Posted by WA-Hal on January 12, 2011 at 01:39:00 from (208.81.157.90):
In Reply to: Re: Steam power . . posted by jdemaris on January 11, 2011 at 06:34:26:
I agree that wood is probably the fall-back fuel that would be used if suddenly fossil fuels were cut off. Trees grow in most places, and there is wood around.
And yes, wood gas can be used to run an internal combustion engine, but doing so has a bunch of negatives. The worst problem, as I understand it, is getting the wood gas clean enough so it doesn't gum up your engine real fast. I have read that this problem sometimes caused the engines to need to be cleaned out manually after only a few hours of operation. Kind of like the creasote problem in wood stove chimneys. Also I wonder how the wood gas users kept the fuel/air mixture adjusted, as I don't think there were any carburetors made to use wood gas. My guess is that trying for any power or efficiency took constant fiddling with the mixture.
Solar space heating doesn't work worth beans in the area where I live. Because during the times of the year that lots of heat is needed, it is usually cloudy here. Solar cell generation of electricity works, but has the same problems with cloudy days. It is also way too expensive now.
I am concerned with just what will happen to individual transportation in this country. We have become accustomed to being able to go places fairly far away and fairly quickly. For most of my life, I have not thought that much about jumping in the car and driving from Spokane to, say Seattle. Doing so has been affordable and easy.
It isn't as affordable as it once was...even driving vehicles that get much better mileage than the ones we drove a couple of decades ago. Technology has made the vehicles of today much more fuel efficient and incredibly cleaner. But they also cost a lot more.
I am interested in electric and hybrid vehicles, although I don't own one--yet. My cousin has a Prius, and is very impressed with what it will do with a given amount of gasoline. But it does run the gasoline engine a good bit of the time and it cost nearly twice what I paid for my last new car.
The pure electric vehicles have the huge disadvantage of fairly limited range before they have to be recharged. If someone lived in town, and never planned to drive more than a 50 mile round trip, I suppose a pure electric might be OK, but that would not work well here in the open spaces of Eastern Washington. We drive too far. As you pointed out, the electricity for a plug in car has to be generated somehow (most of ours comes from hydroelectric dams, not coal burning).
But I am hoping that the automakers will be able to come up with affordable hybrid vehicles that get their over the road power from fuel cells, rather than combustion engines. This country has vast resources of natural gas, which supposedly would work great in fuel cells.
What we need is greater efficiency in using the fuels we have available to us. I think that hybrid vehicles using fuel cells might be one of the ways of achieving that kind of efficiency.
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