TechStuff Fuels Up

two parts. The first part is going to be kind of an overview of the different alternatives that we think of with alternative fuel, keeping in mind that, you know, the ones that we're talking about today are the major players, and that there could be an alternative fuel right around the corner that is completely different from the ones we're

chatting about. Now, uh, you know, that's a possibility, but these are the These are the ones that are currently in some form of production and use in various places around the world. It also will behoove us to mention the fact that Lauren and I come from the United

States of America. That is where we live, that is our frame of reference UM and a lot of the information available to us immediately centered around that kind of experience, so we know more about the laws, the prices, and the general availability exactly right, right, what's the infrastructure status in the US. Now, keep in mind that some of these alternative fuels have a lot of support in other

nations around the world. Uh, some nations have have invested a great deal in say propane for example, as a possible fuel source. And we're really talking about fuel for the most part as vehicle fuel and specifically vehicle fuel for you guys as in consumers. Yes, we will mention a couple of places where some of these fuels have been used commercially or in a government fleet vehicles right, or in industrial vehicles that are used in factories or

or construction yards or whatever. But for the most part, we're really looking at this is the alternative to the stuff what you put in your gas tank or diesel tank as the case maybe, or hydrogen fuel cell or etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. So, um, so you can look at these in lots of different ways. You can divide them up into all sorts of different categories. And so we kind of arbitrarily made these into our own categories based upon my whim not not completely arbitrary.

We're first going to cover I think of biodiesel and ethanol. Yeah, and and the idea here is that these are two fuels that we get from uh organic sources, and then we process it to make it into fuel. Also, these two different fuels, they are different. Ethanol and biodesel are not the same thing. Uh. These two fuels also, besides

requiring some processing, have some other stuff in common. For instance, both of them you will frequently see in blended form, meaning that we actually blend these with petroleum based fuels. In the case of ethanol, we're talking gasoline, and with bio diesel we're talking yeah. But anyway, in both cases, we're talking about mixing uh this this biologically uh created fuel with stuff that is petroleum based. Keeping in mind, of course, if we want to go all the way back,

even petroleum based stuff was organic at one point. But sure, sure, but but there's a difference between a between man made, processed organics and stuff that took millions and millions and millions of years to form the way it did. Yeah, there's a tiny difference there. Uh So So let's let's start with um, Well, let's start with ethanol, I think, because that one is probably the one that that a lot of people who may not be aware of it

are using already. Right, um, I think that in American most places in America use a blend of gasoline to about ethanol. Yeah, it's called E ten. That's the the general term for that blend or gasohol. That's also what it's often referred to, although, which sounds so goofy and it's it's it's I've seen it increasing, or rather I should say there's a decreasing trend to call it that.

I think it almost has a stigma against it because people realize that uh ethanol, which by the way, is ethyl alcohol, you know, it's it's just another name for ethyl alcohol. Um that ethyl alcohol could be pretty hard on some engine parts, depending upon what you know, what your engine had in it, like various tubes and connectors

and things like that. Al Right, it is a solvent so um So one of the problems and using some of the higher blends and in normal engines is that it can um a start start knocking some some extra stuff loose um and clogging fuel filters that way, and be can start eating away at some of the rubber components fuel exactly exactly. And so what's what's kind of funny is that when it's eating away at that that

stuff that's built up in an engine. Let's say that you've been using regular gasoline in an engine for a while, but the engine can also accept ethanol of various blends, like even a even a high concentration of of um ethanol to actual gasoline. Well, the nice thing is that it's actually going to start cleaning your system. But the problem is all that stuff that's built up has to go somewhere, and that's when you get into that problem

of it clogging up filters and things like that. Right, which is why should you Should you have a vehicle that can accept both, and you start using higher blends of ethanol um, it's recommended to replace your fuel pumps with something that is more capable of dealing with that, right, Right, And then once you've got everything you know cleaned out that first run through, just have a basic maintenance and replacement schedule, just as you would your normal vehicle. The

way most of us ignore UH and UH. I say that because I know a lot of car owners, and I think regular maintenance is something that just happens to other people. Uh, I've been I've been that guy once or twice. I I take the train, so what do I know. But anyway, so it's it's very common in the United States. Uh. In fact, I think something like cent of gas stations have used some blend of ethanol. And part of the reason for that is that ethanol

will increase the octane of your gasoline. Now, octane is this this rating that we think of that can actually reduce what we call engine knocking. So if you've ever been in an old car running on you know, a low uh octane gasoline and you start hearing this weird knocking noise coming out of the engine, that's that's from this this octane issue. Adding an ethanol increases the octane.

What it also does, however, is it it lowers the actual energy content of the gasoline, because ethanol does not have as much potential energy stored in it as gasoline, right, which in all practicality means that the gallon for gallon, you're going to get less mileage out of ethanol than you will out of gasoline, right, And the less mileage all depends upon that blend, Right, Like So if it's an E ten blend where you've got the ten percent ethanol and gasoline, you might get three to four percent

fewer miles per gallon than you would if you were using just regular gasoline, if you were using eight five, which is kind of the flip side of that, it's ethanol and percent gasoline. This is something that flexible fuel vehicles or f f vs as we call them in the biz, can use. Then you're talking about a significant drop in miles per gallon. You're talking, right, that's a that's big, right. I mean, these are why we have

these different considerations, and we'll do a full episode about why. Uh, there are a lot of challenges to switching to alternative fuel, So I'm not going to really get into it there, but you can kind of already see one of the issues here. Um, So it does have a lower energy content than gasoline. The cost of ethanol kind of varies in the Midwest, where you've got a lot of places

that are actually growing the feedstocks. That's what we call the stuff what we turn into ethanol, right, right, Starch crops are what are used to ferment and distill um stuff into ethanol, and especially in the US. That is the stuff. Yes, and um so corn is here in the US is used mostly in Brazil. I think it's sugarcane, but you can also use wheat, barley, potatoes. Right. The starch based or sugar based stuff can be turned into this.

You can also use cellulose based cellulosic ethanol, which would come from things like wood chips or switch grass. Uh. Now, this stuff has potentially a better return on investment when it comes to energy. There's this thing called e r

o I that's energy return on investment. Whenever we're talking about producing any sort of fuel, producing the fuel requires you put energy into the production, and so it's really important that the energy you get out from that pot entol fuel, like whatever you're going to use that fuel for, the energy is greater than what you've put in, right because otherwise why are you doing it? Yees? Otherwise it

would be an energy sink. Because let's say, let's say that you know, for the most part, the energy you're going to be getting to produce the stuff is still coming from fossil fuels, because that's what we really depend upon right now. So if you would actually consume more fossil fuel producing this alternative fuel than you would if you had used the fossil fuel in the first place. Then it's an energy sink and you're playing a losing game.

You want that energy to be greater the same the same way that that fusion reactors are not popular yet because they use more energy to start up than they put out exactly. Yeah, if you've got an energy sink, then really you've just got a thing what goes deep. It's just what a lot in this. I apologize that I don't know what it was that got into my head. I shot a video today cackled insanely and then got called on it on Twitter. Lauren, Hey, I that was

not Lauren. That was your humble narrator. That was completely different. Fair enough, that's true. You can talk to her right so. But some other things about ethanol, uh, they do. Ethanol does tend to put out fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline combustion does, which is important. You know. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves about moving to an alternative fuel is why are you doing it right?

Because there are a lot of different potential answers you could give, and if one of those answers is I'm concerned about the environmental impact of gasoline consumption, then something like this where you're talking about fewer greenhouse gas emissions, is important. Uh, you know, so that's that's something to keep in mind. Ethanol, of course, is also produced domestically. That's also important because in the United States, you know, some of our oil a great deal roil. Around half

of it really is brought in from it. Yeah, important, and some of that's imported from places in the world where that it would be perhaps better for us to not be supporting economically and politically, right the money that we are are putting out could be funding things that could be harmful to either that region's stability or to the United States. Is stability in general role and so anything you can produce domestically removes that that or at

least reduces that issue. So that's another reason why ethanol is considered to be a nice alternative, is because it's something that we can produce domestically. However, Uh, there's also an issue about how much ethanol we produce versus um how much gasoline we produce. But again, I'll save that for the next show. I don't want to spoil everything

in this one. But anyway, um, yeah, I mean that's that's generally the big picture on ethanol now for ethanol, for like things like that E a D five blend where you have the ethanol. Again, that's something that's only really useful in specific vehicles that have been tooled to accept that as a fuel, so called that flexible fuel vehicles, right exactly. So you don't want to fill up your your right off the lot car that normally runs on gasoline with E eighty five because that's not a good

fuel for it. It could eat through those rubber hoses like you were talking about, Lauren. So this is you know, it's it's one of those things where you're really looking at offsetting gasoline consumption, not completely replacing it. All right, So let's talk about biodiesel, which is the other sort of biological fuel source that we wanted to mention. Biodiesel, of course, as the name suggests, is not a replacement

for gasoline. It's more like a substitute for diesel, which is again a petroleum based fuel, but it's different from gasoline. So a gasoline engine will not burn diesel fuel efficiently. You have to have a diesel engine to do that now. I actually remember when diesel cars were more popular than they are now, because that's how old I am. I was about to say, I don't remember that at all, Jonathan, and I'm not even making fun of you right now. Yeah, no, I remember it because, uh I was alive in the

seventies and nine, I saw diesel engine cars. Uh, you know, because they're still very common in industrial use large vehicles like buses or trucks. But and there are still cars

that are diesel engine cars. They're just not as common. Yeah, a lot of And I did want to mention a lot of the changes that have been made to how we consume fossil fuels started out in the nineteen seventies with them a the here in America, the the Clean Air Act being passed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and also the Arab oil Embargo from seventy three to seventy four, and then the Iranian Revolution from seventy seventy nine. Yeah, we had some major fuel crises in the United States

and the seventies which really started the ball rolling. Things that have kept the ball rolling are everything from the domestic safety issue that I referred to earlier and the environmental issue as well as just people concerned with trying to find a way that would uh some sort of fuel that could be less expensive, less volatile in price than gasoline, right because between say seventy eight and one UM, the cost of oil per barrel skyrocketed from fourteen dollars

to over thirty five. Well, I remember when I first moved to Atlanta, gasoline was eighty five cents a gallon. I I love watching things like a like die Hard where suddenly it pans past a gas station and you know that it's that it was before our time, because it's like seventy nine cents a gallon. Yeah, now it's over you know, three dollars a gallon easily in most

of the United States. And now that we should complain about that because in Europe it's much much much higher, right right, But again, but anyway, sign of the times. So so biodiesel is interesting and that this is diesel fuel that's manufactured from vegetable oils, animal fats, and even

recycled restaurant grease. I remember reading a news report a few years ago, uh, an article in Creative Loafing, which is a local weekly paper here in Atlanta, and it was a feature on a guy out in Athens who had had tinkered with his car so that it could accept a form of restaurant grease with minimum amount of processing.

So he was actually using biodiesel and kind of the issues he was running into on the official end because this was all kind of um from a tinkerer's perspective as opposed to this is something that was fully supported by an infrastructure. But the idea here is that you're using this stuff, this renewable resource, because there's you know, we can keep growing more vegetables or animals or McDonald's, and then we get the stuff from it, this grease or or fat or oil and process it and in

that processing we then end up with this biodiesel. It's a biodegradable fuel. Uh, it's non toxic, so less toxic than say table salt, which is great, you know, right, you know, you have a massive biodegrade or biodesel fuel spill. It is biodegradable, it's non toxic, and it makes the highway small like French fries. So really, I mean who loses which which isn't to say that that a giant oil spill of this stuff would be happy for the environment.

It's not going to like moisturize all of the seal's faces or anything like that, but it's just you know, but but it's a little bit less scary and easier to clean up. Yeah, it's considered to have a lower environmental impact from that perspective, and you still have to have processes stuff, so you still have to put energy into the system, just like you do with ethanol. So don't don't think that this takes fossil fuels out entirely, and in fact, just like ethanol, biodiesel is something that

is frequently blended with petroleum based diesel, so they're different blends. Um, there's uh, there's B two which is only two percent biodiesel and percent petroleum based diesel, B five which is five percent biodiesel, and B twenty, which is biodiesel. You can get B one hundred, although I don't think there are any consumer vehicles that are that run on B one hundred, but B one hundred would be one percent

pure biodiesel. Most vehicles in the United States don't go over B five as the the recommended blend for running into the engine. The engines that you know, the manufacturers say this engine was not designed to run anything with a greater than B five blend for biodiesel to diesel. But but even even those very small concentrations can make a very large difference in the way that the fuel burns. Right. In fact, again just like with ethanol, the biodiesel has

a lower fuel economy than than pure diesel does. So for example, if you go with B one hundred, it's something like a ten percent lower fuel economy, right, which which means that it would take about one point one gallons of biodiesel to equal one gallon of standard right, whereas B twenty is more like just a two percent deficit in fuel economy. So obviously, when you're getting close to B five or B two, the change is negligible to the point where you probably wouldn't notice it that

much unless you're really min maxing era. You're driving experience, and hardly anyone, I mean, there are people who do that. There's some people who go to some pretty extreme links to try and maximize fuel economy. My programmer friends sometimes get bored in their hybrid vehicles and do that. Also they're really tracking it. I think of the people who are drafting behind massive trucks. That's not a safe thing to do, by the way, But it does actually fuel economy,

but it decreases your life expectancy, so uh. It does in general have fewer greenhouse gas and UH and pollutant emissions than diesel, although there is the possibility of an increase in nitrous oxide emissions. So it's not like this is across the board cleaner than petroleum based diesel. But for most of the types of emissions that we would consider harmful, it's better than the petroleum based one. It's

just not hands down or runaway wins. So you can't just point it bio diesel and say this is this, this is the cure for our environmental problem, right right. It does. It does reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but that's a big one. I mean CEO two emissions, that's a

big problem. And also they point out that really the CEO two emissions, the way that it quote unquote reduces them, in part is because you are you are creating feedstocks again in order to create the biodiesel, and by creating the feed stocks, you're creating carbon dioxide sinks, right right, you're offsetting some of that some of what's going to be burned later, right, Yeah, the stuff that's going to be released in the atmosphere is actually getting pulled in

by the stuff that is turning into growing. So in this case, it's it's almost deceptive in a way to say lower carbon dioxide emissions, because part of that is due to the fact that they're saying, well, yeah, it's lower because this stuff is taking carbon dioxide in. Yeah, but I mean you have to That's That's one of the other things that we'll be talking about in this podcast is you really have to look at the big picture.

There's so many factors involved of you know, how how you create something, how you process it, and what ship it, how you ship it, oh yeah, yeah, and and what it does natural gas. It's going to be big on that one. And and and what it does to the environment overall. Um. Another benefit of biodiesel is that it acts.

It's another thing that acts as a solvent in your engine, which which can again create some problems initially initially if you if you aren't um, watching out for your fuel pump and rubber rubber bits, right, and then once uh, once you do get all that cleaned out, all that gunk, that's in there, then it's it should run much more

cleanly than a typical diesel engine would. And um, I mean a lot of people point out that this is one of those things that if we can figure out a way to make it work, it's a huge benefit because first of all, you're taking stuff that nobody wants used restaurant grease, you know, stuff that would you know, we we already have to figure out a way of disposing of that so it doesn't clog up drains or

cause problems. If we can then take what would normally be a waste product and turn it into a few fuel product, then that's a win win in that scenario. Once you start looking outside that, that's when you're like, all right, but you have to take these other things into consideration. Well, yeah, you know, both both biodiesel and ethanol can be created from what we would normally be considered as waste crops um, you know, extra bits that we wouldn't really be using that would either you know,

go into multure, a landfill or something. Although the ethanol argument, people get really up in arms about that because if you're talking about growing corn just for fuel, and then you take into account other things like starvation issues or you know, good or effective land use. Then that brings up another debate. But again I think that actually fits in our second episode, probably a little more. So we'll we'll say that, we'll we'll get on the soapbox for

the second one. Will spare you that for right now. So that that's the biological stuff. Um, let's see, do you want to go right into the more fossil fuel oriented ones or do you want to do hydrogen next? Let's let's do I've got natural gas next on my paper. Let's do that. Then it so natural gas. We're primarily talking about methane here. Methane is one of those greenhouse gases that you hear about a lot. It actually has the capacity to do far more harm than carbon dioxide,

but on a shorter time scale. So uh, it's greenhouse effect is greater than c O two. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long as c O two. But um, but that's one of those things that people will point out. But methane is a clear and odorless gas that might surprise you when you think of all the things that methane is said to be generated by. Um, yeah, it on pure methane is it's clear and it's odorless. It's only gets odors from other things that are mixed

in with it. Uh. It is normally sold in one of two forms, either compressed natural gas where you actually have it in compressed canisters in gas form YEP, or liquefied natural gas, which means that it's really compressed yeah,

to the point where it's actually liquefied. Now we all know that, or if we don't, we will soon that when you compress gas enough, assuming that you've got the right uh set up here, you are actually pushing those gas atoms closer and closer together, and if you are in the right conditions, you can then eventually get add

enough pressure where you can liquefy something. Now, once it is released from that pressure, assuming that the temperature outside of the pressurized compartment is greater than it's boiling point, it will then immediately boil off into gas. Uh. We see this with lots of different stuff. So, for example, liquid nitrogen, if it once it's removed from being pressurized, starts to boil off and it becomes a gaseous nitrogen, which is why why you know you you see that

whenever you see any of those liquid nitrogen demonstrations. You just see this this pour of Yeah, that's that's UM part of this whole process. Well, anyway, methane is one of those that at room temperature is a gas. It's essentially carbon and four hydrogen atoms. That's your basic building

block for methane and UM. It can be used either in vehicles that are dedicated to using natural gas, or it can be used in what is called a a duel or by fuel vehicle, which means they can use both um methane or gasoline or diesel, depending upon what the engine is. So. Uh, one of the reasons we could look at natural gas as being an alternative fuel is we produce a lot of it in the United States. A lot of nations produce a great deal of natural gas. Yeah.

The thing about natural gases that it occurs naturally in association with crude oil. Usually when you tap into a into a well, you're going to get both crude oil and natural gas. Right, So it's a byproduct in that sense. So, but it's a byproduct that's useful. It's you know, it means that you get two things for one process. Right. We only started being able to use it, and I think about the nineties, which is when they started figuring

out how to to basically bottle and transport it. Right, it's efficiently the whole process well processing natural gas so that you can actually draw it off of everything else and make it into a usable fuel. Um. About natural gas in the United States is domestically produced, so only six percent or so is imported from outside the US. Other nations produce all the natural gas they want, or some of them have to import quite a bit of it. And mostly in the US we use it for heating

and cooking. Uh, there's it's used for electric power production and also in industrial uses. Very little of it is being used in transportation outside of a few notable instances like here in Atlanta, we have a public transportation system called Marta and a lot of the buses actually just I think just the buses, but yeah, I was about to say trains, and I was trying to catch myself, but yeah, the buses in mark on Marta for the most part are natural gas buses, so they are using

this as their fuel. Uh. It tends to produce fewer smog producing pollutants by about depending upon the vehicle's calibration and the specific type of natural gas you're using, whether it's that compressed natural gas or liquefied natural gas, as well as a few other variables. It also is about um, well, it produces five to nine percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, so it's cleaner than gasoline. Um although you're still producing

greenhouse gases. It's not like it's eliminating them all right, Right, It is still a fossil fuel, so even though it's an alternate, it's yeah, and that's another thing to remember. It is a fossil fuel. It's not it's not a renewable resource the way that that for example ethanol and bio diesel. Right exactly. It does tend to be cheaper than gasoline, so that's good. It does have lower energy content than gasoline, so just like the other ones we've mentioned.

In fact, you're gonna see a runing theme here where the energy content of the fuel when you when you compare it to a comparable amount of gasoline is lower. One of the many reasons that gasoline became popular in the first place was that it was so so efficient. Yeah, I had a lot of it had a high energy density compared to other fuels, and uh, you know, it's another thing to keep in mind is that it's really hard to compare some of these fuels against gasoline because

they are in different formats. Right, so, right, right, how do you how do you compare a gallon of air versus a gallon of liquid And you have to look at cubic feet of gas versus a gallon of liquid. It's it becomes very difficult to make a meaningful comparison. Same sort of thing will come true in in hydrogen, but I'll talk about that when we get there. Right, the real measure that we can figure out is um and just kind of how many how many miles per

gallon you get off of it? And and even then you start to be affected by things like the fact that natural gas tanks can be very heavy um and and drag down the efficiency would be a you might, you might. I think for me, the best measurement I would be able to say is if you had two vehicles that were of comparable weight and design, and they were both fully fueled with whatever fuel they had, how far could they get before you had to call Mom to come pick you up? And if that number is

greater with gasoline. Than then you say, all right, well, if you're talking about a fully fueled vehicle, whatever, the definition of that is, whatever kind of tank it is is filled up right, and that and that tank the two exactly our fuel cell. The two the two vehicles are of equivalent weight and design because you have to

figure the design too. I mean, if one of them is if they both weigh the same, but one of them is essentially a wall and the other one is a super sleek car, then obviously that's going to play a part. It's one if one way is like a best spun, the other is a STV, right right, Yeah, these are these are This just just shows you how

complex this problem is. It really is one of those things where if you look at it just on the surface and you say, oh, this has fewer greenhouse gas emissions and uh and and it's not nearly as many particulars that we should use this all the time, and then you look at all the factors. Yeah, it's a complicated problem. I'm glad that this I'm glad I just get to pay to talk about it as opposed to have to make the decisions. All right. Before the break,

we talked about natural gas. Let's talk about another type of fossil fuel, propane, which is also called liquefied petroleum gas UM. You know, we talked about how natural gas we we can find that in the same places that we find oil. Propane is actually something that is truly a byproduct of natural gas, processing of yeah, or or even of crude oil. So we can get it from processing natural gas or crude oil. Propane is h is this colorless and odorless fuel very much, you know, just

as methane is colorless and odorless. By the way, if you if you're wondering how is this possible? Because I know the smell of things like natural gas, that's because uh, odorance are actually mixed in with that that fuel. So they're so dangerous that if if they weren't, then if you got a leak, it's a lot easier to send

detect a leak than to die of overexposure. You would want there to be some way of detecting it apart from a spark ends up igniting a huge explosion obviously, so by mixing odorance, and it's really just to alert safety measure to its presence. Um. Right, So propane and butane um, which you know, is used in in lighter fluid are both collected during the production of natural gas and oil refinery in order to prevent them from condensing

and causing processing difficulties. Right, so we can actually use this in other formats as well, other other uses. So in the United States, for example, propanes used in home and water heating. It's used in cooking as a strickland, I am very well aware of propane and propane accessories. That joke was never funny. And then it's also used in refrigerating and clothes drying and farm in industrial equipment, and even in drying corn. That's mainly what we use

it for here in the United States. The propane here in the US comes from domestic sources, so again we've mostly we've produce it ourselves here in the US, and we don't import that much compared to the stuff we produce. UH. As a fuel, it does have lower carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline, but it also has a lower energy content. Yes, so again if you're if you're talking about a fully fueled vehicle with propane versus a fully fueled vehicle with gasoline, you may not be able to go as far in

the propane vehicle. Uh. It also can emit fewer carbon monoxide and non methane hydrocarbon emissions, so it's also cleaner in that respect. It tends to be less expensive than gasoline, although that price can fluctuate over time, right, right, even even for the course of a year, especially here in the U S where we use it a lot for heating, it can be very much mar pensive than gasoline in the winter, and then very much cheaper in the summer. Yep.

All depends on on when and where you're you're picking it up. Uh. And it's um, you know, it's it's got a higher octane than gasoline does, but like you said, has a lower fuel economy, so it does have a trade off. And it's a fossil fuel, you know, just

like natural gas is a fossil fuel. So it is technically non renewable, right, So renewable over the course of billions of years, right right, It's it's not renewable on any kind of time frame that does us any good whatsoever until we hit that fancy singularity thing that's coming in twenty to forty years, right. And and like like the compressed natural gas, you have to worry about how

you're going to actually store this stuff. You know, it's not the same as the liquid gasoline that we can pump into a car, right right, It has to be pressurized and compressed essentially. So yeah, it's it's you know, it's it's usually under when you get a propane it's usually a propane tank that's under a big, heavy tanks. Yeah. Yeah, So so refueling be an issue, just as it would be with some of the other alternatives we talked about.

Ethanol and biodiesel are again the most like gasoline, so that you're the most compatible with current engine designs and infrastructure infrastructure, right yeah. So so in this case, if we were to make a switch to propane, then it would require us to rethink how we package and deliver and and consume this stuff, and how how would you refuel your vehicle? Would it require you to get the assistance of a couple of burly dudes? Probably would for me,

I don't have a large lifting capacity, so uh. But that that's kind of the low down on propane. And now we're going to talk a little bit about one of my favorite elements of all time, which is good because it's also one of the It is the most abundant in the universe. Hydrogen. Hydrogen, yes, hydrogen, of course is the fuel that we think about when we think about what the sun is doing, where it's taking hydrogen and fusing it into helium millions of degrees doom. Yeah,

I can't, I can't not do that. We've done that before in the podcast. I know. Don't write in and tell us that we did that joke already. We know we did. They might they might be. Giants are awesome, and we're not sorry. No, we're not even a little sorry. So and we'll probably do it again in a future episode, maybe even in the next one, who knows. But at any rate, hydrogen can be used as a fuel in a couple of different ways. You could just burn it

in an internal combustion engine. It is combustible. Uh, if you were to do that, it would actually produce some nitrous ox side as an as one of the things that would emit a pollutant. But another way you could use hydrogen is in a fuel cell. Hydrogen and a fuel cells are really cool idea. It's not practical, but at the moment, but we'll talk about that in a

little bit. First of all, the ideas that with a fuel cell, you've got essentially a membrane and you have hydrogen on one side of this membrane and oxygen on the other side the membrane, and that membrane allows ions to pass through but not electrons. So the hydrogen really wants to get over to where the oxygen is. There's a there's a catalyst that's on this membrane, there's an electro light on the membrane. It's all going to facilitate

this this chemical reaction that's going to happen. Actually, this this physical reaction really that happens. So since the hydrogen wants to go and party with the oxygen and the the electrons are being a total pill about it, they ditch the electrons and then they go right on through that that member membrane, which is kind of like the bouncer at a club, right. You know, you want to get in the club, but you brought your you know,

dorky friend who is totally not club material. So your choice is either leave the club or ditch the dorky friend. Hydrogen ditches the dorky electron friend and goes into the club and parties with the oxygen. The electrons are thinking, oh, I'm not having none of that. I will get into

that club. I'm just using the back door. The back door in this case is going through some form of circuit, and then once it goes to the circuit, it comes to the other side of the fuel cell rejoins the hydrogen and oxygen says, didn't get rid of me after all, did you? And then they all have a big water party because at that point you have H two O. Right. Yes, this is called electrochemical conversion. I like my version where it's a club. I like that better too. Okay, at

any rate, so the output here is really interesting. You get electricity, you get water, and you get heat. Heat is a byproduct as well. So a lot of people have said fuel cells, that's gotta be the way to the future, because think about it, you don't have to worry about any greenhouse gas emissions except for water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas, but it can easily be incorporated into the water cycle, um, whereas you know other ones can't. Uh. And the idea that it's a contained cell,

you're you're using the same product over and over again. Well, yeah, essentially, what happens is you get the water in the fuel cell, and then you have to refuel the fuel cell with more hydrogen. Uh. And then the question is, all right, where do you get the hydrogen? Uh Huh. There's the rub because it turns out hydrogen, while plentiful, tends to buddy up with just about everything which is which which

is a how you get the water. But but you know you can extract hydrogen from water, but you have to expel energy to do that. So the question then is like, is it more efficient for you to free up that hydrogen so that you can get that pure hydrogen you need for the fuel cell. Is the energy that you're pouring in to get the hydrogen more than the benefit you're getting from the fuel cell. If it is, then it's an energy sink, like we talked about at

the top of the podcast. And with hydrogen that tends to be the problem is that how do you get lots of pure hydrogen? It doesn't occur that that often here on on Earth. Yeah, not in its unbound form. It's almost always bound with something else. So you have to find a way of breaking those molecular bonds to free up that hydrogen that that requires you to put forth a little effort, and that's that's where the that's

where the problem is, all right. I think the other big problem with high rygen is is a perception concept because you know, people think hydrogen and sometimes they think Hindenburg and then they think oh the humanity and yeah, and that's and you know it's I mean, yes, yes, the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, but but really the problem there was the aluminum powder coating and yeah, and various other explosive properties that they weren't really thinking about

too hard. Right. It also depends on whether it's an internal combustion engine use of hydrogen or fuel cell use of hydrogen, but it still does have you know issues. Procity totten really fast. How do you store it and how do you make sure it gets to the fuel cell safely? Or do you just replace fuel cells? Is that the way you refuel your fuel cell vehicle? And if so, do you need to get those burly guys back over at the refueling station because you know, these

things get heavy. Remember, you know, when we're talking about a fuel cell, that's one unit of what would be essentially a huge stack of these things that yeah, because if you just if you just plug one and it's not going to get you very far, but you have very much juice at all. Yeah yeah, um and and and it would require something like like a giant steel tank in order to create something sturdy enough to house

this kind of this kind of gas now hydrogen. And of course, and the heavier you make the vehicle, the more power you need to move the vehicle. So it becomes this kind of this that you're chasing, this constant problem that just shifts where the problem actually is. Right, you're like, oh, I solve this, but oh now this is the issue. Uh, this is something engineer struggle with all the time, not just in vehicle design or alternative fuels,

but all sorts of applications. Now, hydrogen does contain less energy than gasoline if you're talking about by volume, if you're talking about by weight, hydrogen has the highest energy content of any fuel. But here's the thing. Hydrogen's really, really, really light. It's the lightest element. So when you're talking about getting a lot of hydrogen together before it makes a weight of any appreciable amount, that's a lot of hydrogen.

So that's why you talk about it being a low energy by volume as opposed to a high energy by weight. When you when you get enough for you to compare the hydrogen versus the gasoline, it doesn't bigger than the car. Probably it's it's that's the big issue, or one of the many issues really in high In the United States, hydrogen is mostly used to refine petroleum, to treat metals,

and also to produce fertilizer. So, um, that's the other thing is that you always have to think about how we're what we are using this stuff for currently and uh, then thinking about the added stress we would put on them. Yeah, and we'll talk about more than in the in the next episode. So this leaves us with our final alternative fuel, which is not it's not really a fuel, not in the sense of the others, and we've already kind of touched on it with hydrogen fuel cells, but it's electricity.

And electricity is just another are alternative to making your cars go. And the interesting thing here is, of course, for those of you who know your history with cars, some of the first vehicles were electrical. Yeah, electric cars actually pre date the gasoline powered cars. Uh, but electric cars were while they were early versions of personal vehicles

they were a little limited. You were limited pretty much by the area that you could drive in, and that was mostly in cities, because they had the capacity to generate and distribute the electricity that you would need to to recharge your vehicle. Um once people got it into their heads, this crazy notion of hey, this vehicle would actually allow me to go and explore beyond just getting from point A to point B in my city, but

out somewhere, maybe not across the wild beyond. Right, I've always I've always wanted to drive from New York to you know, uh to Chicago. Then you would need some thing that would allow you to uh to get further than that, or you would have to have some sort of infrastructure in place that could allow you to refuel.

And that's kind of how gasoline took over. Now these these days, of course, there are lots of hybrid vehicles and a few all electric vehicles, and we are creating more of an infrastructure around those for charging stations in between, you know, so that if you don't happen to have a house once every thirty miles along your route, right, yeah, you can't just you know, sneakily plug in your vehicle to whatever outlet happens to be nearby. Uh, yeah, you can.

You can support it through these official infrastructure utilities that are out there. Also, there's uh, there are other innovations like regenerative breaking, where you've get some which you save up some the kinetic energy that you create from breaking or from and normally you would just you would just lose that energy. That energy would normally just be converted

into heat and you would lose it. But with regenerative breaking, you're actually capturing some of that energy that otherwise would just go into heat, and you can put that back into the battery. Now, of course there's no way to completely eliminate heat. If we could, we'd have the perfect closed system and every time we use the brakes, we would capture all of that energy and put it right back into the battery. Doesn't mean that you would even you would never have to recharge the battery, but it

would mean that you could do it. We could go for a really long time. Yeah, but it turns out, you know, we can't do that. We can't press you. Oh your thermodynamics. Um, I blame Newton. Really, it's his fault. If that apple had not hit his head. And he had just stuck with figs, we would have been I think I'm mixing things up anyway. So, uh So, getting back into electricity, the nice thing about an electrical car

is that you really have no appreciable emissions to speak of. Right, you know, you do have to worry about whatever the battery is made out of, if that stuff is toxic or dangerous, and how do you dispose of that once you need to eventually replace it and keeping in my and you can charge and drain a battery a lot of several times, but eventually you will need to replace it. Um.

So there that's a concern on top of that. Just because your car is clean, like the the electricity isn't producing any sort of appreciable emissions, doesn't mean that there were no emissions created during the processing of that battery, yeah, or of the electricity that you put into that battery, right yeah, because because how does you know, how does

power get to your house? Yeah? If you if your power is coming from a coal powered plant, then the fact that your car is not emitting greenhouse gases or pollutants is nice, but it's still getting its energy from a source that really is producing a lot of greenhouse gases and pollutants. So in a way, the way I like to say is that it kind of shifts the burden the responsibility to a different party. But it's all

dull part of this overall system. So again, if your goal, because it doesn't necessarily mean that your goal to switch from one fuel to an alternative, it doesn't necessarily have to be environmental. But if it is environmental, switching all of this other stuff into consider it. You can't just switch to electrical and think I am now saving the world.

It all depends on how the energy is produced. Now, if your energy is being produced by plants that are mainly using hydro power or geothermal power, or solar or wind power. First of all, I'm amazed, uh, not so much with the hydro power. There are quite a few facilities that use that. But but you know, if most people aren't off the grid enough and most people, yeah, but most areas are not in the US anyway, are not using that kind of power for yeah, I mean generation.

Not everyone has access to the kind of stuff. Like you know, if you're using hydro power, you've got to have access to a great amount of water that's in motion. If you happen to be in a part of the United States or the world in general that is not close to any sort of major river or or title motion or anything like that where you can harness this, then you have to find something else to create your electricity.

It's not even that you're necessarily you know, uh, part of the what what some people think of as a giant conspiracy among car companies and oil companies and that sort of thing. Personally, I don't believe that conspiracy really exists. I believe that there are a lot of companies out there that have interests and they will lobby to have those interests protected. But I don't think it goes so far as to let us suppress all innovation. They don't need to, and we'll talk about more about that in

the next podcast. But but at any rate, so, yeah, it's it's a lack of availability of um of of a rare earth elements to to help things like photovoltaics and and be um just just access to the natural resources needed to to really collect wind on a wind farm or solar energy exactly. Yeah, you may not be in a part of the world that is conducive to

any of that, so you have to get it somehow. So, yeah, electricity is good in theory, but again it all depends on how that electricity was generated, whether or not you are net doing a service to the environment. And again if if that's not your concern, if the environment isn't the reason you're switching to an alternative fuel, this is a moot discussion in the first place, because, like we said, there are lots of different reasons. All right, So that

is the overview. Do you have anything else about electricity you wanted to add? Excellent? Alright, So we have covered the various alternatives that are typically talked about when we talk about alternative fuel. In our next episode, we're really going to cover why is gasoline something that we really depend on? We've touched on a lot of it already, and talk about what are the big challenges to moving

to a gasoline free fuel system? And there are quite a few challenges, as it turns out, but we'll cover that in our next episode. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes that we should cover here on Tech Stuff, please let us know. A lot of you been writing in and giving us some great suggestions for future topics. Thank you so much for all of your

all of your letters. Yeah, we really appreciate it. We've been adding to the list, and trust us, that list is very important to us because it means that we don't have to sit there and invent stuff. We already know what you want to hear, and when we know what you want to hear, it makes it better for everybody. So keep that up. Let us know, send us an email, our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on social media. You can find us

on Facebook or Twitter. Our handle at both of those is text stuff H. S. W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and bath into other topics. Does It Has to Works dot Com