drive on what you drink?

[nihilus]

CNN has an article on the future of ethanol use for carsOne of the complaints about hydrogen, that we'd have to completely rebuild our distribution and manufacturing infrastructure, is to me a benefit on the manufacturing side. I think to a large extent we're limiting our automotive technologies because (reasonably) we have a vast infrastructure

Comments

[meico]

Good points, but even if we fully converted to ethanol we would still have horrible pollution problems...

Really the best thing to do is just ditch the old distribution network- it can be easily replaced by electical power distribution if we use electric vehicles. While there are severe innefficiencies with electrical power distribution they make the petrol distibution network look like the pig it is.

Electric powered vehicles are the only option which fully frees us from being hooked on oil. It allows us to continue to use oil based powerplants to generate the initial energy for our transportation infrastructure in the short term while freeing us to use whatever new and more friendly power generation systems come online such as solar, wind, fusion, etc., but also including ethanol too.

[nihilus]

Yeah, I was thinking things similar to this but in terms of hydrogen and distributed grid style setups. So you have hydrogen as the power storage and you have diverse ways to generate hydrogen with different tradeoffs. Particularly I'm pondering whether you can get hydrogen generation systems small enough that people could have them in their house/apartment, and efficient enough that they become the major source of the person's car fuel. Then gas stations become more a road trip/emergency issue than common use like today. Additionally, the hydrogen generators might be multi-input, so if solar is available it uses solar and if necessary it draws from the grid.

Of course, there's always problems relying on non-existant technology :)

Ethanol still pollutes, but it has less of a greenhouse impact at least. Like you said, hydrogen or electric is better all around ecologically though.