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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.
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.
"The Oil Industry" does'nt mean much. If you're thinking about the likes of Exxon, Total, or Royal Dutch Shell, they're on a heavily competitive market, and they don't own the raw material. They make money off extracting it, transforming it and distributing it, but they BUY the raw material, which belongs to the country where it's extracted. If you want to find a conspirator against it, you'd rather look at OPEP.
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
Not if they are smart. This might just be a god send for them. From entirely thier point of view that is. If I was a oil company CEO I would be making these dudes and offer before the ink is dry on the patent. Not to scarf up the patent and have it vanish to but put bucks in it and make it commercial process.
This would be a win-win for them in the long run. They can dump the basiclly hunt and gather approach that has marked the oil industry for the last 100 years. They are living on borrowed time anyway. The oil in the ground is only going to last so long, then what? The process would basiclly do away with the oil industry as a environmental problem. Good press there.
As a county we can drop out dependance on OPEC and take the teeth from that tiger. The US could reduce it's military budget because we wouldn't have to spend so much defending what is basiclly a big sand pile. International terrorizem would drop because, well without the big oil cash cow, they can't fund it.
This is a good thing.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
In fact, the engineers at Zeppelin company kind of didn't realize the doping material on the surface of the Hindenberg WAS essentially a major explosive. If that reflective material was non-explosive, the Hindenberg would have settled back onto the ground, and there would have been a lot less casualties because remember which way hydrogen burns: straight up.
In fact, because hydrogen burns straight up, it doesn't have the extreme danger of things like methane, ethane or propane, which has a very bad habit of burning sideways in addition of burning straight up if an explosion occurs. That's why ships and trucks carrying liquid petroleum gas or liquified natural gas has to be given very careful treatment to prevent ignition.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
"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
Eh, no, it's far from obvious that the first step should be solving a non-problem in such a way that you have very low production rates.
Keeping the algea in "auxillary power mode" is trivial. No genetic engineering needed - just keep them deprived from sulpher. The problem is that if you keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long - they die.
So, you do not want to keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long.
-- 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
more calculation:
a car driving on hydrogen with the same range as a normal car has a tank of 100 litres (very rough number based on a vague memory of something I read on this once). Of course the gas is stored under pressure (5 bar??) so lets assume we are talking about 500 litres H2 for a full tank.
given 0.333 litre of H2/litre alge/10 days, that gives you aproximately 1600 litres of alge to produce that amount of H2 in 10 days or 16000 to do it in one day. But given the 10 fold increase those people think is feasible in the yields we'll assume 1600 litre for 500 litre of H2 per 10 days.
The real question of course is how much litre of alge you can get to produce H2 per square metre of sunlight (i.e. how deep can the tanks be).
Jilles
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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It was triggered by an electriccal spark - the thing was charged from flying through a lightning storm but not properly insulated. So. some panels discharge when the tow rope hits the ground, others don't, you get a spark between panels. That starts the fire. Whether the hydrogen burned or not is difficult to tell, but it isn't going to have started first automatically. Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
mjuarez, I guess you beat me to it!
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
What is happening is that extraction techniques are becoming more extreme, both in the depth of drilling and in where we're willing to drill, so that we're extracting fossil fuels from previously inaccessable reserves.
Of course, even if fossil fuels were unlimited, they're not practical as fuels in the long term because of the greenhouse effect. Only fusion - directly from a reactor on Earth, or indirectly through sunlight into photovoltatics, weather phenomenea (wind, hydro, OTECs), or biomass - is a practical long-term energy source.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
erm - correct me if I am wrong of course, but doesn't it use the hydrogen to make simple sugars and starches, and release the oxygen?
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-=DaveHowe=-
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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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.
Though the obvious next steps would be to first alter it genetically to stay constantly in "auxillary power" mode, and then try to improve hydrogen yield with further genetic engineering. Though in all likelihood they'd end up with something to fragile to survive for long in the real world.
The cake is a pie
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.
Probably. There is some excess hydrogen in the fuel mix (it cools the flame and recovers energy that is otherwise just dissociating water molecules, and it improves the exhaust velocity and thus the performance), but I don't believe this causes pollution as such. The only pollutant I would expect would be some nitrogen oxides produced as the engine exhaust mixes with the air, and this should be small due to the pressure being low and the reducing environment (from the excess hydrogen). NOx production is favored in high-pressure oxydizing environments, and by the time the SSME exhaust hits air it has expanded and cooled quite a bit.
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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.
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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Have you ever owned a diesel car? I have. You may or may not remember they got pretty popular in the late 70s when gas got expensive (I didn't own one then). The minor superiority that they had was gas mileage. When gas got cheaper, people ran away once again.
Why? Because they have other problems. They are very noisy. The performance is not that great (good torque, though). They are much more polluting (ever seen a mis-tuned diesel smoking down the highway?). They last a long time, but that just means that you have to live with the noise longer. :)
Oh, please. Auto manufacturers make whatever the people are willing to buy (and did when there was a demand for diesels). Now imagine that same CEO saying to the shareholders, "Uh, we know the people are clamoring for diesels, but we didn't want to make them, and our marketshare is now down to 5%." Hasn't happened yet.
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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.
The Hindenburg would have exploded even if it was filled with air.
The crazy Germans used iron oxide and aluminum in the doping process to seal the fabric. This makes thermite. Thermite burns rather quickly, very hot, and ignites very easily all on its own.
Add a static discharge, and POOF.
Had the Hindenburge actually developed a puncture the size of a house, then caught fire at that puncture (without the skin burning), it would have LANDED and everyone would have more than likely walked away.
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