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NASA Reports Vast Hydrogen Reserves in Earth's Crust
Garin writes: "The Vancouver Sun is reporting that NASA scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen stored in the Earth's crust while they were trying to explain the presence of living bacteria. Could this be the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil? I hope so."
If only the oil companies would allow it...
Do you not think that there would just be a new group of powerful companies selling hydrogen instead?
Sure, it sounds like a neat idea now.
But wait until we've been burning hydrogen-powered cars for a thousand years, locking up all of the atmospheric oxygen in water. People will be gasping for air at sea level, and the 'dead zone' on mountains (which the oxygen level is too low to support human life) will include cities like Denver and Mexico City.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
When asked what this could possibly mean, Dr. Freud said that it meant that he secretly wishes to engage in sexual relations with his mother.
Thank goodness that they found some Hydrogen in the earth's crust! We were almost running out of dihydrogen monoxide and atmospheric sources!
(Yes, I know it's more costly to derive [H] from other molecules than to recover from the earth and store for immediate use. It's called "vain attempt at humor.")
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I haven't read the linked article yet, as it appears to be /.-ed. So my comments are made in more than just the usual bit of ignorance.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Posted anonymously because I don't need the karma.
LONDON -- Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today's dwindling stocks of fossil fuels, lying beneath the Earth's crust.
The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry.
Governments across the world are urgently seeking ways of switching from conventional energy sources such as coal, gas and nuclear power to cleaner, safer alternatives.
Energy specialists estimate that oil production will start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years, as the economically viable reserves start to run out.
Hydrogen gas has been hailed as the ultimate clean fuel, as it produces only water when burned. Until now, however, moves to switch to a "hydrogen economy" have been dogged by the cost of making the gas. The two most common ways -- extraction from natural gas and sea water -- are expensive and create environmental problems.
Now scientists at the American space agency Nasa have found that the Earth's crust is a vast natural reservoir of hydrogen which has become trapped in ancient rocks.
The team made its discovery while trying to explain how bacteria live many miles below the Earth's surface. Such bugs have no access to sunlight, forcing them to rely on another source of energy for life. Scientists suspected that hydrogen was the source.
According to Professor Friedemann Freund and colleagues at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, the gas is produced when water molecules trapped inside molten rock break down to release hydrogen.
"In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth's crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen," said Professor Freund.
Studies by the team of common rock types such as granite and olivine have revealed extraordinarily high levels of trapped hydrogen. Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
Although formidable engineering problems remain to be overcome in abstracting the gas, the sheer volume of the Earth's crust means that such a high concentration would solve the world's energy problems.
"Everyone thinks of gas and oil as the main sources, and it's very difficult to get anyone to take alternatives seriously," said Dr. David Elliott, the professor of technology policy at the Open University in London. "The possibility of vast reserves of hydrogen in the Earth's crust could change that mindset."
The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined.
Professor Freund believes that the extraction and crushing of rock to extract the trapped hydrogen is likely to be prohibitively expensive. The reaction which creates the gas takes place at depths far below those involved in oil extraction, which are typically about two miles down.
The most promising source of the hydrogen may be geological "traps" similar to those now drilled for natural gas. Professor Freund said: "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."
not a chance.. not for a long time at least.
Forcing huge and multiple industries to completely re-tool for a new fuel source will first cause gigantic resistance. The oil companies will scream no way, the car companies will scream no way, and finally the consumer will scream no-way-in-hell!
Why the consumer screaming? simple.. GM,Ford,Toyota,etc... will intentionally hike prices even higher due to the "forced changes" making you $17,000 budget sedan cost $36,000 and the stupid SUV's costs soar even higher..
it wont happen, not in our lifetimes, and possibly not in our grandchildrens lifetimes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why wait for hydrogen to relieve the dependence on foreign oil. In the states there are thousands of farmers who cannot afford to eat. Why haven't ethanol powered automobiles showed themselves? Corn products seem like a great way to help improve the economy by helping out the farmers, providing new jobs, and lowering the dependence on petrol? What gives? Why are there no ethanol cars?
NASA scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen
Any extraction of this 'hydrogen' should be persued with caution. Especially if this so called 'hydrogen' is in the dangerous dihydrogen monoxide form!
Consider some of it's effects and the consider the whole cover-up and conspiracy surround dihydrogen monoxide!
Please, for the children's sake, reconsider!
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Are solar panels effecient enough to work in automobiles, how about wind power? surely you can't put a nuclear reactor in one... hydrogen and oil, however, can be used in such a way, THAT's the difference.
Economics. Oil is cheaper to use than any of those. Solar, Wind and Nuclear require big capital investments up front and provide electrical energy which can't be stored without a big drop in efficiency. Oil and hydrogen, depending on how difficult it will be to mine it, don't have this problem.
Are you sure? Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If we've found a large, easily tapped reserve, this is a good thing, I think.
17,000 isn't necessarily a 'budget' vehicle. There are plenty of brand new vehicles at around 10K. If they jumped up to 15-17K to switch to hydrogen, and the SUVs became unaffordable I don't think I would cry one bit. I walk pretty much everywhere, so smaller cars on the road would make my day. It's not as if most people who own an SUV need them anyways...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
No doubt about that. But the current powerful oil companies would not be very excited about that unless they could ensure that THEY would be the powerful hydrogen companies as well.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Well, maybe a layman like me is best suited to take a stab at this from my casual knowledge on the subject:
Solar power: cells are expensive, relatively inefficient, and are not suited for all locations.
Wind power: ?? this is used where its effective, but again, not always on, you need _lots_ of mills or huge ones to get anything useful?
Nuclear power: considering that they are gunna start burying waste below mountains in nevada, isn't this somewhat self explainitory? nuclear power is great, but anything that makes garbage always comes back to haunt us, especially if that garbage is pretty dangerous.
And none of these three energy collection/production methods is suitable for the 'on the go' purposes of the car (except maybe solar I guess).
I think the unbquity with which hydrogen could be used is it's big selling point. Anywhere, anytime; and I'd imagine lots of things could be retrofitted to use hydrogen much easier than the alternatives?
"Old man yells at systemd"
This hydrogen is molecularly trapped in Granite! 1 cubic meter releases 1000 liters of gas. Even if it did, the energy required to completely mill one cubic meter of granite is most likely more than the energy value of the gas.
2nd problem. Isnt 1000 liters exactly equal to the volume of one cubic meter? So where is all the granite?
I am in Vancouver literally across the street from the Vancouver Sun. Nobody reads it for a reason....
Considering that they already control most of the equipment resources needed for mining and processing pretty much anything I don't think it will be a problem for them to make a lateral move from Oil Conglomerate to Hydrogen Conglomerate.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Try a couple of google searches. Like this and this.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
But it doesnt stop there. the Hydrogen fuel will also soar in price to stratospheric prices. due to the "added processing costs" of "retooling the industry"
a change to Hydrogen as an automotive fuel will make 6 dollar a gallon gasoline look cheap... and again the consumer will scream no-way.
A real budget vehicle is $17K. and vehicles that should be bought by most (honda Insight and the other super green cars) cost insane prices ($32K for the insight and more for the GM offering)
The corperations are not interested at all in any change from diry/nasty/super inefficient oil fuel cars... otherwise they'd make the green cars affordable.. and start switching the entire lines of vehicles to green-er offerings.
so again...It will never happen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
cars still run on petrol, lorries still use oil derivatives - there'd have to be a *lot* of conversion before hydrogen was used and who'd pay for it all?
Video Game cheats, hints a
Within a certain definition of "easily" when said definition includes hauling up megatons of rubble from two miles below the earth's crust and somehow extracting the hydrogen.
Could this be the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil?
I can think of many reasons why it won't.
oops forgot. a $10K vehicle is an econo-throwaway box. they are not quality vehicles in any way ..(I own a Kia Sephia... it is a piece of crap in quality... you have to drive it very very carefully to not damage it... My Aztek feels better built and get's the same gas mileage(31.2Mpg on highway.. K&N air filter gave me 1mpg on it's own! ).. and isnt as delicate.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
if only the oil companies would allow it...
And you just think the hydrogen will jump out of the ground when we tell it to? IF there are truly large pockets of free hydrogen in geologic traps, it has to be gotten by drilling. Who has the equipment, the experience, the distribution networks, and most of all, the money to drill? The oil companies. They'll be the only ones able to exploit the resource.
The article was very light on on details, but indicated that any such reserves would be very deep. And if it requires drilling through granite, you'll be wearing out cutting bits quickly. To drill and complete one of these wells will easily run into the multi-millions of dollars.
If the H2 is locked up in some other medium other than gas/liquid, the cost associated with extracting it could outweigh the benefit in using it. There's lots of hydrogen all over the planet, but as has been pointed out before, the electrolysis to release the H2 from the H2O takes more energy then is derived from the H2. I hope someone can tell me why this is not the case....the teat that is oil is doing us no favors.
The article claims that Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
This basically means that any particular volume of rock contains its own volume (at atmospheric pressume, presumably) in hydrogen. Unfortunately, that really isn't that much. It takes much more energy than that to extract and presumably, crush 1 m of rock. The article states this, too.
The article somewhat confusingly states The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined. Hydrogen is in fact the most energy-rich chemical fuel, per unit weight, in existence, the problem is that at the concentrations they're talking about, this won't be solving any problems any time soon, unless they find these things trapped. Not that unlike drilling for natural gas.
What might be a lot more promising is that some scientists have been working on bioengineering algae to produce hydrogen when deprived of sunlight. This basically amounts to a very cheap form of solar energy: grow algae in ponds, then pump them into a bioreactor where they produce hydrogen. Leave them in for a few days, then before they start to die off pump them back out. A lot cheaper than refined silicon covering all that area...
the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil
I guess I'll bite.
The problem with the dependence of oil isn't an alternative means. Someone has pointed/will point out that we have many alternative energy sources. Instead oil as a means of energy is dominant because it is cheap.
The world's energy infrastructure is based on using crude oil. There are oil power plants, oil refineries, gasoline engines, etc. Oil is simply cheaper to use. Companies spend billions of dollars researching new drill sites, lobbying Congress, etc. to maintain oil production because it is cheaper than investing in alternative energy sources; i.e. solar, nuclear.
Now what if this limitless source of Hydrogen comes on-line? What if we start using it instead of drilling for crude oil? At some point, the demand for oil begins to decline. Seeing as there is still a supply of oil (a diminishing supply, but still a supply) the price of oil will go down. Eventually, oil will be cheaper to use, and begin to rise in demand. A happy medium will be reached where crude oil drilling and this new hydrogen production will co-exist.
Admitidly, at this point there will no longer be a complete depedence on oil, but I would argue that we (the globe) are not as dependent as the media makes us out to seem. Alternative energies exist, but simply cost more. If we are willing to bear higher costs, we can reduce our oil dependence today.
As I see it the world's dependence on oil will not diminish with new energy sources. At least not until that source is so incredably inexpensive that it will replace all other energy supplies. Or all crude oil supplies run dry. Perhaps the correct question is not: will hydrogen reduce our oil dependence? But will this new hydrogen supply produce limitless inexpensive energy, so inexpensive that all other means of energy are outpriced?
You knew there had to be one.
Down in the article...
Although formidable engineering problems remain to be overcome in abstracting the gas...
At least the hydrogen is only trapped physically and not chemically. For a while I was afraid they were going to say you could get all the hydrogen you wanted if you were willing to chemically decompose water.
If you have to pulverize a cubic meter of rock in a vacuum to get 1000 liters of hydrogen at STP, then you still have a ways to go to compete with conventional processes that rely on getting it from natural gas.
I don't know if in-situ pulverization would even help enough in terms of the economics.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The original article says:
"The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined."
Any petroleum geologist would tell you that there is oodles of available oil in the ground, but it is unprofitable to recover it. That is, it cost more to get it than it would be worth on the market. Obviously, the same economies would apply to recovering the hydrogen trapped in the rock. The profits have to be available to make the business work
Also, the article says:
"Energy specialists estimate that oil production will start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years, as the economically viable reserves start to run out."
The key word here is "economically viable". Think for a moment, what would happen if oil supplies started running low because of a lack of profitable reserves? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic (not dependant on price), so the price would almost assuredly go up, just as when supplies are cut short for other reasons, like an OPEC quota. As the price of oil goes up, reserves that cost more to extract will now be profitable. We'll still have oil, but it will just be more expensive.
This is why the estimates for the amount of recoverable petroleum reserve are SO varied. When you hear doomsday predictions of running out of oil supply, remember these effects of supply and demand on price and profitability.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the rising CO2 levels at all, and I don't think fossil fuels are a sustainable energy source. I just think that clear-eyed skepticism is more productive than knee-jerk idealism.
Because someone choosing to walk isn't sucking up resources at a greater than necessary rate for no bloody reason. I see people driving SUVs with no one in them but themselves, obviously not carrying anything bigger than a small box. Why the HELL are they driving a hugeass SUV?
Minivans are passenger vehicles, if you carry a lot of passengers they are a good investment. They also tend to get better gas mileage than SUVs. SUVs are 'Sport Utility Vehicles' so you get a vehicle that kind of looks like a cross between a truck and a van, but also stuffed full of luxury crap and with worse gase mileage than both.
And you don't have to be driving a Scooter or a Yugo to have an efficient vehicle. The new Volkswagen Beetle gets 50mpg and has enoug room in it to carry 5 people, or 2 people and a whole bunch of stuff. SUVs are an uneccesary, unsightly, blight on the landscape. And SUV drivers had damn well better not be complaining that I choose to walk. I'm trying to make up for their gas guzzling lazy asses so those pathetic whiny entitlement minded me-me-me children they are hauling around will still be able to breathe without a gasmask when they grow up.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Energy specialists estimate that oil production will start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years, as the economically viable reserves start to run out.
Not a well written paragraph from an Economics point of view. What will happen is once the easier to tap reserves run out, production will shift to the harder to tap reserves. More likely than not, that'll lead to technology that'll make those reserves just as economically viable as the current ones now. Therefore, at worst, we may see a price rise, but I would be surprised to see a decline in production.
Offtopic, but there's something that's been bothering me for wa while: Perpetually the US Administration talks about reducing the dependence on foreign oil, promoting the opening up of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuges for drilling, and basically writing a blank environmental cheque for oil companies to sign. All of this is done under the pretense of being patriotic by reducing the countries strategic vulnerabilities (namely having a primary energy source externally controlled). Yet this is the same administration (I'm not talking about one particular party, or even one make-up of politicians, but I mean government momentum on a whole) that continually refuses to enforce basic fuel efficiency (NOT conservation. There's a difference between conservation and efficiency) directives. I don't have the metrics (nor have I ever looked), but the highways are full of grossly inefficient vehicles (not just large vehicles, either, but additionally inefficient small vehicles. The Chevrolet Cavalier is some ~25% less efficient than most comparably sized competitors). If people want to feel patriotic, they should forsake getting that new Expedition and buy themselves a Dodge Neon or a Toyota Corolla : You're doing a great service to your country.
the car companies will scream no way
Bullshit. The car companies are working on hydrogen powered cars, both with fuel cell technology and internal combustion engines. BMW is pursuing the latter approach.
Scientist report vast quanitities of hydrogen in Earths oceans.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
Many alternatives are more freely available than hydrogen, but none of them are particularly efficient nor cheap, except for nuclear, and the only reason we don't use more nuclear power is solely because of political factors.
<digression>
Instead of calling it "radiation" maybe we should call it "Patriot Power Rays" or "Atomic Nature Juice". Maybe we're just marketing it wrong, since everyone associates nukes with things like hysterical movies starring Hanoi Jane, or Chernobyl, which was poorly-maintained, obsolete technology run by a bunch of guys with eyebrows like caterpillars and atrocious taste in winter hats who are always calling each other "Comrade" in the hours-long bread lines. Stop thinking "Gamma World" and start thinking "The Jetsons". Hooray!
</digression>
The only reason we will ever switch from oil is either because we run out, or we develop something cheaper. From reading the article, it sounds to me like drilling down two miles or so and processing huge quantities of rock to release the hydrogen sounds a lot harder and more expensive than drilling for oil, regardless of how much there is.
I'm still waiting for a "Mr. Fusion" for my car so I can go 1000 miles on two banana peels and a quarter cup of coffee grounds.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Representatives from Exxon, Mobile, and other major oil companies warned consumers to expect hydrogen prices to increase over the summer months as demand skyrockets.
It hurts when I pee.
If you built kites and yousold your kites for $10.00 but were forced to retool for a different material that required complete re-design and re-tooling would you swallow all the costs of the changes and happily spend all your money to do so and THEN not change the prices of your kites? Most sane people agree that changes are the cost of doing business.. the car industry has never been ran by sane people.. (destination charges when buying a vehicle for example) and they will use the scare tactic of doubling the prices to try and squash the changes. and if they cant squash it they will punish the consumer for letting it happen... you might say "well the imports will fill in under the overpricing..." wrong... japenese cars are dirt cheap... not in the US though because almost 25% of that cost is in tarrifs and fees paid to the US auto industry... these tarrifs will increase to make the prices match the US cars. If you could buy a honda Insight for $19,000.00 they would sell like crazy and you would see them everywhere.. but the added tarrifs and fees to this double threat (forign and green=evil to US car makers) cranks the price up to $32,000.00.
Do not think for a minute that any large industry in the US would act responsible.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So now can we go to war over where to mine hydrogen as opposed to where to drill for oil?
;)
Moreover to you think Dick and W. will lets us mine hydrogen? I doubt they have any money invested in the resource
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
As noted in this press release, similar hydrogen-consuming microbes may some day be discovered on Mars.
And if we ever did figure out a way of "mining" this trapped hydrogen, there would be a way to fill up your tank if you went planet hopping :)
Sure, I know that the sulfide (ite/ate/whatever) imputities found in most petroleum products are bad mojo for the atmosphere, but isn't burning hydrocarbons just effectively re-releasing lost carbon back into the biosphere? Global warming issues, etc aside, isn't the industrial age simply reverting the environment back to an era before plants more or less depleted the atmosphere of C02? I just wanted to know if anyone else has looked at environmental issues in this way before.
Your fuel tank isn't under pressure like a hydro tank would be. A puncture in your fuel tank won't cause a massive explosion. Besides, a bowl of gasoline on fire doesn't cause a violent explosion, say, compared to a bowl/whatever of hydrogen.
Call me crazy, but, isn't 3/4ths of the Earth's surface covered with stuff that can be easilly converted to clean-burning hydrogen and oxygen?
I definitely think the big H is the way to go. Petroleum is a stinky industrial-age relic that costs too much money to purify into something useful. To make matters worse, its non-renewable, and synthetic replacements are too expensive to produce.
Solar --> Electical --> Decomposition of seawater --> Hydrogen. Whats so hard about it?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Alternatives don't work. Solar power, you make me laugh. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a solar panel? Do you know how nasty to the environment semiconductor manufacturing is? Are you aware of how inefficient solar power is? You'd need solar panel area near 100 times the land mass of the United States to come close to meeting the energy demands. That's assuming the panel doesn't take more energy to make than it produces!
Windmills are the same problem. You need too many of them all over the landscape to have any benefit. Small scale? Sure. Large scale oil replacement? You are living in a dreamworld. Before you call me a freak, bush supporter, bunny-killing lunatic, or any other choice names the environmental lobby uses instead of numbers, look up some of your own. Hydrogen, biodiesel, and ethanol are not energy sources. They are energy carriers, because it takes more energy to produce them than you get from burning them. If there were huge hydrogen reserves under the earth, that would change.
There are two alternatives: Fission and Fusion, and people would rather burn up oil instead of finding ways to make nuclear power safe, or investigate safe nuclear power (Witness the flames to the cold fusion article awhile here on slashdot, of all places). Nothing else has the energy density.
Huge hydrogen deposits in the earth might be evidence of a higher power, because it will pull our bacon out of the fire. do some research as to the state of the world's petrochemical reserves. Like I said in a previous article, Global Warming won't mean much in a few years, because the oil won't be economically viable any more. Uh-oh!
..don't panic
Sure, oil is used for plastics, lubricants, and many other purposes, but who cares? Why would we want to eliminate all use of oil? If we eliminate the use of oil for automobiles, OPEC could shut down and we wouldn't notice. If we also eliminate the use of oil for home heating, our oil use would no longer be a statisticly-significant source of pollution.
Solar is still too expensive - too expensive to manufacture the panels and too expensive to repair them when the birds gum them up because they are warm in the winter. Hydro is basically tapped out - most of the places in the country that could use hydro are using it. The problem comes that for every hydro plant there is a dam, and for every dam the cropland below it is destroyed and the cropland above it is covered in water. Nuclear power is probably the best alternative, but is too hot (no pun intended) politically to be viable. On a side note, I read somewhere that coal plants put more radioactive material into the environment every year than nuke plants (trace elements in the coal). Can anybody back this up?
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
That doesn't leave much room for the rock...
Solar: Need to look at different kinds. Solar-electric requires considerable initial investment; the NPV of that investment is greater than the cost of the oil, except for niche applications where connecting to the grid would be price (e.g. a space station ;-). Solar thermal with active systems to pump stuff around turns out to have maintenance and installation costs that make it impractical in most places as a supplementary energy source. Passive solar heating is in use and is practical as a supplementary heating source at the time a house is designed.
Wind power: Wind poweris a viable supplementary energy source. Have you crossed California coast ranges recently, or visited Palm Springs? Wind power is being developed there on a massive scale. Farmers in other places are finding that it makes a good supplemental "crop", for example when combined with cattle. The loss of productive acreage for the towers and access roads is readily paid for by the power generated.
Nuclear: limitations are currently political. Got a bad rap from current generations of reactor designs which require complex, active sytems to prevent runaway reaction. Newer designs are far superior. Despite their antiquated designs, western reactors have a pretty good safety record if you factor in the deaths caused by fossil fuel pollution.
The place where you see alternatives the most now is in electricity generation. This is because the energy forms are converted into a fungible form (electricity) which is easily distributed. The electricity you use is generated from oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, and hydropower. If fossil fuel plants were magically replaced tomorrow with nuclear, the consumer would never notice.
Energy for transportation is a much tougher problem, because the distribution and end-use is much more tightly coupled to the source of the energy. Converting other energy sources into gasoline would be too inefficient to be practical. The existing distribution system is in place, paid for, and gasoline has a pretty good energy density. For that reason the first practical electric cars are hybrids that run on gasoline.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why would vast reserves of H alleviate our dependencies on other nations? I'm sure someone will claim the H, just as the arab nations own all of the oil they sit on. Of course, if it all lies under the US of A, then we have nothing to worry about, but if it is all under Iraq, we'll, we're still boned.
Greed will eventually settle in. I'm sure lots of legislation would be passed by our corporate controlled government to make sure that the WTO and Free-Trade agreements put us in full control.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I'm still waiting for a "Mr. Fusion" for my car so I can go 1000 miles on two banana peels and a quarter cup of coffee grounds.
And never be late again, either, with the flux capacitor under the hood.
Just to assuage public opinion, they'll have to drill far away from public places. That runs up the cost of packaging and transporting the hydrogen, making it tough to do this as "economically" as oil drilling today. (OK, nobody counts all the costs of oil drilling, e.g. smog control in all those cars, higher healthcare costs, etc.)
Another possibility would be to put electrical generation next to the H2 mines and take advantage of the electrical distribution grid.
Maybe we'll see H2 fuel when the oil supplies have dwindled far enough to force a look at alternative sources. Maybe.
By "awful lot," the numbers may still look large, but when you compare them to what is used for automotive fuel, home heating fuel, and aircraft fuel, you'll find that "miniscule" would probably be a better description.
While there may be advantages to using alternatives (as referenced by other responses), from and economic or environmental standpoint, it's just a drop in the ocean compared to fuel usage.
I think electolysis of seawater is a far cheaper source of hydrogen than mining from deep within the earth's crust. And this also gives off oxygen.
It's not the inavailability of H2 that has lead to our oil dependence.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
In Europe, of course, we've spent the last 20 years developing highly efficient clean Diesels, and the French have put a fair bit of effort into biodiesel (modified plant oil) which is renewable. Growing sunflowers is easier than deep mining, I believe.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, this is true, but I for one would prefer not to be in NYC if Indian Point melts down (for example).
sulli
RTFJ.
It's orders of magnitudes greater--billions and billions. It represents an amount of hydrogen comparable to the amount that is in all the water in the oceans. If there is an easy way to extract it, we'll all be drowning before we run out of it.
Many environmentalists are pushing for renewable energy sources, not merely alternative ones. There's an inherent (albeit longer-term) problem with using a finite non-renewing source indefinitely.
You mean "carbohydrates" wasn't just chosen to sound neat? I thought plants got all their component atoms from carbon dioxide and trace minerals in the groundwater, and only used water as a medium!
In all seriousness, though, I think the extra water would pretty much end up in the ocean and not significantly encourage plant growth (unlike increased supplies of available carbon). Neither would the reduction in free oxygen, that I can see. There's no guarantee that the ecosystem will naturally balance a sufficiently huge influx of some active element in a way that doesn't kill some of the more sophisticated and sensitive forms of life (such as mammals).
We'd have to burn an awful lot of the stuff to make a difference, but who knows? Maybe it will be worrisome in a thousand years, and we'll have to start actively breaking down some carbonate rock to balance things out.
Yes, but often it seems like big companies want stability if at all possible, and this would shake things up a bit.
I think of it as similar to the big music companies. They would probably be in the best position to move things to MP3 (or in addition to CDs). But that would really shake things up, so they are hanging on to what's worked for a long time.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Assuming this discovery is legitimate, I bet that it's old news to the oil companies.
From the article:
"In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth's crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen," said Professor Freund.
I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but come on. How could the huge oil producers not have encountered this vast store of hydrogen? I would imagine the oil companies do 10,000 times more drilling and exploration than NASA.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Insight is $32,000? Somebody should tell Honda that! According to Honda's web-page the MSRP on an Insight is $20,000 for the manual transmission and 21500 for the automatic. You can get one for less if you're willing to live without air conditioning.
I tried building a Civic Hybrid on their "Build Your Own!" page and the manual transmission model started at $19,550. (With fabric seats...)
So are you just ignorant of the true cost of these vehicles or is there some other axe you're grinding that I haven't picked up on?
Who did what now?
Nuclear power is probably unpopular for a number of reasons, such as public perception about safety issues. As for solar and wind, these are fleeting: You can't package wind or sunshine and use it whenever you want. You have to convert it to chemical energy (i.e. charge a battery). Hydrogen has a lot of the properties that make oil attractive, and in addition, they can be used in fuel cells. A big problem with hydrogen is that it is a great energy storage mechanism, but (until now, allegedly) it isn't a *source* of energy because there are no stores of free hydrogen in the earth. You have to *make* hydrogen via electrolysis, which usus electricity, which you get from your typical fossil-fuel power plant. If there is in fact a free supply of hydrogen available, it could trigger a partial, but substantial, transition to fuel-cell technology.
Ever noticed that the people who bitch the loudest about pollution drive around in 40 year old VW buses that leak, belch, and spew exponentially more toxins than a guy behind the wheel of a modern automobile?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
The three alternative energy sources you mentioned all have fairly large drawbacks:
Solar - the equipment is expensive and you need a very large area to harness it, although prices and efficiencies of the hardware is getting better. But solar powered vehicles still suck.
Wind - lots of windmills needed and its only viable in certain geographic regions. Its also subject to which way the wind blows (yeah bad pun I know). For vehicles its only viable for battery power, boats, balloons and kites.
Nuclear - The only problem with nuclear power is that the long term plans for containment of spent fuel is sorely lacking. It cannot be generated safely on small vehicles so its energy must stored in batteries which are not yet up to the task of replacing a fuel tank.
This is not to say that these three alternative energy sources are bad but that they have some limitations. Limitations that technology has not fully overcome yet.
Hydrogens real strong point is that we can transition to hyrdrogen power with minimal notice to the user and we can do it quickly. We know how to harness the energy from burning fuel very well and we're even getting good at extracting the energy from some fuels without burning them. Internal combustion hydrogen powered vehicles can perform and feel almost identical to their gasoling powered cousins (Dodge even showed a hydrogen powered barracuda a few years ago with a reported 400+bhp). Hydrogen power can also be called upon on demand unlike solar, hydro or wind and as stated elsewhere its exhaust is very clean unlike nuclear.
However I'm not sure myself I'd like to go cruising down a highway at 75mph with a tank of compressed hydrogen sitting 2 feet behind me. But a hydrogen powered car sure sounds more fun than a battery or solar powered one.
The only problems I see with hydrogen power is the cost of the fuel and containment in the case of small vehicles. If NASAs findings lead to efficient and environmentally safe mining of the hydrogen this may be the perfect stop gap solution until even friendlier energy sources mature to meet our energy needs.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Here's the original release from NASA, which goes into some of the science behind this:
HYDROGEN-FED BACTERIA MAY EXIST BEYOND EARTH
It appears that Freund only casually mentioned the potential for extracting this hydrogen for energy, but the Vancouver Sun reporter decided to grab onto that for the headline value...
Well, looking at the /. headlines, I would say that Google Web API's are ranking up there pretty high :)
But if the nation's Soccer Moms have to give up their Grand Caravans, and the nation's Midlife Crisis Divorced Men have to give up their Range Rovers, then truly, truly I say to you, the terrorists will have won.
sulli
RTFJ.
Sure gas is explosive but a hydrogen car is a bomb
So would you rather be killed by the 1 megaton nuke as opposed to the 10 megaton nuke? You're just used to sitting on 15 gallons of gasoline...in time (assuming hydrogen powered automobiles make it to the consumer market), you'll be used to sitting on the hydrogen. So many people don't understand the amount of faith they're already putting into human engineering skill, and thus make statements such as yours.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
There's probably hundreds of times the earth's mass of methane in Jupiter, but that doesn't make it a viable energy source.
Detail #2: Water is a potent greenhouse gas.
Any New Englander knows that it's usually a good twenty degrees warmer in the winter when you have a good cloud cover. Of course, burning gasoline generates water too, so it's a win as a gasoline replacement. However, it is not an energy source that is limitless in the sense it can be used in any amount with no consequences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are you sure? Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Are *you* sure? There's a lotta universe out there that we haven't seen yet.
Perhaps you're basing this on the abundance of stars (which burn hydrogen), but you fail to consider the potential number of bodies out there that have *no* star, and are just floating balls of gas or rock. There could be many out there that we don't know about simply because we can't *see* them.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Come on, people, it was a joke. A deliberate attempt to imitate the "there's no silver lining so bright that it doesn't contain a dark cloud" crowd.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Note to you: Scientists are not making these assertions. The people reporting the story are tagging these things on to make their story sound better/more urgent/whatever. This should not reflect poorly on the scientists.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
As far as I know, there are no eletrolytic organisms or other natural process to get the O2 back, so we are screwed.
Photosynthesis takes CO2, H2O, and sunlight to produce carbohydrates.
However, new CO2 goes into the air, spreads out more or less evenly, and its precious carbon becomes available to plants around the world. So carbon balances itself pretty quickly, and you have to really work at releasing it faster than plants can suck it up. New H2O vapor mostly falls in the ocean (or winds up there, eventually), where there's plenty of the stuff already, and doesn't promote new plant growth. So there's not much reason to believe that hydrogen will balance itself out naturally.
And your evidence that this would happen is...?
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
A main problem I see with this is that we could deplete our oxygen supply. Get ready to breath WaterVapor/Nitrogen mix. CO2 can return the O2 via plants. How can the cycle be completed returning O2 from H2O ?
You know, Soccer Mom's I really don't have that much of an issue with (presuming that they actually transport large numbers of children around, making the additional space and utility of a minivan necessary), but as you mentioned with the Range Rover (which gets 12mpg in the city, 15mpg on the highway. A Toyota Camry gets 24/33mpg, by comparison, and is actually a mid-sized car. A Corolla gets 32mpg/40mpg): There are a massive number of vehicles out there that have absolutely no use or utility whatsoever. Indeed, the public at large doesn't pay enough attention to fuel economy when purchasing cars either (though they absolutely should if they don't like killing kids from emphyzema and they're patriotic), and this is perhaps because of pump prices that too low, considering (why is it that a bottle of Coke costs me about 3x more than some oil which was dug up underground half a world away, processed, transported in many stages, and has about 60% of its price as taxes?).
If the US really cared about being strategically strong (presuming that the administration wasn't in the oil company's pockets) they would impose a large tax (with proceeds going to alternative energy research) based upon energy efficiency, or rather lack thereof, in vehicles.
Sidenote: I was recently urged to buy a minivan because "What about when you go camping in the summer? You'll need the space!" : That in a nutshell defined why most people have inappropriately sized vehicles for daily commutes and runs to the supermarket -> For that once every two year event where they actually might need it. RENT SOMETHING FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! I'm a big fan of rentals, and for a low cost you can have the larger vehicle for the period that you need it, going back to a more efficient configuration when you're done.
As far as fuel sources go, nuclear waste produces lots of H2 (He also). That seems like a cheaper way to get the stuff as it wouldn't have to be mined, and would have to be released normally.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
> it wont happen, not in our lifetimes, and possibly
> not in our grandchildrens lifetimes.
Why not? There's still people alive (though I imagine the count is getting smaller each day) who were born before cars even existed. If we can go from no cars to everyone has a car within one person's lifetime, who's to say we can't go from oil dependant to something else in the same time frame?
In other words the world changes a lot faster than you're giving it credit for.
So true. I was actually just trying to think up a fuel efficient North American brand (and I like the Neon, apart from the head gasket issue that I had on my 98) so that I didn't have to keep mentioning Honda or Toyota in the same breath as patriotism. :-) The Neon, at least with the older 3 speed automatic, is a great example of an inefficient vehicle given its size and utility (at least compared to what it could have been with a better automatic, as it now has).
the oil companies have declared that hydrogen does not exist in the earth's crust and that the previous study was a cruel april fools joke that was released 2 weeks too late.
/.
CmdrTaco is being investigated for taking part in this attempt to create chaos in the minds of readers of
Yes. Here is a link.
Excerpt:
"Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons"
And:
"Thus, by combining U.S. coal combustion from 1937 (440 million tons) through 1987 (661 million tons) with an estimated total in the year 2040 (2516 million tons), the total expected U.S. radioactivity release to the environment by 2040 can be determined. That total comes from the expected combustion of 111,716 million tons of coal with the release of 477,027,320 millicuries in the United States. Global releases of radioactivity from the predicted combustion of 637,409 million tons of coal would be 2,721,736,430 millicuries.
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown."
> > If only the oil companies
> > would allow it...
>
> Do you not think that there would just
> be a new group of powerful companies
> selling hydrogen instead?
Exactly. It comes down to whether they think of themselves as OIL companies or ENERGY companies. This could be a huge opportunity for them.
This
There is a very real and techical difference between BigOilCo/Hydrogen and BigMusicCo/MP3.
MP3 is not only technically feasible, its proven itself a superior medium. Using MP3, I can put several analog audo CD's on a single data CD, or better yet, all of my audio CD's on hard disk. BigMusicCo ain't going there because (a) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 has vast advantages, (b) they're ignoring the fact that MP3 is *wildly* popular (in spite of BigMusicCo) and (c) they're ignoring the multitude of distribution and promotion channels that the features of MP3'd music offer... all because they're so goddam greedy that they want to harness the power of computers to do something they've never been succeeded at doing to date: control piracy.
Now, I'm not saying that BigOilCo isn't greedy. I *am* saying that using hydrogen to power cars and the like is not a technical practicality at this time. It's not a simple as carrying around a tank full of compressed hydrogen instead of a tank of gasoline; ever heard of the Hindenburg? Yeah, fuel cells have been around for a while and are getting better, but they're still bulky and expensive. The techno-economic changes necessary for us to be able to take advantage of huge stocks of H are the kind that come slowly, though it helps to keep the social/political pressure on.
It is nice to know that, should we become ready to use it, there's lots of Hydrogen to be had.
(1) Problem #1: Getting the hydrogen. We don't *have* to mine hydrogen. We can get it from water. But this takes power, the practical generation of which has an impact on the environment. This could weigh equally with the environmental impact of mining it (as mentioned in the article).
(2) Distributing hydrogen. Hydrogen cannot be pumped or carted around like petroleum or natural gas. It is an extremely difficuly to handle gas, and contains much lower energy density than other fuels (read: you need more to get the same energy). Part of our dependency on petroleum is based on the current distribution network.
(3) Burning Hydrogen. Contrary to popular belief, burning hydrogen does not produce only water. Yes, hydrogen plus oxygen equal water, but we are not talking about burning hyrogen in oxygen. We are burning hyrdrogen in *air*, which is +70% nitrogen. When anything is burned in air, there is a reaction between the oxygen and the nitrogen to create those nitrous oxide pollutants which we generally associate with cars. These will be reduced but will not go away just because we are burning hydrogen.
Fortunately using fuel cell *does* produce only water. Hopefully many cases where we current burn fuels can use fuel cells instead.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Do you know how much energy it takes to make a solar panel?
I'm afraid I don't know, though I'd be surprised if a single 100W solar panel exceeded the 3.65 Megawatt-Hours it can generate over the course of its service life.
They are energy carriers, because it takes more energy to produce them than you get from burning them.
That's because the production energy for crop based fuels includes all that solar energy lavished on them for months. The available solar radiation is approximately 1.4 kW/m^2. Spread that over a 2 month (for sake of argument) crop with about 8 hours a day of energy and a single square meter of crop took in 672kWH of energy. BP, a manufacturer of solar cells, cites figures that show that 1.4kW/m^2 figure is for solar radiation outside the earth's atmosphere, and puts the available solar radiation at about 1 kW/m^2 at sea level, meaning the same crop took 480kWH to grow.I'd also like to note that, with the same calculation, a theoretical 100% efficiency solar panel of 8m^2 (or about 9'x9') could power a large house with air conditioning and have room to spare. (alternative energy advocates frequently point to how great their house is because it uses so little energy, but they also fail to mention that air conditioning is the first thing to go since it is such an energy hog. I prefer to compare to the current average homeowner's situation, for a more realistic picture) That's calculated as 1.0kW*5H*30days*8m^2=1200kWH/month assuming only 5 hours/day since a fixed solar panel isn't always exposing a 100% cross section to the sun.
Too many people get confused. If you have 100J of energy, and it takes 150J of energy to pump a liter of oil out of the ground, even if I give you a million dollars for that liter, you can't get it out of the ground. Unless, perhaps, I give it to you in paper money that you can burn to get the extra energy. See the problem?
If this hydrogen can be extracted at a net energy profit, and there's as much as they say there might be, I'll start worrying about retirement savings again.
..don't panic
Yes, they're different. That's just the closest analogy I could think of.
I guess the situation with big oil companies now would be (the way I see it) music companies around 1996. Back when ripping music from CDs wasn't as practical because the Internet wasn't as widespread, memory wasn't quite as cheap, MP3 compression might not yet have been fully developed (I can't remember). Starting then, the big music companies could have starting working on this MP3 stuff as well, and moving the industry in that direction. But they ignored it until it was wildly popular. I dunno, maybe it's still not the same thing.
I still think that if hydrogen fuel *does* become efficient, oil companies will still be resistant to the upheaval it would cause to convert everything. Just my theory.
Of course, just because the music industry is being extremely ignorant doesn't mean big oil has to do the same.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Ooh, enlighten me?? I always wondered what happened to the station wagon, I liked station wagons. Fairly small, versatile, could carry people or stuff around, could be made to get good gas mileage. All around great car design, where did they go? What CAFE regulations killed them? I haven't heard about this before.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
So what's the chances these bacteria the depend on this trapped hydrogen are sensient and intelligent and will move to wipe out the human race when we try this?!
Darn, I meant to stick this link in my post above. It's got some stuff that might interest you, including some't on fuel cells.
Are you sure? Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.
Well it is, especially if you look at per-mole instead of per-weight fractions. Except it's much less common on earth, and most of the hydrogen that's on earth has been stripped of its lucrative molecular electrons and is no longer in H2 form. (Translation: it's already burned.) Ocean water is 1/9th hydrogen by weight but you don't see people trading futures in it.
It looks like Saturn was the American manufacturer you should have mentioned for fuel economy.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Your fuel tank isn't under pressure like a hydro tank would be. A puncture in your fuel tank won't cause a massive explosion. Besides, a bowl of gasoline on fire doesn't cause a violent explosion, say, compared to a bowl/whatever of hydrogen.
A common misconception. Actually, a bowl of gasoline is much more damaging than an equivalent volume of hydrogen. I'm not sure where you got your misconception, since there are several sources, but the most common example is the Hindenberg. Contrary to popular belief, the Hindenberg didn't explode due to its hydrogen contents, but its skin caught fire from a spark and burned. From the Rocky Mountain Insitute page:
As you can see this clearly indicates that the hydrogen on the Hindenburg was not the problem.
Just a question --
How efficiently can we store elecrical energy in batteries? In hydrogen? How efficiently can we get it back out?
--
grep "xercist"
I haven't heard that.
However, it would be ironic if Kyoto moves us more in the direction of nuclear power.
I can just hear thousands of environmental extremists slapping their heads in unison in a gigantic "D'oh!"
Heh heh heh!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The reason for the bad Denver smog was thermal inversions where a layer of cold air near the ground was capped by warmer air above. That's why it could be sub-zero on the plains, but 20-30 degrees warmer if you went into the mountains.
We still have those inversions (and "no burn days"), but the bad smog was largely eliminated as newer, cleaner cars replaced the older fleet. Unfortunately we still have a stupid oxygenated fuels program in the winter months, and pollution levels are rising again (but still below Federal guidelines) due to large number of people who moved into Denver and insisted on big SUVs for the "lifestyle" nonsense.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Doh! Can't spell "good" :-\
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
That's nice.
It's about 30 miles (50km) from my house to my work, and there are no buses or trains to take, so I need a car. And don't tell me to move closer to work - the only places within walking distance are apartments the size of my bathroom that rent out for nearly what my house payment is.
Of course, I drive a Toyota Echo, so my consumption of fuel is about as low as I can get it.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
You know it's only a matter of time before an evil super-villian figures out a way to simultaneously ignite all that hydrogen under the Earth's crust, thereby threatening to cause a global, cataclysmic earthquake unless we pay him a ransom of one hundred.. billion... dollars!
<insert maniacal Dr. Evil laughter>
This tagline is umop apisdn.
There's lots of problems with hydrogen:
;-)
a) its energy density is pitiful (about 1/14 IRC of gasoline, so you'd have to have a tank 14x bigger)
b) its best stored in liquified form for maximum energy density (liquid hydrogen needs incredibly high insulation values, and tends to freeze things solid, or condenses oxygen- trust me, either is very bad, and its density still sucks- check out the Space Shuttle main tank, its enormous!)
c) alternatively you store it in a pressurised tank. Pressurised tanks are heavy as heck. Or you can use a rare earth catalyst to store it in. However, the overall weight is about the same if you do so, TOO HIGH. So big deal.
d) Hydrogen can go bang (in an enclosed space the explosion can be awesome). Sure, gasoline does that too. However hydogen leaks out much more easily.
e) Hydrogen embrittles many kinds of metals, once that has occured the metal fails catastrophically.
f) Hydrogen escapes from just about any container; the molecule is just too small to keep in in most cases; still you can control it in most cases, but it's awkward.
All in all, hydrogen is at best a waste of space and at worst a waste of time. Yeah, so it doesn't make any CO2. So what? We've got this handy recycling system called plants. Please go out and grow some, so I can carry on burning my hydrocarbons
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Did anyone think that maybe the hydrogen was there for a reason? Maybe those billions of tonnes of bacteria need it to survive? Maybe their survival is necessary for everything else to also work correctly and that the wholesale removal of the hydrogen would ultimately kill us too?
Do you listen to Rush Limbargh by any chance ?
c e/volcano.html
Volcano's:
http://www.epa.gov/docs/ozone/scien
Cows:
The carbon in cow's methane is added from plant matter which extracted it from the atmosphere in the first place - net effect, zero.
As for the TransAm, good acceleration, but damn those are ugly cars.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
We already have drilled essentially all of the easily available oil. At the start of this business, there were places where oil fountained natually, like artesian wells. Those were the first that were exploited (or perhaps it was the seeps, where instead of a fountain there was just a slow leak to the surface). Those are gone. It now takes a great deal of high-tech just to locate a likely place to drill. Sometimes it takes more to get there.
If we need to come up from low-tech again, we won't be using petroleum to get there. Olive oil would be more likely.
Question about the solar cell plant, however:
Is it, perhaps, a matter of scale? They typical solar generation plant is quite small. If one isn't enough to power a factory, perhaps two or three of them could. Or, if not, the 5, or 10, or 20? Presumably the factory would turn out cells in essentially unlimited number, so if you needed to create several banks of cell to power it this wouldn't be an essential problem.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Another posted mentioned that alternative energy sources will not replace oil, because oil is so cheap. The poster also said that another reason for oil to be replaced is if we run out, or if supplies dwindle enough that we can no longer provide enough oil for everybody (which ties into the rising cost argument).
According to Oilcrisis.com, when we hit the point (within the first quarter of this century) that we need to switch over to an alternative energy source, it will be too late. Our infrastructure depends on oil, and switching every motor vehicle, truck, airplane, cargo ship, and train to an alternative energy source will be a massive endeavor. Perhaps impossible to perform without the support of the infrastructure itself.
I would like to encourage everyone to support alternative energy before this point. We can't afford to wait until it is cheap.
"...So, we have determined that there are vast amounts of Hydrogen locked away in the Earth's crust. These vast stores are held in huge cauldron like features on the crust which we like to call "Oceans" - these "Oceans" hold the hydrogen in place by fusing it with another element, Oxygen, to form what is known as "Water" (Whaa-der). We believe that at some point in the future we will be able to tap the Hydrogen as a source of fuel, but first we have to figure out a fast efficient way of separating the H from the O and get the world at large to adopt alternatively fueled vehicles such as the $32,000 Honda Insight"
Yugo, the former Yugoslavian automobile manufacturer, has set up shop near Chernobyl after their plant was destroyed during the Bosnian War. Yugo claims to have perfected a cheap means of manufacturing personal nuclear reactors for automotive use. "We've done away with the complicated and expensive safety features, and this so-called 'containment' nonsense, to bring the consumer an almost neverending powersource for their disposable car."
Using the Bic Disposable lighter as a model for their prototypes, the Yugo company has finally brought something to the market which will really light up the consumer.
Owners of the new Yugo (and bystanders) can expect to also receive a great tan from the car. Due to the high acceptance of birth defects in Kentucky already, the cars are slated to be rolled out next week in Lexington, KY. Subsequent rollouts will based on which direction the fallout cloud blows.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
When I was little, I had a Sit-n-Spin that was more fun than a Kia. But I really wanted a burrow owl ;)
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
As far as drilling in Alaska? Why not? The location is just frozen tundra, and if you *really* want to save the caribou then grill one up and see how it tastes. If it tastes good, people will want to eat them and you can start a caribou ranch. Maybe they taste as good as venison.
,over the past 25 years or so the herds have more than doubled. As a result the herds have widened their range and have been assimilating the domestic herds the local Inuit tribes raise, in some cases destroying the family business.
I saw a special on tv a while back ( I think it was on the Discovery channel) about the Alaskan caribou herds in the region of the pipeline. IIRC it was predicted that the pipeline would decimate the caribou as a result of its detrimental effect on the environment. In fact
I would have thought a 250 could do better than 70mpg. That's about a quarter of the size and power output of the engines in the cars I listed, but only a bit more than double the mileage.
I guess a motorcycle's engine is running closer to peak output than a car's most of the time?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Brazil was privatizing is partly because of the political fallout from the loss of the world's largest offshore oil platform in March last year.
I would be willing to bet that if there is agenda to budget tax dollars to research the potential energy source there will be a lot of hot air to shoot down the proposal from those that get campaign finance from the petroleum sector.
On a positive note, the Bipartisan Renewable, Efficient Energy with Zero Effluent (BREEZE) Act extended the production tax credit for energy generated by wind for five years. (The tax credit expired Jan. 1. 2002) That is a lot of hot air.
pronoblem
I think what you're forgetting is a big facotr of why the two companies are different.
The media companies are tapping a theoretical never-ending supply. It's in their best interests to maintain the current business model. The oil companies are tapping into a non-renewable resource. No matter how good they get at it, one day, it will run out, or will be so scarce that people won't use it to power transportation. It's in their best interests to persue any energy souce that could potentially do away with replace gasoline. Unlike other technologies, you could theoretically burn hydrogen in today's engines, unlike trying to adapt a current car to electrical or solar or nuclear power. Considering that most oil comes from some of the most unstable places on earth, their business model is potentially much more unstable than the music industry's.
Also, not every big oil company belongs to OPEC. There isn't a major record label that's not in bed with the RIAA.
I'm not saying big oil isn't evil, I'm jsut saying that I fear it much less than I fear the RIAA or the MPAA.
-------------------------------------------------
thanks. I love this quote from the article:
SKILLING (former CEO of Enron): I will personally eat every new nuclear power plant built in this country for the next 100 years. I don't think we are going to see any new plants built.
cpeterso
There's more than enough Uranium and Plutonium to remove our dependence on oil, but that doesn't mean the oil industry will let it happen.
Solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind. If these technologies had the full support of the government and didn't have big oil lobbiests against then you might see a country that didn't care so much about fighting in the Middle East.
Kevin Fox
"Nuclear waste tends to be a bit more concentrated."
So? What does that have to do with the comments in this thread? I think that this is a good thing. The nuclear waste from meeting all the energy needs of a family of four for forty years would fit into a shoebox.
Besides, the big difference you neglect to mention is that nuclear waste from nuclear power plants isn't being released to the environment, coal ash is.
Yes friends, it is time for me to bring up my solar-hydorgen powered Jeep once again!
Do you know why people think that hydrogen powered vehicles are a long way off? It ain't the energy companies keeping it a secret, it is an unholy alliance between environmentalists and the government!
How do I know? Well, my Jeep is powered by solar derived hydrogen and I drive it almost daily (unless I am in a hydrogen powered aircraft of course). I purchase my hydrogen in liquid form, so do the airlines. My Jeep's birthday (to me) is tomorrow, 16 April, the day I liberated it from it's pen at the dealership. It will be 6 years old and has carried me over 226,000 miles now. Try that with a $5,000 "electric Honda deathtrap"!
Back to the point... The conspiracy has hidden this plentyful source of hydrogen by banding together with advertisers and disguising the name. Just so you are not duped, and to prove that I am being honest, here is the formula for the reaction: CxHy + O2 --> CO2 + H20 SEE? Simple! The big "H" on the left side is Hydrogen of course. It is bonded with some Carbon (the C on the left) to keep it in liquid form at surface tempratures and pressures, thus making it stay "in the container" so-to-speak until it is needed for combustion.
Not only does my Solar/Hydrogen Energy Plant, under the hood of the Jeep prouce water (more on that later), it also produces plant food! Yep, that little CO2 notation is something plants love! I try to drive up to pristine forrested areas as much as possible to feed the trees. Sometimes the trees love me so much they want to come home to my fireplace, but that is a different environmental service that I preform (free of charge too) and it can wait for another topic.
Ooops! I almost forgot to let everybody in on the secret places where I get the hydrogen for my Jeep! Liquid sunshine, aka, hydrogen fuel, is sold at places with funny names like Exxon/Mobil/Connico/Arco/Shell/Standard/Amaco... As a matter of fact, many of these places will clean the outside of your vehicle if you just come in and fill your hydrogen tank with at least $5 of the stuff! They use that left over H2O to scrub all the grime and crud off of your vehicle after a nice weekend of tree feeding.
Besides the great combustion properties of "liquid sunshine" (my favorite name for this miricle product), it is perfect for lubricating the parts that make your vehicle go, no matter what kind of power plant you run. Why do I call it solar-hydrogen or liquid sunshine? Because solar energy was used to combine the carbon and hydrogen of course! How much more environmentally sensitive can you get than that?
I could go on forever, but seriously, the energy companies have known about vast quantities of hydrogen in the earth's crust for ages. It is called "oil" and "natural gas" and is a lot easier to extract that chunks of granite. School children know of another surface source, it is called water and it is a lot easier to haul around than granite or hydrogen gas too.
Sometime soon I will tell y'all about my solar-hydrogen fireplace. The best BBQ ribs in my apartment complex are smoked there.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
...when these scientists later considered that the universe is composed of 74% hydrogen, they realized their "discovery" was somewhat moot.
-... ---
Who cares what they're excited about? Remember all the trouble the government had with the wealthy, powerful, monopolistic railroad companies? All their power and wealth still didn't stop the death of their industry. If hydrogen becomes cheaper, I have no doubt the same thing will happen here.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
They do (well, I'm not sure it goes to alternative energy research, but the tax exists). This is why those ultra souped up sports cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Below a certain fuel efficiency level, there's something like a 100% tax. The problem is, if you eliminate the bottom half of vehicles in fuel efficiency, then the 25%-50% group will become the new bottom half. There will always be vehicles that seem fuel inefficient compared to their bretheren.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
We're supposed to be running a free society. The theory is that we explain things to people, and they decide what to do. We explain that we feel that gas is too important to waste, and people (perhaps) agree with us and use it carefully. Or maybe they don't, but that's because they're free adults, and they don't have to agree with anybody, not even the Forces of Truth and Justice.
If it's really urgent, then be up front about it. Ration gas, if you think the situation warrants it and the public will stand for it. But rationing through taxation is a horrible idea -- it creates the impression that taxation is arbitrary, certainly encouraging tax evasion ("Oh, they don't need the money -- they're just using taxes to manipulate you!"), it creates a government dependance on the very thing that they're supposed to be discouraging (how much has gambling increased in the US since states found it such a lucrative thing and started actively encouraging it? What would they do if gas tax revenues rose for several years and then fell?), and it's simply dishonest. If you feel it necessary to be the nation's parent, then be an honest parent -- don't let people buy their way out of the rules.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
You do realize we're not actually expanding the nuclear power infrastructure at all, right? There hasn't been a non-private nuclear power plant built in the US since Three Mile Island back in '79. The only reason wind power could outstrip nuclear in a year is because we use a pitiful amount of nuclear.
Now, I'm not saying nuclear is the way to go, but it's hardly fair to say that we should stop exploring it and go with wind instead. The nuclear power industry barely exists and thanks to a few missteps towards its inception it never really did.
Personally, I favor solar power for large-scale power farming and hydrogen fuel cells for personal-scale use. I like solar because it's so widely applicable. A wind farm is...a wind farm. You need certain conditions to build one and it takes up a lot of land to generate a fair deal of power. Solar panels can be slapped on top of buildings and scaled down for personal use in homes where wind power wouldn't be feasable.
Of course, admittedly, my viewpoint is more based on a hopeful future than what could be achieved right this minute. Wind power is a fairly well-known technology. Further funding would get us more farms and maybe more efficient windmill designs, but there aren't going to be any huge breakthroughs in wind-power harvesting. Solar, and even the much-frowned-upon nuclear, have a great deal of room for innovation. Orbiting solar power collectors to save planet-side space or orbiting power plants to keep us all safe from the danger of core breeches and meltdowns; new, more efficient solar cells; fusion reactors or better control systems for fission systems... Increased funding and interest in either area could bring us those things, whereas wind power is little more than a stop-gap measure to shunt us off fossil fuels for the moment. But do we really want to move into a new generation of entrenched services? At least we have continuing research in fossil fuels to reduce emissions and improve fuel-use efficiency. Where can wind power ever really go?
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Exactly how "limitless" is this? I mean, a century ago when the oil tycoons were around and drilling, it was projected that the oil would be limitless, because they just did not know how much oil we would soon be using. Similarly, this supply of hydrogen may seem limitless to us now, but will we be running into the same problems again in another hundred years? How much energy will things take in a century? Even if it increases linearly from the amount needed a hundred years ago (unlike everything else), we may well be running out of hydrogen in the same way we are now running out of oil.
Nothing is limitless except to the short-sighted.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
In an effort to force car makers to develop more efficient cars, they passed laws requiring car makers to meet a minimum MPG rating average for all of the cars they sell. Good idea, right? No...
Car makers didn't bet their business on the hopes of making significant breakthroughs in engine efficiency before the imposed limits went into effect. Instead, they downsized the stationwagon cars into the small compact cars we have today. Then, to cover the market previously served by the large station wagon cars, they made SUVs. SUV were considered a truck and not subject to the MPG rating restrictions imposed by the gov't.
And thus moderately low MPG station wagons were replaced by abysmally low MPG SUVs. Thank you gov't regulation.
Though certainly not great, I think many of them get better gas milage than a typical SUV, I know a Porsche Boxster (obviously not quite the type of car you are talking about, but the closest I know anything about) gets 20mpg in real city driving.
Listen to your friends at the DOE They say methane hydrate is so prevalent it would take us a thousand years to use it all up even if we all wire our houses up as high voltage plasma labs and commute a hundred miles to work and it wouldn't require a fuel cell infrastructure to be useful. So, relax, turn on some of those lights, run the dryer for an extra cycle. Leave the door open with the air conditioner on. There's plenty of energy and there always will be.
If you just hate burning dead swamp muck, there's the pages at Sandia with Bush himself saying how concentrated solar using nothing but mirrors could also easily handle the US power needs in a space the size of lake mead.
The question isn't "is there an answer to the problem?" as much as a question of "what exactly is the problem we're trying to answer and who decided it was a problem?"
I'm proud of having been liberal to the point of extremisim all my life and hope I always will be, but the evidence seems to suggest that burning oil is nowhere near as bad for the environment as many people have feared in the past and this crap about running out of oil twenty years from now has been going on since at least the seventies. I think it would be more realistic to assume that these alternatives will only become useful when they become cheap and that this is not such a terrible thing.
I think there is room for the MP3 analogy, but it's not going to happen with hydrogen. The infrastructure trade-off makes it no different than existing oil and gas, much more likely to be revolutionary in the sense of MP3, Divx is going to be high powered nanotech solar panels. Now that is what scares the shit out of petroleum companies because there's no infrastructure to control. Their product becomes irrelevant. As long as you've got abundant electricity, powering up a fuel cell car is not a problem and electric kicks ass all over diesel for torque.
It makes more sense to use up the foreign supplies of oil before our own, then we will have oil and the rest of the world won't. What is the incentive to use our domestic reserves?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I got his book and read much of it. Basically he theorises that free hydrogen comes from slow oxidation of hydrocarbon molecules trapped underground. It's worth a read if you're interested in geology.
The Deep Hot Biosphere.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Fuel cells will be the likely candidate for replacing our oil habits. Hydrogen IS the most common element that we know of (now) and can be produced rather cheaply. When we begin converting to fuel cells we can dip into so many other fuels beyond hydrogen like boron (less ignitable).
s en ic.html
Regarding solar cells: I think they have a long way to go and they use poisons such as gallium arsenic.
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/arsenic/ar
The best that could come out of this is the removal of the strangle-hold the middle-east has over us because they have most of the oil.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
gas is $1.70 a gallon because some greedy oil company says that's what it should be.
know what we call that, class? ignorance. i don't know where you are, but here in michigan the price is about $1.35... which includes the costs of drilling the oil, shipping, refining, shipping to the gas station, and somewhere near 45 cents a gallon of tax. then, the gas station has to make a few cents to cover the costs of wages, maintenance, rent, and the 3-4% that the credit card companies charge.
who makes the most money off a gallon of gas? not the dealer, not the oil company... the STATE. they are the greedy ones.
also, the price the oil companies charge dealers is closely related to the commodities market, so check that to see if maybe the brokers are the ones pushing the price up, instead of the oil companies.
BTW... i think oil cos. are bastards, too... but for environmental and political reasons, not price reasons.
Mod this up someone. I was going to make point number three myself. All three of these are excellent points... N
there is also a "gas guzzler" tax, i'm not sure what the basis for it is, but it has something to do with the average fuel efficiency of a manufacturer's entire fleet. so, even if ferrari came out with something that got 60MPG, it would still be subject to the tax.
Yeah, the analogy is kind of flimsy. Although I never meant to indicate that big oil companies need to be feared like the music industry folk. I just meant that even if hydrogen becomes a very good option, I think the oil companies will move grudgingly, and might resist at first in some ways. I mean, if the oil companies move to hydrogen instead of oil, it's a pretty fundamental change. But it's probably just a matter of time.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Scientist 1: Wow! It's kinda dark down here.
Scientist 2: Just a sec...let me light this match for...
The point being: the relative cost of oil and alternative fuels is not the issue - it's DEPENDENCE on oil-producing nations.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
At the Detroit Autoshow Media Preview days, I had a chance to talk to an engineer from Mazda about hydrogen Rotaries (if you are unaware of Mazda H2 Rotaries, check out this website
They said the largest problem for them right now with hydrogen is delivery and distrobution. Mazda has the in-vehicle delivery system basically in place, and can, within a matter of months, crank out rotary powered hydrogen cars. "We are ready to go" he said, "If they distribution system was in place today, we'd be number one on the market.
Additionally, he said retrofitting older fuel injected rotaries (13b RX-7's from 1984 on) would only need the fuel tank replaced, injectors replaced, and computer repoogrammed.
The remaining problem: there is only 68k BTUs per ft3 for H2 compressed at 3500 psi. At the same ft3 for gas yeilds 922k BTUs. Increasing the PSI for in car storage is a major research focus for the auto industry right now... Hyundai has developed a 5000 psi tank, but that still falls short of the 922 BTU's that has has at 1 ft3
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
Every time any sort of alternative fuel/transportation or whatnot comes around people ask if it will be the end of the use of oil.
It wont.
As long as there is oil left in the ground the large multinational corporations and every single oil mogul will not let this happen. There are plenty of good and efficient ways to replace the use of oil right now. Not gonna happen; the billionaires will never ease up on selling oil until there isn't an extractable drop left anywhere. Even then, they'll probably synthesize it themselves, strongarm the energy concerns, and sell it at incredibly high prices.
But hey, I'll be long dead before then. Until that day, screw em, I'm walking.
I am BelDion's
Yes, but surely this process takes place on a geological time scale, such that once the supply becomes depleted it would take ten thousand years to get it back. In parallel, if we start using this within the next couple decades, what percentage of the current supply will be used up in a century, and by that time what percentage of the original value will have been produced?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
...you don't hear people who drive SUVs whine about other folks choosing to walk.
Um... A walker complaining about SUVs compares to an SUV driver complaining about someone commuting in a tank, not a SUV driver complaining about walkers.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
I see people driving SUVs with no one in them but themselves, obviously not carrying anything bigger than a small box. Why the HELL are they driving a hugeass SUV?
Sometimes, one hopes, it is because they occasionally need it, and would rather not have more than one car. Experience suggests that this is not the case very often. Many people with SUVs own two (often 'his and hers'), and use them exclusively for highway commuting and errands, with nary an off-road hauling trip.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
You know, 20mpg city is pretty bad. Even for a sports car. The Boxster is fairly light and the engine pretty small. Isn't that a 2.8 or 3.0 Inline 6? Must be that long duration cam... bad porsche, bad.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
It is deeper and less concentrated than petroleum deposits. It will have impact simlar or worse than petroleum extraction. Many so-called of "free energy" sources have turned out to have considerable environmental drawbacks. Geothermal has it corrosive brines, hydropower distorts rivers and river life, fusion has dirty neutrons that turns any nearby metal highly radioactive.
one problem in hydrogen is that it's energy density is far too low and another problem with hydrogen is that it causes really awesome explosions.
You cant have your cake and eat it too you know.
I also realize that the main reason the sports car is expensive is because it is a fancy car that takes a lot of money to produce. I was just commenting on the original that said that part of the cost was due to fuel-efficiency taxes. I felt that any tax portion is mostly due to luxury taxes instead.
And yea 20mpg is not good, but it is still a lot less than the 12mpg that those SUV's get. I'm sure the SUV's are more efficient per pound of steel being moved around, but when the main purpose is to haul one person it seems that a fancy sports car is a better deal for the environment than an SUV.
Is why hydrogen isn't as good as fossil fuels.
Furthermore: it takes energy to separate and store (compress) hydrogen. Since hydrogen doesn't occur naturally in usable quantities from the start, it cannot support itself (thermodynamics laws and such.)
Thus, you need a source of higher energy density that is readily available, and there are only a few sources like that: hydroelectric power, coal, oil, natural gas, radioactive elements, and wood.
Wind and solar power are neither efficient, nor have the energy density to compete. I saw a wind generation area on the Columbia River in Washington yesterday. I haven't seen a natural-gas fired power generation plant that spanned an area ten miles long! I've also seen the solar plants near Barstow, California. Huge amounts of area are taken.
Consequently, you just shift the pollution source elsewhere. Just like electric cars. You shift the pollution source to the power plant.
The ONLY energy solution that will satisfy all environmental issues is complete reversal back to pre-fire technology.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
actually, the Mr. Fusion only powered the flux capacitor....reaching 88mph still relied on running the engine powered by ordinary gasoline.
:D
Of course, the 22 GigaWatts of power required by the flux capacitor could go a long long long way in powering electric vehicles
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Nope, it wouldn't be in the oil industry's best interests. Guess what the Bush family has been heavily into for decades? Hint: They're from Texas. And lookee.... the Bush family is back in power, and
Hemp is outlawed because it would compete with (maybe destroy) the oil and timber industries. In the mid thirties, a machine was invented which made Hemp cultivation on an industrial scale possible, which was poised to launch a new Hemp industry. It was promptly buried and outlawed by oil and timber moguls. It has nothing to do with Marijuana usage, this is just the scapegoat.. the paper tiger... what they used to stir up public support and panic 60 years ago to get the prohibition passed, and what they've been using ever since to pull the wool over our eyes.
This is an excellent paper on the subject, allow me to quote some passages:
If Hemp is really outlawed because of the possible misuse of Marijuana, then oil should be outlawed because of molotov cocktails, not to mention the thousands of other dangerous applications of gasoline.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Paraphrasing:
As much as 1000 liters of Hydrogen gas may be stored in each cubic meter of rock!
Wow!
Let me see now... 1ml = 1cc
100^3 cc = 1m^3
10^6 cc = 1m^3
1L = 1000ml = 1000cc = 10^3cc
(10^6 cc/m^3)*(1L/10^3cc) = 10^3L/m^3
= 1000L/m^3
Gee, either that's some REALLY HEAVY hydrogen or som REALLY LIGHT rock!
GodsMadClown writes:
:
The key word here is "economically viable". Think for a moment, what would happen if oil supplies started running low because of a lack of profitable reserves? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic (not dependant on price), so the price would almost assuredly go up, just as when supplies are cut short for other reasons, like an OPEC quota.
while skwang writes:
The problem with the dependence of oil isn't an alternative means. Someone has pointed/will point out that we have many alternative energy sources. Instead oil as a means of energy is dominant because it is cheap. The world's energy infrastructure is based on using crude oil. There are oil power plants, oil refineries, gasoline engines, etc. Oil is simply cheaper to use.
Newsweek summed up the energy market quite well with this litle bon mot
"You want alternatives? That's just so much sweet talk," one former official at the Saudi Petroleum Ministry told NEWSWEEK. "Suppose you target the cost of alternative energy at so many dollars per Btu--and then we lower the cost of oil below that. All your investment goes down the drain."
Da Blog
Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
1 cubic meter = (100cm) ^ 3 = 1,000,000 cc = 1,000,000 ml = 1000 liters
upper bound indeed!
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
That the Big media companies all collude, and while I'm not saying the oil companies wouldn't it's possible that one or two of 'em could leave the others behind by moving in that direction...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Who cares what they're excited about? Remember all the trouble the government had with the wealthy, powerful, monopolistic railroad companies? All their power and wealth still didn't stop the death of their industry.
Um, what? The railroad industry is as big as ever.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The article states that Hydrogen produces only water when burned. This is WRONG. It produces water and carbon dioxide.
This discovery of hydrogen seems to me to give more weight to Thomas Gold's thesis, that natural gas and oil are not fossil fuels at all but a result of geothermal processes on stored hydrogen.
Gold is a professor emeritus at Cornell; his key works can be found via web searching. Basically, he suggests that the Earth is filled with hydrogen, left over from its creation and perhaps the decay of the uranium core. (I'm a little fuzzy on details. Read him, not me, for details.) The hydrogen percolates outward. Some of it gets cooked into natural gas. Some of that becomes petroleum. Gas accumulates when it hits a geologica formation that keeps it from the surface. Thus natural gas wells are replenished from below.
This fits in well with the recent discovery of life deep underground. The origin of life may be in the crust, not the oceans. These bacteria live on the hydrogen-methane chemistry. Maybe they poop oil.
So the supply of natural gas is probably nearly endless, if not tapped too too quickly; oil is also replenishing. (Coal is indeed a fossil, very finite.) Still, there are costs in extraction and burning (CO2) so you can't treat them as free resources. But you may find them in unexpected places.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen any mention of Thomas Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere" theory. This would seem to support his idea that there is a second biosphere that produces hydrocarbons as a waste product.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Well, I agree that whatever stance they take, hydrogen will win in the end if it gets the edge over oil. I was just thinking about what kind of resistance they might put up *before* they either grudgingly accept hydrogen or go under.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Wow, great idea! Oh, wait -- some people actually need to use their vehicles for something other than getting from point A to point B.
/.ers' religious railings against the SUV in an urban environment, let's not forget that they do have a purpose other than the soccer moms wanting to burn a shitload of gas.
While I understand most
Hauling capacity isn't as much as a pickup truck in an SUV, but it definitely assures (within reasonable limits) that your cargo won't get soaking wet in the rain. This comes in extremely handy when hauling moderate-sized loads of electronic equipment in situations where renting that U-Haul isn't economically feasible due to the amount of time the transport is needed.
Not everyone lives in cities, nor desires to.
It seems rather obvious. Carbon, when placed under extreme pressure for millions of years, becomes diamond. Apparently water, when placed under similar circumstances, becomes hydrogen. Why would it not take millions of years?
Do you realize how foolish it would be if the scientists claimed that the hydrogen could be formed from water after just a few hours and then re-mined? That's not mining, it's farming. We're talking about rocks, not plants: it takes a damn long time.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
You don't even necessarily need a small car. My '99 V6 VW Passat sedan--which has a TON of room--has a nifty trip counter that measures average MPG. I regularly get 25 city/33+ highway. Granted, many of the little cars will top this (and if they don't, they should), but my Passat has both space and power.
*k
In Europe and Japan, the taxes on gasoline are so high that the average price of petrol (as gasoline is known in most of the world) is the equivalent of US$5-US$6 per US gallon.
At those prices, people will end up buying a lot smaller cars than currently; I'm not sure if Americans want to drive vehicles with the average size being that of the current Volkswagen Polo (what Europeans call the super mini class of vehicles).
One quick way to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is to rapidly develop clean-burning diesel engine technologies; with the EPA mandating low-sulfur diesel fuels very soon, diesel cars can have sophisticated fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control systems that are found on European market diesel cars, and this will allow diesel cars to even meet the strict Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard for exhaust emissions. The nice thing about diesel technology today is that they now offer 30% or more better fuel efficiency with almost no loss in performance; the proof of this is the amazing Duramax engine found on the Chevrolet Silverado, which has more torque than the equivalent gasoline engine but has nearly 50% better fuel mileage!
" Perpetually the US Administration talks about reducing the dependence on foreign oil, promoting the opening up of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuges for drilling, and basically writing a blank environmental cheque for oil companies to sign."
... that continually refuses to enforce basic fuel efficiency ... directives."
Modern drilling and pumping operations are quite environmentally friendly as it is. Seismic analysis allows the prospectors to drill far fewer holes and the Alyeska Pipeline has been shown to have nearly negligible environmental impact. The only truly messy part in getting more oil is the refining process, which doesn't happen anywhere near the state of Alaska (this is why we have oil tankers).
"Yet this is the same administration
First off, CAFE what?
Secondly this isn't a sign of a failing of the government (besides, you shouldn't be looking to the government to solve all of our problems in the first place) but a sign of the general tastes in American vehicle consumption.
Generally speaking this can all be traced back to the mid 70's when the government was pushing for both fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions. In order to make the adjustment to the new regulations in the short amount of time given, car manufacturers came up with questionable solutions. For example emission percentages were lowered not by putting out fewer pollutants but by puming more clean air into the exhaust before it comes out the tail pipe.
Another example of such a quick-fix were the hastily-deployed models with a diesel engine retrofitted where a gasoline-burning engine was before. These engines were rough, noisy and not at all fun to operate, and the average American consumer has come to equate diesel engines with this memory of them.
It has been known for some time that diesel engines are both more fuel efficient and cheaper to operate than gas-burning engines. My father's Dodge Ram 1500 weighs something like 3 tons empty and it gets about 22 mpg of diesel fuel. Compare that to the "efficiency" of the much smaller and more aerodynamic Durango.
However, because of the American market's brief brush with cars powered by diesel engines, diesels simply don't sell well in the states. It has gotten to the point where GM and Ford offer many models with diesel engines in the European market that they simply won't offer in the US (the aforementioned Durango is either currently or will shortly be offered with a diesel engine in Europe).
Because diesels can't get a decent foothold in the US any time soon, we're stuck with waiting for new technologies (like diesel-electric hybrids, which even then aren't selling as well as gasoline-electric hybrids). But even with that the US has a problem with deploying cars using different fuel (such as natural gas or hydrogen). Unlike the numerous European countries that offer these fuel alternatives at the pump, the United States is the third largest country in the world with patches of sparse population bigger than many European countries. It will take a considerably long time and a large amount of capital to put in the infrastructure to offer these new fuels nationwide. Heck, there has yet to be a cell phone provider to offer truly nationwide coverage.
"If people want to feel patriotic, they should forsake getting that new Expedition and buy themselves a Dodge Neon or a Toyota Corolla"
I believe the Expedition is another example of a model offered with a diesel only in Europe. The Neon and the Corolla too, I believe.
Large vehicles like the Expedition are popular in the US because we take long car trips with the entire family. Sure, perhaps the "soccer moms" are being a bit extraneous, but when was the last time you tried to make a two-day road trip with two kids in a sedan? If one of them is a girl you'll be lucky to fit all your luggage in the trunk.
Why aren't these vehicles as popular in Europe? For one they have a denser public transportation infrastructure (another cultural difference between the US and Europe is the fact that we like independant personal transportation). Another factor is that there are few if any European countries where you can drive 20 hours in a straight line and still be in the same country.
You can be sure that these vehicles aren't selling well because they advertise the price of gasoline. But if the American consumer feels that that is an acceptable cost, who is the government to tell them that it isn't?
Well, yes, but not the way you think. Oil is easier to control from a few central points (governments and corporations) than solar or wind, etc. So there's more economic incentive to stay with oil as long as possible.
and it happens fast enough that there's a good chance of blowing yourself up since the gases cool down and recombine rather quickly.
That's exactly the point. The Earth's crust doesn't seem to have the habit of blowing itself up due to such chemical reactions, possibly because said reactions are not happening fast enough to create an explosion.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Not quite sure what the H2 is for in your scenario. There's massive deposits of methane under the ocean for example. So why make it from H2?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"