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Sunlight + Algae = Hydrogen fuel
frivolous writes, "The University of California, Berkeley has issued a press release here that describes how they've managed to fool algae into producing pure hydrogen gas. This hydrogen can then be used to power nearly everything that's oil-powered today - cars, homes, industry, and so on. If they can get the production rate up as high as they suggest, this could revolutionize the energy industry. I've already submitted the info to Bruce Sterling (see the Viridian Web site for more on his involvement). " To qualify the release: The scientists have filed for a patent, and the process will be appearing in a peer journal next month. That means that it hasn't been throughly analyzed by the scientific community yet. Let's hope it holds up under scrutiny.
it can still be "combusted" in a Diesel and the exhaust smells like french fries.
Mmmmm... French Fries.....
In response to the news, the algea has announced an IPO. I'm not making this up. You can read about it here.
Yep, that's great that algea can produce hydrogen, but does it need to keep getting sunlight? cause that could cause problems...
I'm not talking about someone fishing algae from a lake and selling it as a weight loss drug at 300$ per pound, and surely any short comming of algae can be solved trivialy by scientists now or in the very near future.
But what about decertification of land caused by heavey farming? With current practices and population growth, any way you look at it we're doomed. I have read much about the issue. It's the main reason i'm a vegan.
dox
How much CO2 is used by soft drink manufactures yearly?
Should the oil industry convert to the hydrogen/algae industry, I can imagine them teaming up with environmental organizations to protect their assets. Kinda funny if you ask me.
3. What environmental impact will the creation of 900,000+ acres of ponds have? (In the U.S. alone, just for cars...)
If you're thinking that you could only do the algae in ponds, think again... I'm already thinking of designs that would consist of large transparent tanks, stacked vertically, in fields of such structures in really sunny areas, say the california/arizona desert all happily generating hydrogen... As soon as they get it down, phyisical acerage won't be such a limitation...
also, think of the SPACE PROGRAM. Orbital algae->hydrogen fuel tanks? Sounds pretty damn cool to me. Have to see if they need water or not, though. But it could be a neat all-purpose fuel solution for space or other planets/moons... thinking long-range, of course. But what an elegant solution! algae for fuel... neato.
later
"What's sad about this? Is it wrong for an oil company to want to be profitable?" For grubbing capitalists, frankly yes it is wrong. (I like Linux and I'm not a commie, but...) You probably never lived (grew up) by a refinery. Lot of asthma and birth defects in those blue collar neighborhoods. Do you like the chronic taste of tar in your mouth? Come live in WoodRiver, IL-- it isn't a beautiful place you know.
As I've heard this over and over again, can anyone here give one specific example of Oil Co's buying & burying patents
why is it everyone is obsessed with putting a hydrogen engine in a car? - everybody knows that is probably the worst possible use for it - make the generators centralised and use efficient distribution methods to make the energy available to whoever needs it - plug the car in and give it a good battery / fuel cell... and by the way - little cars are not all econo-boxes... - in the us you have the corvette - in the uk we have the lotus elise - a 1.8ltr engine which will outmanoevre the corvette any day of the week. (http://lotuscars.co.uk) (and look at the 340R too while you're there...!)
I don't know about geothermal energy, but nuclear energy comes from uranium and transuranic elements, which were created in solar masses during the last stages of fusion before the star goes supernova. Sure, it's not from photons reaching the Earth, but it's originally "solar" nonetheless.
-M
The fuel the powers the universe.
We should use it to power blimps! They will be safe, eh?
I know many people that have had Mazda rotary engine's. Most of them had mechanical problems. And where expensive to get repaired.
In order to "bury" a good piece of technology, you have to be a group of people wuth sufficiant power to control that industry. Now, if the rotary engine was superior, there is no reason for the Automotive industry to bury them. The manufature process of the auto industry is designed for adaptabilty. Usually by introducing "Superior" products, at high price levels, and then bringing them down over time.
Now if the rotary engine was introduced when only one or two companies had control, then it could have been buried. The competion in the automarket is too fierce. 15,000,000 cars are sold a year. Thats why every other advertisment on American tv is for an Automobile.
My brother had an rx7, fun ride.
if you live outside America, I have a question for you. on average, how many TV commercials out of 10 are for cars? here its about 5. Me and a friend of mine have been keeping track, just for curiosity. I know it's informal statistics, but hey, you got to have a hobby,right?
Let us pray that some massive oil conglomerate doesn't simply buy the patent, and hide it away from the world - as they've done with so many other "alternate fuel" technologies. :(
Nope, no damage to the ocean, because the reverse reaction is 2H2 +O2 -> 2 H2O. There are a few byproducts because of other gases in the atmosphere, but largely, hydrogen burners produce water as their waste.
If Algae can produce Hydrogen, what does fungi produce? Methane?
Yeah, the Hindenburg made it all the way across the Atlantic before going up in a ball of flames.
I don't think the idea is to have the algae provide hydrogen fuel on a just-in-time basis (I love using computer terms refering to things outside computers). Instead the idea is to have the algaes produce the gas in factories or what not and then shipped to the "gas station" like petrol is now.
Incidentally, there's quite a bit of water coming out of automobile tailpipes already. In case you have forgotten the chemistry, that stuff you put in your tank is called a "hydrocarbon" for a good reason: it has hydrogen and carbon in it. When you burn it, if you burn it completely, you get water and carbon dioxide. (Considerably more water molecules than C02 molecules, BTW.) So, tell me, what kind of impact does the climate of SoCal and Colorado currently suffer from the millions of cars ejecting water into the atmosphere?
1) How will they enforce the patent? If this stuff is like other algea, all someone has to do is grab a handful and cart it off to their own pond. Then it reproduces on its own. So who's responsible for violating the patent? You or the algea that's actually doing the reproduction? 2) What happens if this stuff gets into the rivers and lakes? Are we going to start seeing the lakes "evaporate" into hydrogen and oxygen? Are we going to turn into Jupiter? It's an interesting question that may a bit too chicken-little. At least this hydrogen in the sky isn't going to fall-- it's going straight up to the outer reaches of the atmosphere.
Nuff Said.
This is the proposed method to extract this precious gas resource from your bodies:
We should be able to produce about 500,000 bombs a day using this method. They shall be known as SFB's (Smart Fart Bombs) and will be devistating to the Gotrj'vet empire. The foulness of the Gotrj'vet will be erradicated once and for all. As soon as this mission is accomplished, we will have mercy on you, and produce couch farms where you will be laid upon so you can live the rest of your lives in front of a television. Not unlike the lives most of you live now anyways. For most people this will be a blessing; a utopia if you will. Even nirvana for some.
So be prepared, because this will be happening soon enough; sooner than you may think. Good day, earthlings.
If you've got essentially free hydrogen, feed it into a fuel cell and use the electricityto run your vehicles. Hydrogen based fuel cell technology has already been demonstrated. Sounds like the perfect match.
How long before the Bovine Matrix makes its way as a made for cable movie. What thought implants should be programmed for them?
The scientific community does not need to analyze this method, if it's any good, the inventors will shortly disappear mysteriously.
It's not really the lack of ideas or talent why we're still using combustion engines.
from another post
"The algae is able to split 2 H20 --> 2*H2 + O2"
see, I'm right
fission bombs!
Hindenberg disaster : People killed by burning diesel fuel falling on them, the burning hydrogen went upwards.
Idiot. If you people are going to get +2 without moderators' help, could you at least read the articles first? It only does that when you deprive the algae of sulfur. It's not that it's some special algae.
If you're thinking of Hydrogen (fusion) bombs, you're competely off base. This technology has absolutely nothing to do with fusion. On the other hand, Oxygen is a requirement for any chemcial explosive, so I guess you're against Oxygen. I hope you can hold your breath a very long time.
I believe that fuel cells are different from actual combustion. They use a metal aluminum plate submersed in the hydrogen to generate an actual electrical current.
My friend did this for her westinghouse in 1994 thats SIX YEARS AGO. (and no this is not her, and she didnt even win) PRIOR USE! No Patent! Patent bad!
TWO words?
Does this mean that the main engine on the Space Shuttle produces no pollutants as it burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen? (And Yes, I know the solid boosters are dirty as sin, I'm just talking about the main engine and the stuff in the big fuel tank.)
Me + most Mexican (and some chinese) foods = methane gas.
I'd love to drive around with a tank full of H. And if it doesn't work we can just blame the oil industry.
let it come down
Its seems algae will be essential to our future. Not only can Algae produce hydrogen from sunlight and water, certain types of Alae are the perfect food. A few types of blue-green algae contain everything our bodys need. It easy to grow as well. You pump nitrogen-rich water up from the depths of the ocean (water floats, it only takes about as much energy as it does to pump the water 18 feet above sea level) and mix it with warm sea water and algae populations explode! And with no wasted stems or leafs that we won't eat, and no cellulose, they are 100% easily digestable.
If you want to read an interesting book about this and the future, check are Marshal T. Savages The Millenial Project: 8 easy steps to colonize the galaxy
Alae would also be the perfect food in space stations and such. All you need is sunlight and water, and the water is a catylst (you don't need to replace it in the food prodcution). Hydrogen from algae may be an important step for the near future, in the end it could be our food! I really suggest you read The Millenial Project for more information on it, its an amazing book.
The Moral: Algae rocks.
-Dox
drew0054(at) tc umn edu
Is photosynthesis-hydrogen-combustion a more efficient way to extract solar energy than photovoltaic-battery/flywheel-electric or steam-turbine-electric? Is it any cheaper?
My guess is that it has the potential to be cheaper, but I am stumped on the efficiency question. How much heat will these little suckers produce when kicked into anaerobic mode? Would a pond get hot enought to kill the algae?
One other question... is the algae edible?
csmarmot@micron.net
2H2 + 2O2 ---> 2H20 + energy (aneorbic respiration).
That's an exothermic reaction. Yielding very pure energy. It's a chemical reaction. Who ever moderate your comment to 4 seem to be out of touch in biochemistry.
I hope I set the record straight.
Kent (former UC Berkeley Biochemistry student)
Have you visisted http://www.newyen.com
the trick is that 'good battery' thing.
;)
personally, i'd like to see electric cars powered by giant tesla coils on the side of the highway
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
In fact, it is my understanding that most oil companies would *much* rather deal in things like plastics.
Personally, I don't recycle plastic b/c I'd rather store as much fresh petroleum as plastic (which can be recycled whenever we run out of oil in the ground) rather than waste it by burning the stuff.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well if you wanted to be really anal and efficient, you could build sunlight collectors that pipe light to the tank via fiber optics.
Set an engineer and a mathematician on the problem and you could probably end up with really high-efficency tanks that double as industrial art. Given as how a lot of cities require new construction projects to have art these days, this could be a nice way of saving money.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I am pretty sure. I might have the numbers slightly wrong, but it's a wide range. Hydrogen is WORSE than acetylene in this regard.
Propane is a liquid at room temperature and quite modest pressure, which is undoubtedly how it is stored in a cars fuel tank. If the pressure escapes, a proportion will boil off, cooling the rest until it is liquid at atmospheric pressure (about -40C if I recall correctly) and it will then sit there boiling off relatigely slowly.
Hydrogen is not so obliging. It will not liquefy under any (sane) pressure at room temperature, and will boil very quickly (low latent and specific heats) if the cold liquid gets warm.
Something like a scuba tank is one of my options, but having one in a car does present some weight and safety questions.
I still don't understand why large cities can't combine their problems. Why is it not possible to create a large clay bowl a 100 yds across and several miles long and cover it with a transparent material. Feed waste water, pulverized trash and all sorts of bio-agents like this into one end. Along the way, air pumps keep the water supplied with oxygen and force exhaust gas full of fuel out of the system. On the other end you extract a ground enriching slurry to sell to farmers, and all along the middle you collect flamable gas to pipe to a power generator located next to the enclosure.
Well I know of one Canadian city that sorta does that now. They have a "free" wood chipping and yard waste disposal plant. Once they have a big'ol pile of wood chips and such they mix it with partially treated organic waste, let it ferment for a year or so, and then sell it as 'Oggie grow. It actually makes the city a fair chunk of change, and saves a lot of room at the landfill.
:wq
And americans could start by driving smaller cars, that would save a good billion liters of oil a year.
Don't forget, burning oil is only ONE use for petroleum. Think of all the other products that are made with petroleum, such as a wide variety of plastics, medicines, paving material, etc.
I imagine that sometime in the future, our desendents will be shocked to learn in history lessons that the first use put to such an incredibly valueble resource was to simple burn it as a fuel.
There are so many uses for the non-renewable resource petroleum (besides the inevitable Vaseline as personal lubricant trolls)--plastics, including vinyl, medicines, and all sorts of other synthetics--that it's really almost a sin to burn it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There was a little noise made a year or three ago about re-cycling deep fat fryer oil for use in Diesel engines. Apparently after it's been used to fry stuff until it's no longer any good for frying stuff (it gets broken down by heat, light, water, and salt), it can still be "combusted" in a Diesel and the exhaust smells like french fries.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Hydrogen storage would probably be in pressure vessels. That way you don't have to spend so much money getting it cold and keeping it there.
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Interesting post, Abigail.
Hydrogen is not as dangerous as carbon based gaseous fuels because hydrogen won't 'flash over'. It is lighter than air and rises above most common ignition points, unlike gasoline vapors, which flow along a floor until a pilot light is reached. The U of Ok has done a lot of work on Hydrogen fuel. It will be what will power your transportation before the next quarter century is passed for two reasons. It will recylce as water in the environment, so it is nonpoluting. Second, fossil fuels are rapidly being exhausted. Even coal has a shorter remaining life span than most folks realize. In fact, today's college students could burn 95% of the remaining available coal during their life time. Well before that event could occur folks will wake up and force the switch to Hyrdrogen. Coal and oil are too precious a source of organics for plastics to be burned for electricity or transportation. Solar power towers will replace many fossil fuel burning power plants. Hydrogen will replace gasoline in either combustion engines or fuel cells.
One question I have is "How can two researchers or the academic institutions they attend make claims to inventions they discovered while they were funded by US TAXPAYERS."
The TAX PAYERS OWN the rights to that knowledge. THe two researchers were paid for their work and will probably be awarded degrees in addition to their stipends. If they want to patent their discoveries they should have funded their own work. Ditto for the universities.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
But think of the bumper sticker possibilities:
Powered by farts!
Farts inside!
Caution: Car makes frequent ventings.
We already have the online environments for both cows and pigs. MOOs and MUDs
(oh come on)
Oil is hard to find. This makes it valuable. Water and algae are not. This is bad for OPEC et al.
---
Joseph Foley
Akamai Technologies
You have to take into account just who is patenting it. I'd rather see this patented by a University than a business. If the university doesn't patent this, someone else will claim the research and patent it first. If the university is smart, and they probably are, they won't sell this exclusively to a single company for money, they'll license it at a reasonable cost or free to people genuinely interested in developing it further.
Patents are not by definition evil, and neither is the governmental system. It is just the abuses (e.g. Amazon.com's one-click patent) that make it seem that way.
What is the plant trying to break down? In otherwords, even if you where to just build a bunch of algea filled ponds, it seems to me that you still have to 'put' something into the pond in order to get the byproduct you are looking for. So my question is: what do you have to put into the pond to get the byproduct? It cannot just be water and sunlight alone. You need some other sort of nutrient..and can you get large quantities of these outside nutrients? (Sorry biology was back in the 9th grade)
Oh boy... water pollution. When I mention this to people who champion hydrogen fuel solutions, it is as if I had just asked to buy their daughters. Blissful environmental types have no tolerance for the concept that their prize social causes might create problems as bad or worse than those they think they are solving.
Well, what really strikes me as silly is the way IP gets divided up, with the "latest and greatest" cashing in, taking all the glory, and everyone else looking foolish. So these guys figured out how to start and stop a biological process that has been going on almost as long as there has been life on earth (probably...). Does that give them the exclusive right to make megabucks off what could be potentially the biggest paradigm shift in energy use in our lifetime (probably not, though...)?
But what about the other people who contributed to this discovery - the University of California, the Federal Government (land grant college system, probably a bunch of grants these people worked or studied under at one time or another), the people who figured out that these organisms produce hydrogen in the first place? Does everyone get a cut? They all seem to have a pretty good claim, in this particular case.
To really stretch the point, perhaps part of the proceeds could be contributed to environmental causes - after all, global climate change and toxic waste may not be good for these little bacteria (yes, I know this is a stupid argument, but I am trying to make a point, and it is actually much more relevant in the case of medicines patented based on rare tropical plants, genes taken from animals in threatened environments, etc.)
Fundamentally, the whole idea of patenting discoveries and getting rich off of them in an area of scientific investigation raises some pretty big questions in my mind. There are a lot of parallels to software development. What if I decide that I am not going to publish anything, so that no one can use any of my ideas to come up with anything? What if people start horading their research? Corporations like pharmaceutical companies, already do this. Its this what we want academic research to become?
If this is public research, let it produce public results. If it is private (and I mean private, none of this "It was public until the government gave us the patent *cough* AZT *cough*" BS.
Not that I am the first to think of that...
...or I would have patented it by now...
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
Uh, these people are working in *public* universities. Funded with taxes, maybe?
How much do you think they spent on airtight jars for this experiment?
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
"In short, good luck guys - great tech but you're up against goliath."
Hrm, there's nothing a group of screaming, crying, ranting advocates can't do. You might see `Hydrogen Fuel' from the people who brought you Linux. Guratanteed to leave a confusing, unsettling, slightly odd aftertaste. Also sure to generate plenty of ranting hate mail and flames. Watch out!
;)
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Lots of energy schemes look promising in the
early stages.
Algae hydrogen is fundamentally a bio-solar collector. Whether is more efficient than solar
collectors based on toxic chemicals like silicon
wafers is a toss. Ultimately effiency is limited
to the amount of sunlight.
Of course... I meant the first power-efficient method for producing hydrogen, not one that uses up double the amount of energy the produced hydrogen can generate.
When UCB hires people, they make them sign a paper that all the patents they produce while in their
employ are property of Regents of University of
California
I have a certain uncle, a professor at a University of some acclaim, who is credited with discovering a protein which has been extremely useful in the battle against cancer.
As I have heard the story from my mother, this University was unwilling or unable to help my uncle apply for patents regarding his discovery and work with the protein.
As a result, a couple of very large, very wealthy pharmeceutical companies are engaged in a bitter multi-billion-dollar lawsuit regarding who has the rights to this discovery, both claiming to have made it first.
If a person or organization has an ethical or moral beef against the use of patents, and therefore _doesn't_ patent their work, should it be left to the greedy hands of corporations to lay claim on all of it?
Re: "hydrogen gas is explosive in proportions of something like 4% to 80% in air"
Are you sure that you didn't drop a zero? I don't believe that even acetylene is that bad.
I definitely remember (the report) that there used to be this professor in France who would illustrate his lectures on hydrogen by first inhaling a lungful of hydrogen and then lighting it as he exhaled. True, he one day lost his teeth doing this, but I don't think that a mixture explosive at 4% would have lasted that long.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Let's get real, here. Did Edison put his inventions in the public domain? Did he have to? If this is really as big as you think it is (and I'm not convinced yet), these people and institutions should get both fame AND compensation for this invention. Or should only *other* people be allowed to profit from it? That is, unless you're willing to put them up in your house and support their families while they do this work. Or would you want them to have a 'real' job at McDonalds to support themselves while they do this?
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
Let's assume that, upon subsequent review, this invention turns out to be everything wonderful folks hope it to be.
Given that, your perspective is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean these guys invent a process that could significantly improve the lives of people around the world -- a product of their own minds and their own creative efforts -- and you all but demand they give it to you? Talk about greed! It's theirs to dispose of as they see fit. Sure, they might choose to put it into the public domain. But that will be their choice to make. I can't begrudge them if they did choose to demand payment for use of their process. Hell, it didn't even exist until they developed it. They have added to our world in a positive way. They have a right to what is theirs.
--
The new thing about this is the *AMOUNT* of Hydrogen that they are getting out of it. Previously we have only been able to get tiny amounts. Now, a reasonable amount can be extracted.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I'll take your word on methane being a horrible greenhouse gas. Methane is produced naturally by fermentation, in wetlands, farmlands, etc. So, *NOT* using methane as a fuel, and thereby converting it into different compounds, H20 and C02, would create HIGHER concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, not lower. Using methane as a fuel would *DECREASE* the Greenhouse effect, not increase it.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
A metabolic switch that triggers algae to turn sunlight into large quantities of hydrogen gas
This is the very first sentence. Of course, it means that sunlight is used to convert water.
Bitching aside, this is cool. Beyond cool, in fact. We may survive to see the twenty-second century, after all.
As far as the economic viability, try this on for size: if these diatom algae were available to growers nationwide, enough farm land lies fallow (unplanted) every year to provide oil which can be refined to supply all of the US's diesel requirements. Also consider -- milk how milk is economically viable for smaller farmers --they work together in huge dairy co-ops -- why not an algae-oil co-op? on the fallow land.
Finally, some of the concept cars now being tested marry the proven diesel technologies to electrical engines -- giving the electrical cars essentially unlimited range and overcoming the horsepower problem. The difference is -- instead of that engine being forced to pollute while you wait at that next red light, once the batteries are charged, the diesel side of the engine shuts down.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
By the way, you are 100% correct about what biodiesel is and how it is produced: roughly four parts oil, one part methanol, or three parts oil one part ethanol, plus just enough sodium hydroxide to catalyze the reaction. (too much and you get soap.)
The "trans-esterification" reaction (spelling?) splits the oil into a glycerin component and the more useful "biodiesel" which can be used as is in virtually any modern diesel engine, with less pollutants (translated: no sulfur in the fuel to get burned into S02) and some nice handling qualities (higher flash point, lower jelling temperature).
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
What's that? I'll take a big mac and four gallons of peanut oil to go...
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Commercially, it's not so good. The government tacks on alot of requirements (some of which are good, many are (IMHO) simply protections for the petroleum industries) and taxes such that it becomes quite expensive to build and operate what is essentially a "biodiesel" refinery. I've heard fuel price figures from $2.00 to $4.00 per gallon as being reasonable prices.
I guess my main point is, if there is a consumer move to embrace biodiesel and government essentially gets out of the way or even actively promotes it -- we'd all benefit -- and the fuel prices would come down.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Isn't this a violation of the Prime Directive?
Algae are a form of life too, they should be left
alone to do their business, rather than putting them in this Matrix-like environment.
Assuming you don't add engine oil (or use olive oil, yum!), where would the other stuff come from?
I think this should indeed be pure water...
>>>As a county we can drop out dependance on OPEC and take the teeth from that tiger.
WOW! Your county does business direct with OPEC? that's amazing. Seriously, though, Enron (a fossil-fuel company) made a whole new set of business opportunities for themselves by metamorphing into a data company. Even if H makes energy cheap, the oil companies won't have to die, unless they refuse to change, and we've all heard that refrain. And for the middle east nation-states? Fuck 'em. No offense to middle-eastern slashdotters, but really it's the same story. Change or die. Most of them have coastline real-estate anyway, they can make big aquaculture stations near shore, maybe even switch the offsea rigs into floating H-factories.
Just to nitpick. It was the Hindenburg instead of Hindenberg. And the bloody thing ran on diesel, not on hydrogen.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Well, the Wankel, as most people in the U.S. know it, was introduced in mass-production for Mazda's RX-7. Unfortunately, it suffered from two serious problems in the first-generation car: low fuel economy (with relatively high prices at the pumps), and a mechanical problem with sealing the rotor tips, roughly equivalent to leaky piston seals, which led to many repeated trips to the shop.
Despite the fact that Mazda engineering managed to eventually sovle both of these problems, the bad PR about rotary engines has persisted.
- B
Because, unknown to the Germans, the dope [protective covering] used on the fabric of the Hindenberg was highly reactive, essentially a form of explosive. All it took was one spark and the ship's skin went up like detcord.
The party's over
So build a glass pond with mirrors around it and on the bottom to provide more light from more directions...and stick glass columns all over your pool to make a bunch of "holes" for light to enter.
What's sad about this? Is it wrong for an oil company to want to be profitable?
What's sad about it is that it typifies the attitude of just about every corporation on earth; not simply "Can I make money off of this?" but rather "How can I make the most possible money, no matter whose rights I have to step on, as long as I can legally get away with it?" Corporations have no morals. Their only motivation is greed. This leads to Microsofts and Exxons and Ted Turners. Big business, big banks, politicians, and all their combined greed is going to destroy this planet (if it hasn't already). They're so afraid of losing a little market share, power, prestige, or profit that they're willing to keep poisoning our air, water, land, and space just to keep the money rolling in. They're willing to keep selling the crappiest software ever seen by Mankind to keep the money rolling in. The money must roll; that is their only concern. This is to me unconscionable.
So what can be done? How do we save ourselves from these self-serving greedy capitalist bastards? Beats me. To have any control over them requires power; to have power requires money; and the process one must go through to get enough money to matter usually turns one into One Of Them anyway, so the point is moot. Oh, there are some exceptions, most notably Joe Firmage (my personal pick for Man Of The Millennium), but for the most part, all the rich people care about is staying rich no matter what it takes. Is there an unfortunate paragraph in the US Code that keeps you from increasing your profits 1.09% because it prohibits toxic waste dumps next to elementary schools? Just buy a lobbyist and send him to Congress and have him whine and pass out gifts and do everything possible to get that paragraph deleted from the law. Money buys power, power supports money, and both power and money corrupt absolutely.
Greed is the root of all evil, and it is a basic part of human nature... and to me, that is the saddest thing of all.
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
The mention of Joe Firmage totally makes me not take anything you say seriously.
Any time a man can put his personal fortune (worth some 2 billion dollars) on the line to stand up for what he believes in, no matter what he believes in, in the interest of bettering mankind, whether what he believes is true or not, ya gotta respect him for it. Joe is to me an infinitely better person than Bill Gates, Ted Turner, George W. Bush Jr, William Randolph Hearst, and John D. Rockefeller all put together, because he is that rarest of humans - a very very rich man who isn't also a very very greedy man, and is willing to spend whatever it takes to bring what he believes to be the truth to the world *without asking for anything in return*... and it has nothing to do with religion. Well, the religion of science and philosophy, if you wanna get technical. He's my hero. Whether I believe as he does (which I do) doesn't matter; he gave up a hell of a lot to preach his message, and asks for nothing more than listening to him in return. And if your only knowledge of him comes from the two or three media-blitz stories about how he's a UFO hunter now, you don't have a clue as to what he's really all about. Once you find out what KIND of person he is, you know the media is (as usual) completely unfair in its portrayal of him as a UFO conspiracy nut.
And by the way; are you saying that because I say I like Joe Firmage, you cannot agree with anything else I said in that post? What if "The sun is very big and very hot" had been part of it? Would you deny that factual assertion simply because I'm, in your mind, "one of those people"? Judge my words based solely on their merit, one word at a time; pigeonholing them all because of a few of them is no more fair than me calling you an asshole because you're disagreeing with me (which I'm not).
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident."
Actually, using solar cells to generate electricity and then seperating water into hydrogen and oxygen would be nearly as efficient, not patentable and can be done in a great many environments where you can't get the algae to grow efficiently (the volume of water needed is very different and in the desert. . .)
But the fundamentals of using hydrogen instead of petroleum products is the best environmental idea since . . . sliced bread.
Incidently, the Hidenburg was designed to use the much safer helium, but the US government refused to allow American companies to supply helium to Germany.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
If you are setting the record straight, let's not have 2 atoms of oxygen vanish.
2H2 + 2O2 ---> 2H2O + 1O2
I read somewhere, can't remember where that the entire world uses 28,000,000,000 gallons of gas a day. So that's about 105,840,000,000 liters a day. You'd need at least 3,175,200,000,000 liters of algea on any given day worldwide to produce a steady flow of H2.
That's a lot of sludge.
Like the hydrogen fuels that went before, this one is destined to the same life of suppression.
This will be the last you hear of it. All the while we go on using fossil fuels!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
They make you sign a form giving them a certain (large) cut of the royalties from any patents you get from work done hear. I signed one myself. So you don't need to worry about this getting into the hands of an Evil Corporation. Although the university was involved in the development of the bomb...
Of course, Hydrogen is not necessarily the most well behaved fuel (witness the Hindenberg disaster, although in that case there is concern that doping the skin of the Hindenberg with a mixture resembling gunpowder was also a problem...) but the possibilities of having a reasonably clean environmentally friendly fuel ready to take over from Crude oil derivatives is something we should be thankful for.
Actually, in many respects, hydrogen is no more dangerous than gasoline. In some cases, it is actually less dangerous. Since hydrogen is such a light element, any tank rupture is going to result in rapid dissipation of the hydrogen gas. Gasoline, in comparison, is much heavier in its gaseous form.
The major problem in using hydrogen as a fuel source is in storing it. It takes much more complex tanks to store hydrogen gas than regular gasoline.
hmmm... I don't remember the conversion factor between the two octane ratings, but I'm guessing that 'super unleaded' is probably ~92/3 in the system I'm used to... that runs over $2/gal here... I use regular/mid-grade in my car (no benefit from anything over 89).
I figured the prices over there would go up, too - I was basing my estimate on my last trip to Spain, where the price was about US$.75-85/liter (or litre, I suppose) - giving a range of ~US$2.80 - 3.25 / USgal, allowing for some daily currency fluctuations...
My original post was somewhat in jest, since I've actually seen overseas prices, and realize that $1.20-1.50/gal isn't the end of the world that people here seem to think it is (it was nice below $1/gal, though).
We, of course, have to put up with people from the U.K. and Australia telling us that we spell color, liter, theater, etc. incorrectly. That and we have to deal with those pesky non-power of ten divisible units. Bah! Everything is so much easier in binary/hex anyway...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
$2.50/gal - yikes! I thought it was getting bad here ($1.50-1.60)...
It's almost like Europe now...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
If the top 15% own more than 90% of the country and only pay 50% of the tax burden, there is a problem. IMHO, the top 15% should pay all of it if our current system must be more or less preserved. I suppose that puts me into the 'must be stopped category :)'
The problem with this is that the people who are making the most money are also typically the people who provide the jobs and wages for the lower income people. And, while doing this, they aren't neccessarily consuming any more of the public goods that the taxes are supposedly paying for. So, why tax them so highly? It seem punitive to me. Punishment for success. I'm not there yet, but when I am (and yes I still believe in the American dream), I certainly don't want to be punished for making it big.
Here's a simpler example that goes along with what I'm saying. In my state, taxes for license plate registration are based on the value of the car. Now, why is this? Does a $50,000 car actually consume more public goods (such as highways, state police, and pollution) than a $1000 dollar car? No way. In fact, it could be argued that since the junker cars typically have inferior pollution controls, they should be paying more in taxes than the expensive newer vehicles. So, why are the richer people taxed more in this case? Because they'll pay it. It's another example of wealth redistribution, and there's simply not enough of an outcry to stop it.
It's like this. If 15% of the people are shouldering the lion's share of the tax bourdon, and then you have a poll asking people what they're most concerned with in politics, should you be surprised when only 11% of the respondants name taxes as their primary concern? Well, it happened, and the response from the politicians around here was, "See no one cares about taxes, it's a non-issue. Let's raise them some more."
Arguably, it costs X amount of dollars for each person's share of the public goods. Now, why would anyone have to pay more than this? It is so backwards to me that if someone works harder to make more money, more gets taken away.
You also argued that since the top marginal tax rate is now 39%, we should feel lucky because it used to be well above 70%. Well, the top marginal rate used to be 0% (zero). So, anything above that seems like a big rip-off to me. I'm not against paying taxes. I should pay for what I'm consuming from the public goods. I find it very hard to believe that I'm getting anything even close to what I'm paying in taxes back in the form of public-anything.
Hope ... that you are having a better day than I am.
Yeah, I'm having a great day, although this thread is getting so buried that I doubt anyone is actually still reading it. When I read the article about who would be the best "geek" presidential candidate, and the concensus was Ralph Nader, I knew I was going to be talking to a brick wall by taking a fiscally conservative stance on any issue. However, I'm happy to press on, and so far the arguments against me have been well thought out and well-intentioned. (They just happen to be completely wrong. ;)
But back to "what goes through an oil baron's head"... That's easy... "Can I make more money off this than oil, what's the cost of conversion, and can I convert profitably?" Sadly, that's pretty much it.
What's sad about this? Is it wrong for an oil company to want to be profitable?
What if "The sun is very big and very hot" had been part of it? Would you deny that factual assertion simply because I'm, in your mind, "one of those people"?
Of course not, that's silly. If you had included the comment about the sun, it would have been the only factual statement in your post. (Of course, I suppose that you could argue that "big" and "hot" are both subjective terms.) Let's go through your original post and forget the refernce to Joe Firmage.
What's sad about it is that it typifies the attitude of just about every corporation on earth; not simply "Can I make money off of this?" but rather "How can I make the most possible money, no matter whose rights I have to step on, as long as I can legally get away with it?" Corporations have no morals. Their only motivation is greed.
Just about every corporation on earth is purely motivated by greed? I disagree. Plus, you still dodge the question as to why this would be wrong. The point of a corporation is to maximize profits. Just because you want to label it as greed doesn't make it evil.
This leads to Microsofts and Exxons and Ted Turners. Big business, big banks, politicians, and all their combined greed is going to destroy this planet (if it hasn't already). They're so afraid of losing a little market share, power, prestige, or profit that they're willing to keep poisoning our air, water, land, and space just to keep the money rolling in.
Now all corporations are killing the planet? The planet has already been destroyed? That is simply absurd. How is Bill Gates poisoning the planet? His company might make poor software, but do you think that this is poisoning the planet? What about Turner, one of your other examples? How is he poisoning the planet? Ok, Exxon had an oil spill. You found 1 example. Congratulations. That must mean that all corporations are evil and greedy.
The money must roll; that is their only concern. This is to me unconscionable.
And this hurts you how?
So what can be done? How do we save ourselves from these self-serving greedy capitalist bastards?
A better question might be (at least here in the US), "How can we save ourselves from the tree-hugging socialists on the left who seek to gain personal power through a constant cycle of increased taxation, redistribution, and dependance?" Yehaw, them evil greedy bastards got to be stopped. I've got news for you. After you "stop" the capitalists, there's no one left to suck the money from. The top 15% of income earners in the US shoulder more that 50% of the tax burden (source: Congressional Budget Office - stats from 1995).
Is there an unfortunate paragraph in the US Code that keeps you from increasing your profits 1.09% because it prohibits toxic waste dumps next to elementary schools? Just buy a lobbyist and send him to Congress and have him whine and pass out gifts and do everything possible to get that paragraph deleted from the law.
Care to back this one up with a fact or two? Yeah, buying votes is wrong, and certainly happens. I'm not denying that. I do deny that all or even a majority of corporations participate in this. The largest and strongest lobbies are typically the government unions. Look at the teacher's union. Good god, you want corruption, start with them.
Greed is the root of all evil, and it is a basic part of human nature... and to me, that is the saddest thing of all.
So now all humans are evil too? I seriously feel bad for you and the dark world that you live in. I see people as inheriently good. The bad ones are few and far between.
Now, regarding Joe Firmage. I have no clue what he's really about, and I didn't judge you because of what might have been said about him. I agree with your distrust of the media, so I can feel for you there. If you say he's your hero, ok. I won't hold it against you. I will, however, strongly disagree with your assertation that humans are evil and are destroying the planet.
This machinery included large anal probes to collect methane gas which the machines used to produce energy...
And it all works fine until the cows wake up...
--
I gave my boss a reality check. It bounced.
Yeah, this is one of the big problems with current solar cells - that more energy is put into the manufacture of one than it will put out over its lifetime.
If this problem could be solved, then the electrolysis of water could be performed cheaply - though it still wouldn't make much sense when you could just use the electricity from the panel directly, and avoid the conversion process.
Now, if you could come up with a way to turn sunlight into electricity via a catalytic reaction (I am thinking of sunlight being a catalyst in a chemical reaction that liberates electrons - I am not a chemist) of some sort...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Well, yeah - pretty much...
What I am looking for is something more efficient. Maybe a chemical reaction (when I say this, I mean something like a chemical reaction in a liquid like substance) isn't any more efficient or it is worse.
IANAS, either - so I am talking out my ass here, and maybe this thread shouldn't continue...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The amount of energy necessary to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis is more than what you would get from using the resulting hydrogen as fuel. In other words, there is a huge net loss during the conversion (mostly heat, IIRC).
Not to mention the energy costs (which you have to factor in) associated with creating the silicon solar cells - you would probably NEVER be able to recoup the energy used in the manufacture of the device, let alone have a net gain...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Storage is a big problem - as a gas (and maybe as a liquid too, though I don't remember seeing anything about it in this form), hydrogen is highly "corrosive" to many materials over time (and I am not mixing up hydrogen and hydrochloric/hydrosulferic acid - hydrogen in steel tanks causes the steel to become brittle).
One other thing about hydrogen, from what I remember, is that on combustion, a very small amount of "pollution" is created (I don't remember what the gas was called), in addition to the water vapor. The amount was extremely small, much, much smaller than normal gasoline engines, but still there, nonetheless. Not that we shouldn't look for a way to use hydrogen as a viable fuel, just don't think that water vapor is the only thing that comes out of the pipe.
The safe storage and handling of hydrogen as a fuel is a big issue. I believe we should switch over to methanol (grain alchohol), which burns very clean, and can be made from corn (and other grains).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
From what I understand of the people that died it was the ones that jumped from fear of the flames, while others that rode it down lived. In the film you see the ship doesn't fall from the sky but slowly drops (slowly compared to 9.8m/s/s) since the fire wasn't that intense the people inside weren't incinerated, hurt yes but not cooked. Panic from the flames made the others jump from too high and fell to thier death or seriously hurt themselves. And the reporter's description and emotion over what he was seeing really (along with it being live over the radio) added to the hype.
I suppose you might get nitrogen oxides, but the nitrogen must come from somewhere. So, for example, a hydrogen-powered car in Los Angeles might produce more NO2 than the same car in Las Vegas.
The point is, it won't be adding to the problem!
(ceci n'est pas un
Doh! Nitrogen does make up 78% of the atmosphere, after all...
(ceci n'est pas un
>>2. Watts are already a measure of energy (or
:-)
>>work) per unit time.
>Go read your electric bill. They charge you by
>Kwh. That's Kilo-watt-hours. For the rest of #2,
>I agree. I was feeling generally pessemistic
>yesterday.
You are right, I do pay for electricity by the KWh, which is a measure of energy (3.6 MJ to be exact). But Watts are a measure of power, or energy per unit time. "Watts per hour" would measure the rate of increased energy usage over time (Joules/sec/sec, sort of like accelleration being meters/sec/sec).
BTW, the solar energy flux at Earth orbit is about 1360W/m^2.
Back in the early 90's Greenpeace toured the USA with a solar generated built into a semi trailer. The generator was used to power and record live concerts for a benefit album.
The trailer was hauled by a Ryder Tractor that burned soy diesel. The cost for the fuel ran about the same as fossil fuel diesel in Europe, or the cost of US diesel once you factor in direct and indirect subsidies.
It smelled mildly like French Fries, a lot more pleasant than ff diesel. The particulate count was much lower and as previously mentioned the O2 CO2 cycle was balenced.
Cool stuff, friends of mine were the drivers, one even bought an old Mercedes diesel and ran Soy Diesel in it.
Steve
feed the hungry for free, visit: http://www.thehungersite.com
Uh, you realize that the propane is compressed right? It is a gas at atmospheric pressure.
Intolerant people should be shot.
That's why cutting down rainforest to make room for cattle ranches is so bad... Cows make an obscene amount of methane, to the point where they actually contribute a signifigant amount to greenhouse.
Intolerant people should be shot.
I'm fairly sure I remember reading (in SciAm, or maybe PopSci) about an arangement of carbon that would hold hydrogen, at fairly high density, without any pressure, and allowed for simple extraction. I'm sure I'm not remembering it right, because it doesn't sound like anything plausible. Anyone else read the article and actually remember it? It would have been at least a couple years back...
Intolerant people should be shot.
...the oil companies are inherently evil...
...they're just ruthless moneygrubbing companies...
Uh, am I the only one who failed to see any difference in opinion here? (Other than a refinement from general to specific?)
Intolerant people should be shot.
Uh huh. Competitive. That's why gas prices never vary across the city for more than 18 hours or so. They may compete for sources, but they don't compete for customers at all.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Any hydrocarbon can be used in a Diesel. That was the original point of them. Pour it in, turn it over, and go. Preformance and fuel economy will vary with the hydrocarbon, but it'll go just the same. (You can do the same thing in gasoline engine, but it won't last long.)
Intolerant people should be shot.
Don't feel like doing the math on your silly Imperial system numbers, but I know that the gas prices in Canada have gotten so high, that there's a huge protest being staged by truckers in the East. They've got hundreds of trucks stopped on the New Brunswick / Nova Scotia border, restricting traffic to one lane, and preventing any freight from passing. And the 401 in Ontario is being slowed to a crawl by other truckers (well it was last night anyhow) Unfortunately, they're not trying to get the oil companies to straighten up, they want gasoline taxes reduced. Sounds good for the immediate, but, reducing a fixed cost when the variable cost is driven up means fewer tax dollars that have to come from somewhere. Also, the oil companies can then reduce the prices to what they were, say, a month ago, when the taxes were at the current level, meaning more profit for them, and a mostly placated public. Then, the next time they drive the price up, the government is forced to reduce the tax even further, and so on, until there is no tax on the gas, and prices where they are now, and oil companies making huge profits that used to pay for roads which are now pothole filled messes.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Actually, I agree with what you've said. Intent does matter. Although, to some extent I think that they make sure to remain indifferent/ignorant. I'm sure that many executives who thought much about it would realize that the reason that most of their oil tankers are registered in Third World countries (including some landlocked ones) is pretty obvious.
Intolerant people should be shot.
propane is a gas too... I guess that means my parents only imagined that 600km drive, on one tank, right? ;-)
It would probably be stored at something like 2000 psi (for comparison, the tank I carry on my back when SCUBA diving holds air at ~3000psi). At least, the gas cylinders I've worked with in the lab are typically at that pressure; I don't know what pressure propane is stored at in a car's fuel tank.
"When correctly viewed, everything is lewd
I could tell you stories about Peter Pan
Or the Wizard of Oz - there's a dirty old man!"
"When correctly viewed, everything is lewd
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
Or the Wizard of Oz...
Oh sure, like the Oil Industry and other fossil fuel industrys won't lobby to have this suppressed too.
I suppose you put a lot of work and money into it...
They could exploit it commercially until they have a pretty penny (a couple of million for the researchers + enough to cover the expenses) and then release it to the public.
(this should not take too long if the technology catches on)
That way they get rewarded for their work and the public would be happy too!
---
What about the storage problems associated with electricity, batteries are not the answer at this point anyway or else we would be using them at power plants. Hydrogen is containable, it could be burned to produce electricity on demand when it is needed.
Gasoline is not the most behaved fuel either but we use it every day. We have figured out how to store flammable gas at least last time I looked the hot dog outside my window is still there pumping natural gas into my house. Is Hydrogen that much harder to store? Hmmm.. I wish I could fill that sucker up with Hydrogen that I produced from my Hydrogen producing algae pond in my back yard. If this deal floats, it sounds easier than building a methane digester, adding a lot of manure to it once a month and stirring it up when production is low. The key here seems to be keeping the algae alive by giving them access to sulfur when they need it and then reverting back to a no sulfur growth medium when they have regenerated. This is the coolest thing since I discovered methanogens, I hope they open source this bugger;-)
This stuff has been around for a long time. I have a friend who works at the Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab, and is collaborating with the Berkeley guys. The link is here. This page dates from 98. I went in to see Eli last December, and saw a working photobioreactor. They were calibrating it when I got there.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Interesting post, but your "other problems" were not that well thought-out.
1) Maybe (big maybe) genetic engineered algae could be an environmental hazard, but the article itself suggested to me that they'd be investigating the potential of other, naturally occuring, algae first. Why bring up the gen-eng bogey-man? As for the "rest phase", just have one batch charging up while another is producing. Just a simple, standard process issue. I doubt if an industrial chemist would even consider eliminating the "rest phase".
2) Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time. Watts per hour is therefore a rate of acceleration of energy useage - not what you meant, methinks. On the land useage issue, I think you've set a widely pessimistic upper limit on the requirement. Consider: How often do you run you truck eight hours a day at absolutely maximum power? Also, the 22% for solar panels is ignoring the losses going from the panel to the vehicle (probably via electrolysis).
3) Not an issue - consider deserts, deep ocean (largely lifeless), Antarctica (but deeply politically sensitive) or, probably most practical of all, city industrial flat rooftops.
IANAS but isn't that basically what existing solar cells do? Link
As I understand it the electrons are "freed" by the combination of the two chemical substances when exposed to light. Or am I completely botched on the subject?
The Tick - "Spoon!"
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Thanks! I figured there was a problem with the process but I wasn't sure what it was.
The Tick - "Spoon!"
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Fine patent it. At least fucking sell it to somneone who will do something w/ it. If this ends up buried like the rotary engine, like Tesla's work, and like all technologies that can harm the revenues of bloated companies who know they have no future, I'm going to be very pissed.
Sorry but unlike you I don't live in a vacuum.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
On the other hand, I would much rather have an academic institution patent it - and therefore a public reserch institution hold an ownership - instead of some large, untrustworthy money grubbing fat-pig capitalist corporation that might bow down to oil pressure, and bury this tech for hundreds of years to come.
- passion
The NOx emissions come about as the oxidizer used is not pure oxygen but air, which is mostly nitrogen. The high reaction temperature of burning hydrogen does result in some of the nitrogen getting oxidized in side reactions. There is a simple solution, however: lower the cumbustion temperature a bit. How? water injection. Done properly it will keep the cylinder just cool enough enough to reduce (if not eliminate) NOx production. And if you cool (some of) the exhaust, you don't need to worry about running out water for this.
--
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
I remember hearing that the planet was running out of fossil fuels faster than it was producing them. I also remember hear the inverse of that later on. I was wondering if anyone could give me a definite answer. Are we consuming more than the world can produce? Is there a balance?
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose -- Elliot
Two words, Hindenburg.
A few *minor* thing just occured to me:
1. Water will be coming out of the tailpipe and will be extensively present in the engine. Won't this cause a LOT of problems in places where it is very cold? Not just freezing, but also the expanding and contracting that happens in a typical ice -> water -> ice cycle.
2. Los Angeles. Summer. Three hour traffic jam with a bazillion cars all dripping water. Hehe, exactly *how much* water drips out of these things? Is flooding an issue? I know that here in Israel, they don't even bother to place gutter because it rains for only a few weeks during the winter.
3. Hydrogen fueling stations. I mean, come on! Can we say major hazard!?! Would they be keeping the hydrogen in liquid form? How would they store all that fuel??
Just some nice, uninformed questions off the top of my head.
--
rJames.org - illustration
Burn hydrogren in an internal combustion engine and you get all sorts of other things coming out as well. I for one would definitely not drink it.
threadeds blog
Basically most things rotting produce Hydrogen Sulphide. If there is little Sulphur they can't, so they produce Hydrogen ...
Helps the process if there is Iron around.
threadeds blog
One group would contain Nitric and Nitrous Acid.
threadeds blog
This raises the problem that the fuel tank cannot be double skinned or contained itself without increasing the risk of explosion.
threadeds blog
In photosynthesis yes, and that is where the Hydrogen comes from originally. Later they use Anaerobic respiration to get at the Hydrogen. For the want of being boring, I can't see from the article what thing they have done that is new.
threadeds blog
The problem with the Hindenberg was the reflective surface used to prevent solar heating. They had both aluminum powder and iron sharing a surface. High school chemistry students may recognize these as the ingredients for thermite, which burns far hotter than gun powder.
When you burn Hydrogen, the flame is almost entirly colourless. You have probably got some Hydrogen in your house already - it builds up in many central heating systems and needs venting off every now & then (do you have to vent your radiators? - the gas is Hydrogen!). The hydrogen gets there because the warm water reacts (very slowly) with the iron radiators. The iron oxidises into, well, Iron Oxide i guess leaving you with hydrogen.
The usa uses an amazingly disproportionate amount of fuel vs. popluation.
For more info on pollution produced by cars, go to this site here. Here's a summary of some results:
Quite a difference there. The US is the single biggest source of pollution in the world, and the most unwilling to do anything about it from all indications.
Considering it's already approaching $2.50/gal in our area that threat will be taken seriously.
<sarcasm>$2.50/gallon. Really?</sarcasm> Based on the current exchange rate of £1 = $1.6 and an average price over here in the UK of about 75p a litre, that's about $4.50/gallon. I think you've got it easy over there with your fuel prices. Probably why our cars are more fuel efficient :)
P.S. For some evidence on that last part, see my post here, which has some facts on fuel consumption.
I believe that the point of the original poster was to indicate that 'the point of a corporation'--to maximaize profits with or without concern for P>anything else--is the evil he was sepaking of. I Suspect that both of the posters you are replying to see nothing wrong with the pursuit of self interest--even the 'rabid' ambition and greed displayed by the oil companies--as long as it does not take 'the bottom line' as its moral priority.
2). How is Bill Gates poisoning the planet?...What about Turner, one of your other examples?
Both of those individuals do not concentrate their interests solely on single product, company, or even industry. All of them are heavily invested in other companies, including mutual funds and other index-based stuff. All of the financial interests of the world are interconnected, making it rather difficult to decide who is and who is not 'destroying/polluting the world'.
Wait!! Whats that you say? Your mutual fund invests in a malaysian power company [gasp!]. Youre one of them.
Such a tapestry of common interest woven by the possession of wealth seems to lend at least some credence to the idea that there exists a difference between the interests of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'
Plus, I would argue that Gates is polluting the earth more directly. I cant help but associate my copy of windows 98 se2 with concepts like toxic and odious. A kind of moral and efficiency-pollution :)
3). The top 15% of income earners in the US shoulder more that 50% of the tax burden
This fact, however, is best thought of in the context of a few other facts:
A.--The richest 2.7 million Americans - 1% of the people - have as much combined income as the bottom 100 million citizens. And the gap between those groups has widened since 1977, when the top 1% had as much as the bottom 49 million AND
B--** In the late 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration, the wealthiest Americans paid a tax of 91% on income. Today, after 3 major "tax reform" laws passed during the Reagan/Bush/Clinton administration, the top tax on the wealthy is 39%.[7] (you can find the source here--a congressional investigation of the late 80s)
If the top 15% own more than 90% of the country and only pay 50% of the tax burden, there is a problem. IMHO, the top 15% should pay all of it if our current system must be more or less preserved. I suppose that puts me into the 'must be stopped category :)'
Hope this helps to clear up some of the reasoning I assumed to be behind the other posts, and that you are having a better day than I am.
Later
Matt
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
Talk about using hydrogen directly as fuel seems to me to be missing the point. Why not do to hydrogen what we've been doing to coal, oil, and atoms: convert the stored energy into electricity? It's the energy glue of our society. I'll grant that there may be more efficient ways to carry energy but it's the current standard.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Given these microbes will be places in a flat panel tub like contraptions to maximize sunlit surface area, wouldn't it be the same as solar panels but with living things in them?
I don't see the significance of this one. Unless its 10x efficient in turning sunlight into energy, this thing only adds maintenance costs.
And who/how are they going to clean out the dead microbes while leaving the live ones alone...???
...
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# exoduz : escape while you can.
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--
# I have no brain
I remember hearing about plants making hydrogen in a plant physiology course way back when.
The algae is able to split 2 H20 --> 2*H2 + O2
And the plant doesn't even need the hydrogen. It's after the oxygen. Sounds like a good plan to me...
JohnnyB - johnbowman.net
These systems are under active development, as they are still too expensive to be used commercially.
What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end.
"What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end."
It seems to me better to withdraw all subsidies and let progress happen at its own, natural pace. Fossil fuels are a terrible thing to burn anyhow, they are much better as a source of reduced carbon, for sythesizing plastics and such. However, we're not running out just yet, and even if we do, there's still Titan.
As for nuclear power, how is this a dead end? Volcanos continue to bring up radioactives from the core for our fission reactors, and there's enough hydrogen in the oceans to last us a very long time.
Radioactives occur naturally, spread throughout the enviroment. What's wrong with putting our radioactive waste back in the hole where we dug up the fuel in the first place?
"Given that, your perspective is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean these guys invent a process that could significantly improve the lives of people around the world -- a product of their own minds and their own creative efforts -- and you all but demand they give it to you? Talk about greed! It's theirs to dispose of as they see fit."
Sure it is. And if I reinvent it, then it's mine, too, to do with as I see fit. I don't care what they do with their invention, as long as they don't interfere with my right to invent it on my own. This isn't about who gets rewarded for their invention. It's about the freedom of others to reinvent it.
"Sure, they might choose to put it into the public domain. But that will be their choice to make."
Yeah, that is their choice. But they have no right to sue me for following in their footsteps. Not that it matters to me, after all, I wouldn't be able to reinvent it. But other people are, and now they're not allowed to. That's not right.
Now what I would really like to know is how efficient are hydrogen-based engines and how far would these 6000 litres go? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Dave
Dave
"the rotary engine was not buried, it just sucked."
mazda rx-7:
mass produced
decent gas mileage
good power
reasonably priced
my friend has a rx7 that is 12 years old, seems pretty reliable.
why do rotary engines suck?
Doh! - The sound made when someone is beat with a clue stick. :-)
When I said "watts per hour, I was thinking "watthours". Dam my public education...
BTW, the solar energy flux at Earth orbit is about 1360W/m^2.
That's more interesting... That means the area calculation is off by roughly a factor of 9... Serves me right for working from memory.
Temkin
Uh, am I the only one who failed to see any difference in opinion here? (Other than a refinement from general to specific?)
For starters, your cut/paste edit alters the meaning. In effect, you've misquoted me. The first line should have kept the "you're assuming".
Think of it this way. Evil requires intent. The oil companies are simply indifferent. It's kinda like the difference between murder and manslaughter, although that's probably being too easy on them.
Temkin
Oil is hard to find. This makes it valuable. Water and algae are not. This is bad for OPEC et al.
What are you smoking? The energy derived from oil makes it valuable. The lubricating properties of hydrocarbons are valuable. The fact that it is hard to find rates way down on the chart. Walking from California to New York is hard work. Guess what... Nobody is going to pay me for it.
Temkin
1. Why bring up the gen-eng bogey-man?
Because the first thing I'd do is try and improve the yield. The second thing I'd do is improve the process. In short, on #1, we disagree. Counter thought: Why are they investigating other algae? because they want to see which one works better, and gain insight into the mechanisms involved.
2. Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time.
Go read your electric bill. They charge you by Kwh. That's Kilo-watt-hours. For the rest of #2, I agree. I was feeling generally pessemistic yesterday. :-)
3. Not an issue
Exactly. Though I didn't make that clear in my original post. Nice thing is, you can do this with salt water. This will give arid regions something to do. They can pipe in ocean water, or use municipal effluent.
Temkin
You must drive with the gas pedal floored continuously, otherwise your truck only uses a fraction of that amount of energy. At highway speeds you're probably using about 30 kw.
I take the fifth! :-)
But seriously... It might be a better approach to calculate it from the mileage. I get about 24 mpg in my truck. Gasoline has roughly 18,000 Btu per pound, something like 6.5 pounds per gallon...(from memory again...) so... 4875 Btu per mile... Of which I get to send about 15% to the pavement, due to the conversion effeciency of the engine/transmission. The rest is lost as heat. I wish I had the conversion factor handy to get from Btu's to watts. That would at least make this interesting... We could take this to the next step, by comparing it to hydrogen, but I don't have the data for hydrogen. I think it's like 40,000 Btu/lb. but I may be wrong. I'll bet that nobody will simply burn it in an internal combustion engine, and even then, I don't know what kind of mileage I'd get. So I'll stop here.
Temkin
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Actually I wasn't offended as you actually expand on the point I was trying to make in my posting. Hydrogen is very light, hence it's use as the buoyancy in the Hindenburg (I'm assuming this is now the correct spelling since someone pointed it out). It's role in the Hindenburg accident is still contested, although I lean towards the flammable casing theories nowadays. Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it. As far as energy of combustion is concerned, to get close to the energy output from a litre of petroleum, you need to compress it massively - without looking at the figures I suspect that there are limitations on compression technologies for hydrogen, plus storage difficulties and explosive (from the pressure alone) problems. To replace the petrol tank in a car with hydrogen gas in a portable format will take some work - maybe we'll see clip-in gas canisters at 'Gas' stations so that as you burn off hydrogen you leave the empty canisters behind and replace them with pre-filled ones. These are technological problems though, rather than scientific ones, and given the opportunity in an emerging market, I don't doubt that some major corporations will be funding their R&D divisions in search of a viable product.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
oil consumes, and we see we are standing in a new age. this new source of energy, as i see it, of it's quite easy production, machines and other things that needs a source of energy might start to relay on these new source instead of oil. i've waited for a new source of energy for years, yet i'm on of the cold fusion fans, which wants a cleaner environment, and a better source of energy. in one line - it is good weve found a new source of energy which i hope we could relay on.
Dan.
Let's see... My truck has 143 hp, 745 watts per hp, that's 106Kw... divide by 1200... allow for 50% loss... we're talking 178 square feet. Assuming my numbers are close. So a 10 foot by 18 foot pond would produce enough hydrogen to run my truck for say 8 hours a day. Not bad.
You must drive with the gas pedal floored continuously, otherwise your truck only uses a fraction of that amount of energy. At highway speeds you're probably using about 30 kw.
Whenever hydrogen is mentioned somebody always brings up the Hindeburg.
A few facts:
1. The majority of the passengers survived the wreck.
2. Of those who died, most died from the fall.
3. If that bag had been filled with gasoline vapors instead of hydrogen, the reporter who tearfully reported the tragedy live on the radio would, with everyone else in the vicinity, have been a smoking cinder.
Well, he could have avoided others patenting his discovery by publishing it in any publicly circulated publication.
An inventor and entrepreneur I know publish all their discoveries in a small local newspaper from the south of Chile (cheap, and few if anyone there can read it). They have recognized that the patent process is too much trouble for a small company to go thro, and this way they are protected from anyone hijacking their inventions.
Wilbur and Orville Wright patented "wing warping," which made powered, controlled flight possible. Alierons (the things on the wings that allow a plane to bank, or turn) are a derivative of that. The Wright company got into viscous patent suits with Curtiss Aircraft up through WWI. It stalled the development of aeronautics in this country (the USA) for decades. In the end, the Wright patent expired, and the USA became the largest (and best, IMHO) aircraft producing country in the world. My point of this, besides telling a cool, slightly off topic story, is that that just because something is patented doesn't mean that the technology will not be developed or used or benefit all of humanity. It just means that, while the patent is in effect, some other country will do it, like the French did until 1918 or so.
The mention of Joe Firmage totally makes me not take anything you say seriously.
I guess it's patent based around process and discovery of process. Much in the same way you can have the madness of naturally occuring genetic material being patented by companies... Justified through process of use and extraction...
Working for the (other) man
Yeah, NOx are truly evil. Crack the NH3 into N & H and 'burn' the H in a fuel cell and problem mostly solved. Scrubbing remaining NOx from exhaust is very doable.
The problem with N and C is really agrivated by high temperature combustion. Fuel cells really help reduce this, but it will never really go away since we seem to have a mostly N atmosphere anyway.
I'm just waiting for the first plant/algae rights activist. We are torturing poor helpless little algae to serve our own selfish needs. They'll start polluting our ponds and labs with sulfer preventing the switch from taking over. I just hope that they not only continue to go ahead with this, but they ignore the intimidation tactics of other parties, including the oil industry. You know, if you think about it, this is basically the end result of cold fusion... No splitting of molecules, but geting H2 from water... Anyway, I think that it's high time for a new fuel, prices are going nuts and Clinton is sitting on those oil reserves like they're Monica Lewinsky or something. I'm sick of paying 1.50+ for gas... I just want to have a tank full of green ooze sitting in my garage to fuel my car whenever I need. Thanks for letting me rant.
Why is it that people always hear what I say, and not what I mean?
We are making the assumption that cars etc. will use internal combustion engines.
I'd think it is far more likely that hydrogen powered cars will use (fuelCells | batteries | internalCombustionEngines)*.
Some combination of the above could be far more efficient than todays gas engines. The engines would be lighter and cheaper as well, because they may not need any anti-pollution controls.
I seem to recall (from an environmental engineering class) that the bioreactors used in sewage treatment have reaction rates at least an order of magnitude higher than nature.
Combine that with directed evolution and/or genetic engineering and it is very realistic to assume we'll get a 10 to 100 fold increase in H2 production rate.
This seems to be a very interesting and very promising technology, but I have two concerns.
1) What would happen if an epidemic of a virus or bacteria arose that killed these algae? Does this mean that a nation/region could be without power because of a disease?
2) This looks like a very clean fuel. Does anyone think that Nuclear Fusion research will continue to recieve the same amount of funding or do you people think they will cut back on it? After all, algae farms wouldn't do much good for a spacefaring craft in vacuum at low temperatures.
Otherwise, looks like a really promising and interesting technology.
Thank You,
I did not have my thermo book next to me as I wrote that post, but I wonder what the highest compresion ratio would be for a four-cycle hydrogen engine operating at STP in order to not experience pre-ignition. Maybe someone who has their resources handy could figure this out and compare it to a standard engine at, say, 8:1 compression.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
it's a gas, so you will get significantly less mileage out if it than you would from an equivalent volume of gasoline. It would annoy me if I had to stop to refuel every hour on the Highway
This is a good point. From my point of view as a mechanical engineer, the fuel economy of simple H2 is so low compared to that of gasoline that one would have to store a lot more mass of fuel in order to drive a normal distance between refueling. This means that the production of H2 would have to be significantly high in order to drop prices to where the everyday consumer could afford to drive a H2 car.
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
I just thought when they talked about supressing this technology, they where discussing OPEC. Now they would be Huge losers in this deal, should it actually pan out. Every Major US Oil company has an R&D group that is given Huge dollars to research alternative fuels. If say, Exxon, discovers a viable alternative fuel, they can make More money, and they know it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the rotary engine was not buried, it just sucked.
Tesla's work was never Buried, He lacked the ability for self promotion. Of course the smithsonian won't give him credit. They even have an AC motor under a bust of Edison! go figure.
and this kind of technology is perfect for companies that rely on OPEC for there base product i.e. crude oil. Opec will still have a market, we use petrolium in a number of non fuel avenues.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
50 years
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here in the UK, it's about 80p/litre for super unleaded (97 RON). That makes it 0.8*4.54=£3.62 per gallon (UK not US gallon).
Converting to US gallons (div by 1.2) gives:
3 quid per US gallon.
Convert to dollars @ $1.6 / GBP gives
$4.80 per gallon
You think you have it bad
stty erase ^H
Those horrible scientists, exploiting defensless algae so that we can continue our wasteful lifestyles. We should all live in caves as hunter gatherers rather than exploiting a single other living creature!
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
There are numerous examples of oil producers buying patents for more efficent engines and alternative power only to bury them to protect there market share. This seriusly delays (if not prevents) new green technolgies. I hope this one doesn't go the same way.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Woulnd't that kill the oceans ? Fun to see some people are actually working for the better of the earth ... now if only i coulnd get that linux power car ...
http://mrhide.pinnesota.org
You seem to counter your own arguments... You say that the problem with electricity is the storage. Have you ever tried to store a scum pond? Seriously....
And how would you capture the gasses from this wondrous self-maintaining scum pond? Hydrogen rises very quickly, so you'd have to enclose the scum pond, add venting, ensure that no superior rival algae appear and replace this GM algae, make sure there aren't many algae-eating animals or microorganisms to reduce efficiency...
If I want cheap hydrogen for my new hydrogen car, I'll buy myself a solar panel and stick two wires in a beaker of water, and attatch it to a compressor and a tank system.
What, wait? Solar panels too expensive? I'll just then hook up my handy dandy gas generator instead! Wait... duh...
I think I'll stick to using unleaded gasoline for my car, at least for a few more decades.
E
I ran a similar study and found the loss of rednecks due to death by pickuptruck and be greatly reduced by providing the rednecks with shotguns and hunting grounds. They begin to colect food and reproduce in a self sustaining reaction. The only problem is stoping the rednecks from accidentially shooting each other when they exceed a critical level of beer in their system. Another potential mechanism would be to replace beer with wisky, resulting in a quicker but more expensive reaction.
"The anwser to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is... 42" -Douglas Addams
First, let us assume that we can produce a sufficient amount of H to satisfy our needs. This is not terribly far fetched if one keeps in mind that H (per given weight) contains something like 2.5 times the BTU's as gasoline (remember that internal combustion engines are nothing more than air pumps). Now comes a large problem. Hydrogen is DANGEROUS. Aside from the need to greatly upgrade the existing infrastructure, think of these "hydrogen cars". Remember at STP (standard temperature and pressure), H is a gas. And a thin one at that. Think of the high-pressure tanks that would be required on cars. Not only are such tanks extremely costly, but also consider safety and added weight. Filling such a vehicle would be quite a hazard too. I am not saying that H is not feasible, it just should be noted that there are many layers to this issue.
Give it a rest. Patents are not "inherently evil", just often misused. This case does not seem like a misuse.
Link this with a hydrogen powered car, and I now have the perfect excuse for my wife...
"But dear, I have to have all those decomposing sandwiches & empty McDonalds wrappers in the car, or I'll run out of gas!"
Imagine the size of the slimeball you'll need for a zeppelin!
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
The USA burns it to the tune of almost 20 trillion (that is 2 times ten to the thirteenth power) cubic feet every year (see this USDOE page for my source). Europe imports a great deal of it from Russia. Exactly what did you mean by "wasn't used so much"?"
;-)
Talking about a local perspective - I wonder why it isn't so well used in Wales. I know Wind/SOlar and tidal are used a lot, but we hear a lot of talk about biomass/methane with little action on it.
There was a lot of talk about putting smaller biomass generator's in my local community as top-up power but little was done about it.
My guess - its another of those UK-USA differences we love to talk about
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
The big problem with Methane of course is that it is one of the worst greenhouse gases.
The advantage of H2 is that even if you took the most inefficient way of using it as a fuel - burning it - the byproduct is totally harmless and recyclable.
I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane.
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
"Oh, are you laboring under the delusion that there is no natural gas industry because of greenhouse-warming issues? Think again"
No.
When I said "I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane" I meant just that. I didn't know particularly why it wasnt used so much. I know here in Wales biomass energy production is hardly seen. We have quite a lot of Wind Turbines for example.
I know there are lots of issues with methane production - it is the worst greenhouse gas for example, much worse then co2. SO I made a guess.
Honest!
I am aware that greenhouse issues haven't stopped people before but think of it. If they don't want a technology in place that could seriously undercut them, then play to the easiest card. And in methane's case its the fact it is such a bad greenhouse gas and global warming/cooling is such a big issue
...Upgrade now to Schrodingers Dog...
"The Hindenburg fabric was found to be made of a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant." ---from the NASA study done by Addison Bain in 1997. cellulose acetate is that 'flash paper' stuff you can find in magic supply stores. it pretty much consumes itself instantly upon ignition. yay!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
That would be The Mootrix.
"Information wants to be paid"
You made a mistake in your calculations.. a bad one. You need to remember that the Alge is not the only necessary ingredient. The alge must be exposed to sunlite in order for this to work. Because of the density of alge on the surface of the pool (ever see a swamp.. alge tend to get really dense) you would have very little sunlite penetrating more then an inch or maybe 2 into the water so you are able to support far less Alge. So your 50x20x2 meter pool would only effectively be say 50x20x.02 meters and you realize you now have a lot less hydrogen coming out of that pool ( can someone else figure this out... I don't do math ).
NO one ever replies to me.... Anyway, after you account for absorbtion by clouds and air, it is infact 500W per square meter. Making the area required 1.2 Million square meters. The average output of a modern powrestatin is 1000Mw. So, for one average powrstation: you need an area of 2 million square kilometers, again assuming 100% efficieny. It's plainly not feasable.
If God created us in his own immage, how do you explain Vanessa Feltz?
I love to be pedantic, so here I am. If, as you say, everything is solar (which isn't true, really. It's only solar if it's first-stage solar) then we should be able to reach some form of long term equilibrium with anything.
Anyway, saying that direct solar (whether photovoltaic or turbine-based) is the only thing that we can work with indefinitely is a farce. Just because we don't know what else there is for us to work with yet doesn't mean solar is it. For all we know we'll come up with a way to use minor gravitic fluctuations to generate power.
Oh, you left out "Coal/Oil power is just animals and plants (IE, solar-powered biomass) that was compressed and heated via geothermal processes, so it's half solar." And while we're on the subject, let's not forget geothermal, though that does admittedly have a whole ton of problems.
Just my $0.04.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A quick juggling of numbers indicates that a liter of of alge produces about 1/3 liter of H2 (room-temperature gaseous state) every 10 days. While not bad, we'll need a LOT of this alge slush to produce useable amounts of H2. How much H2 is needed just to drive a car to work? or run an all-electric fuel-cell-based house for a day?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
In the most energetically efficient biosystems, less than 1% of the visible light (and much less than 1% of the total light energy) radiated to the Earth from the sun is converted to chemical energy. This figure is for photosynthesis, which is clearly a more evolved (and therefore efficient) metabolic pathway. If you want figures, look in any introductory Biology textbook. Current solar cells are capable of extracting at least 10% (maybe more, I'm a biologist, not a solar panel designer) of incident solar energy. Plus, the electrical energy they extract can be converted to work at a much higher rate than chemical energy (because work from chemical energy needs to be extracted from a heat engine). While capital costs of solar cells are high, they (unlike biological systems) require virtually no maintenance or cycling. So, what you're looking at is at least a factor of 10 higher cost (probably closer to 100) for extracting energy from biosystems, even assuming the bacteria can be evolved to be extremely efficient at splitting water. Synthetic chemicals are another matter; here, bacteria might occasionally be used for mass production of bulk chemicals, if current enzymatic technology improvse. However, the only current example of commodity (i.e. large scale) chemical bioproduction is the isomerization of sucrose to fructose in the making of high-fructose corn syrup for carbonated beverages. Which is sort of a semi-example, because sucrose is a bioproduct anyway, not a hydrocarbon.
The "photosynthetic efficiency" you describe as being 50% probably refers to the percentage of light absorbed over a small range of wavelengths or something similar; it thus has little to do with the overall percentage of energy extracted from the sun. Otherwise I can't rationalize the figure of 50%. The actual percentage of the sun's incident energy is much lower. Additionally, metabolic processes inherent in creating sugars, hydrogen and oxygen, or whatever else in the cell, use a large fraction of the energy. Plus, the cell has to use lots of energy to maintain its other functions. The most efficient biosystems, in fact, are algal ponds, packed with photosynthetic oragnisms, basically exactly what we're talking about here; again, they use less than 1% of the sun's incident energy towards the synthesis of chemicals. I referred to cycling in the biological systems, because the authors of this paper referred to these organisms requiring periodic sulfur innocuations to perform their hydrogen syntheses.
What's really going on here? The energy from sunlight is harvested by the bacteria to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. So, essentially, this is a form of solar energy. Is it realistic to expect this source of solar energy to compete with solar panels, which provide direct electric current, and which do not suffer from the inate energetic inefficiencies (I'm talking metabolic pathways here, not current efficiency levels) of biological processes? I doubt it, especially considering the storage problems of hydrogen. I don't think this discovery will revolutionize the hydrogen industry, much less the world energy industry. It's fun to go nuts over these reports, and dream of a care-free life, but please, let's think about the overall thermodynamics of the situation.
Actually, to get the algae to produce hydrogen, it must be deprived of sunlight and sulphur. The algae needs sunlight to reproduce and grow into mass quantaties, but once light and sulphur are removed it reverts to a primordial state and starts producing hydrogen like mad. What it eats in this state is a mystery.
And the bad emmissions are drastically reduced even from there if a fuel cell is used (and they make H2/O2 fuel cells that are really efficient... like 98%).
H2 is really good, there have been lots of strides in different ways to store it... especially metal hydride storage.
And the ability to drink what comes out of your tailpipe is just cool cool cool. :-)
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
stored in the form of sugars. H2O and CO2 are utilized to create the sugars - oxygen is released as a byproduct of this process. The plant still needs oxygen to metabolize the sugar, much as we do, so, under adverse conditions, it evidently splits water to get at the oxygen so it may utilize it's sugar and then release the excess hydrogen. This is my understanding of the process.
Wouldn't it be interesting if animals had more of the capabilities of plants at food production?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
The Oil Industry might go along with it, as other posters have stated.
But what about the OPEC nations? What happens to the Middle Eastern nations? What happens to Mexico, Congo, Indonesia and Scotland/Norway?
Replacing oil with H would be a crushing blow to Texas, Alaska, Louisana and Oklahoma.
I'm all for replacing Oil with H as fuel.
Who cares if they patent it. 17 years later it's public domain. (Unlike, say, the formula for Coca-Cola, which is just a secret.) It'll take 17 years to implement this develop and implement this tech.
Besides, judging from the text that whizzes past when I load a kernel, The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley are pretty cool about licensing their IP. [Rimshot.]
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Storage problems are being addressed, and it's been shown that hydrogen does not easily explode.
The OPEC and oil companies have very VERY different interests. For instance, it's the interest of the OPEC that the production be limited, so as to drive their oil stock to a higher value. Oil companies, OTOH, benefit from a large amount of oil being consumed.
Then, the energy is extremely competitive. There are dozens of HUGE companies competing. If one of them can find a cheap alternative, it will give them a competitive advantage.
If this ever works out, just like every patented technology, ... is that a commercially viable system to exploit this will be extremely complex, and will probably involved dozens of other patented techniques. The involved companies will enter into licensing agreements, etc ... plus it's never going to be the end-all be-all energy source; it will have to compete with fossil fuel and nuclear energy, so they won't be able to force an astronomical price on it.
to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive"
Have you tried to buy a gallon of Diesel in the Northeast US lately? It's going for over US$2/gallon!
What price can they generate biodiesel for now?
Your Working Boy,
Press release. Wild claims of enormous energy. Patents. I'm having flashbacks to Pons & Fleishman (or however you spell it...)
Anyone got a salt shaker?
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Yeah, it's bad to put up people's taxes to pay for research, but it could be even worse to patent the research and make people pay exorbitant licensing fees. At least if the research is funded by taxation, everybody has equal access to it and there can be competition in implementing it, giving lower prices.
Paying an extra $10 in tax to save $100 on your electricity bill isn't such a bad deal. Of course, this technology may not be like that.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
In the meanwhile, oil companies around the world will mobilize to capture the patent for themselves. They'll also put strong pressure on the US saying "market this and we'll make prices go higher!" Considering it's already approaching $2.50/gal in our area that threat will be taken seriously.
In short, good luck guys - great tech but you're up against goliath.
"Typically, microalgae are grown in ponds, harvested and the oils extracted. The extracted oils are chemically reacted with alcohols to produce diesel fuels..."
Wait a sec... I'm guessing these oils are probably going to be some sort of fatty acid, which would react with alcohol to form an ester. Now, if we've got enough low molecular weight fractions in the result, it could mean we end up with diesel trucks that give off a nice fruity fragrance.
Well thats the thing, I'm assuming their method is more efficient than using solar power. With solar power, you lose most of the energy hitting the panels striaght off the bat.
What I'd like to see is cold fusion. If we can produce stable cold fusion, then our energy concerns will be set. Imagine this:
- Using electrolosis, we produce an endless supply of hydrogen and oxygen
- We irigate the Sahara desert using ocean water with minimal costs
At this point, we'd have very little reason to resort to fossil fuels. I've heard testiment of 5-10yrs before ignition, but I don't know how realistic it is.
Well you need oxygen for the combustion to occur. Since the engine won't store oxygen and will presumably use air from the atmosphere to obtain the oxygen, you get nitrogen also. Couple this with the heat the combustion produces and you'll get N combining with O to produce NO_x.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way. With a production rate of a whopping 3 * 10^-3 litres of H2 per hour per litre of algea culture. Which can only be in production half of the time. It will be long long time (decades) before we see production plants producing mass quantities of H2. And it will even be longer before a significant number of cars use H2 instead of oil derived fuels. There are several major problems with introducing H2 as fuel:
- The chicken and egg problem. Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere. (This can be solved by goverment intervention though)
- H2 is much harder to store. H2 is a gas, except for extremely low temperatures. You can bind H2 to metals, and use poreus metal tanks, but that makes cars heavier and bulkier. It also means that when you are out of gas, you can't just walk to the gas station with your plastic jerry can for some fuel.
- Oil and oil based fuels burn easily, but compared to H2, they are childs play. To ignite oil and oil based fuels, you need some heat source (to evaporate the liquid), while H2 is already a gas. Remember the Hindenburg?
Furthermore, even if H2 will be used as a significant power source, it won't be the end of oil. Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.-- Abigail
Well, yes, but if you want to use H2 as a fuel, you're not letting it freely rise...
The TAX PAYERS OWN the rights to that knowledge. The two researchers were paid for their work and will probably be awarded degrees in addition to their stipends. If they want to patent their discoveries they should have funded their own work. Ditto for the universities.
Eh, you don't want to go there. While this research might have been done on a grant paid for by taxpayers, it might also have been funded by external money. I've worked in the academia myself, and for two years I participated in a committe that gave recommendations on who to assign grants to. There's a lot of external money going on, and the reasoning "research foo was done on a grant by US taxpayers so US taxpayers own the right to that knowledge" also means "important discovery was made by a scientist on a Microsoft grant - Microsoft now holds the keys to the cure of cancer".
The scientist will publish papers about their work. At that moment, the information will be available. Don't forget, scientific results don't mean anything unless they can be reproduced independently.
-- Abigail
Based on Berkeley's work, I've done the following:
Step 1: Get a largish, air-tight tank
Step 2: Put a bunch of algae in the tank with a lot of algae food (check your local pet store).
Step 3: Seal the tank.
As the algae produce H2, the pressure rises. All of this has been proven in the lab. If my linear extrapolations are correct, however, a further *mumble* increase in pressure will start the spontaneous fusion of H into He. This could revolutionize the energy industry!
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I wouldn't be surprised if such a version already exists in the wild in swamps. It's an obvious advantage in a hostile environment. Whether it exists may depend upon whether the two activation paths are mutually exclusive at a low level.
You can get 40% efficiency out of a well-built reciprocal engine (40% of the gasoline's explosive energy turned into torque), the other 60% disappears as heat either through the cooling system or through the exhaust. The reason these figures are so good (in comparison! :) is that the heat in a reciprocal engine is concentrated at the top of each cylinder. Less metal to heat up means less fuel wasted heating metal.
Wankel rotary engines top out at around 30%, mostly because the entire crankcase is the cylinder head. They heat much more evenly.
It took the automotive industry 50 years to push 30% to 40% for reciprocal engines - they might be able to do the same for rotary engines given another 50 years.
I still don't understand why large cities can't combine their problems. Why is it not possible to create a large clay bowl a 100 yds across and several miles long and cover it with a transparent material. Feed waste water, pulverized trash and all sorts of bio-agents like this into one end. Along the way, air pumps keep the water supplied with oxygen and force exhaust gas full of fuel out of the system. On the other end you extract a ground enriching slurry to sell to farmers, and all along the middle you collect flamable gas to pipe to a power generator located next to the enclosure.
So it doesn't produce a lot of electricity? You at least got some, you reduce the landfill load, you take care of your waste water treatment and you return some nutrients to the land.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I love to be pedantic, so here I am.
It's great to meet somebody one has something in common with!
If, as you say, everything is solar (which isn't true, really. It's only solar if it's first-stage solar) then we should be able to reach some form of long term equilibrium with anything.
Well, accepting your definition, that's strictly true, but to do so you would have to accept more severe restrictions. For example to use fossil fuels at a equilibrium rate, you would have to limit your energy use to the formation rate of coal, petroleum and natural gas.
Anyway, saying that direct solar (whether photovoltaic or turbine-based) is the only thing that we can work with indefinitely is a farce. Just because we don't know what else there is for us to work with yet doesn't mean solar is it. For all we know we'll come up with a way to use minor gravitic fluctuations to generate power.
Again, if you want to be pedantic, of course I can't prove the non-existence of some future, now-unforseen non-solar renewable energy source. It is logically impossible. Maybe some day we discover an infinitely renewable energy source from unobtainions flowing from dimension X. It can't be ruled out by I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, you left out "Coal/Oil power is just animals and plants (IE, solar-powered biomass) that was compressed and heated via geothermal processes, so it's half solar." And while we're on the subject, let's not forget geothermal, though that does admittedly have a whole ton of problems.
Well, yes, they are "fossil fuels"; it hardly needs saying that we probably are extracting them faster than they are being formed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What isn't solar power?
Animal power comes from plants which convert sunlight into sugars and other nutrients.
Biomass power (burning wood) just burns the same plant captured solar energy.
Hydropower captures the work against gravity done by solar driven evaporation and convection.
In the end, almost all of our energy sources other than nuclear and geothermal are derived indirectly from solar photons. This is why environmentalists who are interested in long term sustainability are so ideologically committed to solar power. In the end it's the only energy source other than geothermal that human beings can reach some form of long term equilibrium with.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder how long before they get an "offer" from the oil industry in exchange for them moving their research in a "slightly different direction" (read: give up).
:)
Sorry for the slightly cynical view of things, but I'm sure its what will go through an oil baron's head when he reads about this
Wouldn't it make a good hybrid engine? I would think that a hydrogen/electric engine would work quite nicely. What's more the electric utility could ALSO use hydrogen....
Think about this: Solar energy is the most efficient source of energy on the planet. However large portions of the planet do not allow 365 days a year solar stations due to cliamte considerations(Seattle). This method of extracting hydrogen would be good for those portions of the world with poor sunlight coverage. Storing the gas has become safer than it was in 1936.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
While I realize the need for a better source of energy is not an Ameri-centric problem, and that the world needs to look at and use alternate fuels, one problem I can see, at least for America, to the slow adaption of alternate fuels, is a large, if crazy one:
The American male "macho" attitude.
You see, most alternate fuel concept cars I have seen, that worked, had little "get up and go", so to speak. Many would start out slowly, build up speed, then be running normally. Electric cars are the slowest in acceleration (although I do know of the Wired article on electric drag racing, so maybe there is hope), but most alternate fuel vehicles are dismal in the acceleration figures. Maybe this can be improved on in time (I am sure it can).
However, if these vehicles are released (on the American market), they have to have accelleration figures and horsepower to match a gasoline car (and you better bet the FUD will fly by marketing on this), if it is to be adopted in America.
Personally, I wouldn't give a damn, as long as I can still accelerate fast enough to get out of harm's way. But, as we see in America with the SUV's and sports cars on the road, faster and bigger are what the public wants, and it doesn't seem like alternate fuels are delivering on that.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I guess it's patent based around process and discovery of process. Much in the same way you can have the madness of naturally occuring genetic material being patented by companies... Justified through process of use and extraction...
I don't dispute that (well, I do, but that is another matter <grin>) what I *do* dispute is that their discovery required enough effort to justify a patent - this is stuff a high-school project could have done.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
I have a feeling this should have a "patent gone mad" icon rather than a genius one - that they have noticed that standard alge, deprived of sulphur, produce Hydrogen is of course a useful product of research, but seems to rank below discovering that rubber dropped on a hot stove vulcanises - and they rejected that one fast enough.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
It was aluminum powder. All the structural stuff was coated with various super-flammable laquers. And at least some people knew how very dangerous the aluminum powder was and how flammable the craft as a whole was. One of the engineers sent a note (basically a "memo") to the higher-ups, who didn't bother to act on the fact that they were building a hydrogen bag with tinder.
Intolerant people should be shot.
What an odd comparison. The Hindenberg was using Hydrogen gas as a source of buoyancy, not fuel. Although you're right about the explosive doping compound (look here for more info), the whole point of using hydrogen as a fuel is that it is *combustible*. Its explosiveness is what makes it a good fuel.
smallstar
This whole story is really depressing. Not the news, but the quality of ideas and presentation. First the article itself, with a slew of real bone-headed nonsense. What does "a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles" mean? Didn't anyone notice that the two quantities being compared are in different units and dimensions? (How long does it take to produce enough hydrogen of several cars for a week?). Then there's that incredible peice of non-sense: "What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen". Duh... This is either incredibly self-serving or unbelievably ignorant (ever heard of Solar Cells and Electrolysis?). These aren't the only flaws in a very depressingly badly written paper - as others have pointed out.
Then the
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Come on, folks, you can do better than this! (or am I just having a really bad day)?
Responses:
1 & 2: Water comes out of the tailpipe with gasoline, diesel and whatever else gets burnt that has hydrogen in it and uses oxygen as the oxidizer. Just with H2 as the fuel, the _only_ significant reaction product is water. Water will not likely drip out of the tailpipe after the exhaust system is warm. So LA does not have _this_ to worry about for flooding. =-]
3. Yes, fueling stations need to be careful, but they already have to be careful. The likelyhood of storing H2 in liquid form is so remote as to be incomputable. It just wouldn't be done.
In response to the other posts, I abbreviated. I left out the metal hydride storage, water injection and fuel cells on purpose. Really =-]
I'd like them to use turbines instead of fuel cells because turbines have better instantaneous power. Unless the fuel cell is hooked up to the flywheel power storage system I saw in Discover a few years back (4.2KWh/wheel with 50HP apiece instantaneous power output), then we'd have good acceleration. I drive a big, powerful car because I think it's safer to get out of the way of an accident than to be stuck in some little piece of crap econo-box deathtrap =-]
MSNBC.com has an article about this. Unfortunately the site is being stupid and won't give me the exact URL. Look for the News article "Scientists say they've struck oil with algae."
You can trust me. I'm with the government.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'll bet that the biomass generators aren't used because they can't compete with fossil methane (natural gas).
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
True, but hydrogen cannot explode spontaneously by exothermic decomposition.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Fuel value of hydrogen is about 52,000 BTU/lb.
You were saying?
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Simple answer: we don't see them because these inventions never existed. Yet the rumors continue because a large number of people are ignorant jerks who think the world owes them an effortless living, and since the laws of Nature could never make it difficult to accomplish something worthwhile, it must be some person causing their failure.
It's only one small step from there to the thinking which produced the Salem witch trials.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
What's going on here is that someone has found a way to use a natural (harmless to the environment, because already part of it) self-reproducing (cheap) organism to provide large amounts of chemical energy in a very useful form using what appears to be inexpensive methods. This is a huge advance because the expense of collection is radically lowered.
In a word, yes. Photovoltaic panels and batteries supply power at a cost of about US$.90 per kilowatt-hour. Sunlight, by comparison, is extremely cheap. Pond surface is relatively cheap. If you need something like fuel to run a vehicle (or hydrogen for the fuel cell running your 2002-model laptop), tapping some H2 from the green stuff growing in the pond is likely to be cheaper than converting to electricity via PV, then to H2 via electrolysis. Storing hydrogen isn't a big problem, it can be stashed in metallic hydrides relatively cheaply or chemically converted to other fuels. CO2 and H2 can be catalytically converted to H2O and CH4 (methane, natural gas), ethylene, and I presume methanol as well. Methane is a terrific fuel, ethylene is a great synthetic chemical (think polyethylene plastic just for starters) and methanol is the fuel of choice for some newly-invented fuel cells.For further reading see:
Burning Backwards (New Scientist), an article about converting CO2 back to methanol enzymatically (powered by hydrogen to convert NAD back to NADH), and
Viridian Note 129, regarding methanol fuel cells.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This is starting to look like the future.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Well, I don't really understand why this is any different from other biological systems that are known to produce hydrogen. The first three attached references are for microorganisms that produce hydrogen gas as a normal part of their life cycle. In the second reference you can see that the rate of this process has even been measured at about 12 mL per liter of fermentation per hour. This is thee times as fast as what was just announced at Berkeley. The last two references show how some organism can use hydrogen as an energy source. They absorb and "eat" hydrogen. That means that an enzyme in their metabolism can oxidize hydrogen. Enzymatic reactions are all, in principle, reversible. Thus, it is not surprising that a bacteria could catalyze the reverse reaction., the electrochemical reduction of some substrate resulting in hydrogen.
Smooches --- > O'Biquody
References:
1) Electrochemical study of reversible hydrogenase reaction of Desulfovibrio vulgaris cells with methyl viologen as an electron carrier.
Anal Chem 1999 May 1;71(9):1753-9
2) Studies on kinetics of substrate utilization of hydrogen production from wastewater with immobilized cells of photosynthetic bacteria.
Chin J Biotechnol. 1995;11(1):69-77.
3) Methanogens outcompete sulphate reducing bacteria for H2 in the human colon.
Gut. 1994 Aug;35(8):1098-101.
4)Fe(III) as an electron acceptor for H2 oxidation in thermophilic anaerobic enrichment cultures from geothermal areas.
Extremophiles 1997 May;1(2):106-9
5) Purification and molecular characterization of the H2 uptake membrane-bound NiFe-hydrogenase from the carboxidotrophic bacterium Oligotropha carboxidovorans.
J Bacteriol. 1997 Oct;179(19):6053-60.
Connect them up with PVC pipe, some valves and, bingo, your roof is a threat to OPEC!
Seastead this.
Not every college sees this benefit. Also, I'm not arguing for turning the NCAA sports into money machines...
It's just that a number of schools with good teams (UConn, St. John's, etc.) indeed *do* make a lot of money from their programs. These are schools with huge, well-known teams that win consistently. I don't see why a school with a very good, well-known science program shouldn't reap the same benefit.
Yes, educational facilities that are spending how many bazillions on research should be entirely funded with taxes?
Wouldn't you rather see the experiments fund themselves as much as possible?
The basketball team helps support the school, the football team helps support the school, why shouldn't the science department help fund the school?
This is a fascinating discovery, but it is nowhere near anything that "could revolutionise the energy industry". When we read the small print it turns out they are getting 3 milli-litres (cc) of hydrogen *gas* per hour per litre of culture.
;-)
This is an absurdly small amount. Orders of magnitude less than you could produce using photovoltaics and an electrolysis cell.
The real problem with most bio-mass energy projects is getting decent energy density. The most practical (so far) involve using high-yield crop plants to produce oil and/or feedstock for methane fermentation.
You can buy rape-seed diesel oil in Germany that is produced sort-of economically (tax-breaks) in this way. Makes your snazzy new turbo-diesel car smell like an old-fashioned UK fish-and-chip shop (Greasy Spoon kitchen for our US cousins)
Pardon my general science ignorance but couldn't the production of hydrogen also be done with a DC current produced by solar power and then fed through water? (Sorry old data records on general chemistry class have bit-migrated. *grin*)
Or is the amount of current needed per amount of hydrogen produced not workable?
The Tick - "Spoon!"
"Bah!" - Dogbert
There are two ways of storing hydrogen for use as a fuel. One is to compress and pressurize it, just like propane -- with all the same problems and risks. Propane or natural gas bottles can go boom, and so can hydrogen.
The other means is to store the gas in a (heavy) metal hydride. This is far safer but has a problem of its own -- those metals ARE heavy, thus limiting range per amount of energy much as batteries do for electric vehicles.
NOVA several years back had a very interesting demo of this. A can of gasoline, a bottle of propane, and a tank of metal hydride were each set out on a range and shot at. The gasoline made a fireball and lingering fire. The propane bottle detonated. The metal hydride just hissed.
Hydrogen isn't perfect, but if a cheap means of production works out, it could mean trading current fuel's imperfections for a better set of problems.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
The first viable hydrogen producing method? How about using solar power to electrolize water? As I recall, all you need is a little water and some electricity...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come.
Maybe you will come, but history has shown that most people won't. See many electric cars on the road? They are heavily subsidized, and the public still runs away in droves. Basically, the reason is because they suck. The range stinks, and they are built like golf carts with delusions of grandeur.
For a new vehicle to succeed, it's going to have to be superior to the gasoline engine in some significant way (cost, performance, etc), or it's doomed to failure. Pollution superiority is not enough, simply because modern cars are already almost non-polluting.
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They have to put the algae in very specific
conditions in order to make them produce
H2. (no sulfur etc)
There is no danger of these algae escaping
(in fact they're very common and can be found
in water al over the planet)
J.
hmmm, NH3 as fuel? wouldn't you be producing huge amounts of NOx compounds in this reaction?(no thanx) also what about the efficency of the haber-bosch(endothermic) process to produce the NH3 in the first place. im guessing its not fantastic. but i do agree that fusion is the way to go. too bad congress killed funding for ITER, eh?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Does anyone realize what this new source of hydrogen REALLY means???
I can finally build that fleet of death-zepplins to conquer the world. And if they try to shoot back, we crash onto our enemies in a raging inferno!
The Kaiser will be pleased...
Kinda like a dog with seven pupils in its eyes... Kinda like a madness that refuses to subside...
Remember the whole bit of Methane production from cow digestion? methane is also a cheap source of hydrogen and yet the conversion of biological waste into Methane as a fuel hasn't gone too far. Certainly the byproducts of straight hydrogen use are better but using macroscopic biomass fermentation might be easier than something that has specific microenvironment needs.
I lived for the day this announcement would come... it was just a speculation a few years ago... and now they're going to patent it? Come on guys... it's supposedly for the well-being of humanity.
I suppose you put a lot of work and money into it... however, I can't (don't want to) imagine a single company holding a grasp of the entire industrialized world, which at some time could come to depend entirely on hydrogen, instead of oil.
How about giving away the patent into the public domain? That way, your name will be remembered for all eternity, as the inventor of the first viable hydrogen-producing method, while at the same time saying that you weren't some kind of greedy businessman.
Just my thoughts on it.
This is especially interesting in light of recent advances in fuel cell technology. (Sorry about the source.) I'd love it if my next car ran on a hydrogen fuel cell.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
That is, dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).
Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.
For more information, go to http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/.
Ban DHMO!
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Pretend there is some witty statement here.
Newsflash! People can drink "pure water"!
"Hydrogen is so clean burning that what comes out of the exhaust pipe is pure water," Melis said. "You can drink it."
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then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
As stated, it hasn't held up against 'peer review' yet. That is a direct result from pursuing the patent. Anything published, cannot be patented. They have to postpone publishing until the patent is officially pending.
The fact that they filed a patent, may indicate that the scientists themselves believe it's important. However may not mean that we're even close to hydrogen fueled machines. That's what was also said of nuclear fusion some years ago. It always takes much longer than expected.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
This is great news, if it works, but the biggest problem with it is storing the hydrogen.
I'm not talking about it's volatility (although that's an issue).. It's my understanding that hydrogen is a difficult thing to store efficiently - it's a gas, so you will get significantly less mileage out if it than you would from an equivalent volume of gasoline. It would annoy me if I had to stop to refuel every hour on the Highway (if there even were pitstops that frequent.) (I'm not knocking the technology - it's a good start.. but this only gets us halfway...)
Ford Pinto
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I remember reading about the 'Holy Grail' of Hydrogen Farms back when I was eight or nine in one of my 'Science Fiction or Science Fact' books. If these scientists really have cracked this problem, then this could be as fundamental a shift in energy generation as the nuclear reactor.
Of course, Hydrogen is not necessarily the most well behaved fuel (witness the Hindenberg disaster, although in that case there is concern that doping the skin of the Hindenberg with a mixture resembling gunpowder was also a problem...) but the possibilities of having a reasonably clean environmentally friendly fuel ready to take over from Crude oil derivatives is something we should be thankful for.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The consumer cost of electricity and natural gas are 2/3 distribution costs. It will be many many years before hydrogen (even if it could be made for free) will ever make it to our homes or autos. The USA has enourmous amounts of natural gas, and we haven't even started looking into the methane hydrate reserves found offshore.
Environmentally, we could make some immediate gains by getting rid of the suv's and buying one of those new hybrid hondas! The usa uses an amazingly disproportionate amount of fuel vs. popluation.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Goddamit! The correct prcedure is observation, hypothesis, experimental falsification, paper, peer review, publishment, repeat experimentation, aceptance and Scientific proof. If this thing does turn out to be good (and bear in mind if it gets it's energy from the sun ALL it is a rather efficient solar cell, after all, I dont think they have found a way to make Algae break the law of conservation of Energy, and if it does turn out to be feasable... (work out the energy density of the sun and it is NOT feasable for large scale gneration of power. The Earth recieves 1.3 KW per square meter of sunlight, so you would have to have an area of 462 thousand square meters to have an equivalent of a 600MW Powerstation. 600000/1.3=461538.5, and that assumes that ALL of the solar energy is being turned into hydrogen gass.) And then you have to work out how to collect the hydrogen bubling off. Thats a lot of water, a lot of neutrients, and a lot of plastic/glass sheeting (the only way I can think of imidiately to allow sunlight through but retain hydrogen.) This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that these guys are not talking about saving the world, they are fishing for a research grant. This is probably why they went for a press release rather than the normal procedures, because the peer review would involve people doing feasability studies, and it would appear asa comment. It would become a scientific curiosity rather thana great new idea. BUT... it does have aplication for making hydrocarbons I guess. But for power generation, no.
If God created us in his own immage, how do you explain Vanessa Feltz?
Pedant here...
The Hindenburg fire wasn't started by the Hydrogen, it was started by the envelope. It was cloth, doped in either aluminium or iron powder - I forget which. Anyway, pretty explosive stuff. As it flew through the highly charged air with an electrical storm about, it got very wet and charged itelf. Problem, though - the individual cloth panels weren't properly earthed to the frame. So, as the mooring rope goes to ground, some panels discharge and some don't. Somewhere along the line this caused a spark on a sheet of cloth doped in an explosive (in effect - and it wasn't known as an explosive then, so it's not as stupid as it sounds) which set that panel alight, which triggered others. As that burns, it heats up the hydrogen so that catches fire and the whole thing goes up in smoke.
Two problems have perpetuated the myth about it being a pure hydrogen fire: The film and the camera angle. The film was black and white so you couldn't see the colour of the flames, while the fire broke out on the tail of the opposite side to the camera so wasn't picked up on film until it had already taken hold. If you'd had colour film you'd have seen (they got eyewitness reports to test this one) that the flaems were an orangey-red, whereas hydrogen burns with a very pale blue IIRC.
Hydrogen's flammable, sure, but it doesn't just explode all by itself. Hydrogen airships are perfectly viable, now we know more about the properties of these things.
Does anyone have the proper details? This is all from memory.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
That said, I also have read of research (sorry, I haven't found a good web link yet) into diatom algae that grow readily in warm climates and that are 50% oil by weight. The cool thing about the oil produced by processing this particular type of algae is that it can be quickly converted into biodiesel and run in existing diesel engines -- from home generators, to trucks, all the way up to large marine diesels and diesel power generating plants.
Equally significant, the algae removes as much CO2 from the atmosphere as can be burned in the fuel-- so there is no net gain in the so-called "greenhouse effect".
So what I am looking forward to are the so-called hybrid diesel electric engines, and for someone to develop turbine engines using biodiesel or biodiesel like fuels. Then maybe we can at last grow our own fuels and leave the environmentally damaging, old-earth fuels alone.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
" Research conducted in these labs is aimed at producing biodiesel fuel from microalgae and other plants. Biodiesel fuel is made from oils and fats found in microalgae. It can be substituted for diesel fuel or used as an additive. Biodiesel generates fewer pollutants than typical diesel fuels.
Quoting what I found to be the more interesting part of the page:
- Typically, microalgae are grown in ponds, harvested and the oils extracted. The extracted oils are chemically reacted with alcohols to produce diesel fuels. Research in the laboratory is directed towards genetic enhancement of the fat and oil content of the algae to make the biodiesel fuel product more cost-competitive by 2010."
My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come. (And because of competition, the costs will come down anyway.) Secondarily -- will these algae be patented like Monsanto's new seed crops such that only big businesses can benefit from the research that our tax dollars pay for?...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
For one, if you burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, you get nitrogen oxides as well as water coming out of the tailpipe. Nitrogen oxides are noxious, cause acid rain and contribute to smog. This is not the perfect solution, although as a fuel for power plants or other large-scale installations, it's about as good as methane.
Humongous ponds of this would also tie up a large quantity of greenhouse-effect causing CO2 and of course using hydrogen for fuel will reduce the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere for a two-fold effect. That would be a Good Thing.
Now if the car companies would just invent a catalytic converter that got rid of the nitrogen oxides and invent a safe way to store hydrogen in a car, this would be very cool. Although, hydrogen isn't all that dangerous to carry around; e.g. a lot of the people on the Hindenberg lived through the explosion (more died from falling and getting burned to death than being blown to bits).
I'd love to have my own little hydrogen refinery pond in my back yard. I'd like to see this get developed further, but someone may come along and kill the project. Let's hope not.
Some rambling comments about hydrogen:
Hydrogen has been thoroughly investigated as a fuel for all kinds of uses (automotive, home heating, etc) in the 70's and 80's. The DOE even had a hydrogen powered Buick that was powered by liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen embrittlement caused turbo-charger failure, but that was solved by a bit of metalurgy. The car ran great, the hydrogen fueling station was managable, and the car had great performance and safety. They even crashed the thing once on accident, no Hindenburg. Hydrogen is probably an overall safer energy carrier than gasoline.
However, what became clear in all my hydrogen readings and research a few years ago is that hydrogen as an energy carrier for any mobile application just plains sucks - its density is too low. Even for liquid hydrogen the tank volume is so great your vehicle looks like a mini space shuttle - small cargo space, huge tank. As far as compressed hydrogen, don't even go there. Tanks of 4,000 PSI hydrogen stuffed all over, in, and under a vehicle will get you back and forth accross town a few times. Maybe practicle for a bus. Barely. Also, there is enough energy just from the compression of the hydrogen to launch an average vehicle vertically up a few thousand feet. No thank you. (this is a risk introduced by the compression, the fact that it is hydrogen is irrelevant to this particular risk, mostly. Hydrogen does throttle hot). Compressed natural gas is even more stupid - all the drawbacks of compressed hydrogen, plus you'd still be burning a hydrocarbon. Cleaner than gasoline or diesel, yes, but still nasty. For functionality, safety and cleanliness (overall) liquid propane is still way nicer than compressed natural gas. Its liquid, very easy to fill a tank, great energy density per tank volume. Its almost as convenient as gasoline or diesel, actually, more so in some ways.
Some people think metal hydrides will make nice hydrogen storage systems. Yeah, right. Trade massive volume for massive mass. Or, go the carbon composite adsorption route - a nice mix of volume and mass, but it still sucks. How many people want to wait tens of minutes if not hours to fill their tank? Some have proposed tank swapping: drop off an empty, pick up a full tank. So, now fueling stations become warehouses. Nice. "Sorry, we're out of full tanks right now, you'll have to wait an hour". Again, no thank you.
Hopefully this makes it clear that the fuel (or energy carrier, as it actually is) is not the real issue, distribution and fueling stations are the issue. Hydrogen is nice cuz it doesn't have any carbon to mess up our air, but its such a pain to transfer around for any kind of mobile application. Maybe the gas companies can pipe it to your house - this would be nice, you could 'burn' it in a fuel cell, produce electricity and heat your house all at the same time. Molten carbonate fuel cells and/or solid oxide fuel cells could do this now with natural gas, hydrogen would just make it a little easier to keep the membranes from being loaded up with sulfur and other nasty crap from natural gas.
For a mobile application we really need a hydrogen based energy carrier thats more like liquid propane. And we have one, a rather nice one. Ammonia.
Sure, its stinky, but its relatively safe. Dumb-ass Kansas/Colorado/Nebraska farm kids (me) have been dragging HUGE tanks of ammonia around the countryside and spraying it into the ground as fertilizer for generations. It has great energy density per tank volume, and its not a hydrocarbon. The X-15 space plane flew into space on two relatively small tanks, one was ammonia, the other LOX. Remember, if you are flying in and out of the atmosphere alot (as the X-15 was designed to do) huge tanks won't cut it - too much drag.
So, in short, making hydrogen is one small step towards a clean and sustainable energy economy that we as a race MUST move towards, that is if we want to keep breathing. NH3 is a much nicer way to move hydrogen around. Making hydrogen with the sun is cute. Maybe it will amount to something someday. I doubt it though. I honestly think Henk Monkhorst and clan are onto a much nicer path with their Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor.
Henk is the man, fusion rocks.
This parallels my own research into producing methane gas by combining rednecks and beer. The process only has one remainign hurdle to overcome: isolating the rednecks from their pickup trucks so they live long enough to provide enough methane to hit the break-even point. Unfortunately, this has proven nearly impossible (with pickup trucks apparently playing a critical role in the redneck reproductive process), resulting in the untimely (and often spectacular) demise of 87% of my test subjects within the first two days of the study (usually preceded by the words "Hold m'beer, Bubba, and watch this!"). We've also run into unexpected expenses which lead me to believe that this process doesn't hold quite so much promise as I initially projected (who could've predicted we'd need to spend $347,000 on pink garden flamingoes?), and the cost overruns make the future of this study uncertain.
-- WhiskeyJack