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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.

32 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. All this talk... by inertia187 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't understand why creating water instead of carbon-monoxide is better for the environment. If we suddenly replaced all fossil fuel engines with hydrogen engines, we'd have the same problem: excess waste.

    How many tons of waste do we humans send into the air every year? Do we think that equivalent amount of water is better? Instead of air pollution and all of the problems associated with it, we'd have to worry about the oceans being diluted, excess humidity, or some damn thing we can't think of.

    I actually am not of the opinion that it's as bad as people think it is anyway. So talking about changing from one form of waste to another is just an unnecessary expense.

    --
    A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
    1. Re:All this talk... by Cheeko · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Except that the hydrogen is obtained through electrolysis, which decreases the amount of water. Not to mention the earth as a whole could definately benefit from more fresh water in many places.

    2. Re:All this talk... by Temsi · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
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    3. Re:All this talk... by einhverfr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    4. Re:All this talk... by Jason1729 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    5. Re:All this talk... by elwinc · · Score: 3, Informative
      It's because CO2 is a greenhouse gas -- it raises the overall temp of the planet, which may cause havoc. H20 is not a greenhouse gas. Also, compute the average time for a carbon atom to be captured by a plant, then returned to the atmosphere -- it's about 5000 years. Do the same for a water molecule to go from atmosphere to river and back to atmosphere -- it's a few months. Thus the atmosphere is better equipped to shed excess water than excess C02 (it's called rain!).

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      --- Often in error; never in doubt!
    6. 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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    7. Re:All this talk... by brokenwndw · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    8. 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

    9. Re:All this talk... by Greedo · · Score: 5, Funny

      and unfortunately many places do not have handy geothermal vents

      Obviously you are new to slashdot, where many of the posters vent a lot of hot air.

      --
      Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
    10. Re:All this talk... by cygnus · · Score: 4, Funny
      I'm not sure whether using it without electrolysis is viable - that Hydrogen has to come from somewhere, after all.
      maybe we can get it from stray protons from nuclear fission reactions. :)
      --
      Just raise the taxes on crack.
    11. Re:All this talk... by mfrank · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    12. Re:All this talk... by einhverfr · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ahhh water:

      1: In its vaporous state, it can cause severe burns....

      2: It is found in high quantities in cancerous tumors.

      3: It is a major component of acid rain....

      How dare you say water is OK? ;)

      --

      LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
    13. Re:All this talk... by Jordy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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've heard this far too much. Photons are little packets (batteries) holding energy. The earth's core is just a giant battery holding in thermal heat. The sun is just a giant hydrogen battery.

      There is no "source" of energy. Everything is energy. We just like to convert it into forms we can use easily.

      I mean by your logic, photovoltaic cells are an energy "source", not the photons. A nuclear power plant's turbine is an energy "source," but not the plutonium. Fire is an energy "source," but coal is not.

      Now if you said electricity source, maybe I'd agree with you, but otherwise you are just nitpicking.

      --
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    14. 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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  2. Hydrogen is not a source of energy by XNormal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hydrogen is a method for energy storage. If you're lucky like the icelanders you have cheap geothermal energy you can convert to hydrogen. But if the energy is coming from fossil fuels it only means that they will be burned at the power station instead of in your car engine.

    --
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    1. Re:Hydrogen is not a source of energy by Jeremi · · Score: 5, Interesting
      But if the energy is coming from fossil fuels it only means that they will be burned at the power station instead of in your car engine.


      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.
    2. Re:Hydrogen is not a source of energy by Mr.+Sketch · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Hydrogen is not a source of energy by egomaniac · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
  3. I wonder how much they charge per tank? by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Funny

    And will they let you fill your balloon or are they going to insist on wasting it on a car?

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  4. unlimited energy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    if only we could somehow harness the pent up sexual frustrations of all the slashdot readers and turn it into electricity....

  5. cheap, clean geothermal energy... by demonbug · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:All this talk... - you're kidding, right? by Xerithane · · Score: 4, Funny

    You cannot honestly label water as "waste". For as you and I are 90+% waste then ;)

    Some would argue that to be a higher number. I personally find most people I interact with can be replaced by a small shell script, and thereby be a 100% waste (from my frame of reference).

    I'm more interested in technology to remove stupid people from driving on freeway systems. Smart drive systems can save more resources because there will be less traffic jams. They aren't mutually exclusive, and I'd like to see both being developed, but that's where my interests lie.

    --
    Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
  7. 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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  8. Dihydrogen Monoxide by GjhH6vb8 · · Score: 4, Funny

    This process seems to use alot of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
    You think more people would be concerned.

  9. Re:I have a question! by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Informative
    no offense, but that's retarded.

    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.

    --
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    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  10. According to some Wired blurb. by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  11. hydrogen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. What will it be used for here in Iceland? by HalliS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

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  13. Clean except.. by Dolly_Llama · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  14. Ice land by Hao+Wu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most places don't have access to the abundant geothermal energy that Iceland has access to, located on a spreading center as it is. Spreading centers (places where two plates are moving away from eachother, creating new crust) bring magma very close to the surface of the Earth, much closer than pretty much anywhere else (except volcanoes, but those are a little tricky to harness the thermal energy from). I can't think of a single place (dry place, that is) besides Iceland that sits right on top of an active spreading center, so they are in a pretty unique situation (sure, there are failed rifts in Africa, but those are not active. Also possibly failed rifting in the U.S., but again, not active)
    So unless you find a way to get energy from dozens to hundreds of kilometers underground, much deeper than we have ever even drilled, then we will have to be stuck with our few spots of high geothermal activity for producing energy in that way. Oh yeah, and depending on geothermal energy just delays the problem - the Earth is cooling, albeit very slowly.

    --
    I suggest you read Slashdot
  15. MOD PARENT DOWN by Uber+Banker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mod parent down or don't mod at all (why mod up something that is wrong??????)

    Chatting sh1t is not informative, it is flamebait/trolling.

    > Carbon monoide is not poisonous
    Uh, no.

    > Carbon monoxide is not a problem... we have the technology
    You have the technology? We have the technology to make diamonds from dust... how about using it instead of creating more CO???

    > Carbon dioxide... the normal result of combustion. (That means it's unavoidable)
    Yes, it is not the same or as disasterous as CO, but CO2 is still a problem. And it is avoidable - use energy sources which do not combust where alternatives exist. There is a big difference between normal bodily functions (breathing) and burning millions of tons of oil and coal every day. Do you understand that?

    > Your problem is that you are not only ignorant
    So, are you not ignorant and talking rubbish, or you are ignorant?

    Its a pity you clouded some reasonable points such a lens effect and conflicts of different global warning theories (indeed, whether they really exist) with such ridiclous cr4p.