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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.
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!
One option is to store it as a very cold liquid, requiring a well insulated fuel tank. This is possible, but a bit hard to handle safely. If the tank cracks, or some heat gets in, you will have rather a lot of hydrogen gas trying to get out, and hydrogen gas is explosive in proportions of something like 4% to 80% in air.
Another is to store it under moderate pressure (a few atmospheres) adsorbed onto the surface of a metal dust. In this model your fuel tank is lightly pressurized, and full of dust. You pump hydrogen gas in under pressure, and it is adsorbed, but when you let some out and reduce the pressure slightly, it is released again. The problem here is that the tank is heavy.
The third option is to store it as a gas, under very high pressure. This requires a really serious pressure vessel as your fuel tank, which is likely to be heavy, and you will need to engineer the tank to seal itself and remain intact in a crash, adding still more weight, and a rather heavy object flying through the wreckage flattening people.
It might be better to use the hydrogen to make something which is a bit easier to store and not too much more polluting, like methanol.
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