The Ultimate Ground Transport Fuel

I love those colors, and there will be an explanation later related to quantum dots. But what is the ultimate fuel for ground transport? Some would argue that electricity will prevail and many, still, gasoline. Very few of any sense would say ethanol, although federal governments, including mine, today continue to support this option. There is a core of advocates for hydrogen, especially in Southern California and various automobile companies.

The Methanol Economy seemed to come and go with George Olah. However, his concept was based on producing methanol from fossil fuels.

Let me start with the basics. The first element in the chemical table, and the most abundant in the Universe, is hydrogen. This gas is fused by our Sun and all the stars to produce solar energy. But isotopes of hydrogen are the active ingredients for the Hydrogen Bomb. Nevertheless, some say, this has got to be the ultimate fuel. I was there when the Hydrogen Romantics first met at Nejat Veziroglu's 1974 gathering in Miami, in 1979 wrote the first hydrogen legislation in the U.S. Senate, which became the Matsunaga Hydrogen Act, and in the 90's chaired the Secretary of Energy's Hydrogen Technical Advisory Panel. I even worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion. My "HUFFINGTON POST" article on "STARPOWER FOR HUMANITY" is worthy of your click. However, I irritate friends and Romantics when I say the Hydrogen Economy is at least a century away. Controlled fusion for electricity will not be commercialized anytime soon, and there is no infrastructure, nor any approaching cost-effective technology, to be competitive for ground or air transport. I still think that, someday, some next generation aircraft will be powered by hydrogen.

"Anyway, let's get to the next level of simplicity, methane (left"): one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. This is the compound that is most of natural gas, which has suddenly become "cheap" through the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Not only is methane dangerous for global warming, as one molecule is from 20-65 times worse than one molecule of carbon dioxide, but this is my featured villain in "THE VENUS SYNDROME", which could well be the ultimate doomsday scenario.

"If you can find a way to insert oxygen, you have methanol (above right"), the simplest hydrocarbon liquid. I remain of the opinion that a liquid will dominate as the ground transport form of this century. What is currently lacking is the direct methanol fuel cell ("DMFC"). Well, not quite true, as Toshiba is said to be marketing a DMFC ("left") for portable applications, so the concept is real. Methanol is the only liquid which can be directly and efficiently utilized by a fuel cell. The part that convinced me most about the sensibility of methanol is that one gallon of this fuel has 1.4, or 140% more accessible hydrogen atoms than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. You know how much it costs to produce liquid hydrogen? Anyway, there is no DMFC for automobiles, for reasons that befuddle me, although I sometimes think that the Farm Lobby had a lot to do with this tragedy to protect ethanol. Many of my first ten articles for the "HUFFINGTON POST" features methanol.

The traditional way to make methanol is the steam reforming of natural gas. Let us eliminate all fossil fuels from this process. You can destructively distillate wood, which is why methanol is also called wood alcohol or methyl alcohol. This process is too expensive, so the gasification and catalysis of biomass is how industry currently produces methanol. Economic analysis will show that the resultant product for ground transport is cheaper than fermentation for methanol or ethanol.

"However, I've led you this far to introduce you to an excitingly new concept: combine carbon dioxide from the air and non-potable water to generate methanol using solar energy. This way you also reduce global warming. While not quite that, Jim Lane, editor and publisher of BIOFUELS DIGEST", reports on:

Quantum Dots: A New Nanohighway to Renewable Fuels

"To summarize, the National Science Foundation provided a 2 million grant to a group of researchers at Lehigh, led by Steve McIntosh and Bryan Berger (to the left"), to make methanol using only carbon dioxide, sunlight and water. The key is to produce quantum dots using bacteria. Huh? Well, you can read the article. They are nowhere close to commercializing their system, but it certainly makes sense to me. Now, let's get on with, in parallel, perfecting the direct methanol fuel cell.

-