Global Warmists back off on prediction

[xoxoxoBruce]

tw's call for efficiency rings hollow when you look at the efficiency of posts. Now Aussie busses are Bush's fault.

Did someone say there are no magic bullets? Then why would an experiment to run city busses on hydrogen, thereby reducing greenhouse gasses in the city, have to be justified as sufficiently efficient? There's no reason to believe that down the road it can't be made sufficiently efficient.
It's a pilot project to see what hiccups will develop in a practical application. A PR experiment that will help get people thinking there are alternative solutions, not to convince them hydrogen is the answer for them.

Most every home already has natural gas pipes to 'refuel' their car.

"Most every" is actually less than 2/3 have gas service. The ones that do, have this ever scarcer fuel coming in at less than 3 psi. How far do you think your car would go, with the biggest tank you could carry, at 3 psi?

It would have to be compressed... high pressure and low temperature, by the same people that start fires just filling their cars with gasoline. No, best leave that to a filling station attendant that's been trained and tested handling high pressure connections.
Even so, the gas won't last forever so we have to keep plugging at different solutions, use gas for stationary uses, industrial and residential.

Gasoline is wonderful stuff, beyond compare...so far.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Hey, guess what... I know how to eliminate 6 Billion tons of CO2 being added to the air, every year. That's 6,000,000,000 tons... every year.

Over 20 years ago, Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, claimed that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water. Everyone had a good laugh and life went on.

When Michel Barsoum, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, heard Davidovits claim he laughed too. But when he was told nobody ever checked it out, he decided to disprove it with a few hours of electron microscopy.

Egyptian born Barsoum's daily routine consists mainly of teaching students about ceramics, or performing research on a new class of materials, the so-called MAX Phases, that he and his colleagues discovered in the 1990s, so he's no amateur.

"What started as a two-hour project turned into a five-year odyssey that I undertook with one of my graduate students, Adrish Ganguly, and a colleague in France, Gilles Hug," Barsoum says.

At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."

"How energy intensive and/or complicated can a 4,500 year old technology really be? The answer to both questions is not very," Barsoum explains. "The basic raw materials used for this early form of concrete-limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth-can be found virtually anywhere in the world," he adds. "Replicating this method of construction would be cost effective, long lasting, and much more environmentally friendly than the current building material of choice: Portland cement that alone pumps roughly 6 billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere when it's manufactured."

Wow, if we could eliminate Portland cement for everything not poured underwater, what a tremendous energy savings and CO2 reduction.

[The Eschaton]

bruce, i think you have something there....

As to the bus program, i read the slide show from the link, there was not much information there. Basically they said they would see how it works. I support the development of the technology to make cities cleaner but it does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

Current hydrogen and most foreseeable hydrogen production is from natural gas, so of course fossil fuel companies are big on hydrogen.

At the end of the slide they had the cost analysis:

Hydrogen Costs - Today
Ex Refinery: $6/GJ
Delivered (truck): >$20/GJ
Gasoline: $6/GJ)
On-Site Electrolysis: $60/GJ ($0.07/kWhr electricity)

[xoxoxoBruce]

On-Site Electrolysis: $60/GJ

What's that? Making it at the point of sale with power off the grid? And what the hell is GJ?

Clicking on the bus link, I was a little taken back by that slick dog&pony show that BP had made. I was expecting something more along the lines of a typical government/municipal web site. That presentation is clearly not designed to inform, but to sell the concept and pat themselves on the collective back, as one of the good guys.

Well, whatever technology wins, BP will have a jump on the infrastructure.

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

... And what the hell is GJ?...

xoB, a GJ is a gigajoule or 10^9 joule. It's approximately 1 million Btu.

1 J = 1 kg*m^2/s^2

1 Btu = 1055 J