Hurray for High Gas Prices!

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Krill
Honestly, Who here understands how a hydrogen fuel cell works?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

[Krill]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_...rane_fuel_cell would have been a better link tbh.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Agathon


?

If that were true, we'd just keep building ghost towns.

You've heard of FDR, right?

[Hauptman]

Additionally, during the extraction of hydrogen from hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide is released. Although this gas is artificially converted into carbon dioxide, such a method of extracting hydrogen remains environmentally injurious

Meh... I was close.

[Krill]

It's more the fact that you think burning hydrocarbons releases about 1% of carbon dioxide and 99% water which is wrong.

[Hauptman]

Originally posted by Arrian
Drilling in ANWR would hardly impact prices, IIUC. It's not a solution.

We will be dependant on oil for a while yet. But we can either get to work now on switching over to alternatives, or we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's not a problem. High gas prices tend to remove people's heads from the sand, forcefully.

-Arrian

Drilling in ANWR, probably not. Drilling in ANWR the Dakotas, the coast of California, The Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else... YES.

We will always be dependant on oil. Plastics are too good a product to live without. Could you imagine a wooden computer? So we need to keep getting it. If by chance, it ever started to go away and stop beeing there, then we learn to make it.

Better living through chemistry.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by DinoDoc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

I'm trying to understand the link between your link and the question posed. It doesn't really demonstrate understanding, just an ability to search for something vague on the interweb.

[Hauptman]

Originally posted by Krill
It's more the fact that you think burning hydrocarbons releases about 1% of carbon dioxide and 99% water which is wrong.

Apparently, you are correct sir!

Long answer:

One gallon of gas weighs about 6.25 pounds. The weight fluctuates with temperature and octane, but this figure is good enough for government work.

Let’s pretend that gas is entirely made up of octane (more properly referred to as 2,2,4-trimethylpentane). It’s not, but that also doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Octane contains 8 carbon atoms (hence the oct- prefix, like Dr. Octopus) and 18 hydrogen atoms. Carbon has a molecular weight of 12 and hydrogen has a molecular weight of 1, so octane has a total molecular weight of 114 (8 x 12 + 18 x 1).

Oxygen has a molecular weight of 16, so CO2 has a total molecular weight of 44 (12 + 16 + 16). Every molecule of octane makes eight molecules of CO2, with a total molecular weight of 352 (44 x 8).

6.25 pounds x (352 / 114) = 19.3 pounds

Et voila! All it takes to convert 6 pounds of gas into 20 pounds of carbon dioxide is some highly confusing algebra!

Bonus material:

Gas doesn’t burn 100% cleanly. You also get some carbon monoxide and other nasty stuff coming out of your tailpipe. But that doesn’t really affect our math very much. The official World Resources Institute conversion rate that we use in our carbon calculator is 19.564 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas.

Also, your exhaust is quite a bit heavier if you count the steam that is generated. Those 16 hydrogen atoms attached to every octane molecule have to go somewhere. They combine with oxygen to create water (H20). Every gallon of gas creates roughly 8 pounds of water vapor. And water vapor does, believe it or not, contribute to global warming.

Aren’t you sorry you asked?

I was thinking of the carbon MONoxide, measured in parts per million. So a car does create alot of co2... But so do I!~ I was stuck on the 1 gallon of gas = 1 gallon of water, wasn't thinking in terms of molecular weights.

[Wezil]

I think I am still near the top in yearly miles (or kms for the civilized parts of the world).

I average 50K kms (30K miles).

[Krill]

Originally posted by Hauptman



Apparently, you are correct sir!




I was thinking of the carbon MONoxide, measured in parts per million. So a car does create alot of co2... But so do I!~ I was stuck on the 1 gallon of gas = 1 gallon of water, wasn't thinking in terms of molecular weights.

Thank you for doing all the hard work for me (and a fyi, all that is GCSE chemistry). The fuel cells OTOH are stuff that a Ph.D student would work on.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
They've been taking mass transit at record numbers

Oh, yeah, baby! Let's see, SF Bay area MUNI and BART ridership up more than 1% from same month last year!

Woohoo! If SF could triple that growth it would keep up with population expansion! If SF spent a mere $10k/capita public transport capacity could be doubled! Spend that four or five times over before the marginal increase drops to nil.

Of course, every other municipality in the Bay area would have to do the same to make it work, so for a mere quarter trillion, and a couple decades of horrifying construction mess, we could end intra-urban commuter traffic.

[Wezil]

[Grandpa Troll]

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Hauptman
I was stuck on the 1 gallon of gas = 1 gallon of water, wasn't thinking in terms of molecular weights.

With water = 8.34 lb/gal, you do get about 1 gallon of water vapor from burning the gallon of gasoline. You weren't counting the mass of all the oxygen used to burn the gas, which is 73% of the CO2 and 89% of the H2O.

[snoopy369]

FWIW I don't think the water vapor contributes at all to global warming, since the air is generally saturated from time to time with water anyway; so the vapor will just rain out at some point. Unless enough water is made to affect the current global ratio of water:air significantly, this isn't going to change anything (and it will not).