Petroleum To An Alternative Energy Like Hydrogen example essay topic

Hydrogen: The Fuel of The Future By: JsonWhy are we as Americans so afraid to change? even if it is a change for the better? the world has been using oil coal and other petroleum products to power just about everything that moves for the last 150 years. yet most cars in the united states only get 10-20 miles a gallon and even the 'good' ones can get only a petty 20-50 miles a gallon. so why do we put up with the inefficiency when there are far better alternatives out there? Such as hydrogen, which was discovered hundreds of years ago. Hydrogen has long been known for its (with air) and abundance in the universe (in other forms i.e. water on earth, and its form in space is a gas). Hydrogen can do just about everything conventional fuels can do but better. Hydrogen can be 'packaged' in several ways, as a fuel gas in a H 2/02 powered engine or the newly devised solid state pellet of hydrogen isotopes that contains about the equivalent of 5000 cubic feet of hydrogen and is broken down and releases gas into the second chamber where it goes to the engine for use. There are many ways to get pure hydrogen out of many compounds using methods such as electrolysis and chemical reactions.

One of the easiest ways is using a chemical reaction. Simple chemicals (aluminum, sodium hydroxide, and water) can be reacted in the home to produce heavy hydrogen to power your furnace or your hot water heater. No electrical power at all is required. The reaction also gives off a tremendous amount of heat. Even the waste heat could be captured for heating the house. The resulting sodium aluminate is harmless and could be collected at recoiling centers for complete acid / base neutralization.

This way is a simpler way than electrolysis produce hydrogen for heating the home, because in a automobile it would be harder to do. Electrolysis is another way to produce hydrogen electronically. It is a way that am more familiar with because I do it quite a bit in my room and have done several experiments with it. Electrolysis will produce a 2: 1 ratio of hydrogen to oxygen out of water. higher voltages will give you faster collection. With a 12-volt battery it took around a half an hour to get a quarter of a mountain dew bottle filled with a catalyst of a small amount of Baking Soda. I used it because it was cheap and I knew it worked.

Another time I used a 75 volt / 2 amp power supply with a catalyst of 2 drops of sulfuric acid to a pint of water and the result was very differing from the last time. I filled the whole mountain dew bottle in less than 6 minutes. All of that gas came from a little less thana drop of water (when I light it off there was only a little spec of water on the inside of the bottle) I can only gasp thinking that that was only 75 volts and voltage can get into the billions of volts. Although electrolysis is not the most efficient way to produce hydrogen it certainly deserves recognition for working and I am sure sometime soon someone will discover a way to produce the same amount of H 2 and O 2 with less power and time either with a new catalyst ora more efficient power supply. One reason that hydrogen power has not taken off is that there are thousands of jobs in the petroleum and coal fields.

Really who would want to own a car that requires about 20-30 cents per mile in gas expenses when you could basically pull up to the water hose every month and fill your tank with something about 20 cents every 2000 or so miles?? So demand for petroleum products would sky dive and thousands of jobs would be lost and no one except the water company, car alternator / generator company and the battery company would profit from it. People would also so angry about losing their jobs over such a change and boycott the automotive companies making hydro-cars and cause havoc for the people trying to 'upgrade' us to a better system of working. I mean everything in a car has changed but the engine stays essentially the same. It's commonly known that large oil companies have been paying off the auto makers to keep all cars under the 40 mile per gallon range. There are a few exceptions and all they really changed was the size of the car.

Every engine has the capability to get a hundred miles per gallon and up with modifications to the carburetor and other internal parts of the engine. Only half of the gas that goes into the chamber actually gets burned and the rest goes right out your tail pipe, and they call them efficient?? You would figure that when NASA uses it in the space shuttle for fuel to lift a 122 foot long craft plus a gigantic fuel tank (the solid boosters help also) it has to be working right. And no one ever whines about pollution either unless they are totally niece because the only pollution from the shuttle (besides the boosters) is water vapor.

It takes a lot of energy to get water from water to H 2 and O 2 and it takes a lot of energy to get it back to water also, in other words a spark (which is a very hot burning spec of flint but it doesn't hurt us because it doesn't have a very long life and is small) or a flame and it takes it on an explosive ride back to water vapor. It is weird that way I guess because, if you burn a cup of gasoline you can't just capture the soot (carbon) and residues and other 'by-products' and apply electricity to it and instantly have what you started with. So basically hydrogen is a forever renewable resource that is non-polluting Politically oil is the source of all evil. We went to war for it and said it was for another reason, yeah right. If we where ever to switch suddenly from petroleum to an alternative energy like hydrogen we could expect an immediate political or military threat because that is just like making the oil corporations go bankrupt, instantly. It would be especially hard on a country that has oil for its main export like Kuwait or Iraq, And it would be the stock market crash all over again for us also.

It will probably take a very dramatic threatening event to make us switch from fossil fuels, like running out of them. The world will eventually realize the potential of hydrogen and put it out there, but it may come very late like when gas will cost 3.95 a gallon but it will happen, it just has to. People will have no choice but to change or, well, walk. It is time that we upgrade, we do not drive 'Horseless Carriages' anymore so we shouldn't use ones fuel. We call ourselves 'high tech' when we are using hundred year old technology in our 'high tech' things. Airplanes have gone from the " June Bug' to the F-22 fly by wire fighter in around a hundred years so why can't cars and heaters and power plants do the same??

As a globe l society we need to upgrade.