9 Responses to “What kind of alternate fuel do you see us using in future cars ?”

1. whereisbob on July 29th, 2010 11:04 am

   not sure but it WONT be bio fuel: polutes alot, takes up sooo much room to grow them and this isnt viable witha food shortage at the moment hydrogen fuel cells or electricity are best bets at mo

2. Michael A on July 29th, 2010 6:37 pm

   As much as I’d love to see a hydrogen economy, it’d be very difficult to implement on a large scale. There are issues with: production, storage, transportation and so forth.

   I’d expect to see vehicles switching first to hybrids, and then to fully electric vehicles. We already have national grids and such which distribute electricity everywhere, so this makes the most sense. The only difficulties will be to overcome the issues with range and price.

3. MCB on July 31st, 2010 4:02 am

   Cars powered by Soul. (HALLELUJAH)

   Not Sol as in the sun, Soul as in…

4. Headtater on August 1st, 2010 7:50 pm

   Hopefully we will be using a variety of fuels.

   I foresee that you will be able to got to the hydrogen pump, the ethanol pump, the bio diesel pump, or the high-speed battery charger. This will promote competition and decrease the likelihood of energy dependence.

5. juansosapms on August 2nd, 2010 5:18 am

   in the future that i think it is water becuase they already made cars that works with water only that they have to get more water stations for the cars last time i heard they already have 8.

6. Dana1981, Master of Science on August 4th, 2010 4:30 am

   Definitely electric cars. They’re simply the most efficient option, and the only thing keeping us from driving them right now is that the batteries have a limited range, take hours to recharge, and are expensive. All of those problems are in the process of being solved.

   Hydrogen is not a viable option for reasons discussed in the second link below.

7. bestonnet_00 on August 7th, 2010 1:50 pm

   It’s still an open question with electricity, hydrogen and synthetic hydrocarbons the most likely fuel to replace oil dug out of the ground for transportation purposes.

   We still have some work to do on all of them to get them to be viable although they could do all do the job.

   Whatever happens though I’m expecting future cars to tend towards being at the very least hybrids simply due to the superior efficiency possible by having some electric components and energy storage on the car.

   I personally suspect that if converting coal to oil takes off that we’ll just end up transitioning the process to using something other than coal for the energy needed and CO2 from the atmosphere as the carbon feedstock (which would actually result in a system that is carbon neutral, not sure how the timeline would compare with electric or hydrogen conversions).

   Electricity is unlikely to be viable for propelling aircraft (the batteries are just going to be too heavy) so we’re still going to need either hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbons for that purpose even if electricity does win at it’s second chance to become the preferred fuel for cars.

8. ulysses on August 10th, 2010 10:20 pm

   We have to understand that what we’ve been using, petroleum, is essentially several hundred million years’ worth of solar energy we found in a hole in the ground. We’ve used up roughly half of that energy in about 100 years. So that’s like using several million years’ worth of solar energy each year. To think that we are going to replace all of that energy with solar, wind, and biofuel power is absurd. We know that we have no choice but to move away from oil and toward these other methods of capturing what all still amounts to solar power (the sun powers the wind, and the sun grows crops for biofuel. All energy on Earth, except for nuclear power, is ultimately solar generated). I don’t believe it is possible to continue using as much energy as we have been consuming. The single most important element to a sustainable future is conservation. We have to start driving smaller, lighter, more efficient vehicles at lower speeds, less often, and over shorter distances. That’s the only thing that can save us. And it’s the last thing you’ll hear a political candidate talk about.

   Biofuels have their place as a transition fuel, but we need to get away from corn-based ethanol. Biodiesel offers big advantages over ethanol, and we’re starting to see why using food crops for fuel is a bad idea. We need to concentrate on finding crops that can be most efficiently grown in places where they aren’t competing with food crops, and crops that can be most efficiently converted into fuels. Corn is not it. There may be some potential for corn stalks, algae, switchgrass, palm, hemp, and many other things.

   Hydrogen and compressed air are not energy sources. They’re just energy storage mechanisms. There are no large stores of hydrogen that can simply be collected, ready to use. The energy required to separate hydrogen from water is greater than the energy you get back out of it when it is rejoined with oxygen and becomes water once again (it would be equal, but some energy is dissipated in the form of heat, friction, and other efficiency losses). Likewise, the energy used to compress air will be greater than the energy stored in that compressed air.

   We do have an enormous fusion reactor at the center of our solar system. We could hypothetically collect far more solar energy than our current energy consumption, and the rest of the solar system would hardly notice. The trick is to find methods of collecting that energy that don’t take more energy to perform than what they yield. The Earth’s atmosphere filters out the large majority of the solar energy coming to us, rendering earth-bound solar panels woefully inefficient. Our best bet is to capture secondary manifestations of the energy being trapped by our atmosphere. I believe wind-powered electricity is probably the single most promising area of alternative energy right now. It beats hydro power (which is also solar powered - atmospheric heat is what lifts water out of the ocean and drops it on top of mountains) because the ecological impact of wind power appears to be much less than that of hydro power (hydro dams disrupt rivers, interfering with flood planes and many important wildlife habitats which are important for sustaining life on Earth).

9. Kim R on August 13th, 2010 11:45 pm

   Well, my cars use natural gas (methane) right now instead of gasoline. It’s cleaner and cheaper than gasoline, and there’s plenty of it in the USA, so I’m hoping natural gas will catch on as a fuel. We just need more places to fill up.