First off, a fun little thing. I've contributed a book's worth of material to Wikipedia while I've been unemployed and bored so far this year. In a weird way, one of the most successful articles is what I wrote on progressive shifting. Honestly, I don't know if what I wrote is right—most places just say that progressive shifting involves a slightly higher RPM after each shift, which I don't say at all. It might be a correct observation, but I think it must be more of an effect than a cause. Anyway, I think the article partially explains the technical reasons why it's better, but there could be more info. Still, there is very little information out there on the subject.
I randomly wandered over to that page recently and decided to search for any information that I could add. To my surprise, the article showed up as the first entry in my Google search. This is kind of weird because within Wikipedia itself, the page is pretty much not referenced at all, except for a link in my user page. I guess people must believe the article is correct—they seem to have linked to it in order to have it show up at the top in Google. I'm most impressed because I only made one edit on that page—to create it.
Anyway, yesterday I went to a talk put on by the Minnesota Renewable Hydrogen Initiative. It turned out to be moderately interesting, though I was especially impressed by the talk Lanny Schmidt did on the ethanol-to-hydrogen reactor/reformer that got a lot of press last month. It's a really simple device, kind of the pulse-jet of hydrogen reforming—except that it's actually efficient (maybe that makes it the ramjet of hydrogen reforming).
When I first heard of the device, it seemed kind of silly. In a way, it still seems kind of silly. Well, actually, the silly thing is that it's meant to feed fuel cells that are fragile and expensive—the reactor is only silly by extension. If fuel cells can ever be made cheaply, it's a great idea. Hydrogen is difficult to store because of its extremely low density (I think I heard that even liquid hydrogen is less dense than air, but I'm unsure). Storing hydrogen in Ethanol instead is a much easier thing to do.
Schmidt also frequently repeated that we need to transition to using biomass-based fuels. There is no way around it. You can extract hydrogen from coal or oil for a while, but you'll just end up running out. In additon, the carbon that comes out in the process has to be put somewhere if you don't want the greenhouse effect to get worse.
There was a lady from the Department of Energy there who kind of got picked on after a while. She was from the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office, which oversees a lot of the new energy initiatives going on at DoE. She put up a budget table that kind of skewed toward giving money to projects that produced hydrogen by using electricity from nuclear power and projects to sequester carbon from fossil fuels—both things that renewable energy folks really don't like to see because they still involve non-renewable energy. She had to defend herself by saying that a lot of the renewable fuel money comes in from different sources than the main budget she had listed.
Still, I was kind of disturbed by the amount of money the government was putting into the idea. It was a large sum, something like $1.7 billion, but there are individual car companies out there that are putting more money in than that!
Overall, I was fairly impressed by the crowd there. The presenters were much more in-depth than I expected. News reports I've seen about hydrogen and renewable fuels barely scratch the surface of what was discussed over the few hours yesterday—and yesterday's forum just barely scratched the surface of these issues in general.
There was a lot of good buzz at the meeting by industry insiders, but because of secrecy, they couldn't really say much. The DoE lady was the person who was most reluctant to believe that anything could happen quickly. I suppose this is partially due to the fact that she is looking at the national picture, which looks pretty bleak. In Minnesota, we at least have enough crop land to attempt to become self-powered through the use of biomass and wind energy, but this is a much more difficult thing to do nation-wide.
A comment that became cliché by the end of the seminar was, “the Upper Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of biomass and wind energy.” Actually, that comment was made in a few different ways. It was first mentioned by Lanny Schmidt, but I think about three other people also said it. The comment is probably somewhat inappropriate (since places like Brazil could out-biomass us any day of the year), but kind of a nice idea nonetheless.
Well, I could go on for a pretty long time talking about the seminar, but I suppose this is enough for now.
Posted by mike at March 16, 2004 03:17 PM | Hardware , Politics , The Media | TrackBack