Hydrogen Cars, Vehicles and Infrastructure
Canadian Pacific’s southern merger puts zero-carb freight in easy reach by guest blogger Stan Thompson Canadian Pacific Railway has throttled-up the transition to zero-carbon freight movement by two big notches recently. Last December, 2020, CPR announced “that it plans to develop North America’s first line-haul hydrogen-powered locomotive.” Then in March, 2021, they announced a combination with […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson If you’ve ever seen a slow-motion video of a dropped glass object shattering, then—the video reversed—reassembling to form the whole again, you have some notion of futurism. Futurists pay attention to the moving fragments all around us: which are biggest; how they are shaped and spinning; and the direction toward […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson updated 12/21/2020 In the late 1800s Nikola Tesla took Thomas Edison’s DC and alternated the polarity back and forth so that its voltage could be stepped up by a transformer and hauled much further by overcoming electrical resistance. Way off in the distance, at the user end, another transformer stepped […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson New Testament, Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 3: And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? This familiar passage is quoted not because scripture proves anything about GM, Nikola or pundit journalism but […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson In case you came in late, the synthesis epoch is when we started making stuff like fertilizer from renewable energy which, in the previous extraction epoch, we sourced by digging or pumping matter out of the ground. • Natural gas hydrogen is to electrolyzed H2 as jumper cables are to […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Archimedes is quoted as saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” Bell Telephone Laboratories gave mankind the transistor and—just as Thomas Jefferson foresaw— the free American pursuit of happiness (AKA the will to innovation) forged it into the Internet, daddy of all […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Very different processes distribute the earth’s mineral wealth and the political configurations of its surface. Though different, they coincide in ways that profoundly impact our destinies. In the late industrial period, the relative value of energy has been so high, and energy extraction as oil and gas has been so […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Davidson College is near our NC home and its proximity offers neighbors access to an astonishing parade of great minds. In 1962 I met cosmologist George Gamow there and got to ask him a few questions. Albert Einstein had died only seven years earlier; some would say Gamow was his […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson The world may little note nor long remember the routine June 8, 2020, press release by Germany’s venerable Thyssenkrupp industrial giant. But to me it is a transition marker that’s profound in the same way that the tiny band of iridium and ash around the world marks the cretaceous-tertiary boundary […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Many of us who saw the hydrogen transition coming over two decades ago are frustrated by writers today who feel obliged to apologize for the vast amount of hydrogen that goes into fertilizer and petrochemicals. Many of these folks probably feel they have to mention it because so many have […]
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