Paul,
Hydrazine is nasty stuff. We use it on the Space Shuttle to fuel the APUs for hydraulic powers and it is one of the safety hazards that must be carefully managed and controlled due to its nasty corrosive chemical properties. It can easily damage your electrical wire insulations and even your health...... So as you said, additives must be added for safety reasons if massive use of hydrazine is allowed by general publics for cars and yet we don’t know how expensive or how hazardous the additives can be?
If we could generate electricity for baseload needs regardless from terrestrial or space based solar installations, why need we mess around with any liquid fuels such as hydrazine or methanol etc. for cars? We don’t have to feed the world economy based on the inventions or existing paradigms of the centuries-old “combustion” technologies that our great grand fathers had discovered and inspired us long ago? Can’t we just all plugging our cars into the energy of the Sun? In my humble views, the future cars and transportations should all use electricity directly and directly generated from the energy of our Sun. What could a better “fuel efficiency” or “fuel economies” can beat the efficiency of electrical powers (either thermal, electrical or chemical) directly come form the sun? Yes, the technology isn’t quite there yet today, but if you look into the trend and the steps of solar technology breakthroughs (relative to the government/private R&D funds invested) in the past decade, it’s not all that hard for big automakers to understand that investing in cars capable of plugging into the solar-electrical “fuel” stations anywhere will be the future of their immeasurable profitability, isn’t it?
In short, isn’t it now time for us to start breaking away from our great grand father’s old paradigm of a “combustion world economy” to the forever sustainable “solar-electrical world economy”??!! If the
Historically and retrospectively speaking, our politically system (just a few attributes of our systems) doesn’t seem to support or favor any “revolutionary” changes in all aspects.... Just a simple example: the use of fiber optical based internet popularity grow from nearly zero to explosive proportion in China in just very short time because of their low costs for average citizens, while we Americans have to “innovate” all the way from our old copper-based infrastructure to “dial-ups” to DSL, ADSL to cable and it costs average Americans 3 or more times monthly to get connected with the rest of world. And, of course there is the other example in transportation infrastructures.... So, you get the idea? Often times the raise or fall of a power of individuals or a nation is not entirely depend on whatever the efforts an individual or a nation could be taken, sometimes, it depends almost entirely on fortune or misfortunes given the timing or historical moments/events.... In my views, the rapid raise and domination of the Japanese economy (same was true of our economy) after the atomic disasters (or WW-II) was partially due to rapid sunk of their nation to the bottom of the power/economic status. On the same token, may be the raise of
Best of luck to us all,
Feng
From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [mailto:paul.werbos@verizon.net]
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 11:47 AM
To: BobKrone@aol.com; richard@cgpublishing.com
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Subject: Drilling the Sky -- link to fuel flexibility in cars
The
new cars in 2-4 years, if we really pushed. It's well-established technology.
new cars in about two years, and the
If oil companies supported it, strong motion could start in two months.
**WITH** GEM fuel flexibility and intelligent engine control...
it may not be too hard to use a zero-carbon liquid fuel as well.
I know that GEM flexibility is easy, and how. I do not know how
much extra it would take (if anything), to get to GEMH flexibility --
gasoline, E85, M85 AND HYDRAZINE, if hydrazine should
be the liquid fuel of interest.
Cars have run on hydrazine in
Why hydrazine? As a LIQUID FUEL, it can be stored in the same kind
of gas tank that golds gasoline, E85 or M85 -- though I don't know
whether today's gas tanks in cars are corrosion-resistant enough to do it.
Still, I do know they can handle M85, so hydrazine may fit too.
(If not, I don't know how hard it would be to upgrade the tanks... or whether
there is a comparable fuel.)
UNLIKE hydrogen, hydrazine could probably be moved around in the same kind of
infrastructure that could handle methanol. I have heard a chief economist
of a major oil company say... it would cost at least an order of magnitude more money for them to
move to a hydrogen infrastructure than to a methanol (or flexible) infrastructure.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO US: pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is expensive (and basically
unproven, unless you count biofuels). CO2 from coal plant emissions is messy.
But -- NONCARBON liquid fuels like hydrazine or ammonia DO NOT REQUIRE
a source of carbon. Also, the chemistry of making ammonia, say, in bulk,
is very well known and efficient in mass production.
I do not know what kind of additives would be needed to make hydrazine or ammonia or
other noncarbon liquids as acceptable as gasoline or M85 for use in cars.
There is a lot of unreliable conventional wisdom out there about all these fuels.
(For methanol, I KNOW things are fine, based mainly on the survey review by Roberta
Nichols of Ford posted at www.werbos.com/energy.htm. But ADDITIVES ARE ESSENTIAL --
pure methanol would not be acceptable for the mass market.)
Someone really needs to look into this.
IN SUM... for a company like Exxon, maybe it is time to start thinking about
"the hydrazine economy" as a long-term alternative to "the hydrogen economy."
Using energy from space (or earth-based solar power), it would probably be a lot cheaper and easier to
make stuff like hydrazine than stuff like hydrocarbons!!!!
And it is zero-CO2...
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