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A Hydrogen-Based Economy
Glog writes "Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of Wired magazine have written an amazing article explaining why we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Lots of info there, estimated cost and benefit ... very good solid reasoning for whatever floats your boat - national security, environment, super-duper-charged automobiles."
The hydrogen economy needs trillions of dollars in investment to get it going. This won't happen in our "returns-in-six-months-or-else" system we have at present, beacuse it is more cost-effective in the short term to do what we're doing right now. When the global energy system becomes dire - which it WILL, eventually, and sooner than you think - the hydrogen economy will take off, because if it doesn't the human race is quite literally doomed.
But it's not doomed for more than six months. The accountants won't let the investment happen. It's not too late... yet.
-Mark
While eventually we probably will move to a hydrogen based economy, there is a flaw here. Currently and in the foreseeable future, extracting the vast amounts of hydrogen that we'll need requires...wait for it...hydrocarbon based fuels like oil and coal! That's right, in order to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water, we need energy. How do we produce most of our energy? Hydrocarbons.
Increased nuclear, solar, wind, and geothermal power generating capacity would help solve this problem of course. However, it will be a long, long time before we can wean ourselves off of hydrocarbon based fuel sources.
This is all well and good, but why can't we promote hybrid cars in the meantime? I for one was pissed when I found out the Bush Administration was ending the programs for hyrbrid cars and shifting the money to hydrogen cars that won't be around for at least 10 years.
How much you wanna bet the funding for those end just before we get to the point where they might be useful, so that we can persue the next big thing in energy efficiency (all the while sticking with the crappy methods we use now)?
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Conspicuously missing from the article, where the hydrogen comes from.
We dont know how to make hydrogen a commercially viable alternative. As soon as it's profitable, it'll take off in a big way.
It's the simplest element, it's everywhere in the universe, we'd never run out of it, but we dont know how to get it without putting more energy into the extraction than we would get from it as a fuel.
Why not just write an article on how a pixie-dust based economy is the wave of the future? Or another one about rocket cars and living in giant plastic bubbles under the ocean?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Hydrogen + fuel cell is just hoped to be either better for storage of electricity than batteries, or cleaner than hydrocarbons (still has to be converted somewhere, generating pollution and CO2), eventually. That's all, until we can use the planet as a Bussard collector.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
How do you mean water-powered? As in use electricity to "crack" the water into H2 and O? Where does the electricity come from to do this? Generated by the engine burning the H2 and O2? There's a little thing called the laws of thermodynamics.
What I see is a cracking plant run from household electricity. Or any other central locations, where you can fill up on H2 and O2, but that is just a Hydrogen fuel cell.
Since when did blatant conspiracy theory become insightful?
Maybe they killed the programs because they were wasting a huge amount of money and getting little commercial interest. Apply Occam's Razor.
Damn them for trying to profit.
The hydrogen economy has lately gotten lots of press, but much of it mistates role that hydrogen can play.
Hydrogen will not, can not, be a primary energy source for our society. Current hydrocarbons provide net energy (at least in a temporal sense) because the energy that was consumed in their creation was used millenia ago. There are no similar, vast reserves of hydrogen waiting to be exploited.
While other posters here (and many others in varied other media) talk of a supply of hydrogen gained from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, they have forgotten that this process requires energy, thus necessitating some other primary energy source. Some suggest that source may be solar or wind or hydro--but then they are the actual source of the energy, hydrogen is merely an intermediate storage device.
It is much more likely that any 'hydrogen economy' that emerges in the next 3-4 decades will be based upon the extraction of hydrogen from methane, either at a large scale, or in fuel cells at the point of generation.
I'm not saying that hydrogen has no place or not interesting, but in our excitement, let's not forget the law of conservation of energy.
--my $0.02
But the myth of the hydrogen economy is confounding to me. For example, take the claim that "hydrogen is plentiful" made by Mr. Schwartz. Yes, it's a plentiful element, bound in low energy configurations in other molecules. There are no hydrogen "free lunches" sitting out there waiting for us to take advantage of them. The problem is that most of the sources of hydrogen take more energy to get hydrogen from than they provide in energy output from burning the hydrogen (or reacting it in a fuel cell). This is fundamental chemistry and physics. No ranting and raving or spending campaign is going to change it.
The "hydrogen economy" really needs to be relabeled as the "coal economy" or the "nuclear economy", because hydrogen's role in this hypothesized economy is merely as a very efficient battery.
The most viable alternative energy sources we have right now are right under our noses but we've chosen not to see them. Ethanol can be produced quite efficiently at reasonable cost from renewable sources. Low cost cellulose-containing feedstocks are available that don't end up with the energy-sinkhole problems faced by corn-based ethanol (i.e. you end up putting more energy into making it than you get out of it). The tools of biocommodity engineering are starting to mature, and this is where we need to put more resources.
Ethanol and methanol, in fact, can be used to power fuels fairly efficiently (not quite as much so as hydrogen). But we don't have to wait - FFVs (Flexible Fuel Vehicles) are on the market today, thanks to tax incentives. People need to be made aware of this alternative. The problem? Outside of the midwest and corn based ethanol, it's hard to fuel up on fuel grade ethanol at the pump. More investment in building production facilities and developing distribution channels to the pump is needed for the several million FFVs already on the road, and a government-financed consumer awareness campaign would also go a long way to supporting this effort.
Other real possibilities exist too - biodiesel, for one, though the economics of it are likewise not as favorable as for ethanol production.
We don't need to enslave ourselves to oil. But we do need to be realistic about the alternatives and acknowledge that hydrogen is merely part of the equation. We shouldn't use "hydrogen" as shorthand to refer to the broad array of _real_ alternative energy solutions that are available. The myths about hydrogen need to debunked - it doesn't make you anti-progress or pro-oil to point out the realities of a full "lifecycle analysis" (to use the term from the biocommodity engineering literature) of hydrogen production and usage. And to divert vast volumes of money to research hydrogen when that's not necessarily the most viable path to a sustainable energy economy seems at best foolish.
Currently, the least expensive method is a process known as steam reforming, in which natural gas reacts chemically with steam to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Far preferable would be to use carbon-free resources like solar, wind, and hydropower to produce electricity for electrolysis, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen would make renewable energy practical, acting as a storage medium for the modest amounts of energy such resources produce. Wind power, especially, lends itself to this sort of use.
And there's the rub. Even neglecting the astronomical capital costs, no one has concieved a renewable energy program that will fulfill our energy needs. Most hydrogen will have to be produced from natural gas. The rest will have to be produced using electricty generated by nuclear, fossil fuel, and hydroelectric plants. No renewable technology has yet been proposed that could possibly generate enough power to do this a bearable cost. Hence, our dependance on foreign oil remains.
People go on and on about the hydrogen future, but it's a mere distraction. Hydrogen will not replace oil, or coal, or gas. It may replace gasoline. Because hydrogen is an intermediate energy form - it's temporary storage between production/harvesting of energy and use of energy. And for all its supposed advantages, it's got a lot of faults. IMHO, diesel/biodiesel is a much more flexible and practical intermediate fuel - and if anyone could come up with a better battery, it would beat both.
The real question is energy generation/production/harvesting. We need to stop shipping in oil and burning up coal and start harvesting it from renewable (AKA "effectively infinite") sources, particularly the ones with low environmental impact. That means solar, wind, microhydro, biodiesel, cellulositic ethanol, tidal and current turbines, and geothermal. We need on-site off-grid power generation. We need to distribute energy generation and storages so that we don't need delicate, wasteful shipping methods - be they the power grid or fuel trucks. And we need to stop letting everyone get away with building structures and devices that waste energy with wild abandon.
Long story short - hydrogen may have potential, but it's being sold like snake oil and it's years away from reality. If we focused on simpler, proven technologies and put some real effort into some rather obvious fields of research (like high efficiency solar) we could have a working system in much shorter order.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Perhaps not efficient, but necessary. The problem here isn't one of physics - it's engineering.
The two big problems with renewables are:
a) Where the energy is generally doesn't have good grid connections. For example, there is enough wave energy off the west coast of Scotland to run the entire UK, and enough wind to run about half the country. There are simply no Supergrid connections to the entire region. It would be very expensive and fairly difficult to build them. But we already have gas pipelines to supply the towns with natural gas.
b) You can't regulate them by demand, as you can with fossil powered turbines. When the wind blows, you get electricity, regardless of whether you want it or not. The Grid can't store electricity - it has to produce exactly as much as is being used at any one time. Any imbalance is taken out of the kinetic energy in the spinning turbines, which leads to a.c. frequency fluctuations. Too much wind/wave/solar power feeding straight into the Grid would rapidly lead to desynchronisation.
However, both these problems could be solved by using Hydrogen, as it's a simple method of storing energy, which could be piped ashore/around using existing natural gas pipelines and stored until needed (porosity issues aside).