Re: GAS-L: Fuel Cells -- ethanol -- reforming natural gas

[Joacim Persson <joacim@ymex.net>]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Peter Singfield cited:

> January 9, 2002
> 
> U.S. Ends Car Plan on Gas Efficiency; Looks to Fuel Cells
> By NEELA BANERJEE with DANNY HAKIM
[interesting reading snipped]

* Compare the statistics for world production of petroleum products to,
for instance, world production of pulp, and with the corresponding heat
value (and realistic process efficiencies), to get a hint of how much
biomass (in wood) there may be available for powering transportation.
Too many vehicles, and not enough trees? Where else would all that
hydrogen, ethanol, whatever, come from in the long run? Only switching
technology of vehicle motors won't be enough. The problem goes deeper than
that.

* They look for complicated solutions. What must be added to the equation
is the cost (in energy) to build and maintain the technology. The more
complex it is, the more it takes to get it and keep it running. Simple is
beatiful. Complexityficationalisation is an unnecessary long word.

Much of the energy consumption is intrinsic to the cultural geographical
structure. A city takes significantly more energy to keep running, than a
corresponding rural population and small but plentiful installations rather
than concentration and few large installations.  Small is beatiful. Synergy
is a myth. (More precisely, synergy is a concept which only applies to a
/portion/ of a larger system. This is often ignored. People often make the
mistake of assuming that positive synergetic effects also implies overall
positive effects. But the second law says there will be more mess outside
than there is order at the hub. The whole is /less/ than the sum of its
parts.)

The oligarchy in the car industry is a serious problem. Why are there so
few new, small, car manufacturers showing up on the market? There are just
about none. The few there are, are into extreme sport vehicles and such.
The car industry in the world is producing cars today that most people
cannot afford to buy. They are building luxury cars, all of them. No wonder
the car industry is so sensitive to variations in market cycle. Henry Ford
was a man who realised one must produce stuff people can afford, to have a
`market.' If all this (necessary) new technology costs a bleeding fortune,
and must be replaced `overnight,' there simply won't be buyers of it and
nothing will happen. The wheels will just stop turning.

The car industry is heavily regulated. A crash test costs a fortune, and
having designers working on design problems caused by red tape rather than
physics, making sure it conforms to the details, costs time and money. If
anyone can drag out a motor, a few bent steel pipes or whatever he fancy
from nearest pile of junk, weld it together and call it "car", design costs
would be near to zero. That would hardly make developers of complicated
space technology zillionaires, but if would certainly speed development.
Even a blind hen can find a seed. A million blind hens would find quite
a few, I should think.

Instead of subsidising specific (often costly) projects, selected by
politicians (with their specific motives), they should let the tinkerers
play. This is also much cheaper.  Think of it as "massive parallell
computing".  The Big Guys have lost the initiative; they build ornamental
status objects. It's the bronze age all over.  Poverty is the mother of
creativety, freedom is the father.

[Regarding the reference to the bronze ages: It is a period in history
sometimes called "a wonderful parenthesis" by archeologists. They knew
about iron, but rarely produced it. It is twice as complicated to make bronze
than iron, and tin and copper ore is rare compared to iron ore. Still, they
made bronze. Why? One theory is that the ones that were wealthy enough to
hire the pre-historic metalurgists weren't interested in practical tools,
but status objects. A bronze axe is not better than a stone axe to cut
with, but is shines a whole lot better than a rusty plain old, but useful,
steel axe, and not everyone can afford to go bronze. In some areas, this
absurd situation was maintained for up to 6000 years. Idiocracy can rule
forever if you don't do anything.]

Joacim
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