Will petrol ever become redundant?

[+Steve]

Will petrol ever become redundant? Will they ever actually find a way to replace it? We can ship a man to the moon but cannot find proper alternative fuels! what do you think?

[junebug1701]

Think about it: a gallon of petrol can propel a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds down the road for 20-30 miles at least. Then consider how little it costs to do this. Is there anything available now that could do the job cheaper? The only way petrol will become obsolete is if it becomes much more expensive, or some other form of energy becomes much cheaper.

[Jan&tone]

Will petrol ever become redundant?

Not while Governments can take so much tax from it and while oil companies make so much from it!

There is presently no incentive for the oil companies to invest in any alternatives.

[Red diesel]

Will petrol ever become redundant?

Not while Governments can take so much tax from it and while oil companies make so much from it!

There is presently no incentive for the oil companies to invest in any alternatives.

Unfortunately Oil is not a renewable resource so i would suspect that petrol will (unfortunately) eventually become redundant. Oil will become scarcer

and that will mean increased petrol prices so alternatives will start to look far more attractive cost wise.

Red diesel

[Uber_Luke]

Not in any of your lifetimes

[PaulinhoT]

I hope not.. as I won't have a job

[Raistlin]

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future

[acetip]

The writing was on the wall for petrol,when they brought out gas ciggy lighters.

[Leeky]

Give its another 10-20 years and the majority of new car sales will be Fully Electric or Hybrid/Range Extender. I cant see Hydrogen ever taking off - its just too expensive to produce and Tesla are bringing out fully electric cars which have a 300mile range.

Personally i think all cars will end up with solar panels on their roofs (ala Prius Optional Extra) and the technology will be so good that they can pretty much keep your Battery topped in between using up your 300mile range worth of stored power.

The whole concept of having to go to a service station to get petrol/diesel/lpg/hydogen is just such a huge inefficiency.

I think within my life time i'll see the death of the majority of petrol station....

... they are putting more an more quick charging stations in car parks and shopping centres all across the country. So once people get into the mind set of 'leave the car on charge while i pop into the shop' you'll always have juice.

Even if i was going to do the 400mile trip from my house to the Nurburgring; in the future i'd charge up my 300mile range Tesla at home, do the 117miles to dover, plug my car in on the boat and i'll have 300miles worth of charge to take me the 277miles from Dunkerque to Nurburg (assuming i dont stop along the way for food and charge up the car at the services while im eating).

Jobs a good-un :)

[Raistlin]

I cant see Hydrogen ever taking off - its just too expensive to produce

Hydrogen sure seems like the perfect alternative to fossil fuels. Just zap water with a bit of energy to split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and presto, you’ve wound up with a gas that can be used to power the planet—and that emits no CO2. Ah, were it only so simple. Conventional water-splitting catalysts that make hydrogen gas are either too expensive, too frail, or too finicky to work in water alone.

Now, however, researchers report that they’ve created a new molybdenum-based catalyst that cranks out the hydrogen, is cheap to make, works in water, and is robust. The catalyst isn’t perfect, as it requires too much energy to generate hydrogen. But its unusual character offers chemists a valuable new lead for making and improving water-splitting catalysts.

Generating hydrogen gas (H2) isn’t difficult. Platinum is adept at transferring pairs of electrons to pairs of protons to make H2. But the precious metal is far too expensive to use for commercial hydrogen production. A cheaper model would use bulky microbial enzymes called hydrogenases that make H2 using proteins based on nickel and iron. Researchers have made slimmer versions for years, but most either work too slowly, work only with the addition of organic acids and other additives, or quickly fall apart.

None of this was initially on the mind of Jeffrey Long, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his colleagues had been working to combine metal atoms with organic appendages called PY5 groups in an effort to make molecules with the magnetic behaviour of bulk magnets. Their studies revealed that one of their molybdenum complexes had an unusual ability to transfer electrons, a key requirement for hydrogen generation. So they tested its hydrogen-generating abilities and got several nice surprises.

In tomorrow’s issue of Nature, Long and colleagues report that not only did the compound turn out significant amounts of hydrogen, it also worked in pure water or seawater without the additional expense of additives. It’s also more durable, Long says, because the molybdenum atom in each compound is bonded to five other atoms, making it harder to knock apart and thus more stable than competing hydrogen-generating compounds using iron and nickel that form fewer links to their neighbours.

“It’s pretty noteworthy,” says Thomas Rauchfuss, a chemist who designs hydrogenase mimics at the University of Illinois, Urbana. “This thing has a lot of the attributes people are looking for,” he adds. Just not quite all of them yet. The catalyst still needs to work faster, for example, as it can’t match the pace of natural hydrogenases, and it requires a fairly high electric voltage to operate, an energetic penalty.

Long says that he and his colleagues are now tweaking their PY5 groups and trying different metals to see if this improves matters. They are also looking to couple it with solar power technology in order to provide a carbon-free source of energetic electrons that the catalyst needs to operate.

[Phoenix999]

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future

I agree completely

Once oil reserves are almost depleted then hydrogen research will kick back in and when produced in decent quatities will become price competitive