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Monday, December 25, 2006
http://www.inblogs.net/dickmcdonald/

Global Warming and Hydrogen Fueled Cars - Both Huge Cons

Dick McDonald

The left in America has created straw man issues out of whole cloth. Global warming is pure poppycock. The Hydrogen fuel car is a similar fiction. Below I sent out a e-mail asking everyone to review a YouTube video on a new hydrogen fueled car. It was most impressive.
http://www.youtube.com/v/ry6w3mRm-FM

Knowing full well that there are serious problems with such systems I asked two experts about the video. This is what I got.

Dick:

I watched the BBC clip and read the comments.

First of all, Mr. Kraft is essentially correct. However the BBC clip conveniently ignores some facts. Fuel cells require platinum to operate. Guess what happens when you buy larger and larger pounds of platinum; the price goes up and up. Second, the fuel cell requires about seven times the volume of air (at sea level) as hydrogen to function; I saw no place in the clip for a blower in the car to push air through the cell. With the present art of video graphics, anything can be made to look real.

This whole fuel anomaly presently is a scam whereby enterprising scientists and promoters have found a way to relieve the politicians of more pork.

Dan

Richard A McDonald wrote:
Dan –your thoughts on these two pieces?

From: rskraft [mailto:rskraft@vfr.net]
Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2006 1:48 PM
To: Richard A McDonald
Cc: JoanSharon@aol.com; Ray Kraft
Subject: Re: Arab oil... soon to be irrelevant! Questions - EIR?

Great pics!

Two big technical hurdles ahead -

1. Bringing the cost of making a fuel cell down by 90%-95% - the current cost of manufacturing an H fuel cell is in the range of 10 to 20 times that of a gasoline engine -

2. Producing all that H and developing the infrastructure to deliver it - I don't see how we can do it without getting behind nuclear power in a BIG BIG WAY - since we have to replace something like 1 billion gallons of oil per day - (20 mil barrels now, plus growth, at 42 gals per bbl) - which means we have to produce the energy equivalent of 1 billion bbls of hydrogen per day! - yes, it can be extracted from sea water, but it takes more energy to do the hydrolisis than can be regained from burning H in a combustion engnie or fuel cel - plus energy to compress it, and transport it all over the country - so we probably have to produce something like TWICE as much energy to produce 40,000 btu of hydrogen (equal to one gallon of gasoline) as we get out of it - 80,000 btu of energy to put 40,000 btu in your tank -

3. It could be done with solar / steam matrix power stations (not photovoltaic) but DOE estimates it would take a solar grid equal to about 1/4 the size of NEVADA to produce that much electricity! - it'll take awhile to build . . .

4. I haven't seen ANYBODY even mention an "Environmental Impact Report" for H - we would be pumping 1 billion gallons (more or less) of new moisture into the atmosphere, 8 billion pounds, every day . . . . 4 billion gallons, 32 billion pounds, if the whole world went to H -

Multiply by 365 days a year - and water vapor is the single most important greenhouse gas! - so, will H cars cause accelerated global warming?

Or will all that moisture freeze out in northern and southern latitudes, and trigger the next great Ice Age?

I haven't seen ANYBODY tackle this - and all that moisture could very quickly change the climate dramatically esp. in downwind plumes from large cities, more thunderstorms, more rainfall, more snow . . . more ice . . .

Ray Kraft

Neat looking little car, but since I have no audio here at work, I don't know what they were saying..........

Here's some technical info on the Hy-wire.......

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.autointell.com/nao_companies/general_motors/concepts-2003/gm_hy_wire/gm-hy-wire-front-300-230.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.autointell.com/nao_companies/general_motors/concepts-2003/gm_hy_wire/gm-hy-wire-02.htm&h=229&w=300&sz=62&tbnid=lM9arSSM2LkxVM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhy-wire&start=2&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=2