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Hydrogen Fuel Station in Iceland

Posted by michael on from the should-be-greenland-ha-ha-ha dept.

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.

4 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All this talk... by moonbender · · Score: 4, Informative
    The real wildcard though is the source of the electricity. In this case it is clean, geothermal energy, though it could be solar, wind, etc. If you used fossil fuels, you would have the same problem as we have today but worse because of poor efficiency of the hydrolysis process.
    Hear hear! A lot of people miss this, eg. some of the posters above calling it a "clean energy source". It's not an energy source, at least not if the Hydrogen is created using eletrolysis. In that case it's just a battery. I'm not sure whether using it without electrolysis is viable - that Hydrogen has to come from somewhere, after all.
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  2. You haven't been, obviously. by Absurd+Being · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  3. Re:All this talk... by Dutchmaan · · Score: 5, Informative
    that Hydrogen has to come from somewhere, after all.

    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

  4. Re:All this talk... by Mister+Black · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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