Re: Fuel Cells in a Hydrocarbon Economy

quasarstrider wrote:

What does matter: is hydrogen the cheapest way to create usable energy
for
mobile applications or not? If it is, energy loss be damned!

My bets? Oil will last longer than some people give it credit for. Then
we will use
Fischer-Tropsch from coal, bitumen, tar sands, heavy oil, natural gas,
you name it.
I generally agree with you, but as generated fuel I will bet on methanol from coal. I understand that it is cheaper (looks much simpler) to make methanol from coal than Fisher-Tropsch, and methanol looks like much more convenient as energy carrier than hydrogen.
Does anybody has cost comparisons of methanol against Fisher-Tropsch?
Later methanol as fuel for ICE can be replaced by methanol in methanol fuel cells.
Expensive oil means more hybrid vehicles. Which means more batteries
used, which
pushes up battery R&D funds, which ramps up new battery technology.
Batteries in
hybrids progressively get more capacity until the internal combustion
engine is
expensive dead weight. Result: electric vehicles.
You can look in future of batteries in batteries for mobile electronics. here batteries are much more expensive and much more advanced than car batteries (I never heard yet about lithium car batteries), but still methanol fuel calls look very promising as they clearly win over lithium batteries in energy density.

Electricity will come from coal, wind, nuclear, solar, hydro. In no
particular order.
It will depend on local conditions.

Oh, right... The lottery numbers for next week are:
<EOT>

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