Karlos wrote:
One likely problem with that reaction is that it isn't easy to reverse. You'd end up with a lot of sodium borate (jagshemash!) that would be difficult to reprocess back into sodium borohydride. Ideally you don't want by products from you fuel cell other than water. Anything else is dead weight you are carrying around.
well, I only know about this from wikipedia you understand: I havent really looked into it much further than that.
Production of the borohydride in the first place requires a considerable amount of energy. Overall, it's cheaper to use liquified hydrogen. However, that's also extremely dangerous.
see, theres the tradeoff that needs to be made:
safety vs. efficiency vs storability.
you could also use methanol fuel cell, but you still need to remove the hydrogen to be able to use it in a fuel cell, and what to do with the carbon ?
besides, its all a question of where the energy conversion to electricity takes place: way off at some generator somewhere, or locally with an alternator linked to an engine ?
it is also worth bearing in mind the efficiency of electric motors compared with petrol: a good petrol engine in a car will get about 25% useful work out of the petrol.
a good electric motor will get 90-95% useful work from an electrical fuel source.
a hydrogen fuel cell will get about 80% of the available energy converted to electricity.
the thing about borax (sodium borate) is that it is solid, and could be taken away and recycled in bulk - probably at a service station type thing.
also, if one is forced to burn hydrocarbon fuels to produce the hydrogen/sodium borohydride, the powerplant will only be doing ONE THING, and can be made that much more efficient meaning less carbon is released, and potentially use biofuels instead of mineral fuel.
just a train of thought (geddit!), no structure whatsoever, apologies! I'm now gonna read the rest of the thread, suffice to say, I'd heard that Priuses (Prii ?) are still deceptively expensive to run...
