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Combined Gasoline/Hydrogen Fuel Station Opens
98neon writes "This story from Yahoo! News tells of a Shell hydrogen refilling station that has opened in Washington D.C. Six minivans will be the only vehicles refuelling anytime soon. Apparently some of the neighbors are concerned about having a large tank of hydrogen near their homes. Oh come on, what is there to worry about?"
I'm sure having a volatile, quickly burning, quickly dissipating gas is lots more dangerous than a huge tank of a volatile, slow burning, slowly dissipating petrochemcial.
Something tells me that it'd be a lot easier to prevent a fire with hydrogen than with gasoline (seeing as how hydrogen doesn't stick around once released.)
1. Step One - Stand-alone projects with restricted access (like depots for hydrogen-fueled buses)
2. Step Two - Second generation sites, with public access, but separate from existing gasoline stations (e.g. the facility Shell opened in Iceland in April, 2003 which supplies hydrogen made from water to three city buses)
3. Step Three - Fully integrated fuel stations (traditional fuels and hydrogen)
4. Step Four - Within the next five years, mini-network "Lighthouse Projects" (semi-commercial, public-private partnerships involving multiple energy companies, governments, and fleets of 100 or more vehicles)
5. Step 5 - 2010-2020 connecting the mini-networks with corridors and filling in the white spaces
So does this mean that Shell believes hydrogen will begin to reach the mass market by 2020?
If so I kind of think they're being a bit optimisitc in their estimates. I just cannot see a public push towards the new energy, without government intervention (i.e. higher fuel taxes etc.) which I feel would be highly unpopular.
Does anyone know if Hydrogen is more volatile that Gasoline vapor? I wouldn't think that Hydrogen would be any more volatile than that. The article says that the Hydrogen tanks are underground, like most gasoline or diesel tanks, and are under 24/7 monitoring, also like gasoline or diesel tanks. I'm sure the have the required amount of insurance as well. Are peoples' fears justified?
MANY people have noted that the potential in a tank (or set of tanks) of gasoline is much worse than the potential in a tank of hydrogen. You're missing the point.
The average Joe has never heard of a "gasoline bomb" but she/he has certain heard of a "hydrogen bomb"
ps: This also applies to the irrational fear of "nuclear power plants" and the comfort with the far-more-deadly "coal power plants"
--
Only 35 out of 97 people aboard died. Most crashes involving heavier-than-air aircraft kill everyone aboard.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The real question is where does the Hydrogen come from? The easiest way is to use electrolosis on water, which requires electricity, which comes from the coal plant down the street. None of the alternate fueled cars (with the possible exception of solar powered cars) will really be a solution until the power plants actually are better.
"If it sucks without butter, it still sucks with butter, only creamier." - AC
where is the uproar over propane??
A quick google for comparative explosive propane hydrogen yields:this html conversion of original pdf:
In contrast, leaking gasoline or diesel spreads laterally and evaporates slowly resulting in a widespread, lingering fire hazard. Propane gas is denser than air so it accumulates in low spots and disperses slowly, resulting in a protracted fire or explosion hazard. Heavy vapors can also form vapor clouds or plumes that travel as they are pushed by breezes. Methane gas is lighter than air, but not nearly as buoyant as hydrogen, so it disperses rapidly, but not as rapidly as hy- drogen.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
1) It is a lot more explosive than gasoline (hence its use in early scramjets, pulse detonation engines, etc). Whether something is a detonation or a deflagration is largely due to mixing, pressure, and a number of other factors, of course (things much more applicable to compressed hydrogen).
2) Tell that to people who work in oil refineries. At one refinery my father used to work at, before he got there, to track down hydrogen leaks in the equipment, they would wave a broomstick along the sides of the pipes (hydrogen burns with a clear flame). Where the broomstick suddenly got cut in half, that was their hydrogen leak.
Hydrogen has this nasty habit of igniting easily when suddenly released from pressure. It gets well mixed instantly, and is already in a completely gasseous form (instead of small droplets for gasoline's optimal combustion). It takes a lot of work to get gasoline to explode (if you don't believe it, watch the mythbusters' episode where they try to recreate the "cell phone gas explosion" myth, and end up having trouble trying to get the gas ignited even with a spark gap). Hydrogen? Not so at all.
That's it, Mr. Giraffe, get all the marmalade.
According to The Guardian (a UK paper, which had an interesting article today on the same topic), "green" hydrogen (hydrogen produced from bio-mass etc, instead of fossil fuels), would be between $10 - $20 per gallon of petrol equivalent...
Hydrogen doesn't have a visible flame.
Only the skin could have produced that visible flame.
"Actually, hydrogen is most commonly produced from steam reforming methane"
Exactly. I wish all the tree hugging hippies would shut the hell up about getting away from the carbon economy.
From the article:
This will be, in fact, the first step toward the real transition in the economy from the carbon-based economies
of the past to a hydrogen economy of the future," Abraham said.
Where the hell does the hydrogen come from? Natural gas. Um, yea... so long carbon economy.
Incidentally, it's gonna take a freakin miracle to replace the stored solar energy of the past few billion years that we've pretty much depleted in the last 100 or so. The way I see it, unless we plan on covering the entire earth with solar collectors and converting our oceans into mounds of salt and lots of H and O, we're gonna need something better. Sorry hippies, but that's nuclear (fusion hopefully)
Actually, I do not believe that it can. The pipeing and the joints were never designed to deal with H2. While the pipes will not allow the H2 to leak, weld seams and fittings may allow H2 to leak.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Good replies everybody. I hadn't thought it through far enough. I have been reading about creating an electric car lately, and battery technology is _really_ crappy right now, but there are some things on the horizon that address each one of these issues. I guess I'm just wishing for more research into batteries than extending the use of conventional explosion+surface to push on = wheels go 'round.
From what I understand, there are new sulfur-based batteries that can be recharged nearly as fast as you can dump power into them that are also fairly lightweight and have a high energy per weight and volume density. You would be able to recharge your batteries at any place power is available in a few minutes (or a few seconds, if we had specific "power stations" that could deliver a lot more current than standard household). Unfortunately they are in the lab stages of development right now, and would be prohibitively expensive to get out into the real world.
Yo Colin!
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Also, burning hydrogen is mostly invisable. I have heard stories of truckers who haul hydrogen carry a straw broom with them so that they can wave it in from of them. The idea is that they will see the broom burning before they walk into the burning hydrogen.
So, being unknown, it's deathly scary.
I was at a hydrogen industry conference last year and saw a video of a pretty good demonstration of the relative safety of hydrogen and gasoline. They started with two cars, one with a conventional gas tank and the other with a high-pressure hydrogen tank of the type currently expected to be employed on a hydrogen (fuel cell) car.
They initiated a small gasoline leak from the gas tank and opened the relief valve on the hydrogen tank and used a small spark igniter on both leaks. The hydrogen leak stared out more spectacularly as the high-pressure hydrogen burned off in a bright flame. The gasoline leak stated smaller, but since the puddle of gasoline was under the car the effect of the small flame increased as the puddle grew and the car itself was ignited. Eventually the hydrogen fire burned itself out with moderate damage to the rear deck lid of the car, but the gasoline leak soon engulfed the entire conventional car and destroyed it.
But they really didn't demonstrate what would have happened had the hydrogen car been parked in someone's attached garage...
As an example, about 15 years ago, my buddy took his propane-fueled powered ex-taxi to California. Everyone he ran into was flabbergasted that somone would actually drive around with a giant tank of propane in the trunk. People who saw him filling up asked if that was dangerous and, in many places, he had to fill his own car because the gas jockey just couldn't get his head around the idea. Now I'm sure propane stations are common in any reasonably built up area.
Hydrogen is going to be the same way for a while.
That's almost as uneducated as saying 'now we've got a story about the increased incidence of AIDS in this neighborhood' and having a wiki link to homosexuals.
Stupid, tired old stereotypes we've got to get over if we're ever going to make any progress (in either area).
-Nano.