Fuel cell technology is still a long ways off. Honda’s fuel cell prototype will set you back over a million dollars - and it certainly doesn’t run like a similarly priced Ferrari.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks regarding fuel cell technology is the production and storage of hydrogen. Most people simply assume that you get hydrogen from water - put some electrodes in water, pass some current and you’ll see the hydrogen bubbling out. But that’s not where we get our hydrogen. Perhaps ironically (from a warming perspective), the hydrogen that is produced usually comes from the combustion of methane (CH4 + O2 –> CO2+2H2). And that’s assuming it’s complete combustion, incomplete combustion releases CO into the environment. Furthermore, consider that a sizable portion of our energy comes from coal plants (see CARMA) and if you have to get a lot of new electricity to produce the heat needed to make millions of tons of hydrogen to run all of our cars - the carbon pollution savings are not as great as you’d hope, if they even exist. (This by the way, is the same downfall as that for corn based ethanol. While the corn itself reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, producing and burning ethanol puts carbon back into the atmosphere.)

But researches at Penn State were able to create hydrogen using bacteria. Essentially they utilized a bacterial fuel cell that performs electrolysis on a sample of organic matter (in the case of the research they used acetic acid). One of the biggest benefits is that with the help of the bacteria you don’t need to supply as much outside energy as you would otherwise, cutting down the amount of work we need to put in to produce hydrogen. And while other lingering technical hurdles are sure to keep fuel cells off of the mass market for quite some time this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Story from Wired

For anyone interested in examining the CO2 output of various power plants across the globe here’s a great site to check out: http://carma.org

Up until recently I think emissions from power plants were really overlooked. Everyone focuses on the effects of oil and the need to switch over to hybrids, plug-ins, and eventually fuel cells but if all the electricity we produce is powered by dirty plants then simply changing our automobile fuel won’t do much.

I for one hope we don’t add any new red dots onto the American map (note the concentration around the Eastern US and China).

After seeing what happened to ankit on Tuesday i decided i should get to the airport a bit early for my Thursday 8am flight and since everybody kept telling me that the airport was going to be packed at that time i decided to leave around 6ish. I somehow slept through all of my alarms and didn’t get up till 650, woke pav up and rushed to the airport. Luckily there was no traffic and security went by pretty fast so i actually ended up being on time. The moral of this is if you’re going to leave for the airport one hour before your flight, make sure its really early in the morning.

In other news i ended up watching Oprah on Thanksgiving because my parents were watching it and found some really interesting stories i wanted to share. The first is of an 11 year old girl who upon hearing about the aids crisis with children in Africa immediately took all of her own money and adopted a child with aids for a year. This girl was born with a rare liver disease and had to go through two liver transplants in the span of one year. Instead of accepting gifts like flowers from well wishers she asked them to donate to a foundation she created for the aids children. Imagine that, you’re on a hospital bed getting one liver after another and yet you’re thinking about helping others in any way that you can. Former President Clinton heard about this and personally went to her high school and brought her to the Oprah show. Some anonymous person who was traveling with Clinton donated half a million to this girls foundation. What really stood out to me was how unselfish this was on the part of the girl, she had no other motive but to help people in need.  I have always tried to think for the better of other people and not always about myself which is why i admire people like this little girl.

Another nice story i found from the show was of a website called www.kiva.org . Entrepreneurs in this country have all kinds of financial aid available to them to make their small company successful, but what about the entrepreneurs of third world countries? Thats where this website comes in, it provides a place where anybody can loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. The most amazing aspect of the site is the fact that 97% of the loans have been paid back, that is quite amazing considering people aren’t really sure of where they are loaning this money. Its people like the creators of this non profit company that show me how the web 2.0 generation can be used to help out people in need.

There was also a piece on the school Andre Agassi has created in Vegas which ill write about later. Check it out here if you want http://www.agassifoundation.org/ .

Hope everyone is having a good break.

-Saumil