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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.
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.
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.