Peak Oil and why hydrogen won’t help us much (Long post)

[Il_Mostro]

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We've got an energy problem in this country

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Yes. And the rest of the world. But since the US uses the most energy, both on per capita and in total terms, you have got the furthest to fall, so to speak.

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A major problem I see with hydrogen that I see is providing the infrastructure to support it

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Correct. Basically that infrastructure needs a lot of energy, to which end we of course can use H2, if only we find that infinite electrical generation capability...

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Natural gas (NG) may possibly be an effective fuel source but my understanding is that the U.S. will have to import NG in liquified form

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Also correct [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] It's probably not a very good idea to build the infrastructure needed for a natgas economy, we will run out of that too, in a not very distant future.

[playerfl]

"more or less esoteric energy sources like cold fusion and zero-point energy is excluded. Fusion is debatable; as far as I have read the people working in the field says that if at all possible we might have a fusion reactor online in about 50 years, that’s too late."

first I would like to say that hyrogen will never be as good as fossil fuels, and ultimately we will not be satisfied with it. This means that research will go on until we have something better.

There has been a lot of progress in both zero point energy and low temperature fusion. Both zero point energy and low temperature fusion have been proven to exist in reproducable experiments in multiple labs. There are federal government grants for study in these areas, they are now legit.

We are in the same situation as when nuclear energy was experimentally proven in the 30's ( mathematically proven well before that). About a decade later we were blowing up cities with it and building power plants. Imagine being a common man in 1938 and being told that atoms could be split, and that the energy of one bomb could destroy an entire city.

I'm not sure which new tech will pan out first, but I beleive that at least one of them will pan out ( at least for military use ) in the next 30 years because of several factors:

1. hydrogen + conservation will not fill our needs, they will only be temporary measures until something better comes along.

2. The people that commercialize it will become fantastically wealthy

3. The military would want it for weapons even if we never ran out of oil.

[Il_Mostro]

I agree with you, to a point. I'm not enough of a physicist to assess zero-point energy (at least i think so, the little I have read about it talks about quantum-level phenomenon and such things and that's out of my league). However, I cannot see that solving our immidiate problems. Sure, 100 years from now, maybe we are all driving cars powered by H2 that is being generated from zero-point, or fusion. But getting there is by no means automatic, if it at all can be done. And even if it can be done, we still have to get there (to 2100) without crashing.