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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.
Usually you have a closed hydrogen cycle: water + electricity -> hydrogen + O2 -> water + heat. This is why I think of hydrogen as a storage rather than primary fuel source.
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
More tonnes of water evaporate off the oceans every day than man pumps CO into the air. A few million tonnes of water is nothing to the oceans. The water level wouldn't even measurably change.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It's been on my mind for quiete some time, but I was wondering...
Would it not be simpler to store energy as liquid nitrogen (liquid air) instead of hydrogen?
And as far as I know, we wont run out of Nitrogen any time soon either.
And liquid Nitrogen when "consumed" does not involve any other chemical reaction then changing state liquid --> gas.
We would take nitrogen from the air, compress it and release it as is when used. Why isn't it a more explored area?
And producing it is quite simple to no?
I'd rather be sailing...
I'm trying to decide whether the parent is simply confused or a clever troll. It has enough things wrong with it that I suspect the latter. But just in case, I'll "reply not moderate" (although I'd like to know who modded this up to 4):
- Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide as the primary pollutant (on a global scale at least; locally smog etc. could be considered more important). This is carbon dioxide that was not previously in the atmosphere, since the carbon came from stores in the ground. In comparison, using renewable biomass for fuel, for example, adds no additional carbon to the atmosphere.
- The system described here is closed cycle. Water goes in, hydrogen and oxygen come out; then when the hydrogen is burned it recombines with the oxygen to become water again. Diluting the oceans is impossible in this case (and rather ridiculous in the fossil fuel case; consider the volumes involved).
- The biggest win is probably on the local scale I mentioned. I don't think working to eliminate smog is an "unnecessary expense". Unless you think changing from breathing smog to breathing water vapor is just from "one form of waste to another", in which case I'll take the water and you can have the smog.
I'm personally open to debate about exactly how bad global climate change is. But it's dangerous and dishonest to hide behind bad science to resist progress.
The abundance of geothermal energy in Iceland is probably a large part of making this shift to hydrogen energy possible. They have an abundant source of clean electrical generation capacity, something that pretty much no other nation in the world comes close to. For years ore has been shipped all the way from Australia to Iceland for smelting because of the incredibly cheap electricity rates there - it takes a lot of energy to smelt bauxite (to create aluminum), so it turns out to be cheaper to transport the bulk ore thousands of miles by ship rather than smelt in Australia. Thanks to the abundant, cheap energy available in Iceland, hydrogen production should be no problem.
True, but that's still an improvement because then all the pollution control machinery can be made very large and very efficient. Compare that to the current situation where all the pollution-control equipment has to be small enough to fit in a car, and cheap enough that it doesn't significantly increase the price of the car.
And when the fossil fuels start to run out, we'll find it much easier to switch over to (solar/wind/fusion/whatever) if we only need to upgrade a few dozen large hydrogen-generation plants, instead of 50 million separate automobile engines.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Iceland has stated that it's going to go to all hydrogen, and sell polution credits under the Kyoto treaty. Between that and their incredibly profitable gene pool, they'll be per-capita, the wealthiest nation in the world soon enough.
Too bad they seem to be turning into nationalists. So much for emmigration.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
All these people saying hydrogen is just as bad as burning fossil fuels because after all the hydrogen has to be produced by burning fossil fuels are annoying.
You would think all these people claiming to be programmers would grasp the idea of an abstraction layer.
Once everyone is filling their car up with hydrogen up at the pump you can change where the hydrogen came from without changing the cars. This is the whole point.
Got a windy plain? use wind power to make the hydrogen. Got geothermal energy? use that. Got huge rivers? use them. Got some new idea no one thought of yet? Try to use that! You can use whatever you want.
That's the whole point.
Actually water vapor is a major green house gas.
You can't grep a dead tree.
For now, there is only one vehicle in the country that runs on hydrogen fuel, they put 1 kg of hydrogen in it at the ceremony: http://skeljungur.is/uploads/images/Raðherra dælirC.jpg That car will be sent back to Mercedez soon I think. For the nearest future, 3 hydrogen fueled busses have been ordered and will arrive in august. The sole purpose of this hydrogen fuel station is to service these 3 busses (for now). Actually, this means that 4% of all the busses in the capitol will run on hydrogen :)
The next step is to start powering our fishing ships with hydrogen, which make a big part of the CO2 that comes from Iceland.
Hydrogen is for now mostly useable for big machinery such as busses and ships, the personal car will come hydrogen fueled later on (it's not very practical at this time).
My other UID is 1337
Actually in many cases car wrecks would be safer.
You see hydrogen is light and burns very clean.
When your car crashes the hydrogen is mostly just going to float away. It isn't going to form a huge puddle under you, it isn't going to soak into your clothes and wait for a spark.
Also most fires transfer heat through particles released during the burning. Hydrogen burns so clean that unless you are directly in the flame it's not going to transfer any heat to you. You aren't going to die from inhaling fumes and you aren't going to get your lungs filled with scalding hot particles either.
Be on guard for FUD, most of it doesn't hold up in reality.
Remember, most, if not all deaths in the infamous hindenburg were from people jumping out and falling to their death NOT from burning.
The only thing that scares me about hydrogen is the explosion part.... Car wrecks could definitely get a lot scarier.
Yeah, good thing we're running on non-flammable, non-explosive gasoline right now.
Yeah, would you rather burn to death in a gasoline-fueled car wreck, or be blown to bits in a hydrogen-powered car wreck?
I vote for being blown to bits...