Submitted by nastratin t3_11da9s2 in Futurology
Just stop burning shit. All of these things are half-measures. Stop trying to “fix” dirty combustion and instead go to solutions that don’t need dirty combustion. Solar, wind, nuclear, geo, hydro, battery power, and hydrogen are all going to be exponentially better than swapping the fuel.
In general, you're right, but jet fuel is one of the few things that we can't just "stop burning" right now. You simply can't replace jet fuel with batteries -- the energy density isn't there.
If some form of clean fuel were discovered, it would be amazing for air travel while we transition to electric planes, which will take a decade or more.
This is not that clean fuel, obviously, but we shouldn't discount fuels entirely.
Actually, we can quit burning jet fuel, but people don’t want the consequences of removing air travel.
fast air travel, anyway
Great point! 😁
You can have fast air travel without it... as long as you don't mind being rail-gunned at multiple times the speed of sound. You won't die as long as the track is long enough to limit gforce, but you may crap your pants
Man, if I knew my body could handle the stresses, I'd be willing to deal with shit to get back home (9 hour flight) significantly faster, let alone better for the environment.
Are you saying that facetiously? Because a world without air travel would be exhausting to get anywhere in. How does air travel get removed without posing an extreme burden to society and the economy?
Did you not read, or not understand my previous comment? Also, profanity isn’t wanted. Take it elsewhere or don’t reply.
80% of the world’s population has never even been on a plane.
Mostly what removing air travel would do is mean rich people have to take more time to go places.
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The best thing about hydrogen is that it requires very litle adjusment to convert natural gas combustion over to hydrogen. Already some succesfull converdion projects done for home heating. Omly hurdles are compact/save storage and clean generation.
Hydrogen is clean (assuming it's green and not blue), but it's remarkably inefficient. For home heating, you need almost 6 times as much renewable energy with a hydrogen furnace compared to an electric heat pump. And that's with a middle of the road heat pump (COP 3). The newer high end ones can reach a COP of 4 or 5, which is more than twice as efficient as a COP 3.
Hydrogen may very well be our best bet for air travel, but for things on the ground it's not a very good solution.
Only problem is that it's also stupidly dangerous, especially in a confined area with a lot of people like a plane
I mean... jet fuel is highly combustive. Jets explode when they crash. Any highly concentrated storage of energy (fuel tank, battery) is basically just another name for a bomb.
Except unlike batteries or gasoline, hydrogen is also colorless and odorless like carbon monoxide. So it's more like an invisible bomb that expands to the size of its container.
Straight electric is always gonna be better, it's more of an in-between solution and a way to make use of excess green power that might be overloading the net at certain times.
It isn't clean to burn regardless of what color. It gives off a lot of NOx.
As for air travel, the low energy density by volume makes it a pretty big barrier
And the worst thing is you have to store it under high pressure in big tanks and its extremely flammable. TANSTAAFL.
Uhm, no. First of hydrogen doesn't have the energy density by volume, you can convert it into methanol and use methanol fuel cells, but it still less energy dense than jet fuel.
And heating with hydrogen is a dumb idea, it outputs a ton of NOx.
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