onetrack

Here's another "failure to proceed" in the Hydrogen production story. Following on from the cancellation of the $600M Green Hydrogen project in Whyalla (due to economics that failed to stack up), Trafigura (a huge global corporation) has now cancelled its $750M Green Hydrogen project in Port Pirie. The project failed to even get past the economic feasibility stage. Yet, the Govt is still throwing vast amounts of our tax dollars at anyone who wants to pursue the Green Hydrogen Dream. I'd have to opine it's actually going to turn into a Hydrogen Nightmare, because nowhere in the world has anyone come up with the answer to the basic fact, that trying to produce cheap Hydrogen - in any form - is costly - and in the case of Green Hydrogen, it wastes something in the order of 35% to 36% of the input energy, to produce that Green Hydrogen. I know that the Japanese Govt is throwing literally trillions at the problem, trying to find the Eureka answer to acquiring cheap and plentiful Hydrogen. The Japanese Govt has a working group which has drawn together all the major industrial players and manufacturers in Japan, to try and develop cheap Hydrogen. Despite all the money and admirable effort by the Japanese, the Hydrogen Dream is no closer now than it was 20 or 30 years ago - and it's all due to physics, and a lack of a simply-acquired source of Hydrogen. https://www.miningday.com.au/trafigura-scraps-750m-green-hydrogen-plant-at-port-pirie/

Both Mike and his brother Mark Patey have been diagnosed with ADHD (or ADD), and Mark has even written a book about how they deal with it. Interestingly, the book is full of spelling errors and mistakes in grammar, which is typical of people who are always working at super-speeds. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23516836-addicts-or-millionaires-the-gift-and-curse-of-adhd https://add.org/high-functioning-adhd/#:~:text=Many ADHDers are high achievers,their (often undiagnosed) ADHD. To me, this is a very good description of ADHD - "ADHD Doesn’t Define Your Success, and Success Doesn’t Define Your Diagnosis".

Nope, no doctor or psych qualifications, just a long lifetime (I'm 76 shortly) of interaction with tens of thousands of people, employing hundreds of people, and making a lifetime study of personality traits and features, and judging their strong and weak personality points, and individual skill sets. However, I reckon that the majority of "driven" personalities who work excessively long hours, are highly obsessive, who aim for lofty and extremely powerful positions, who gain multiple numbers of high qualifications, and who often have somewhat deficient interpersonal skills, are "on the spectrum".

Oh, I've no doubt they're very clever, just as the worlds greatest code breaker, Alan Turing, was brilliant beyond belief. These peoples brains work differently to normal peoples brains. But they're still ADHD sufferers, and often have major social skills dislocation, and they can also become very depressed, very quickly. Without knowing anything about Mike Patey, I concluded he had ADHD, within 5 mins of coming across one of his videos.

I must admit, I'm quite impressed with this "tiny home" on wheels (I don't know why it's not simply described as a caravan), but I can't see how they managed to convert it (from a Dash 8 training fuselage), and then sell it for around $50,000 - they must have lost money on it, as in the form of a promotional deal. The average caravan will chew up $100,000 of your hard-earned $$'s today. https://newatlas.com/tiny-houses/aero-off-grid-towable-home/

You can anything with a lot of money, but I'll wager the surplus gliders were cheap as chips. Nowadays, this is what you do with oodles of money and defunct aircraft.

Orion have their own website, and it appears you order factory-direct. Nice-looking machine. https://orioncub.com/

Nev, you mean you haven't become a squillionaire, and don't run 10 businesses at once? You're doing it all wrong, then. 😄 Maybe you need your own YooToob channel? 😄

It's interesting watching these squillionaires with ADHD, operate at double the speed of anyone else, and burning up money at mind-boggling levels - while they also generate mind-boggling amounts of money from running 10 businesses at once. I liken them to 100W, 240V light globes running at 400V. They produce a fantastic and incredible amount of light, before they rapidly burn out, long before a normal lifespan. Many ADHD sufferers have short lives, due to their love of extreme risk-taking, and their supremely overconfident natures.

.....OT then realised that it was obvious he hadn't called on Don enough to become familiar to the Marines. As OT was reaching for his phone to call the White House desk, Don walked out. He spotted OT, and said, "Oh, it's OT! I was expecting.........

A rare Ryan STM-2, powered by a Menasco engine. It flipped in 1967, too, when the collets holding the inlet valves stripped, resulting in an EFATO. https://www.aerialvisuals.ca/AirframeDossier.php?Serial=18747

Is this the new aviation maths?

No information is available are regards how long it was after the crash before the wreckage was found. The wreckage was reportedly found at 11:15AM local time, so it could've been there for anywhere between 5 hrs and half an hour. Ogilvie Road West is a gravel local road in a sparsely-populated rural area, at the top end of the Northern Wheatbelt of W.A., so you'd be lucky to have any more than 5 or 6 vehicles a day transiting the road.

......made the W.A. gold rush of 1893 look like an Anglican Church ladies day out. It was the word "gold" that had raised OT from his torpor (caused by reading reams of absolutely libellous, slanderous and salacious stories about West Australians and their ancestry in general - which as everyone knows, is pure drivel, straight from the mouths of low-down Eastern States convict offspring) - and which word made OT misty eyed, as he reminisced about his time as a big gold producer on the Coolgardie Goldfield. It was obviously time for OT to get back into the gold game, and accordingly, he rang up President Trump and asked him about what he planned to do with all that spare, useless gold stored in Fort Knox. "Hi, OT" said the Donald (because Donald and OT have been on first name terms for many years), and he went on, "I was thinking about moving it all to Mar-A-Lago for security purposes? It'd look good, stored in my bedroom, along with all the other.................

Jeez, just what we needed! An AI essay on aviation! Does it go on to say all crashed aircraft are normally Cessnas?

I've only just read about it, because I was away in the wheatbelt all day today. The information is a bit sparse, because the crash location is 47kms N of Northampton - and no-one noticed him missing, until a passer-by spotted wreckage in a paddock. Obviously, he didn't file a flight plan or organise any SAR, or the crash would've been picked up sooner. It seems the "Cessna 150" description must be correct, because the ATSB is sending an investigation team to W.A. to look into it. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/light-plane-crash-ogilvie-western-australia/105082806 https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/wa/light-plane-crashes-in-ogilvie-500km-north-of-perth-in-wa-c-18115296

I believe there's only so much one can do, to stop an arrogant, overconfident pilot from killing themselves - and their pax. The outrageous and dangerous piloting behaviour of the Metroliner pilot involved in the Lockhart River disaster was reported to CASA, and CASA did absolutely nothing, as regards lifting Brett Hotchin's pilots licence. Any other "safety authority" in any other country, would have been sued to the nth degree, and the "authority" dismantled, if the Metroliner disaster happened in that country.

You'd have a lot more trouble trying to finding a refuelling point, with a hydrogen car, Spacey! 😄

The only manufacturer in the world going down the IC Hydrogen path with diesels is JCB in the U.K. Anthony (Lord) Bamford is pushing the IC Hydrogen engine with a £100M investment. He's even built JCB Hydrogen refuelling vehicles. But nowhere is it mentioned where a constant, cheap source of hydrogen for the long-term, is coming from. I don't know where JCB is getting their hydrogen, but I'll wager it's a refinery by-product - and no cost of the hydrogen is mentioned. https://www.jcb.com/en-au/campaigns/hydrogen/hydrogen-truck Bamford claims it's a no-brainer to use hydrogen in current IC engines, because the development costs are low, and he doesn't have to add serious strength to his machines to carry the batteries needed for electric drive. He says if went to electric motive power on a 20 tonne digger, the battery would add 8 tonnes in weight to the machine and he'd have to install a heavier undercarriage and frame. But there are already pure electric motive power machines appearing in the construction industry, and I think Bamford has taken a major detour that is going to lead him into a cul-de-sac for the long-term. The problem with hydrogen is, although it's very energy intensive, carrying 33.33 kWh per kg - as against about 12 kWh per kg for petrol and diesel - it's hydrogen TRANSPORTATION, that is the giant bugbear. Hydrogen rates poorly for volumetric efficiency in transportation, even when pressurised to 700 kPa. It can be pressurised to much greater levels - but at what cost and safety level? So hydrogen has to be LIQUIFIED to be transported efficiently. But when it's liquified, it takes around 36% of its available energy to liquify it. Current research is all about trying to reduce the cost of hydrogen liquifaction - but no-one has come up with a cheap liquifaction method yet - and no-one has produced cheap and substantial supplies of hydrogen - even though we've been promised cheap, GREEN hydrogen for a couple of decades now. https://www.idealhy.eu/index.php?page=lh2_outline Note that the hydrogen liquifaction project in the last link above, was completed in 2013 and nothing further has come from all their research. In the meantime, battery design has improved in leaps and bounds, tripling and quadrupling energy storage abilities in just a few short years, and with more substantial advances in the near future. You'll be flying an electric aircraft long before you'll be flying a hydrogen fuel cell one - and you'll be able to recharge in a myriad of places with ease.

The hydrogen fuel cell is a pipe dream economically, and they will continue to be a pipe dream for decades, or even centuries to come. It's simply unviable, there's no other way to describe the system. Some on here may recall Perths hydrogen fuel cell bus experiment, which ran from 2004 to 2007. Three Mercedes-Benz buses fitted with Canadian Ballard fuel cells were purchased with Federal Govt backing of more than $3M. The W.A. Govt also provided a lot of money and infrastructure to run the buses. Hydrogen was produced from the Kwinana BP refinery and trucked to the Transperth bus depot in Malaga. This was not a widespread hydrogen distribution system, there was only one point of hydrogen dispensing, which limited the buses movements. The program was called the STEP program (Sustainable Transport Energy for Perth) and the fuel cell buses were provided to multiple countries to see how workable the design and system was. Perth was the only Australian location to use them. The fuel cell bus global trial was a Mercedes-Benz initiative, designed to see if they could produce the buses as a long-term viable product, globally. The hydrogen fuel cell buses were generally regarded as acceptable, with satisfactory reliability - but overall, operational costs were high, and routes were limited due to lack of an extensive hydrogen distribution system. The fuel cells were found to need expensive reconditioning every three years, and three year testing of hydrogen tanks was another cost burden. The trial ended with no substantial orders for the fuel cell buses. Full scale production of the fuel cell buses was abandoned when Mercedes-Benz deemed proceeding with the fuel cell bus design was uneconomic. Transperth made the decision to simply convert diesel buses to run on CNG, and about two-thirds of Perth's bus fleet has been CNG-powered buses. The CNG buses have proven reliable, and lower-cost to operate than either diesel or fuel cell buses - although there were early teething problems with bus fires using CNG, because of an initially bad CNG conversion design. Today, electric buses are deemed to be the future of mass transportation. Perth's Public Transport Authority has been operating Volvo electric buses for 2 years now, with great success (18 have been operational since last year), and has recently placed orders for another approximately 130 Volvo BZL electric buses. The Kwinana refinery (once, Australia's biggest refinery) has since been closed down, so one cheap source of hydrogen locally has been removed. No-one has developed a sustainable hydrogen-production operation in Australia yet, even though we've been promised that "cheap" hydrogen production for over 20 years. No cheap hydrogen, and no distribution system for hydrogen, so where's the benefits of hydrogen engines or fuel cells? https://www.bpswa.org/hydrogen-fuel-cell-buses.html https://www.busnews.com.au/inside-the-mysterious-first-australian-hydrogen-bus-trial https://www.pta.wa.gov.au/news/media-statements/first-year-of-electric-bus-travel-in-perth-a-success https://www.transdev.com.au/press-release/new-electric-buses-for-perth-cbd-routes/ https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/c-king/media-release/wheels-turning-manufacture-new-electric-buses-wa

Nowhere has anyone found a cheap source of hydrogen to replace oil that is simply pumped out of the ground and simply hydrotreated. Breaking down water to make hydrogen uses so much energy, it's not even remotely competitive with oil - even if solar energy is utilised, the hydrogen then still has major storage, transport and dispensing problems. Toyota is only working on hydrogen, because they want to ensure multiple sources of energy for powering vehicles, so they never become totally reliant on one source of energy. They have never forgotten their hard-earned lessons of WW2, they are an island nation with no reserves of any minerals or energy sources, and they constantly look for energy independence.

It's just another hydrogen engine dream. There is no way that any major supply of hydrogen, available in all regions, at low cost, will ever become available. At best, it might become available in densely populated areas for about $10 a litre. Meantimes, the Chinese EV onslaught will rule, with new and more efficient batteries every second month.

I actually got some work done, when the sites were down all day! 😄

By the time Trump is finished wrecking the U.S. economy, destroying 83 years of good relationships with Allied nations, finished toadying to one of the worlds most murderous dictators, and substantially reduced overseas markets for many U.S. manufactured goods (including armaments), then the Democrats will start to look good.

Chinaman say, "I like frying my Cub".