What is the best alternative to Gas?

Question

what is the best and most promising new fuel to use for the future to replace gas?

Answer 1

Thermal energy!

You can get your thermal energy from wind and sun...

Answer 2

Hydrogen is the only real legitimate alternative.  The problem with Hydrogen at the moment is they are having trouble finding an affordable and efficient way to extract and capture the gas and they're having trouble making the power plant for the cars small enough that they will actually have a trunk.

However, Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the world, it doesn't pollute (only water is given off), and it's more powerful than gasoline.

Ethanol is a collossal flop.  It's less efficient than gas, it pollutes just as much, it's driving the cost of food through the roof, and it's causing draughts.  It's ridiculous that people are actually buying this c**p.  Those people should be ashamed of themselves.

Hybrids make no sense.  They're really pretentious which is why a lot of people are buying them, but all-in-all they make no economic sense.  For the most part, they are thousands of dollars more than their small engined gas alternatives and their battery system has a limited life and is thousands of dollars to replace.  Unless you're driving 30-50k miles in the city per year, a hybrid will usually cost you more money AND they're still dependent on gasoline.

Oil is still a viable source, but the problem is that we've handcuffed ourselves into not being allowed to tap into our domestic sources of oil.  We have more oil in this country than all of OPEC does, but we've passed laws that prevent us from drilling for it.  If we remove those laws, we'd allow ourselves to drill and produce out own oil.  That would massively reduce our national debt, put OPEC in a major crisis, create tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of jobs, and it would allow the US to opperate according to it's moral, ethical, and legal guidelines by fighting against an illegal oligopoly (OPEC) and bringing it back into a free market.

You will NEVER be independent of oil.  Oil is used for so many things you would never think of, not just gasoline or fuel.  However, if can switch to a different fuel, it would allow the economy to reset back a little bit and provide cost relief.  I'm all for a viable alternative fuel, I just think that the only one that has been proposed (Hydrogen) is still 10-15 years off into the future.

Answer 3

Sorry, but there really isn't one,

gas has developed over millions of years by compressing the energy absorbed by prehistoric plants and algae from the sun over yet more millions of years, that much stored energy just isnt't around anymore. (even nuclear will only last so long)

Electricity is really the only option left, since highly combustible chemicals are on the decline, but how do we get it?

There are three vast reserves of energy we can look into, but none as easy to reach as fossil fuels:

The sun, which can be captured as solar power or wind power, but its only available during the day and not particularly up to providing energy for our needs yet.

Geothermal, that is, using the huge amounts of heat at the centre of the earth to produce our energy.

And the moon, (hear me out) the moon turns the tides and the rising and falling of sea levels can be calculated and predicted centuries in advance, placing hydro generators in bottlenecks to coves will literally capture the energy of the moon for application directly into the power grid to run cars etc.

Problem: electricity cant be stored very well, in fact the best way to store large amounts of energy ive heard is simply to pump large volumes of water uphill, so that it may be let down again to run hydro generators, primitive huh?

In short, gas is on the way out, the price will only go up, and there will never be an energy source to fill the gap, we'll be forced (eventually, say, 15-20 years) to really look at cutting down the amount of energy we use, not for the sake of pollution or greenhouse or any of that, but just because we wont continue to survive on the way we live today.

-EDIT-

Hydrogen is a good answer (it actually answers the question), but then we're back to the old issue that to get hydrogen, you need the energy first, hydrogen doesnt just grow, it takes electricity or fossil fuels to produce, and for every potential kW of hydrogen you produce AT LEAST one kW of energy needs to be used.

Answer 4

Ethanol

Answer 5

Ethanol made from seeds like corn is just not wise, but made from hemp which grows to maturity in 110 days, it makes sense. After oil hemp is the number one souce of fossil or biofuel. and it has 25,000 other uses.

http://www.freethehemp.org

See what they say... i just joined today....  good luck....

Answer 6

Stay home and drink beer. It may give you gas too, though.

Answer 7

Walking

Answer 8

Electric, no question. Its just they're making them excessivly complicated now. Tessler sp. seems to have a decent design. It wouldn't be that hard for many people to run off the grid (co-op windmills and solar panels) as far as charging goes. Or series hybrids, like diesel locomotives.

Answer 9

Solar energy could be used by companies that produce hydrogen fuel.  But everytime this is suggested, eggheads and their calculators come rushing out to cry that the nearly free solar electricity thus produced should be tabulated at its market price into the equation to thereby show that hydrogen is expensive.  In other words, people want to figure added value (profit) into the "cost" of making hydrogen, instead of just figuring the end product (hydrogen) to be dependent on a step that involves capturing energy for the next step of seperating the hydrogen from the oxygen in water.  The situation is comparable to an organic farmer wanting people to pay him a marked up price for compost and then paying again for the higher-than-market price for organic produce.

There is thus no solution to the dependence on oil because people apparently want no solution.