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Widespread Use of Hydrogen May Hurt Ozone Layer
Saeger writes "The AP has a story about a CalTech study which has found that the Hydrogen Economy may deplete the ozone layer by 'as much as 8 percent' on the assumption that '10 percent to 20 percent of the hydrogen would leak from pipelines, storage facilities, processing plants and fuel cells in cars and at power plants.'" CalTech's press release has more information.
Maybe it's just because IANAES (I am not an environmental scientist) but how is this any worse than the crap that comes out of our fossil fuel based economy as it is?
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
The greater the size of our population grows, the less buffer we will have between us and the environment. The greater our numbers climb into the billions and finally trillions, the greater the effects our slightest alteration to the environment will create. One person with a campfire is nothing, 100 million people with campfires and you start to get some serious pollution. One person hiking through the woods is nothing, thousands of people visiting a national forest every year is like throwing a 40,000 person concert there.
Its our numbers, not the action that destroys our environment.
No matter what we do, we will pollute and destroy.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
20% leakage is a lot.
If they include system monitoring (like that wonderful check engine light) We should be able to get very low leakage rates.
Yes people ignore the check engine light, but that is only because they aren't losing 20% of their fuel.
I don't buy it. Their model would work if everything changed overnight to a hydrogen economy, but as countries like China will inevtiably use fossil fuels to take care of their economies, it would take a revolution to match their models.
--Chag
If the hydrogen is produced by Methane reformation, there is a carbon that's lost during that process which would most likely be released into the atmosphere. Contributing even more to global warming.
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What would Yossarian do?
You have to get the hydrogen from some energy-intensive process anyway. Either you are refactoring fossil fuels, or using nuclear to split water, or some other energy intensive process. Sure, you could use solar to do some of that, but you could use solar to charge electric cars too--if you want to turn the entire Desert Southwest into one giant panel farm. Of course, solar hurts the environment too. Yep, you heard me. That giant panel farm alters the "albedo" aka reflectivity of the Earth, which changes weather patterns. Nevermind that the shade would also alter the desert ecosystem.
What we should be doing is encouraging advanced modular hybrid technology. Idling and braking waste huge quantities of fuel. With modular hybrid systems (think, multiple small engines you can lift out of your car and swap like video cards) we would encourage innovation in conversion efficiency and alternative fuels. Also, drill ANWR. Yep, that's right. Drill the SOB. Send the environmentalists to the Middle East and see if they can persuade them to stop pumping for a change.
Just once I'd like to see our leadership encourage conservation and local production.
Republicans need to pull their heads out of their posteriors and realize that conservation!=anti business. Democrats need to do the same thing and realize that production!=destruction.
I'm not optimistic that any of this will happen anytime soon. It makes too much sense.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It is my understanding that the reason that hydrogen can permate so many materials is because the molecule is so small.
Wouldn't any theoretical tracer gas placed along with it have to have an equivalent size? As far as I understand it, no gas would fit the bill.
CFC's did shit to the ozone layer, one volcanic erruption in south america during the 90's expelled more chlorine free radicals into the upper atmosphere than all of the CFC's ever produced. We humans give ourselves too much credit for our ability to trash the plaent. I'm not saying that we can't damage it, we obviously can, especially through deforistation and pushing natural cycles over humps but I don't think anything we can do will ever be the major factor in destorying the ecosystem.
rising prices in natural gas are because of reduced production investment when there was a supply glut a few years back.
I simply won't. How profitable or economic (company and consumer perspective, respectively) is it to vent your Hydrogen into the atmosphere? Correct: it's not. There is no practical reason why people would allow leaks as large as 10 - 20 percent to exist, as it's simply wasting money. The market will keep this from happening. Hydrogen venters will be poor, and can't afford more hydrogen to vent. Even evil plotters trying to give universal skin cancer. Hey, I should try that and buy bananna boat stock... ::toddles off::
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
...and with Hydrogen, which is expensive, you can bet your last dollar that the infrastructure in place will not tolerate even 2% leakage. Companies will not have the tolerance for leaking Hydrogen like they currently do with fossil fuels, which are cheap and easily replaceable.
"No matter what we do, we will pollute and destroy."
....and the universe will continue on.
Pollute and destroy according to who? Us? Why does that matter? I mean, the earth doesn't share our prejudices towards "pollution" and our "destruction" of resources. From the earth's point of view, that is just another event taking place within a larger system -- that we, as humans, also happen to be a part of. Remember, nature includes EVERYTHING. It's not just trees and birds and butterflies. It's *everything*. The nastiest, most toxic, nuclear radiation is nothing more than a small piece of a much much larger system. The earth does not discriminate between "good" things and "bad" things. It just is.
If the pollution get so bad, the earth will simply create a new paradigm that goes something like this:
Earth + pollution - people = new paradigm
The Big Hydrogen Tycoon will look exactly like the Big Oil Tycoon because the Hyrdogen will be extracted from fossil fuels.
The fact of the matter is that Hydrogen isn't an energy source, like solar power, nuclear power, or fossil fuels, it is merely an energy container (like a battery). Hydrogen is either going to be obtained by breaking down fossil fuels or by electrolizing water with electricity generated from fossil fuels (or possibly nuclear power). The Hydrogen merely moves the point of pollution from millions of individual automobiles to hundreds of power plants. Localizing the pollution will help in some ways, and hurt in others.
Walk.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Gee, where to start with a statement like this? fossil fules are cheap and easily replaceable while hydrogen is not? Costs will depend on how it is produced, but hydrogen is certainly easily replaceable, far more so than fossil fules. What's more, leak a fossil fuel and you have polution and cleanup issues; leak hydrogen and it just goes up and destroys the ozone layer but leaves no trace at the point of the leak.
Infrastructure will not tolerate it? Why do they tolerate leaks of fossil fuel? But more importantly, much of the leak is likely to be at the end-users point, mostly the hydrogen run cars and SUVs. The infrastructure will not only tolerate that, but will likely cut corners so much that they greatly contribute to it. Will they add extra cost and weight to avoid the loss? Hardly likely in view of all past history.
But it's also important to realize that some of that gas is simply going to get away. Ever work with containment of hydrogen and helium? The damn stuff is tiny . It leaks right out through solid metal containers. Thick walled tanks, of course, hold it better than devices that have to have complex design and seals designed to retain the gas, but fuel cells and similar devices are going to leak, by the very nature of the gas they are working with. The small nature of the hydrogen atom, particularly when it's electron slips off into a metal, is exactly why fuel cells can work; the lone protron is able to pass through the fuel cell barrier. You're not going to be able to work with such tiny atoms and not have a significant loss in conditions that are reasonable for a car.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It takes MORE, I repeat MORE energy to manufacture the hydrogen than the hydrogen returns.
Err, that's called thermodynamics. It happens to apply to every energy storage mechanism which exists. Your plant biomass idea is really just a glorified solar-energy collector, which is why it appears to involve an energy surplus. But I could do the same thing by using some (albeit, highly efficient) solar cells to crack hydrogen into water. It's the SAME THING! The difference is in how you collect the energy and the form in which it's stored.
Incidentally, I suspect your idea doesn't actually generate an energy surplus. Or did you think you could harvest the plant material and convert it into ethanol without expending any energy?
Partly because of these concerns about radioactivity and the cost of containing it, the American public and electric utilities have preferred coal combustion as a power source. Today 52% of the capacity for generating electricity in the United States is fueled by coal, compared with 14.8% for nuclear energy. Although there are economic justifications for this preference, it is surprising for two reasons.
dosn't coal dump like 10 times as much radioactive waste per unit of power then nuclear energy?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.