There's a better gas than hydrogen

[jmowreader]

DU is covered up with posts about hydrogen being the "fuel of the future." The only problem is, it isn't.

As has been extensively discussed here, there are two basic ways to make hydrogen. One is to pull it from water by electrolysis--requiring more power to perform the separation operation than you'll ever get by burning the hydrogen. The other is steam reformation of natural gas--which not only uses lots of energy, but relies on fossil fuel feedstocks. (You may as well just put the natural gas right in the car as use it to make hydrogen. An engine will run on natural gas. Go behind any Home Depot in America and look at the generator we have in case of a power outage. It's natural gas-powered.)

Plus you've got to deal with a massive, heavy-duty tank. Plus you've got to deal with the product leaking out of every joint in the system. Plus...it just ain't a sustainable process, 'kay?

What we SHOULD be looking at, what we SHOULD be working with, is acetylene.

http://www.afuelsllc.com

Acetylene is a gas with the formula C2H2. It is produced in many processes, but the most interesting one for us is the water reaction method. In a reaction vessel, calcium carbide is mixed with water and acetylene is liberated, leaving behind calcium carbonate dissolved in water. (The calcium carbonate is salable as an industrial chemical.) This process is exothermic--it will boil water to create steam, which you can use for various functions on the car.

So here's what I'm thinking: your acetylene car will carry four tanks. One will contain calcium carbonate, which is moved via auger to the reaction vessel. Two are for water--this process requires a lot of it. And the last will hold the wastewater.

The acetylene will be pumped into a turbocharged ceramic engine--ceramic to handle the 6000-degree heat well-aerated acetylene burns at--for use. As any welder knows, you can only really burn acetylene well in an atmosphere that's seriously rich in oxygen--which is supplied via hose. This is what the turbo is for, to put lots and lots of O2 into the engine. Here's the reaction: two molecules acetylene plus three molecules O2 gives four molecules carbon monoxide plus two molecules water--which is what you're looking for, right? Now for the fun part: if there is enough O2 in the area, the heat of the initial reaction will cause a secondary reaction in which the two molecules of CO will grab a molecule of O2 and create two molecules of CO2. That's right folks, carbon monoxide is itself flammable--and it adds to the energy which will ultimately push your car, with you in it, down the road. Now we use some sort of CO2 absorber to capture the carbon dioxide, and there's no exhaust of greenhouse gases.

Acetylene is the fuel of the future--and the best part is, it's available right now.

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. Water being 8lbs a gallon might make for some very heavy cars

How much water will be carried on board your acetylene car?

[jmowreader]

11. Probably 20-30 gallons

[Jamnt]

2. What about the water shortage?

I presume we can't use seawater...

[Ian David]

5. We could suck the water out of Republicans. n/t

[jmowreader]

12. You probably could use seawater

It would probably fuck up any plans to recover the byproducts for reuse, but the carbide-acetylene conversion should work with seawater, dirty water (as long as you strain out the chunks first) or maybe even sewage.

[BushOut06]

3. There's another way to get hydrogen

http://www.zetatalk.com/energy/tengy14r.htm

<snip>
Researchers have found a metabolic switch in algae that allows the primitive plants to produce hydrogen gas - a discovery that could ultimately result in a vast source of cheap, pollution-free fuel. Hydrogen, which can be used as a clean-burning fuel in cars and power plants, is virtually limitless in availability, because it is part of the water molecule. It is a candidate to become the world's primary fuel in coming decades. But until now, it was obtainable in quantity only through relatively expensive extraction procedures involving the electrolysis of water or processing natural gas.

The breakthrough, by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. Department of Energy, would make possible the commercial production of hydrogen gas by photosynthesis in tanks, ponds or the open ocean. “I guess it's the equivalent of striking oil,” said Tasios Melis, a microbial biology professor at UC Berkeley. “It was enormously exciting. It was unbelievable.” Melis made the discovery with UC Berkeley researcher Liping Zhang and with Michael Seibert, Maria Ghiardi and Marc Forestier of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a Department of Energy project in Golden, Colo. The team's findings appear in this month's issue of Plant Physiology, a science journal.
<snip>

[CATagious]

8. that article is from 2000...

it sounds like an exciting breakthru, but given the date of the article, I'm guessing nothing has come from it.

[BushOut06]

10. I'm guessing research is still being done...

While googling for this info, I came across several articles about this, some more recent. Stuff like this isn't going to happen overnight, and it does seem promising. If this does pan out, it would indeed be a very good thing.

[CATagious]

13. cool! here's an article from this year...

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70273-0.html?tw=rss.index

[madokie]

4. I read about a gentleman who powered his auto by acetylene

with the engine modified for acetylene use and he was very impressed with it. I wish I had a link but it was a few years ago when I read it, probably read it in popular science or popular mechanic though.

[karlrschneider]

7. Wasn't it essentially a steam car? I vaguely recall something like

that.

[madokie]

9. I am afraid I am going to bruise this brain but I think the one I was

thinking was a modified auto engine. Compression ratio was the big mod best I can remember. but hey I might not be remembering right though.

[jmowreader]

14. The link at the top is for a company whose intent is industrial

Specifically, power generation engines, but they're working on doing cars too.

They have modified:

a 9-hp diesel engine
an 8-hp gasoline engine
their forklift (the one in question is a 3500-lb Toyotalift containing a 2.2-liter engine)
a 275-hp GM Vortec 4.2-liter inline 6
a 100-hp Allis-Chalmers diesel that's 50 years old
a 2000 Saturn LS with a 1.9-liter engine
an 11-hp two-seater hybrid car

They're getting the burn to a rational temperature range by running 85 percent acetylene and 15 percent ethanol--there's a bank of acetylene injectors and a separate bank of ethanol injectors. The Saturn is showing exhaust gas temps of 650 to 1100 degrees F--650 is COLD, man, gasoline's exhaust temps are around 1100 degrees F.

They also claim the equivalent of 55mpg fuel economy on the Saturn. A normal Saturn gets what, 27mpg?

They're making life easy on themselves: they seem to be just going to the welding shop and buying acetylene in 225-cf tanks.

Come to think of it...there's an even better gas than acetylene for running cars on. It's called MAPP--methylacetylene propadiene. According to a welding book I've got, one 70-lb container of MAPP gas is equivalent to six and a half 225-cf acetylene tanks, and it's a lot easier to handle than acetylene is. It won't detonate if you leave the cylinder lying on its side for too long, for one thing, and acetylene's been known to. Unfortunately, that "propadiene" suggests it's a petroleum product, but maybe they could pull propadiene out of coal somehow.

[karlrschneider]

6. Well, CaC2 is expensive and acetylene stinks to high heaven.

I doubt a turbo will provide enough oxygen to produce anything near stochiometric so there likely would be a soot problem and then the combustion temps are so high and the reaction is so fast, it would be hard for any sort of piston-driven engine to deal with them (mechanically, that is, the ceramic composition might handle the heat but there's still the problem of the expansive medium that could
utilize it)

Maybe there are workarounds but I wouldn't invest in it...not now anyhow.

[formercia]

18. and it has an octane rating around 2 or so.

Ever make a Carbide cannon?

[karlrschneider]

21. Yep, and also have had to pee in a miner's lamp more than once.

(true!)
:D

[alfredo]

23. Maybe a rotary engine like the Wankel would work.

[BrotherBuzz]

15. I'm hedging my bet and holding out for the flux capacitor

I'm collecting jigowatts now, and see garbage becoming a valuable commodity in the future.

:hide:

[longship]

16. There's a really bad problem with both methane and acetylene.

Both generate greenhouse gases. Both are hydrocarbons with finite resources. If one has to make a device to absorb C02, why don't you just do the same with the gasoline engine?

Our energy futures have to be based on solar, geothermal, and other natural sources, not burning things. Electrical vehicles are the only future which accomplishes this. We have the technology now. Hybrids with small gas engines, first, then full electrical.

[Cruzan]

17. "Now we use some sort of CO2 absorber to capture the carbon dioxide"

You do realize that if just that alone was done on a commercial or industrial scale it'd solve a huge portion of the greenhouse gas problem?

[hunter]

19. Dimethyl ether (DME) is better than that.

It's a bottled gas like propane, and it works well in diesel engines.

It can be economically synthesized using a wide variety of energy sources.

Currently it is most commonly used as a propellant for things like hair spray.

http://www.vs.ag/ida/index_dmefact.htm

[MadHound]

20. Rather than converting to a fuel that we have no real clue

As to whether or not it will work in the real world, rather than switching to another finite fuel, rather let us switch to something than we can implement now, with little change to our vehicles or the fuel infrastructure. Let us switch to something that is cheap, clean, and renewable.

And that would be biodiesel.

Diesel engines are ready to run on the stuff. It is easy and cheap make, and by using algae derived biodiesel, we can supply all of our fuel needs without having to use one acre of cropland.

Biodiesel is an off the shelf technology that can power this country, it is high timed that we switched to using it.

[hunter]

22. There are many reasonable solutions...

The root problem is that the Dick Cheney's of this world aren't done making money from war and oil yet.

Biodiesel is a good idea, but we use so much diesel there isn't enough arable land to replace it all with biodiesel.

Some other reasonable ideas, in no particular order, are:

• decreasing truck traffic by increasing rail capacity
  
• electrifying rail lines
  
• replacing short hop passenger flights with high speed rail direct to urban centers
  
• "plug in" hybrid electric cars
  
• increasing passenger and truck mileage standards (no more hungry vanity SUV's)
  
• biomass to ethanol (probably not corn-to-ethanol in the long term)
  
• encouraging urban rather than suburban development
  
• increasing the density of existing suburbs
  

etc., etc.