Andy - I'm very glad to hear you are interested. Herewith some factors to consider.
Andy Hunt wrote:Bill -
Have you seen this?
http://www.hydrogensolar.com/
Direct solar electrolysis. Put a panel on your garage roof, when you need to refuel the hydrogen is there for you.
Sadly this company don't provide various information - such as the cost of Hydrogen vehicles, support infrastructure, gas-feedstock for hydrogen to justify building factories to make the cars, etc. Nor do they give a credible account of road-miles /yr provided. Nor do they explain how these various costs will be met by wanna-be car owners in the IIIW.
Personally, I think that if we solve the 'food miles' problem - i.e. grow all food either in back gardens or as close to those who need feeding as possible - and eliminate air tourism, we will have solved the major part of the transport fuel problem.
The problem here is that to do its share of emissions cuts, (without which we've no hope of other I, II, or IIIW countries doing so) the UK needs to cut by around 80%. Food miles and air tourism are a rather small fraction of the liquid fuel fraction of that 80%.
Of course there is also the potential for using battery-powered vehicles for short local journeys, which again would avoid the need for liquid transport fuels. As long as you had an electric motor and wiring etc, you could build the rest of the vehicle out of wood, if necessary! You would of course need to generate the electricity somehow, but that might actually be easier than finding liquid fuels.
The first problem here is that power generation is the largest sector of GHG emissions. The prospect of expanding power generation for transport is thus a retrograde step.
The second problem is about energy grade. Converting fuels or kinetic energy up to electricity costs the highest fraction of entropic energy losses en route. To then accept more losses in transmitting it, more in putting it into a battery, and still more in getting it out of a battery, makes this option highly undesireable in efficiency terms. In addition there are the problems of global infrastructure and vehicle manufacture for this option to play any significant global role.
If you are viewing power-supply as being effectively unconstrained via nuclear proliferation, then we differ fundamentally - but if so we'd better take that to another thread.
With regard to wooden battery cars I can tell you as a wheelwright and vehicle builder that while my grandfather was building wooden lorry-framing in Bristol in the '20s, a great deal of factory-made metal also went into them.
Is there any way of recycling plastics into liquid transport fuel? There must be enough waste plastic in the world to keep us going for a while!
I think the fraction of plastic you'd need to burn to provide energy for the re-processing plant and for mining and sorting through the stinking garbage pits, would probably be item 17 on the list of why this is a non-starter as a future liquid fuel supply.
Certainly Coppice Methanol is far from the only solution - Offshore Wave Energy alone has at least as large a potential energy yield for the UK, and a similarly massive export potential around the world.
Should sustainable electricity capacity one day exceed future base-load demand,
its off-peak provision to Methanol refineries for hydrogen production would seem sensible,
in that wood contains roughly half the hydrogen it needs to convert all of its carbon into Methanol. (CH3OH).
In this sense Methanol is just the nearest we have to an ideal large scale liquid energy carrier.
regards,
Bill
