Emission-free car fuel made from air and water

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Public transport is one way - relocalizing work is another. Here is a radical idea - actually build the companies close to the peoples homes and vice versa - not according to where it is cheap. But I know, that is a planned economy and that is communist....

That's not a planned economy; that's town planing ; a planned economy is where performance and growth is dictated rather than forecast, and people are 'allocated' as another resource.

Remote work happens in some cases and is getting far more prevalent, but it depends what the work is. An office, sure, but not a factory, even if that factory is making solar panels or whatever

But even without this, you just made the point that this sort of fuel technology is nonsensical because it certainly will take the 10 years you proposed for the practicality of a public transport system that you like to erect and power and fuel all the infrastructure to make this artificial oil plus the power plants that run it.

I actually agree - I didn't say it was practical; as such a system would be most practical to be inductively powered if not outright maglev, perhaps with fuel provision for emergency vehicles.

I dare say that this would probably take even longer - certainly it would take a lot longer and will be a lot more expensive than to do something rather simple as to double or quadruple or even increase by an order of magnitude the availability of public transport.

Sure. It's always worse to refit than to build in place, even to build in place in "for but not with" style for what might be anticipated; it would mean reworking practically every road, and as such, it's likely to spring up in trial cities first, and certainly not on a national scale in 10 years, but I do think that in 10 years, Chinese cities will probably have such systems, albeit with no national network for interconnection purposes.

The costs of getting 10x as many busses and 4x as many trains and 10x as many people who drive the busses is quite a bargain compared to basically increasing the number of power plants by 20 or 50 or 100% in addition to building massive numbers of high tech factories to produce oil from that power.

That's just the point. Oil will be obsolete; powering them via fossil fuel would be an unnecessary hop in the power chain compared to a simple distribution system in parallel. It's also the point that if you could (purely back-of-the-envelope numbers) reduce the total number of vehicles (meaning replacing everything from cars and bikes to buses to taxis to trains) in existence by at least half and achieve perhaps 75% utilisation at peak times any maybe 5% at minimums, it's being used a lot more efficiently. Most vehicles are idle most of the day, and most mass public transport has large slack times where it's mostly empty and as such, stops unnecessarily (a major waste of energy even with regenerative braking systems, and just as importantly a waste of time), which in most cases results in the operator running them at a loss at such times.

Do you know Physics? There is something called thermodynamics and what it says basically is that if you transform energy from one form to another, you always loose something and you always create at least "disorder".

I'm fairly sure he does - the point is that for some specific cases, it's a useful tradeoff as the storage density is huge. It doesn't mean cars can keep being used on it, but it is useful for any number of small applications where batteries are prohibitively large, expensive and inefficient. Think datacentres' backup generators - the critical point is consistency of output, while they are typically only used for maybe a day in the worst cases outside outright disasters they are designed to work in the exact case of failure of the normal system. See my earlier point about how PRT would likely be externally powered or maglev, but some fuel provision for emergency vehicles would make sense in case of far-reaching problems.