Originally posted by Skydancer
MMM yes The USA probably does have abundant suypply of Hydrocarbons but if you keep burning em at the rate you do at the moment the USA might be a little smaller! and not quite such a comfortable place to live! So maybe a fuel who's only by product is water is a good idea? No?
You have to build hydrogen Skydancer.
Possible sources are water, but that is already been burned. Energy needs to be put into the H2O molecule to seperate the molecule into it's constituant elements.
Entropy says you will have to put more energy into the electrolysis to seperate the parts than you get out of the hydrogen product. Therefore, you need abundant supplies of energy from nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar or fossil.
An easier source is hydrocarbon. The USA has enough in coal alone to completely service the energy needs at todays levels for 250 years. Add the energy pent up in oil shale (more than the Saudi oil reserves) to liquified coal, and we could run todays automobile technology for many generations.
Hydrogen would be a good idea, but producing it will cause nuclear waste, dead birds from wind turbines, dead fish from dammed rivers, CO2 from fossil plants, etc.
Might as well go directly to solar vehicles. The technology for solar vehicles is a mature one.
