became of them. Sure the gas could cost a dollar-fifty but its $500/oz right now and it assumes limitless free hydrogen to encapsulate in our nano-thingees. But hey it could happen right? Forgive me my cynical skepticism, but call me when its at the gas pump.
- Swannie 16y ago
  Hmm, I'm not so cynical. The research has been done by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These guys are just down the road from Oxford University. The facility it one of the top research facilities in the UK. That gives these claims some weight. Whilst the price is probably "back of envelope", I'm pretty sure the science is sound.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    The principle might be sound, but I'm skeptical about the yield. Lots of chemical processes work at small scales but fail when they're implemented at full refinery/chemical plant scale. This is doubly true for nanotechnology. They've demonstrated that the process works at small scales. Whether it'll scale sufficiently to work in a refinery is anyone's guess.
dmlorenzetti 16y ago
A conventional further objection to using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles is its low (relative to gasoline) energy content per gallon. According to Richard Muller's "Physics for Future Presidents," even in liquid form hydrogen has about 1/3 the energy per volume. Muller also notes that storing liquid hydrogen requires a much stronger, heavier tank than for gasoline. Maybe these "micro-beads" can contain liquid hydrogen, given the researchers' claim they can use their fuel in an unmodified car. In that case, look for 1/3 the range. If instead their microbeads contain compressed hydrogen gas, Muller estimates a car could go in the neighborhood of 10-50 miles between fill-ups.
vhackish 16y ago
Also I'm curious what it is made from - the atoms have to come from somewhere, right?

wcoenen 16y ago

The $1.50/gallon claim doesn't appear in their own press release. They are just announcing their own launch. http://www.cellaenergy.com/uploads/press/Filling%20up%20with%20hydrogen%20now%20a%20real%20possibility.pdf http://www.cellaenergy.com/uploads/press/Filling%20up%20with...

VBprogrammer 16y ago
Nor, worryingly, does the claim that it can be used in existing engines.
- Someone 16y ago
  Well, gasoline is gasoline… Oops, they aren't claiming it is gasoline, either. This is a nice example of how popular journalism works, though. 'it is sort-of liquid and it burns fairly cleanly' is sufficient to gets a press that forgets to discuss: - where to get the energy from to make the stuff. - what we will do with whatever is left over after burning the hydrogen in these hydrides (If I google 'hydride' I get the strong impression they aren't made from pure hydrogen atoms.) - whether that other stuff is rare or abundant, cheap or expensive.
- Swannie 16y ago
  Infact the vague implication is that it can be used where existing vehicles are running on compressed hydrogen.

iwwr 16y ago

Where does the energy come from? Is it just a more efficient fuel package (or additive)?

gvb 16y ago
It looks to me like it is a more efficient/convenient fuel tank. The article says "our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline." It also says "micro-beads". That implies they have a new metal hydride material/manufacturing processes that stores hydrogen. IC engines can burn hydrogen "without modification" (replace the fuel injector-based system with a gaseous carburetor system). Being able to store hydrogen compactly, safely, and efficiently would be a big breakthrough. Having said that, hydrogen is an energy storage method more than an energy source - you have to create hydrogen using some other energy source, e.g. solar, wind, or (currently most commonly) from natural gas (not quite as "green"). Ref: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydride * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
- Cushman 16y ago
  Gasoline is an energy storage method.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    Gasoline is already stored energy.

terhechte 16y ago

Also, that article is full of redundancies. The phrase "The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme" appears twice. Alas I concur in that it sounds too good to be true.

ratsbane 16y ago
Yes. The phrase "at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford" also appears twice in this 256-word article. The large gap between two concepts - "high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying" and "$1.50/gallon gasoline" with no attempt to explain how you might get from one to the other - increases my skepticism.

yason 16y ago

The thing is that the human kind has been feasting the last 150 years on energy that is sort of a compressed accumulation of solar energy from the preceding millions of years. Further, it's been so cheap to dig coal and pump oil that the cost of energy hasn't had the time to really be an issue yet. For any imaginable scale of human history, consider that a one-time opportunity. It has been observed that the global oil peak was apparently reached a few years ago which means that from now on each year will see slightly less oil produced than the previous year. That gives the tangents of monotonically but slowly diminishing supply and monotonically but perhaps not so slowly rising price. Natural gas is running out as well. Known alternatives, such as hydrogen fuels, electric cars, solar energy, nuclear power, are and remain alternatives. They're either energy containers (such as hydrogen) or represent energy production that just doesn't scale to replace the humongous amount of W/h that we've so far been able to extract from oil almost too easily. It's out of the scope of this rant to even start about the countless things made possible by oil, but I think I should mention industrialized mass-production of food which is prevalent in modern countries. Fertilizers and pesticides are mostly made of oil and natural gas. Take away food from people and bad things start happening. That means that the standard of living, for better and worse, is going to radically change in the coming decades. It doesn't take much more than a pike in the price of oil to cause financial and social havoc, such as the one in the 1970's. Maybe we'll get fusion reactors up and running in 2050 but by then I suspect the world has changed already. We should start taking this into slow but very serious consideration instead of wearing blindfolds and waiting for some scientific research centre to hand over to us the alternative energy source that is the silver bullet which allows us to continue living like the way we do now.

barrkel 16y ago
This is how capitalism works. As oil's price rises, the expected return to investing in alternatives increases. That's what drives research ultimately, not "blindfolds". If you think oil is running out faster than its price warrants (ie you think serious work on alternatives isn't being done), you're free to buy oil futures, since it seems you think oil doesn't have its future scarcity priced in sufficiently today.
- 16y ago

ax0n 16y ago

Most ICE's will run on pretty much anything as long as you nail stoichiometry and it burns at approximately the same speed as the hydrocarbon chains found in gasoline. It's actually pretty trivial to retrofit a normal car to run on liquid propane or natural gas. You can even run them directly on hydrogen gas, but pure hydrogen's far too volatile to be dragging around in a passenger vehicle. Interested to see where it's going.

jacquesm 16y ago
Here is a car running on wood with a woodgas convertor: http://www.langsdemaas.nl/hetvervoer/geefgas1.jpg http://www.langsdemaas.nl/hetvervoer/geefgas1.jpg During the war years and the recovery period immediately afterwards gasoline was so scarce in Europe that this was a fairly common occurrence.

SmokenJoe 16y ago

Creating hydrogen has always been an energy intensive task. It is impractical to make it from electrolysis and is now usually made from natural gas. Burning it may not create carbon but making it usually does. Pure hydrogen will infiltrate most metal making it brittle and cause premature engine failure it is in contact. Hydrogen is not safe long term for engines that have not been redesigned for it. The price is without a reference I doubt any ligitamate company would claim it as it would be trivial to shoot down.

jacquesm 16y ago

There have been so many articles about innovations in the energy sector that went absolutely nowhere in practice but that were announced with great fanfare and media coverage that for me the bar has been raised to the point where I'll literally believe it when I can buy it and not a day before. Solar cells with fantastic properties and prices, windmills that produce more power than there is in the wind using configurations that have been tried long ago and discarded for very good reasons, magical conversion processes taking 'ordinary household substances' (to lift a phrase from FightClub) and turning them in to gasoline at lower-than-current-pump prices and on and on. Cars can be made to run on just about anything, almost anything containing carbon can be converted in to petroleum and by extension to its derivatives. That does not mean the process is either efficient, cheap, non-polluting, safe or even feasible in bulk. These announcements happen with a frequency of about one per month (what was one of the hypes last year again? Solar Cells from human hair ???) never to be heard from again. You can safely put this right next to the 'cure for cancer', 'a cure for aids', 'free unlimited energy' and a whole bunch of other things that humanity would very much like to have. If it's really that good and applicable it'll be on the shelves and someone will be raking in money hand over fist, they won't be talking about, they'll be selling it.

reader5000 16y ago
On the one hand this is a good thing because it indicates a growing mass awareness of the urgency of the situation. On the other hand humanity can't help but respond to urgency with a generous helping of charlatanism so yes I suspect this trend will only grow.
stonemetal 16y ago
I think my favorite technology that never was is the sunflower. It was a sterling engine with mirrors for solar concentration.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I spent some time improving on that concept using a stationary receiver: http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/concentrator/ http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/concentrator/ One of the most fun projects I did back in those days. I still have the Stirling engine :) (a tiny one, store bought) I thought that having the Stirling engines on a mobile parabolic mount was a design weakness and figured out a way to do it better.

cubicle67 16y ago

Hey, have you guys seen the Jaguar C-X75? It's only a concept car, but it's a (apparently) fully functional one. http://www.caradvice.com.au/96384/jaguar-c-x75-preview/ http://www.caradvice.com.au/96384/jaguar-c-x75-preview/ It's all electric (581kW (780hp) and 1600Nm) but can charge via twin turbines - yes, of the jet engine variety! Ove advantage of them is that (again, apparently) they can run on just about any fuel out there; it it burns they'll run on it. Normally Jaguar isn't really my thing, but this, well, this is different :)

jacquesm 16y ago
I'd hate to stand behind that thing at a traffic light (though I'd love to sit in it ;)), unless they bring down the EGT somehow that's going to be decidedly unsafe. That's one slick car! But I'd like to see a more consumer oriented prototype aimed at the mainstream market along the same principles. The Jaguar / Land Rover companies are actually a subsidiary of Tata, an Indian company.
omarqureshi 16y ago
except its too expensive to make and will not be hitting mass market anytime soon. Nor were the Top Gear presenters allowed to drive it.
icegreentea 16y ago
Whoa that's super cool. Coupling a turbine to electric seems to get around one of the problems of turbines in land vehicles. Basically, fuel efficiency at low speed is atrociousness . It was one of the arguments against the Abrams tank when it first came out, and it's only really through your ridiculously super developed logistics system (really, it's one of the shining examples of what the US Military can do super well) that you can keep your tanks running at will.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  The very reason the Abrams uses a turbine is for logistical flexibility. It can burn petrol, diesel, jet fuel or (at a pinch) methanol.

ck2 16y ago

Yet another "5 year plan" http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

DennisP 16y ago

More information and a link to the research paper here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/cella-energy-hydrogen-fuel-storage-in.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/cella-energy-hydrogen-fuel-...

cagenut 16y ago

Is there any way to see which 57 people voted up this article? Can anyone who did so please explain how it made it past any of their b.s. filters? I read HN for the high quality content its curation system bubbles up, an article like this making it to the front page is a bug in that system.

jacquesm 16y ago
Hope.

samatman 16y ago

Did some digging around to figure out what's actually going on here; my background as a chemist includes some time working in biofuels. This technology is micron-sized beads of ammonia borane encapsulated in various plastics. So far, they've figured out how to store hydrogen and release it at least modestly safely. They're working on varying the plastics so that they can recharge the beads with hydrogen; so far nothing they can demonstrate. Problems: they can't recharge it, yet, it would be hella toxic if it caught on fire, and you'd have to handle it using powders-handling equipment. They gloss over this, saying it's "like a liquid", but it isn't; in particular powders are vulnerable to static charge, which in the case of metal hydrides wrapped in jellied gasoline is a Bad Thing. That, and it's a hydrogen delivery mechanism, making it a chemical battery, not a fuel per se. One still needs to make the hydrogen. This research, IMHO, is more likely to lead to better batteries than to a replacement internal combustion fuel for gasoline engines.

StavrosK 16y ago
I think better batteries are more important than car fuel (especially since we already have cars that run on batteries).
jessriedel 16y ago
Could you let me know if I'm thinking about this correctly? My understanding is that... 1. Most battery technologies use hydrogen as the fundamental energy storer. The low energy state is Xx H_N, where Xx is some vehicle molecule, and the high energy state is Xx H_(N-n) + n H. Energy is stored in the battery by converting from the former to the latter, and it is released by doing the opposite. 2. One of the primary challenges of making a feasible battery is that the n hydrogen molecules form into hydrogen gas, which is bulky. To fit the hydrogen into a reasonable volume, it must be either compressed to very high temperature, cooled to very low temperature, or attached to a carrier molecule. 3. This technology seeks to solve the problem by putting the hydrogen in molecules of ammonia borane, H_3 N B H_3. Is any of that right? What is the purpose of the plastic encapsulation?
- samatman 16y ago

Swannie 16y ago

A more technical look at the subject: http://www.ongreen.com/news/stfc-rutherford-appleton-lab-spin-seeking-develop-and-commercialize-novel-solid-state-hydrogen- http://www.ongreen.com/news/stfc-rutherford-appleton-lab-spi... If you have access to academic journals (university accounts etc.) then the paper can be found here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp107871v http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp107871v

schwit 16y ago

Ranks right up there with zero-point-energy on the believability scale.