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Hydrogen Fuel Station in Iceland
klang points to this blurb about Iceland opening a hydrogen refueling facility. While it isn't, as the blurb states, the world's first hydrogen station, it is notable because it produces the hydrogen onsite with electricity from geothermal energy and electrolysis, making it an almost perfectly clean energy source.
Except for one major difference.
Water vapor is not bad for the environment.
70% of the planet's surface is after all covered with water.
You can then take that same water vapor, cool it, store it, and use it to make more hydrogen.
Clean energy, clean waste, reusable. Kinda neat.
-- This sig for rent.
You are kidding, no?
;)
Water, H2O... unlike carbon monoxide and whatever else current IC engines spew out is a very useful and re-usable substance.
You could collect it and maybe clean it up and run your toilet with it. Or collect it and green the desert with it. Or whatever, all that is really besides the point.
You cannot honestly label water as "waste". For as you and I are 90+% waste then
Cheers,
Andre
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Uhh, no.
Think about it:
Water + GEOThermalEnergy --> KineticEnergy + Water
This does not 'dilute' the environment at all. The thing about Iceland is that the GEOThermalEnergy is essentially free (capital cost is large, operating cost is small).
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H20 is not a greenhouse gas
That, my friend, is wrong.
Water is the most siginificant and most abundant greenhouse gas. It is also one we have the least control over. We do have some control over CO2 and Methane, and so that has been the primary focus of greenhouse gas reduction planning - but were a mechanism found to control water vapor, we might not have to bother much with controlling carbon based greenhouse gases.
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Burning hydrogen creates about an electron volt of energy per molecule or so. FUSING hydrogen into helium, what a hydrogen bomb does, generates several MILLION electron volts of energy per atom. So unless you have a hydrogen tank for your car that is at EXTREMELY high pressure, you don't have a hydrogen bomb. There are dozens of chemicals that generate far more explosion energy for a chemical bomb, such as, say, GASOLINE!
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IMHO, Algae is the most likely source of renewable hydrogen in the foreseable future.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,5445 6,00.html
we only need to upgrade a few dozen large hydrogen-generation plants, instead of 50 million separate automobile engines
Actually for only about $1500 you can turn your car into a hydrogen fueled car. I found the link on google not too long ago, but I can't found it now, the best I can find is here.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
It requires energy to collect and compress nitrogen. A *lot* more energy than will be released by popping the valve on the nitrogen tanks.
You'd be more efficient to blow into a balloon and release it, or eat beans and light your farts.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
IMHO, Algae is the most likely source of renewable hydrogen in the foreseable future.
So in this case you have 2H2O + sunlight -> 2H2 + 02 -> 2H20 + heat. Your limiting factor here is sunlight. So again this may work well where you have lots of sun, but not everywhere.
I suspect there will be a wide variety of hydrogen sources, mostly involving an electrical source, generated by wind, hydropower, geothermal, etc. But the algea may be an important part too.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
High water vapor levels -> more clouds -> higher albedo -> more reflected sunlight -> lower temperatures -> more rain -> lower water vapor levels. There's a feedback loop.
The feedback loop for CO2 involves freshly exposed rock becoming carbonate and getting transported to the ocean by the process of erosion, where it eventually gets subducted into the mantle. Higher levels of CO2 (theoretically) increase weather activity and the rate of erosion. This takes place over geological time, however.
The geothermal process is clean if it is a closed system. Water is piped down to the heat source and back up again driving a turbine creating electricity. The problem is vent gases from the geothermal sources which can be malodorous at best and highly toxic at worst. So everything is ducky as long as they can contain the nastiness from the heat source.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I won't go into specific numbers (you can plug them into the equation if you want), but it should be clear that the stored energy is a logarithmic function of the pressure. In other words, storing energy in the form of pressurized gas is extremely inefficient, and in fact becomes exponentially more inefficient as the pressure increases.
Carbon-monoxide is not poisonous, but it can kill you because if there is more of it in the air than oxygen, the process of osmosis in your lungs will admit that, thus starving you of oxygen. (O2 is molecularly similar to CO.)
Where did you get your biology information? JC Penny? Carbon monoxide is very posionous. There doesn't have to be more CO than O2 in the air. The iron in hemoglobin is something like 20x more likely to bind with carbon monoxide than oxygen. And it won't release it as easily once bound. More info here: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question190.htm Secondly, there isn't osmosis taking place in your lungs because water is not moving across a membrane. The process taking place in your lungs is diffusion.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Almost everyone is missing the point: yes, hydrogen fuel cells are simply an energy storage medium, so indeed they are not a source of energy-- however, the greater problem is the conversion process which is, by the Second Law of thermodynamics, wasteful (_Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics 4th Edition_ Moran and Shapiro, Wiley & Sons, 2000).
Every time you convert energy from one medium to another (e.g, from oil to electricity, or electricity to mechanical energy) there is a loss of energy due to heat, mechanical vibrations, etc. (rarely is any conversion process better than 60% efficient).
So, instead of using valuable electrical energy that comes from solar or geothermal sources to power hydrogen conversion process, use that energy to light up light bulbs and run computers-- we always need electrical energy. Don't convert from geothermal to electricity, electricity to pure hydrogen, hydrogen to electricity, and then electricity to mechanical (to make the car move)-- that's three extra converion processes!!
Wake up people!
S.P.M.D.
Algae/Sunlight -> hydrogen is a great find. But I still think we will see many competing technologies including solar chimneys, wind farms, manure composters, and many others. Many of these technologies may only be better characterized as energy recycling rather than generation (for example manure digesters are unlikely to result in a net gain of electricity when compaired to the energy required to produce the manure) but they will all play a role.
I don't think there should be any silver bullet. We should be distributing our energy needs among many resources.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
..., he did mention that it was osmosis. Unfortunately that word is used wrong wayyy too many times. Osmosis is diffusion of water in an environment. Osmosis is not interchangeble with diffusion unless your talking about water.
Probably one of the most incorrectly used science term used by our society.
Hmmm... Pie...