OT: If all cars were electric ...??

Well I looked into that, and frankly its more expensive overall than owning a single fuel car that covers my worst case requirement

Yep. It makes no economic sense for anyone.

An electric car would suit me for a lot of what I do, but given te actual prices its not cost effective.

Course it does, smart meters are just cheaper ways to bill you dressed up as ecoshite.

The current move to air sourced heat pumps is dangerous. We dont have the electrical capacity and even with their efficiency using CCGT to run them, still makes them obverall more gas guzzlers than gas CH.

In short its all ideologically driven. There is no economic or environmental case for any of it. It's just virtue signalling political fashion.

In france thanks to nukes all heating is electric. Not heat pumps. Just hot bits of wire under te floor or in tanbks...

Because the nukes were built before regulatory ratcheting pushed the price sky high.

And eletricity is cheap

Well, you can argue that heat is just heat, and the source is irrelevant. But the ceramic industry today has got where it is by a long history of incremental changes. Big revolutionary steps tend to be unsuccessful and usually end in disaster.

Well yes, I am always in agreement with sticking with what works and am no advocate of change for changes sake.

Thats is not howebver what I am saying. I am saying its possible and if gas were expensive and (nuclear?) electricity were cheap I think a few years development would see electric kilns in operation industrially.

power, temperature and gas flow are all achievable. The best way of doing so is not however established, but that's develoment, not blue sky breakthrough.

When I wrote 'beyond fossil fuels' I looked at not a few processes that used reducing gasses amd straight gas and coal heating to achieve thimgs

- steel, cement and the like. In the limit all can be done without fossil fuels *if they have to be*, and making hydrocarbon fuels using nuclear power and electricity is one way to do it.

The problem with all of it is that fossil fuels are cheaper, still around, not an environmental problem and cheap nukes are not around.

Ergo te conservative approach is correct. It works, its cheap and we understand it. Not qualities to be sneered at.

And the free market approach also works. Let many people work on adapting to changing prices of energy and come up with various solutions of which the most cost effective will win through and become tomorrows industry standard.

Just do no let government second guess and subsidise what they cannot know is the best technology.

But, of course, huge numbers are used for commuting. Unlike a petrol or diesel car, electric cars cannot be filled to full capacity in a couple of minutes, so many people will want to put them on charge immediately that they get home, just in case they get an "emergency" call from family or friends. A sort of range anxiety.

SteveW

Most of today's hydrogen is made very inefficiently from natural gas. And to use in cars it would have to be stored at very high pressure, both n the car and at the service point.

The article is bollix. Home will be heated by heat pumps not gas. Plus they will need to be far better insulated than at present. Many new build houses even now have heat pumps. Using hydrogen instead of natural gas means any bangs will be really big. Really hard to stop leaks too.

Or you get on the train.

Smaller hydrogen molecules leak more easily, it's difficult to add mercaptans to it, the flame is almost invisible, it explodes over a much wider range of fuel/air mixtures, not the sort of thing you'd want piped into houses I'd say.

Well, if you need to try it somewhere ...

Not if you generate hydrogen directly from sunlight via artifical photosynthesis.

Also far, far easier to accidentally ignite when it does leak - there is a reason that Hydrogen and Acetylene get their own separate gas group in the ATEX (and formerly British) standards.

It is actually remarkably hard to get the narrow mixture range required for natural gas to ignite and it takes a fair bit of energy to do it.

SteveW

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Therein lies the Achilles heel to your suggestion. So for the best part of the winter, we get no hydrogen. It's the same reason that a lot of plants and trees stop growing and shed their leaves in winter.

Documentary I saw in the US in the 80s about hydrogen as a fuel for cars touted this as an advantage - the flame is not luminous unlike a hydrocarbon flame, which can fry you from a distance.

Eh? Have you got that the right way round? If the flame is luminous, i.e. hydrocarbon, then you'd be able to see and avoid it. You're surely more likely to get fried by an invisible flame, as you can't see it.

Yes I remember our chemistry teacher at school putting a lighted splint into a glass jar that was filled with natural gas from a tap in the lab. He said it was safe providing all the air had been displaced by the gas. He did it in the fume cupboard, partly because of all the gas that would escape from the jar as he was filling it until the gas "overflowed" and partly as a very slight extra safety precaution. And just as he said, the splint went out. He ended by saying "I don't need to tell you - DON'T DO THIS AT HOME".

I saw an even more dramatic demonstration of the flammability of petrol versus diesel at a fire-prevention talk we were given at the lab where I worked in my year off. Out in the open, two metal trays, a couple of feet square and about an inch deep were filled with petrol and diesel respectively. A lighted rag was thrown in the diesel. It went out, no matter how many times he did it. Then he threw a rag in the petrol and it burned explosively, throwing petrol on the grass.

Pyrotechnics - you never forget them! :-)

Never use petrol to light a bonfire, such as a Guy Fawkes night bonfire, being topical. The blow-back can be life-changing. Diesel or paraffin is the stuff to use.

They meant in the sense that, if you're stood near it and the flame kicks off, you can stand near an h2 flame without harm compared to a hc flame that will fry you. Due to radiated heat.

Of course, if its a container that ruptures, most bets are off.

Keele University is hosting the HyDeploy project.

HyDeploy is an energy trial to establish the potential for blending hydrogen, up to 20%, into the normal gas supply to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Subject to Health & Safety Executive (HSE) approval in Phase 1 of the project, the aim is to run a year-long live trial of blended gas on part of the Keele gas network in Phase 3 (2019). HyDeploy will determine the level of hydrogen which could be used by gas consumers safely and with no changes to their behaviour or existing domestic appliances.

Yes, but you still have the problem of range who wants to have to take a six-hour break half-way through a journey that is longer than the range of the car? It's fine if you're driving to work and home, because it's got all day while you're in the office to recharge, and all night when you get home in the evening. But driving to go on holiday

And then have to arrange transport to the nearest railhead and from the nearest one to the destination.

Yes, I saw another trial in oz that will mix in up to 10% hydrogen

The quality isn't marvellous, but this guy was great - I saw him give this 'live' once.