Creating Hydrogen With (Very) Hot Water

carbonman writes "NYTimes is reporting that a public-private research team will announce on Monday that they have discovered a new technique to produce pure hydrogen that is far more efficient than conventional methods. The advance could be a significant development in attempts to realize the dream of the hydrogen economy in taking gasoline-powered vehicles off the road, and without releasing carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to climate change. It does, however, require the use of advanced high-temperature nuclear reactors, none of which have been built on a production scale before." swiftstream adds a link to the same story at the no-reg Indianapolis Star, and summarizes the method as "electrolysis of very, very hot water."

Comments

Re:Hydrogen grid?

[Hamster Of Death]

Simple: Cost.

You'd have to build something on the same scale as the current oil pipeline system, but with the added hurdle of being able to hold hydrogen.
The current system won't work since it can't hold hydrogen.

Also with no immediate profit, people tend not to like investing is something they won't see return on in the short term.

So obvious.

[twitter]

The new method involves running electricity through water that has a high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen.

I thought of this when someone first told me about fuel cells. To anyone familiar with conventional thermal cycles and the basics of thermodynamics, the approach is obvious. Thermal cycles take advantage of thermal energy gradients. That such a potential could be exploited with fuel cells seems to be an obvious extention. Hot water is easier to separate than cold water, duh! So you heat the water up, separate it and then combine it in a cold fuel cell. The difference is energy you can use but the devil is in the details. It seems easier than using a turbine but you'd want one of those too if you can't extract all of the heat in electrolysis.

I'm glad someone is finally working on it. People are so slow. I expect the petroleum and coal industries to step in and kill it before anyone can use it.