How about a thread about getting off oil?

[LeeG]

quite the magic hand

[John Smith]

There's a piece in our local paper today about Israel going to electric vehicles and having battery swap stations. Some years back I held the position that this would be the only way to make electric cars practical. Design them so the batteries are interchangable and fairly easy to change. Pull into a station and your battery is taken from your car and placed in a charging bank. Another battery, fully charged, is taken from the bank and put in your car. Off you go.

[Chip-skiff]

Recalling the discussion about natural gas fueled vehicles, there was an interesting piece in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/bu...tural-gas.html

I'd love to convert our 60 mpg Honda Insight ULEV hybrid to natural gas, since that reduce the ultra-low emissions still further, and the engine would likely last longer. But I'm not sure there's space in the layout to accomplish that.

Also read that the first public charging station for the Nissan Leaf had been installed at the Stanford Shopping Center, an upmarket mall in Palo Alto, CA.

[Nicholas Scheuer]

No LPG available at refueling stations in the USA. Conservatives, ya'know, don't want to spand on anything.

[John Smith]

No LPG available at refueling stations in the USA. Conservatives, ya'know, don't want to spand on anything.

Obama's trying to get local towns to use natural gas, and install their own filling station. This is hoped to be a foot in the door in building the necessary infrastructure.

I saw a piece in a paper the other day that Israel is using my electic car system. They have charging banks and interchangable batteries. They pull your battery out and put it in the bank to charge, pull a charged battery out of the bank and put it in your car. Fairly quick operation.

[AndyG]

In my opinion, we will NEVER stop using petroleum based fuel until someone invents a REALLY STRONG BATTERY .......maybe one that's the size and weight of an ordinary masonry brick, will deliver 12 volts at 50 amps for 8 hours and costs maybe $100........something like a radically new capacitor perhaps? I'm surprised that battery development seems to be lagging far behind other technologies.

Batteries? Eventually a dead-end, I think. I'm looking forward to the day when nanotechnology meets aneutronic fusion.

When we can shoot a proton, with nuclear-point accuracy, at 3% of the speed of light, towards a Boron-11 target and do this 450 trillion times a second, our energy worries are over.

Your brick doing this would generate alpha particles (= instant electricity), helium as exhaust, no risk of radioactive contamination, and an instant cut-off if needed. The cost at today's rates for the Boron-11 required is about $50.

Bung in a whole gram of Boron-11 and your brick's 8 hours run-time would be nearly four years.

Odd that we seem to live in an age where potential solutions to possibly civilisation-destroying issues are known science - and yet quite unknown engineering.

Andy