It is apparently not worth while buying a supposedly environmental car in GB!

My link

The government will most likely pull the rug out from under the mat by failing to support the technology in the future. The government is rather fickle in its support of environmental friendly fuels.

I'm confused, you mention "environmentally friendly fuels" but you've linked to an article about bio-fuels.

does not compute.

Diesel isn't environmentally friendly anyway, at least not without a particulate filter...

Summary - Wah wah wah it's not fair the nasty government are taking away my fuel tax break.

Environmentally friendly car?, there's no such thing. No car benefits the environment, there are just cars that damage the environment less than others. Why can't we have engines that burn hydrogen in oxygen?, where the hydrogen and oxygen come from a liquid fuel called water.

Environmentally friendly car?, there's no such thing. No car benefits the environment, there are just cars that damage the environment less than others. Why can't we have engines that burn hydrogen in oxygen?, where the hydrogen and oxygen come from a liquid fuel called water.

How do you make the hydrogen for the fuel cell? ATM the main commercial source of H2 is hydrocarbon cracking, producing CO2 and H2.

Diesel isn't environmentally friendly anyway, at least not without a particulate filter...

That filter only captures the crap for long enough to push the car into a lower tax bracket, doesn't it? The same particulates seem to get into the air eventually, just all in one big, smokey lump at speed

True....!

That filter only captures the crap for long enough to push the car into a lower tax bracket, doesn't it? The same particulates seem to get into the air eventually, just all in one big, smokey lump at speed

Decat and straight-through ftw

They (UKGOV.COM) will always move the goal post to suit their requirements, I think those HIPS packs are just a stealth way of getting infromation about homes, ready to land us with another form of council tax .

They gave companies a discount of derv when they put out the co2 based tax system, only to then hike up the price of derv when a lot switched over.

More on their future plans here : http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cars/rule-changes.htm

Queue the next hair-brained from the Liebore meeja machine designed to keep the green crusty kids of the guardian readers happy whilst extracting the greatest amount of coin from it's misled citizens.

If there is a big outcry from this they'll spend £150Million on a hydrogen scheme that no one can use but gets good headlines.

If the gov were actually interested in being environmentally friendly they'd stop all the money going to windfarms and start building up to date nuke plants and developing tidal generators.

How do you make the hydrogen for the fuel cell? ATM the main commercial source of H2 is hydrocarbon cracking, producing CO2 and H2.

Quite. If you're going to steam-reform methane to produce hydrogen to power fuel cell cars or whatever, you might as well just burn the effing stuff in a gas turbine. Would be more efficient...

You can make hydrogen by cracking water to give Hydrogen and oxygen.

2(H20) ---> 2(H2) + O2

The side product is oxygen, which is always handy as it's used as a liquid gas in many things.

To do this you need lots of electricity, which means to do it cleanly you need a hydro dam. So you have to set your H2 plant up very close to a hydro dam and then crack the water.

As for biofuels... they might reduce the amount of carbon that comes into the cycle, but unless you use pre-used oils it is tenuous due to all the energy used to grow the crop.

Let's not even get onto the effect it has on food prices.

Then there is the cutting down of rainforest to grow bio-crops, which is just very bad all in all.

You can make hydrogen by cracking water to give Hydrogen and oxygen.

2(H20) ---> 2(H2) + O2

The side product is oxygen, which is always handy as it's used as a liquid gas in many things.

To do this you need lots of electricity, which means to do it cleanly you need a hydro dam. So you have to set your H2 plant up very close to a hydro dam and then crack the water.

No kidding - hence the previous posts regarding steam-reformation of methane being the only viable industrial-scale method of making hydrogen. Electrolysing water takes 250kJ/mol, as opposed to the 165kJ/mol required for SMR - over half as much again, which is a lot on a mass scale!

Realistically, fission co-generators are the only way to make sufficient hydrogen for us to switch from a carbon economy to a hydrogen one. They're probably only a couple of decades away if there's the will / need to start building them - until / unless we get nuclear fusion to work, of course, in which case the World will be our technological oyster!