Why do we still use gasoline in automobiles?
It's not like alternatives haven't been invented, why are we still sending all our money to Arabs for Oil, when that money could be spend over here in North America? Please enlighten me...
Here is Jack Nicholson in 1978 showing off his hydrogen powered car...yes 1978.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjfONpsFvyM
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M$11 Answers
Hydrogen pumps are not everywhere or easy to find, as gasoline. Auto manufacturers other than BMW are not really advancing much in making hydrogen powered vehicles, and even the BMW Hydrogen 7 Series that was made and was testing is still too expensive for the average consumer.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080328070103.htm
So, basically hydrogen fuel is still more expensive, and much harder to come by than gasoline.
There is a great thread here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/27/0223239&mode=thread
A few other reasons that are my thoughts and facts:
1. Politics and Money
2. It's ubiquitous, easy to find everywhere
3. It costs less for most people
4. Most people have a car that accepts gasoline
5. Electric cars do not work well in the cold
6. It lasts the longest for long trips
Watch the video, there is a possibility to run a car on water and even vegetable oil! See the cars converted to vegetable oil!
See this link:
http://runcaronwater.tk
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M$http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html
The reasons we still use it include cost, energy density, a powerful oil lobby, and existing energy delivery infrastructure, not to mention the cultural inertia that prompts us to buy big, powerful vehicles and eschew public transportation.
Ethanol or other biofuels become problematic because not only can they take more energy to produce than they yield, but they can cause increases in the cost of food (both directly and as a result of increased cost of livestock feed.)
http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm
As for hydrogen, some think it is pretty far from being a commercially viable source. Ballard Power Systems was a leading developer of hydrogen-powered cars, and it sold off its hydrogen division in 2007, which some view as "tacit admission that the hydrogen fuel car, the holy grail Ballard has chased for two and a half decades, is dead." http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=356bed57-656b-4ffd-b3b0-f7f5a96ace29&k=80493
I don't think it is dead, personally, but I do think it is much farther from commercial production than you think.
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M$
Glad to oblige. :) I was actually under the same impression up until about a year ago. And for what it's worth, I hope I am wrong regarding hydrogen. I have really been hoping for faster advancements in the hydrogen cell development. I was also hoping advancements in nanotechnology would lead to some more energy-efficient means of producing hydrogen, but there's no way to predict advances like that.
Canada is so Arabic ;) Thanks for debunking my comment though with a quality link.
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M$
Ha...Touche, if only more followed suit, in fact there is a new member to your club
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/55573/thumbs/s-LEO-large.jpg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/28/leonardo-dicaprios-new-gr_n_153761.html
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M$
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M$Gasoline will be king until the nation's infrastructure can handle the added load of millions of plug in cars, and until battery technology has advanced to the point where the energy density of a battery is greater than that of gasoline.
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M$
Add to that the fact that oil companies want to maintain their business and profit from it. You may notice that oil and energy companies generally aren't suffering as dramatically as companies in other industries. Gasoline has in a way become a staple of modern life, so many people depend on petroleum-based fuels for everything from leisure activities to their daily commute to cooking. As a result oil companies aren't as compelled to strive for alternative energy, since it would cut into their profits.
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M$1. Cheap
2. Widely available
3. Widely adopted
4. Provides high revenues to goverments (by taxation)
5. Has very strong lobbies behind it, that influence goverments
So it´s easy to understand why it is used so much.
But don´t forget we also use even dirtier fossile fuels, like coal, to produce electricity. Coal is also cheap and easy to burn and harvest.
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M$
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M$
If the executive and legislative branches of goverment manage to get together, overcome lobbies and special interests, and have the money and support of the population, then MAYBE it could work. Oh, and it has to be carried over multiple terms of presidency.
It's a massively complex undertaking and very hard to completely predict every repercussion and outcome, both good and bad. And with a country as big and varied as the United States, I think it's a herculean task.
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M$
The thing about availability is, I don't buy it. We could have easily made the switch by passing a law that says, hydrogen cars after so and so date.
Think about how fast gas stations came up after cars were made.
Even if no law was passed, if the demand was there, the gas stations would have popped up with them. They didn't because the demand was there. So the reason is, it's because people the demand wasn't there.
I like to mention a paraphrase from An Inconvenient Truth: The number of articles in a 10% random sample that say global warming is man made is exactly 0. The number of news articles that say it actually might not be man made is over 50%. So people really doubt that there is a reason to go for gas power.
Yet one more thing: No one sees that we are even close to the point where we can't produce gas at the rate we consume it. We actually had the first year where we produced less than the previous year in the past three years, and we did it again this year.
We'll see very different things riding around twenty years from now.