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New Way to Make Hydrogen
zymano writes "Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store. The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water. A new startup is trying a new way to make hydrogen. The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water. Signa has devised a way to mix sodium with silica gel or crystalline silicon to create a powder that essentially strips electrons from the sodium molecules in advance and stores them. When water is introduced, the chemical reaction proceeds calmly. The powder generates hydrogen efficiently. More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat."
Michael Lefenfeld and James Dye of Signa Chemistry wanted to make rooms smell better. Instead, they stumbled on a way that could make hydrogen fuel cells a practical reality.
Who wants to bet that Michael and James have a room full of stinky unshowered nerds to thank for stumbling onto this innovation?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Coal gas seems to be where the big boys are going.
Hence here in coal rich australia our rulers are mad keen on the "Hydrogen Economy".
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
honestly, snape has long been proven to be a good guy. you would know this if you had followed the saga.
This process may be efficient, but sodium doesnt grow on trees (or mined out of the ground). The easiest way to get it is.... electrolysis of sodium chloride.
So you've just shifted the electrolysis problem further upstream and instead of using nice friendly water, you're passing current through nasty, mean molten salt.
Not to be overly pedantic but even though this may correspond to the yield, the hydrogen is originally part of the water, not the sodium.
I haven't RTFA, but surely the submitter didn't mean that the sodium powder is converted to hydrogen... After all, that would involve transmuting (or is it transmutating?) the actual element (Na)...
As I understand it, the reaction in fact involves the water molecule breaking in two. The oxygen (or maybe a hydroxide ion, IANAchemist) binds with the sodium, and the hydrogen escapes as a gas. The sodium powder is converted into sodium oxide or sodium hydroxide (I think, once again IANAC), not into hydrogen. Sorry, a bit of pedantism there.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
This is a very signifigant step up to using hydrogen as a fuel source, although we're still a ways away from using fuel cells as TFA states.
Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store.
You might want to check out http://unitednuclear.com/h2.htm, which is their R & D page. They have been working on hydrogen powered vehicles in a much more sensible method for the short-term: just convert gasoline engines to run on hydrogen. They use a solar-powered electrolysis station (though they do say their current models are too slow) to get hydrogen from water. It's then transfered into metal-hydride tanks in your vehicle, which is a brilliant way to store it. Heating elements inside the tank release the hydrogen, and very little modification needs to be done to the engine. If the tank is cut and burned, the hydrogen is still released slowly enough to just smolder.
This is a neat method, since most people think of hydrogen powered cars as electric vehicles that run off of fuel cells.
Sadly, it isn't available for diesel vehicles due to the lack of a spark plug.
Death by snoo-snoo!
They're not making hydrogen. They're just gathering the stuff that was formed at the start of the universe (or created by God if you're a dumb creationist).
Evil people are out to get you.
Hmm, sodium doesn't naturally occur in a solid form very often, it is usually crystalized with other elements or already in water. I don't see any breakthrough here whatsoever.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
It always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when the production cost of hydrogen goes down.
Liberate it, perhaps. I think any method of actually making it would come with its own set of problems.
Being able to produce hydrogen in a way that does not use fossil fuels "at all" is a huge step in the right direction.
Another process in development involves bacteria that have a hydrogen waste product, if my memory serves me correctly.
Of course, solar, wind, and geothermal are also reasonable ideas.
The first person/company that is able to produce hydrogen cheaply using renewable resources will be an unbelievably good investment. (Assuming patents are taken care of properly)
Great, now my car can explode in a giant fireball more efficiently
"Instant hydrogen, just add water." Hey, thats basically what theyre doing, right?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
this and things are starting to pick up for fuel cell cars to the public.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
mush of reacted silica gel, sodium, and water??
..you'd have about 10-11 kilos of mush left afterwards.
Say you need one kilo of hydrogen... (Which is about 6 cubic inches in liquifidy form, which is roughly equal to 7.5 gallons of gasolene for the energy you get out of it.. and I go thru around 15 gallons of gass in a week due to my job)
What do you do to recycle or reuse this stuff? How much energy do you have to put into (transporting it, creating/obtaining it, mixing it, etc) it before you can get any out, and how much energy is needed to deal with the waste afterwards?
Because at my current usage a person would have to produce 88 kilos of left overs... per month. Just for me to keep my job with a hydrogen powered car instead of a gasolene powered one I already own.
seems very innefficient for such a efficient proccess.
Why not just get a big swimming pool of HCl and use a dump truck to pour in Mg or Zn? If not, the pool of HCl would be a lot of fun.
Hopefully this will lead to a more efficient way to produce dihydrogen monoxide.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
As far as I can tell from the article is that they have found a new way to store hydrogen. When water reacts with sodium, an amount of Hydrogen is produced. However this reaction is so violent and quick that it's impractical. I think they have found a way to kind of "Defuse" the sodium whilst still allowing the hydrogen producing reaction to take place.
The article doesn't say anything about a patent, but it's highly unlikely for them not to seek one.
I didn't quite get this from the article, but are they now able to get more energy from the hydrogen they produce than it takes to produce it with this process? Or is it just slightly less of a loss than other methods?
This poo is cold.
The article is so riddled with technical inaccuracies that it's not even worth reading. Please, can we have a little more discrimination on the part of the editors?
So is their sodium-silica gel a catalyst that reduces the energy barrier to split oxygen from hydrogen through electrolyzing, or is it sucking up the oxygen atoms and releasing hydrogen as a byproduct of the reaction?
Basically what I want to know is, do you just keep feeding more water and electricity into the system, or are you going to be continuously replacing the used up sodium-silica gel?
The real issue is cost not whether it can be done. Sodium isn't all that cheap in quanity and if demand went up the cost would go up, same as oil. Sodium is the easy way to extract hydrogen. You can also use hydrocloric acid and calcium, basic chemistry. It's trying to extract enough of it at a low cost that is the problem.
"...if you're a dumb creationist."
You've repeated yourself.
Oh good. So we have a more efficient way to destroy one of the most critical resources in the world that has no alternative (water) in order to make a highly volatile fuel source that has viable alternatives.
:-)
Except in the "first world", water is not exactly cheap and plentiful. The US may be able to waste water on making hydrogen, but do you really think that Somalia is going to be able to? Or Bangladesh? Or Peru? There are much better things to do with water than break it. Other future-fuel sources, however, would be equally useful to any country and not waste a valuable resource.
Hydrogen is still a silly idea, especially when chicken guts and corn are far cheaper, and far more plentiful.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
The idea is not producing hydrogen with sodium as an energy source. There is no pure sodium whatsoever around, it's too reactive (same reason there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere).
So, instead of buying methanol cartridges, we would buy sodium sticks, put some water in a small tank in our laptop, and this would produce hydrogen and power for the machine.
Furthermore, the most common way of producing hydrogen is not electrolysis, but reforming of hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas), which is done on an industrial scale in any refinery.
The article itself has a good number of inaccuracies. For instance, other than the electrolysis thing, you read:
This is insane. The powder does not get converted to hydrogen, the water does. And still I'm afraid a unit error may be lurking.
The PEM fuel cells are not a way to store hydrogen, but a way to convert it to electricity; the solid oxide fuel cells will never be used in vehicles, since they are expensive, running at temperatures up to 1000 degrees, good only for large-scale plants, and brittle. And they take 8 hours to start up, and they can start up only so many times before they start cracking (about ten).
Oh my, did they know that hydrogen is extremely reactive, and will burn with oxygen at the first occasion? You don't even need a spark, all it takes is the static electricity of a windy day. CO2 accumulates, hydrogen would disappear rapidly.
Of course it is. It contains energy. There is no such thing as an energy carrier that does not contain some sort of danger. It would not be much of an energy carrier if it were inert. So, gasoline burns, hydrogen burns, nuclear goes bad big time, methanol burns, and lithium batteries explode if you hammer them or if they are produced with poor standards.
Solid oxide fuel cells do not require a catalyst. They are the only ones that do not, since they operate at high temperatures. Assuming the article meant SOFC.
Common misconception, hydrogen costs about 0.8 euro per gasoline liter equivalent: in Europe that's already way convenient. It's the infrastructure that's missing.
Alkaline metals being ignored? Of all the bullshit... they might not be C, O or even Al, but most know sodium better than technetium, praseodimiun or some transition metal forgotten somewhere in the limbo of rare earths.
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Maybe they could find a way to use sodium and silica to make LSD! That'd be a real hoot!
ATTENTION SLASHDOT READERS:
You don't have to stand for the crap these so called "editors" put you through! Come join the Slashdot Jihad and end the tyranny of the shit-for-brains editors!
I know you guys like to think much about yourselves, but just because you are good programmers does not make you good editors!!!!!!!!!!
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Does anyone have a formula for the chemical reaction that takes place when water is added to the sodium / silica powder? How much energy can be extracted from one kilogram of the powder, how much water would it take?
Would it be feasible to put the powder in a container and replace the container at a "gas station" when all the sodium is oxidized? Would it be feasible to have the sodium de-oxidized at a special processing plant?
In other words, could this be a feasible solution to the storing of hydrogen in a vehicle problem?
Obviously the emergency jerrycan is a technology too complex and difficult to arrange compared to a simple sodium store, water tank, reformer, purifier and additional carburetor...face it guys, most of the easily led idiot investors lost their cash in the dot-com bubble.
BTW there is an existing technology for producing "safe" sodium involving mixing it with mercury to form amalgam. This has been around for many years (it is the basis of early plants for producing sodium hydroxide from salt.) It has not revolutionised fuel cells or led to a practical mobile phone fuel cell. So explain why this should be any different?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
A use for all those "WARNING DO NOT EAT ME" packets.
There is truth in humor.
It's the simplest fucking thing in the universe. Literally, hydrogen is the simplest substance in the universe. It's like. A bunch of single protons in a pile. And we're falling over ourselves with the difficulty of trying to figure out good ways to make it.
Funny how these things work.
There was an episode of Beverly Hillbillies that covered this topic. Scientist are only now developing this technology? Sheesh... I would have better luck finding oil in my backyard.
Bear in mind that this stuff will take energy to produce and there will be waste to dispose of.
Also bear in mind that electrolysed hydrogen also takes more energy to produce than it will release (until we get perpetual motion sorted out).
So all of this stuff is about finding more efficient ways to generate energy and store it.
In this case the innovation seems to be that this product will make it easy (in water rich environments) to create hydrogen which (it is anticipated) will be easy to make electricity from.
I've made hydrogen by mixing good old caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) with aluminium cans and water.
Year 8 science, same result as this "innovation" although we only got enough hydrogen out of the bottle to inflate a baloon which was able to take off with a 3 metre piece of string drenched in methanol.
lit the bottom as it went by and the whole thing made a very satisfying fireball.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
I can't wait until every car, bus, plane, train, lawnmower, etc. runs on hydrogen! With the exhaust of pure oxygen, we can finally get rid of those pesky trees.
Do what I say, cuz I said it.
-Meatwad
IIRC pure sodium is generally extracted from molten salt by electrolysis. So that means not only do you have to expend a huge amount of energy to get your sodium, you're also producing toxic, ozone destroying chlorine gas as a byproduct. Oh well, at least they can say it's GREEN!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
First thought:
You mean different from the tried and tested one proton, one electron recipe?
siener's youtube channel
especially if one has a diesel vehicle! With a diesel one can run Biodiesel, which is cheaper, more available, and more energy dense than hydrogen could be, even with this new method and the latest experimental storage system.
"'Sorry, a bit of pedantism there.'
Wow, cool, you can use the word pedantic and its derivatives. I'm so amazingly proud of you."
No, he can't. The correct word is "pedantry." This "pedantism" is nonsense.
That only supports your point, of course. "Pedantry" is a more common word than "pedant" is, so to have the wrong derived form is a decent epidemiological indicator. Almost anyone who'd learned "pedant" in a respectable way would have picked "pedantry" up about the same time.
FTA: Methanol is flammable
And hydrogen isn't?
Hydrogen is the most abundant resource in the UNIVERSE! Why the hell would we need to make it? We should stop worring about making more of what covers almost all of the universe and worry about stuff that matters - like fuel, greenhouse gasses, bandwidth wars, online duals, and reading slashdot?
Did someone tell them that water vapor resulting from the combustion of all this hydrogen is the single most potent "greenhouse gas"?
I always thought Methane would be a better alternate fuel, and more potent too
http://www.tomslatin.com/version6/Lit_Fart.mpg
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in several chemical processes, as a moderate strength oxidant (toluene -> (...) -> benzadeyde). It is not liberated into the atmosphere (so far, not that much).
I heard about a guy who supposedly invented a new type of electrolysis for hydrogen. Instead of normal electrolysis, he puts both a positive and negative at each side. Then he alternates the sets extremely fast. This causes the water molecules to go back and forth until they get so hot they just evervesce. Supposedly it uses much less energy than normal. What do you think, plausible new invention or old school con?
New Way to Make Hydrogen
When I saw the title I instantly thought-
Jesus(God) is here!!! YOU are ALL going to HELL.
Seriously, there should be a limit on simplification.
Why do we need to make hydrogen? There's TONS of it sitting right out in the open, ripe for the taking!
My fellow slashdotters, what we need only to do is MINE THE SUN!
All we need is a space shuttle, and a team of roughneck oil workers. With a bit of training they will be SPACE MINERS, and we can send them on their merry way into the sun to mine it for us!
Take all claims by United Nuclear (aka United Nyuck Nyuck Nyucklear) with a grain of salt. It is run by the infamous Bob Lazar Whose claims to fame include reverse-engineering alien spacecraft and working with their power source "element 115"(which doesn't exist in this part of the galazy) and advanced degrees in physics from MIT and CalTech which no paperwork can be found on. His old site has got some "interesting" info on the alien craft.
(as a note, as you progress down the alkali metal group, the reaction with water becomes more violent. Lithium and sodium fizz, potassium will ignite on the surface of the water, and you do not want to be around rubidium or cesium [Caesium if your British] if they go into water unless you want to be covered in molten metal.)
As a further note, the reason that there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere is that it is so light it escapes from the atmosphere.
As a final note, silica gel as a support is making leaps and bounds. Binding a reactant to silica gel allow reaction purification by simple filtration, which is always a good thing. I suspect that if their claims pan out, the reason that its less violent is that the Na/SiO2/SiOH is a less powerful reducing agent than pure Na metal [though SiOH's probably react with the sodium forming NaOSi]. But as someone pointed out, pure sodium metal does not exist on the earth. Sodium exists as salts, which have to be electrolyzed to make pure sodium metal (at about 850C to boot).
An article on the same innovation appeared several days ago in the New York Times (free reg required): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/science/12sili.h tml
A lan party???
Soylent hydrogen is people!
Same way you ship oil from a remote location -- using supertankers. You might even be able to use some of the capacity of these tankers on the trip back to the source of the oil, instead of sending them back empty. Then they could deliver the hydrogen to various ports along the way, or back to the source of the oil, which could use the hydrogen to run a power plant that produces much needed clean water as the primary side benefit.
There are some engineering issues to work out, obviously, but it could be done, even if the tanker had to be filled with aluminum spheres of pressurized liquid hydrogen.
The story states:
"The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water."
From what I understand, this is wrong. I've heard that most hydrogen is ironically produced as a byproduct of refining oil.
Wikipedia for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen says that:
"Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas."
The "New Way to Make Hydrogen" as opposed to the "Old Way to make Methane".
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I don't see it growing on trees or lying in beach pebbles, so surely it has to be made by electrolysis? Oh, wait, you can make hydrogen by electrolysis, can't you?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
cheap energy. I have difficulty in believing in cheap energy and carbon sequestration at the same time.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You want to make 10 times the volume of stuff for hydrogen you need, and you end up with 9 times the volume of stuff as *waste*?!
You've got to be fricken' kidding me.
Ok here is a major hint to the world leaders of this planet...
Nuclear power plant, Gulf of Mexico == Hydrogen. Ship it to all the countries that don't want or have nuclear. Become new major energy provider...
This is not rocket science people! Stop making it harder than it is!
I don't know if they plan to market this as the cheery hydrogen fuel that produces only water as a byproduct, but this process produces large quantities of sodium hydroxide (better known as lye) as a byproduct. So unless they have a way to recycle the waste products back into metallic sodium this will not be a clean fuel.
Signa claims "non-toxic by-products and waste", but I'm very sceptical about this claim. (Unless you don't count extremely corrosive as toxic, in which case I urge their entire PR department to prove non-toxicity by drinking a bottle of lye.)
What the hell are you talking about?
I suppose you might be interested to know that 0.55ppmv means "0.55 parts per million in volume". If you did not notice, this is negligible for any practical purpose.
Besides, it really broke my heart that you did not read my post. Nice you had the time to reply to it however.</sarcasm>
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
you drip water on a metallic salt containging sodium IIRC, and you can run a light on the resulting (hydrogen) gas.
Or you use it to make explosions/bangs with empty milk cans. I wonder if they plan to recycle the resulting salts or that those are just supposed to be flushed down the toilet?
now on to RTFA.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
n/t
Mod parent up informative.
I'm thinking that the fact that this was accidental means that there is tremendous room for innovation by users of TRIZ, who can solve problems on purpose.
http://www.triz-journal.com/whatistriz.htm
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
that's an idea, maybe we can extract energy from stupidity . Now let me see, we'd need a high density storage capability then...
a better option in the near term is to have cars that are plug-in hybrids with flexi-fuel tanks.
hybrids: like what you have now with the prius. They're not cost-effective yet, but will be in the next few years.
plug-in: like a hybrid, except that you can also plug it in at home to keep its battery charged - the fuel won't kick in until the battery needs recharging. saves fuel, and offloads the transporation cost from fuel (oil) to electricity (nuclear, coal, gas). The thought being that nuclear, coal, and gas will run out later than oil will.
flexi-fuel: allow more forms of fuel than normal gasoline. Yes, ethanol can sometimes use up more energy to create than it generates when you burn it. But so does hydrogen. It's not the point; the benefit of ethanol is that it's portable (like hydrogen). And some ethanol sources are far more efficient in conversion than corn. Like switchgrass.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Hydrogen is not difficult to store. All you do is combine it with oxygen and it turns into water. Here on this planet, we have been so successful that we have oceans of the stuff just lying around. You'll see it when you get here.
Bladerunner is considered to be visionary, yet it was set only, what, 12-14 years from now...unless things change a hell of a lot in the next decade, that movie got it very wrong too.
And now you are wrong.
The cars of the future are going to be several generation advanced cars...that is, cars as we know them now, only with cooler stereos. They will still rely upon current fuels. That is where the money is, and that is how things will stay. It has nothing to do with anything other than profit, and the profit is in gasoline.
I can't fucking believe this got modded offtopic. It was hilarious.
All of the current technologies employed for the
"hydrogen economy" either (1) require more energy
to produce than can be stored, (2) are derived
from the "hydrocarbon economy" it's supposed to
replace, or (3) rely upon nuclear energy which
has a 50,000 year environmental pollution problem.
The "hydrogen economy" provides continued
centralized control over energy distribution, but
is not a viable long term solution.
The best long term solution is reliance upon only
renewable energy sources, including initially bio-
diesel/hybrid. The main obstacle to this goal
has to do with political will overcoming vested
corporate interests that continue to seek total
centralized control over energy distribution.
Reliance upon the "hydrocarbon economy" for the
source of the "hydrogen economy" does not make
economic or environmental sense. Hydrocarbons
are a limited resource. Excess carbon must be
"sunk" in order to derive any real benefit from
hydrogen, since COn are greenhouse gases.
IMHO, every politician involved in promoting
nuclear energy as "the solution" should be
willing to commit themselves, their children,
their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren,
(et.al) to perpetual servitude to the new "quasi-
religious order" that oversees the continued
safe storage of radioactive nuclear waste -- for
the next 50 to 60 thousand years.
Reliance upon renewable energy, with increasingly
modest demands upon hydrocarbons like biodiesel,
is the only solution (barring the improbable
development of controllable fusion reactors).
Since the same amount of CO2 is produced, the global warming effect wil be the same.
One of my dreams in life is to one day see the faces of the Saudi Arabian royal family and the other oil tycoons around the world when they realise their oil is worthless and everyone is driving efficient and clean cars. Not that I don't respect them for making shit loads of money, im just jealous. Although with the SA royals its more disgust as they are equal to the dirty shit that builds up around the side of a pig, but now im getting off topic..
There's still lots of hurdles to pass to make hydrogen the choice for fuel but it seems to be getting there slowly but surely..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I think you are thinking of aluminum.
In fact it is possible to produce sodium at low temperature by using a mercury cathode, in which it dissolves. This is an inefficient solution looking for a problem. I suspect it is a research technique for producing sodium for organic reactions, where the efficiency can be low, and they are trying to drum up investor interest by making exaggerated claims. Numerous organic reactions use sodium as a reagent including the high school demo of making ethylene by reacting sodium with pure alcohol to make sodium ethoxide.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
To evaluate overall efficency of this way to create hydrogen we would have to know, how much energy it takes to make the powder.
Great post, I was skeptical to start with, so I stopped reading TFA shortly after "The key is sodium" statement. IIRC (and I bow to your chemistry knowlage), isn't sodium created in commercial quantities by melting salt? Doesn't the molten salt also create equal quantities of chlorine gas? Is this anymore envriomentally friendly than mixing "Draino" with aluminum and water to produce hydrogen?
PS: You're right, I've never heard of technetium or praseodimiun. When I saw the quote "That side of the periodic table people tend to ignore", I got a mental picture of a bunch of whitecoats (ala "The Farside" cartoons). They were hudled over a poster size periodic table that was spread out on a lab bench. None of them could complete the formula scrawled on the whiteboard because Eric was leaning on the Alkaline metals and nobody noticed them.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There is probably a reason because I'm no chemist or physicist. But I wonder why they don't use Hydrochloric acid (HCl) and Magnesium (Mg). You add them to gether and you get Magnesium Chloride and all the hydrogen gets released. I'm pretty certain that neither of these items are rare. Considering many foods contain Magnesium and every person contains HCl.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Millions of tons of hydrogen are made every year around the world (for ammonia synthesis, for example), and very little of it comes from electrolysis. Thermal reforming of natural gas and other carbonaceous compounds is much more economical.
here's a system they already have in place to make hydrogen from water by electrolysis powered by wind generators. http://www.energycooperation.org/windproductionH2. htm
I'm not sure how many kw hours it takes to make a gallon of hydrogen, but consider this. 1kw hour of wind power sells for $.06, 1 gallon (from a few places I've checked) goes for $.80-$1.00. If the conversion is profitable you could make a S***ton of money selling the hydrogen instead of the electricity wind generators produce.
I like buzzwords, they make me sound smart.
I heard that most current fuel cells use platinum. This rare metal is more expensive than gold and each fuel cell needs about 60g platinum. Although researchers expect this may shrink to 15g.
But with the current world supply of platinum and each fuel cell using about 60g we can't even replace all cars and trucks!
Seriously, that's not flamebait, it's just another view on alternative energy sources.
Biodiesel is a very real alternative, and one that's being used TODAY in much greater quantities than Hydrogen.
Sodium is an expensive element, mostly because its production requires alot of energy. Hydrogen from water via electrolysis is still the easiest and most straightforward method.
Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation. Go check out the state of the art in battery technology.
0 1.htm
e.g.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr29
http://www.sionpower.com/
You'll see them in mobile phones and laptops first. They'll make it into electric vehicles in a few years.
Generating electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity is, well, stupid.
Deleted
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we just using hydrogen as a energy storage system here?
That is, we take energy (in the form of electricity) from the sun or wind or where ever and use it to create hydrogen gas or compounds that will create hydrogen. All of which methods are less than 100% efficient
Shouldn't we instead work on ways to store the electricity directly, using batteries or whatever?
We already have a electrical distribution system that works fairly well, why not use it?
When you're hammered everything looks like it needs nailed....
Within the measure of current technology in 1973-4, let us say, all of those measures were tried back then. The motivator was the Arab oil embargoes intended to punish the West for supporting Israel. At the same time, lead catalysts were restricted for environmental reasons, resulting in all new cars from the 1976 model year on being unleaded-only.
There was another gasoline shortage in 1979.
The popularity of the US government response, which was to mandate changes to automobiles, compel odd/even license plate rationing, and make a lot of noise about alternative energy sources, can be partially seen in the 1980 election results.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
make cities better designed for walking and cycling
You know, in discussions like this someone will usually mention that cities should "be designed for X". This strikes me as a slightly silly argument:
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Hydrogen is not necessarily any better than gasoline as a fuel, if you want to avoid global warming. Water vapor, good old H2O is also a powerful greenhouse gas.
Before we convert over into a Hydrogen economy, we should study how it's going to affect the environment. If we started such studies now, we could have some answers before we've committed ourselves.
I suspect that we're going to have to face some hard truths, and one is that the kind of energy spendthrift lifestyle that we've enjoyed in the first world isn't going to be possible without destroying our environment.
That doesn't mean we have to give up our computers and home appliences, but it does mean that we need to force our politicians to plan cities better, push for wind, solar, and wave power solutions. We all need to think about ways to reduce our transportation energy costs.
Given the environmental costs of transportation, it might make sense to build smaller factories distributed throughout the country rather than importing products from overseas. (This would have the added benefit of creating jobs.)
No matter what your politicians tell you, we face hard times ahead. We need to work quickly to insure that our children will have a world worth living in.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
In terms of the mathematics of getting from A->B, it's the optimum solution. Highest performance for lowest cost, lowest energy consumption.
http://www.personalrapidtransit.com/
We'll see it tested in airports, university campuses, small towns at first in various incompatible guises over the next couple of decades. It'll end up everywhere.
Deleted
A tougher problem is upstream. Making sodium is gross and inefficient. It's done from brine (salt domes) the in old chlor-alkali process with mercury electrodes. This needs more [over]voltage 3.5V IIRC than hydrolysis. It is the voltage, and particularly the overvoltage needed to drive the process at industrial scales, that makes the process inefficient.
This is all a great idea except for one overlooked detail:
This special powder is only made in the middle east.
[obscure Get-Smart reference]
If you alternate the current, you just reverse the reaction.
Isn't hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe?
There was an article in the NY Times about the inventor of this. Apparently, it started out as his grandfather's idea for an air freshener. The original idea was to capture some kind of deodorizer in the silica gel which would be released when dissolved in the toilet. The grandfather envisioned naming the product "Plop and Drop"
Wikipedia for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen says that:
...and there are enormous deposits of methane hydrates (frozen slurries of ice and methane) at the bottom of the oceans. If someone would develop an economical way to mine and recover this stuff, the methane could be used directly to fuel piston engine vehicles. Methane has an "octane" rating of about 130, making it an excellent fuel for piston engines. It's also useable directly in many types of fuel cells in place of hydrogen to make electricity.
"Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas."
-FL
Sorry dude, [strike]you'll only get oxygen exhaust at the places that produce hydrogen. If you buy a sodium-silica stick/input pack then your vehicle will produce oxygen[/strike], but only as much as is used by the reacting hydrogen to produce power. So, the only output of your vehicle may be a spent sodium-silica pack, while all the water is recycled. (Naive hopes, probably the first ones will expect you to fill up with water too) But you probably won't get oxygen exhaust.
Ok. Scratch most of what I said about oxygen specifically. I wasn't thinking about the reaction at hand. The reason that the reaction of sodium/silica gel with water produces hydrogen is that they rip the oxygen off of the water. This means that your car will actually absorb 1 oxygen atom per water molecule or per hydrogen atom pair. and it will absorb yet another oxygen when the hydrogen is reacted.
Gravity Sucks
So, what is it? Is the process of mining, refining, fabricating, combining, dissociating, and transporting all off this stuff net-energy-positive, or are we just shifting the burden. The latter, of course, as this is just a storage mechanism.
It seems like we're doing an awful lot of work, in terms of energy in, to get hydrogen in a form that can be stored, transported, and used. I'm sure batteries produce lots of crap too, but what are the relative effects, and does this particular process scale to global proportions? Seems like a pretty low yield (9%) with a lot of unsavory byproducts produced.
(Of course, this doesn't even meniton my normal "hydrogen is a bad thisg to give to consumers" rant. Example: 2 rednecks, a trashcan liner, a full tank of hydrogen, and a lighter.)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I guess I can take the Bussard Ramjet off the front of my Pontiac.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Ah typical academics! (I am one I should know). What would the be done with the tons of flesh dissolving sodium hydroxide by-product generated as part of this fuel cell? How would the sodium hydroxide be contained in the event of an accident? Sodium hydroxide is extremely hazardous stuff and that's not lye.
Being a Physicist, I swear I remember in undergraduate classes learning that the reason there is no Hydrogen in the atmosphere, is because at what are considered normal temperatures Hydrogen has enough kinetic energy such that it has escape velocity. It just flies into space. ;)
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
- Gasoline
- Ethanol (a.k.a. Alcohol)
- A combiation of Gasoline and Ethanol, at any ratio
- Natural Gas
While Gasoline and Natural Gas are fossil fuels, ethanol comes mainly from corn (here in US) or sugar cane (Brazil). Renewable, clenaer sources of energy. Check out:Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
1) The most common source of hydrogen is hydrocarbon reforming, done at oil refineries. It's the only economically viable method for bulk quantities. Thus, hydrogen energy is currently dependent on fossil fuels.
.
2) You cannot electrolyze pure water -it's a poor conductor. You need some salt, or other electrolyte. Even then, the amount of electrical energy that goes in is less than the energy value of the hydrogen that comes out. And guess where most of the electricity comes from . .
3) Sodium metal causes a fire when dropped into water because of the hydrogen it releases. The activation energy for the reaction between oxygen and hydrogen is very low, and the heat released from the sodium metal - being converted into sodium hydroxide (aka lye, or Drano)- is more than sufficient to cause the reaction (fire).
4) Sodium metal is made by electrolyzing molten sodium chloride (table salt). A very expensive, energy consuming reaction, not to mention nasty (it releases chlorine gas, also).
5) The amount of energy released when an electron is stripped from a sodium atom is the same, whether it's in water or in silica.The energy is either converted to heat or to some other form of energy. Ever hear of conservation of energy (or mass/energy for nuclear reactions)? Unless they've developed something that can do what the transporters and replicators on Star Trek do, the enrgy is still going somehwere. Entropy demands it, otherwise we'd have perpetual motion machines, and ebergy would not be an issue.
6) Mediating the reactivity of alkalai metals is nothing new - that's what amalgams do.
This story does not deserve the attention it has already received.
MM
Is that silicate gel stuff re-usable? If so, then clearly the arguments against it lose a lot of validity. --Namely, that since it takes lots of energy to fabricate the gel, it is therefore not as efficient as hydrogen initially appears.
-FL
More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat.
I can't wait for the day when science writers actually know a tiny bit about their covered subject. Now, I'm no chemist (actually, holy cow, I AM!) but it seems to me that neither silicon nor sodium is hydrogen, so the powder is not being converted. It may be consumed by the reaction, but not converted. I teach this concept in general chemistry - it's called conservation of mass. I also see it taught in 7th grade public school classrooms. (Perhaps we should revisit the education reform posting of a few days ago...)
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
over it, this produces hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Now, as to how to remove the CO, i have no clue, but i am sure someone has figured it out. Obviously passing it over a catalyst will also affect the hydrogen produced.
i am so very tired....
2Na + 2H2O -> 2NaOH + H2
Sodium metal plus water yields sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. The sodium metal is oxidized and half the hydrogen in the water is reduced.
they're only harvesting it.
Everyone sing along! Proton connected to the, 'lectron... electron connected to the...
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
Iceland already has this mythical Hydrogen economy in place, their free and abundant thermal energy allows them to use the most inefficient process there is to extract hydrogen from water and still they come out ahead. Don't be surprised if OPEC ends up buying the country just before the supply of oil runs out.
If you're going to have to offload used silica-stuff anyway, you might as well use zinc.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
There has been a few studies recently that show that even if ethanol was the best solution and had, say the same efficiency as petrol for running your car, producing the quantities we need would mean that more than 100% of all arable land has to be used.
:
:d =190&catid=66 _ SeparatingFactFromFiction.pdf
Not wanting to spend my life eating artificial meat and artificial vegetables because you use all the good land to grow fuel, if would take it well if you started right now looking for another solution...
Look, on one hand you have this
"The results clearly identify that ethanol outperformed conventional and reformulated gasoline with respect to energy use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions"
http://transtech.anl.gov/v3n3/greet.html
And on the other those data
http://earthtrack.net/earthtrack/index.asp?page_i
http://www.cleanairchoice.org/outdoor/PDF/Ethanol
Now make your own mind...
P.S. You are actually proposing we use high-proof booze for fuel ? Yeah, right...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One can argue the practicality, but not the existence. (I believe there were a number of hybrid cars built as academic exercises, for "energy crisis" competititions, etc. but I can't list them off the top of my head. Of course, none were production models.)
Most other countries have very different cities and architecture. The low density of American suburbia makes it extremely difficult to serve with mass transit (there are no masses to serve), and traffic gridlock makes buses just as slow as cars even before you add in the waits for arrival and transfers. A huge increase in mass transit in the USA is a pipe dream.Sustainability and energy independence essay
All you need is one photon (light) and one electron (electricity). Slap them together, and you have hydrogen. Simple.
continuous rotation electric power generator-- 300,000 km, o petrol/liter, just compressed air
Orontes Corporation
The problem with public transit is that they let the public on it.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
"The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water"
think of all those wasted hours !
I wake up get mostly dressed late on the way to work.
At the stop light I grab the toothbrush.
Squirt a thin line of paste on it and start brushing while waiting for the light to change.
When my car explodes in a brilliant blue flame and I win the first Darwin award for Brushing and not flossing with the new "Hydrogen paste" my wife picked up.
Man commits suicide in rush hour traffic by self immoliation with Hydrogen paste! Film at Eleven!
Currently hydrogen electrolysis can exceed 90% efficiency, so there's not a lot of room for improvement in the real world.
Actually Atlanta is horrible for bikes, walking, and has really crappy public transportation called Marta (I hate them with a passion). It's one of the faster growing cities out there and has more people than say Philadelphia (where I live now) and it seems that Philly has more bike lanes and Septa seems to be quite better although the Subways don't really go anywhere really that great.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Basically when they refine the engines down enough it will have the ability to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, store it, burn it, and recover the resulting waste (water) back to the tank with minimal loss of fuel.
If hydrogen is hard to transport then why not just put the water and the sodium in the car and make the hydrogen on the fly in the car itself?
However, I would suspect this might take a larger fuel tank of water than you can put in a car and require one to dump out waste of used up water rather than burn it off.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Not mentioned was that sodium is produced by electrolysis of molten salt, which is utterly energy inefficient!! And that electricity comes from...
I'm sure plenty of "Hydrogen Economy" morons with hail this as some wonder technology that justifies all their engineering illiteracy and ignorance of thermodynamics!
They could use hydrogen producing bacteria in huge vats.
Like some farms collect methane from bacteria in pig feces.
No, you have the poisoned fish problem. And the "crumpled air factory" problem - the sea is where most of our oxygen is generated, and lots of other pollution is sunk or harmlessly degraded. The results of nuking the seas are a horrible "ripple" effect through the rest of our lives. And of course the total nuke plant supply chain is extremely expensive to build, maintain and secure, even in fuel costs.
How about harnessing the 1KW:m^2 solar energy incident on ocean water? Most of the equator is open water. We could solar-electrolyze enough hydrogen every day to feed us for weeks. Without using up any resources, although eventually we'll have to deal with "entropy pollution" - direct warming through industrial output. The money put into building the huge array of necessary nuke plants, redirected into solar nanotech films, would hand us floating H2 factories that pose little threat to the environment, at a much higher scale of net energy surplus.
--
make install -not war
Amazing how fast we all discount technology, while we read about it here.
While reforming is the current preferred approach, another route is high-heating of water so that the H disassociates. It has been shown to be economical with a nuclear reactor. IIRC, it was here just a bit ago.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1: I can electrolyze pure water using renewable sunlight and solar cells.
2: This process leaves a waste product to deal with.
But other than that...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Oh Great ... Instant bomb ... Just add water.
So, other than the water/powder confusion other posters pointed out (hydrogen comes out of the water not the silica), I suppose that "9 percent of a kilogram gets converted" means that only .009 percent of a gram gets converted?!
yeah, what are u talking about that atlanta has more people than philly. philly is the 5 th largest city behind nyc chicago la and houston. i don't think atlanta even comes close.
The cops and the fire dept. busted me when I was a kid for making hydrogen by reacting aluminum foil with liquid Draino! Of course, what pissed them off was the fact that I was using the hydrogen to fill up balloons that I would float up with a lit string attached, so they would explode, mid-air, into fireballs!
The best part about this story is that I had learned how to do this nefarious act step by step, in school from a gonzo science teacher!
This process appears to use more energy than it delivers. This lowers pollution how? Seems to me it not only increases it, it just moves it to another location.
It's a chemical reaction. The Sodium combines with Water and sucks up all the oxygen (and half of the hydrogen). What you end up with is a mix of lye (sodium hydroxide) and whatever else is in the silica gel they have. If they have a way to extract the lye from the gel, then the gel could be reused in the next sodium-gel mix, and the lye could be reused as well (lye is hella useful in all sorts of industries).
The real problem here is where you get the sodium from. Usually you get it by melting salt down and using electrolysis to separate out the chlorine. Not particularly green, because that power comes from somewhere, and the chlorine is a big pollutant, so you have to store it or use it for something.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
BeiJing is one of the oldest cities in the world and it has been updated to handle bicycle traffic. The traffic in BeiJing is really bad but, on major roads, a person on a bicycle never needs to cross traffic. When one gets to an intersection the cars and trucks go up to an overpass and the bicycles go down to a circle. Riding a bike in BeiJing is very easy.
So, we have the means to make the hydrogen. We also have vehicles (mainly demonstration models) which can run on the hydrogen. Although at this point, I must interject that fuel cells are not the way to go - hydrogen fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst - do the math on how many people in the US have vehicles and how much platinum a fuel cell requires, and how much platinum is available worldwide, then ask yourself if such fuel cells are viable in the long run. Fuel cell vehicles are not the answer, but directly "burning" the hydrogen can be, we just need a way to store it in an easy form to get it in a car. You can't simply put it into a tank made of any material - hydrogen simply migrates through the material (it is one of the reasons why water is such a good solvent) - it turns steel brittle over time. Plus, in order to get a good volume/energy ratio, you have to store it as a liquid - and it is a very, very cold liquid. I can't ever imagine a homeowner having a car carrying liquid hydrogen parked in their garage. Most people aren't even intelligent enough to manage proper handling of gasoline, let alone liquid hydrogen.
So - you need a different storage mechanism. This one mentioned in the article proposes to use sodium, which we already know is an inefficient transfer medium. What else could be used? One company (whose website seems to be down, or they are not in business anymore) proposed to use hydrides to store the hydrogen - their name was Powerball Technologies, and they supposedly had a working product (IIRC, back when they first announced this several years back, GM had a demonstration vehicle running on the system). What wasn't clear was how much energy it took to convert the hydrogen into hydride - it might have been as ineffient as the methods mentioned in the article we're discussing.
Wait - don't we already have a method of storing hydrogen in a dense form, that we use everyday? Remember what gasoline is made out of - long hydrocarbons chains. Perhaps the answer is here? Maybe instead of trying to use hydrogen directly - we should look at methods to take pure hydrogen and carbon, and form hydrocarbons. A system in which you could put hydrogen and carbon in one end, and get hydrocarbon based fuels out the other - could be the ideal method. It would probably take a lot of energy input, but perhaps that energy could come from solar power (ie - a solar furnace or something similar). The hydrogen could come from huge algae bioreactors (if they can get them working better for industrial use). The carbon could come from the atmosphere (CO2). Vehicles could use this fuel (which would end up being something like gasoline - could even be identical to gasoline, maybe - this may help with the answer) - such a fuel might even burn cleaner than today's gasoline, it might even work in current engines. Perhaps we can sequester the carbon monoxide output for recycling back to the refineries making the stuff
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Ok here is a major hint to the leaders of Mexico...
Nuclear power plant, Gulf of Mexico == Hydrogen. Ship it to all the countries that don't want or have nuclear. Become new major energy provider...
Oh - this would be interesting to see happen in my lifetime...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'm sick of people trying to find ways to punish others for the way they want to live. At least in America, it's obvious that millions of people want to be spread out and don't want to live on top of each other in cities. The 'American Dream' of owning a home is still valid even as prices skyrocket so fewer young people can get there.
I think the problem with suburbs is not that the population is so spread out, but actually that there are not -enough- downtown centers. As the formerly rural space between towns starts to fill up with McMansions, it's too bad that zoning boards don't allow (and perhaps encourage) new commercial centers to form at the town borders. Then, those comfy suburbanites would not have to fill up the overburdened roads leading to the 'old' town center just for a gallon of milk or a trip to the post office.
Way way back when towns were founded, a distance of 5 to 10 miles from town to town probably made sense. Even into the late 20th century, the population on the outskirts of a town was fairly low, so there weren't that many people driving long distances to the town center. Now, the towns where I live are facing the prospect of 100% build-out of developable land (at least I hope people realize that's where we're headed). Since so many people just don't want to move to the commerce, I think the solution is to move the commerce out to them.
By the way, I happen to be somebody who has never commuted into a city to work. I live in the suburbs and work in the suburbs. No it's not ideal for finding a public transit solution, but it means that I neither suffer from nor contribute to the congestion of the city. I don't understand why the people who scream about sprawl seem to assume that all jobs are in the cities, and that every last surburbanite is stuck in traffic at rush hour. There are alternatives.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
You guys in Australia have stockpiles of nuclear resources, uranium and thorium (which can easily be transformed into Uranium in a nuclear reactor). That's probably the reason they're pursueing hydrogen down there!
Once cleaner diesel fuel starts rolling in look out!
you mean like biodiesel?
The guys at Adnavance Technologies are working on an artificial method of photosynthesis to produce hydrogen cells. They use special "mDNA" molecules as nanotransistors. Don't ask me how it works!
Look, the only way to make hydrogen is to take one proton, hold it very still, then throw one electron at it with exactly the right velocity so it goes into orbit.
You're talking about extracting it.
And if you want lots and lots of hydrogen, just warm your planet up a few more degrees C -- the methane hydrates I've placed all around your coastlines will bubble out as gas. You'll have enough hydrogen to change the atmosphere completely.
To me, and many others, buying a car for fuel economy is like buying a computer for low electrical consumption.
You hit the nail on the head with that. It's a smaller market, but you can't tell me that low electrical energy consumption doesn't matter to notebook or palmtop users desperate for battery life, or datacenters at the edge of their cooling capacity. You might say it's an environment of sorts driving that demand.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
What percentage of 10 kilograms? Aren't percentages usually independent of units used? I can't beleive the process can only be used on exactly 1 kilogram at a time...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's cool that they figured this out, but it's not like sodium is an abundant or renewable resource. Electrolysis just requires energy which you can get from anywhere.
not everything is a science experiment!
If they need to electrolyze seawater to make the sodium, then all is for naught.
Oh well, what the hell...
I think I'm going to be ill. This is why "u no wut i ment!!!" is not an acceptable excuse for shit language skills: eventually, you stop noticing that you're not actually saying anything, and the rest of us are put to the extra work of shooting you and finding a place to hide the body.
Lots of people think OPEC is a cartel designed to artificially raise the price of oil. This may hav been true in the 70's, but it's not true now. Now, OPEC's main function is to keep the price of oil below $50/barrel, because the oil nations know that the higher the price of oil, the more attractive alternative feul technologies become.
They want to get as much per barrel of oil as possible, but NOT so much that people start spending money on ways to use less oil. OPEC is just as scared of high gas prices as the rest of us - so much so that they've aleady set the production quotas for each of the member countries so high that they've all pretty much maxed out their production.
The real problem, though, isn't PRODUCTION capacity - it's REFINING capacity. That's the bottleneck, that's where the higher gas prices are coming from, and that's something OPEC doesn't really have any control over. Problem is that building new refineries is EXPENSIVE, and takes a long time, and ultimately just lowers the price you can charge for the oil produicts you're refining.
paintball
That's funny, I remember being taught that hydrogen is so light that it will escape from the atmosphere...but I guess that means it can accumulate above the atmosphere? Another poster mentioned it's extreme reactivity, I guess it would react rapidly with ozone.
There are two things that are necessary for making a car "go":
You need some energy for the engine, and you need some way to store that energy in a manner that you can PUT IN THE CAR.
You can't simply say that coal->electricity->hydrogen->electricity->kinetic is always worse than coal->electicity->kinetic. That' doesn't tell the whole story. The whole story is:
(something)->electricity in power grid->hydrogen in fuel tank->kinetic energy from combustion engine
vs.
(something)->electricity in power grid->electricity in batteries in car->kinetic energy from electric engine
Is there an extra effeciency penalty for going from electricty to hydrogen to engine instead of electricity to engine? Sure. But there's also an effeciency penalty in lugging around a ton of batteries in your car. For the whole process, converting electricity to hydrogen and back may be more efficient than trying to store electricty in batteries in the car, depending on how good we get at making hydrogen and how good we get at making batteries light.
paintball
I was under the impression, that the most common way comercial Hydrogen is harvested is from the processing of Natural and LP gas?
First my bias: I am a chemical engineer with a few years experience designing refineries and chemical plants. I am currently an equity analyst--it is partly my job to be up to date on trends that affect oil and natural gas consumption.
Now some facts:
- Hydrogen is not not not not made from electrolysis, because that would be stupid. It's made from reforming methane (passing high temperature steam and methane across catalyst) in an endothermic (ie, energy-consuming) reaction.
- The vast majority of hydrogen produced in North America is consumed near the source at oil refineries, to "crack" the heavy oil fractions into gasoline. In other words, hydrogen is an intermediate chemical in the methane-to-gasoline value chain.
- There is no commercially competitive process to produce hydrogen. The DOE is investigating nuclear-to-hydrogen, but that's about it for non-fossil hydrogen generation.
- Electricity is either primarily fossil fuel (in North America) or nuclear (in Europe and Japan). Pick your poison, but don't pretend that electrolysis is clean.
Now for some opinions:
- The "hydrogen economy" is a stupid expression. As time has passed, society's energy needs have been met by progressively less carbon and progressively more hydrogen (wood to coal to oil to natural gas). This is a continuing evolution, not an end state.
- The methane transportation infrastructure cannot be co-opted to transport hydrogen, because of metallurgical and chemical reasons... hydrogen has a fraction of the energy density per unit volume of methane. Metallurgically, hydrogen is extremely challenging and even today results in explosions and fires.
-The lower energy density of hydrogen (compared with methane) means higher compression costs and lower transportation efficiency. This is non-trivial.
There is too much wasted natural gas in the world to even contemplate manufacturing hydrogen by another process. Once oil and natural gas prices start moderating (and they will, it's just a matter of when), it will be even harder to compete.
So you can stay hopeful about hydrogen fuel cells divorcing you from relying on dead dinosaurs, but you're living a fantasy. Your energy is better served in turning the lights out, slowing down, and STOP DRIVING SUVs!!
Seriously....the lack of quality that Slashdot has degraded to is getting out of control.
After this article...maybe I'll try just ignoring Slashdot or a week or so...read Ars Technica and Tomshardware.
In the beginning Slashdot was pretty cool...Now it's not so cool
American cities are not static objects, they are in flux constantly. Designing or redesigning a city doesn't really imply ceasing one product and replacing it with another (like, say, redesigning a car or stereo). Rather it's more a statement of in which direction the constant flux should be influenced. Influence can exerted by tax incentives, zoning laws, public/private partnerships, and public works projects.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction.
Take wind generator ratings with a grain of salt. The industry standard is to use the absolute *maximum* power output, which is usually at something like 50 mph winds. This is done because the most important feature of a wind generator is that it not overheat and melt at high speeds.
At average wind speeds (10-12 mph) you'll only be getting a tenth of the maximum rating. Especially poor designs won't even turn in a low breeze. So if you're not careful, you make a lot of power at high winds, but you'd essentially be trying to store it all between hurricanes.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yeah, if you look it up online it's rather deceptive.
It's one of those things that you sort of notice when you live there. According to most info sites Atlanta has about 500,000 people in Atlanta proper. Which is actually quite small, but if you count the area out side of Dekalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and various other counties withing in the interstate loop and on the outskirts of 285, you have about 2 million + people in the area all going too and from Atlanta. Now this is subject to debate even with people from the area saying that you must havea 404 area code or live within 285 even though people living in Norcross say they live in Atlanta.
Now the reverse is for Philly. There is about 1.4 million people living in Philly. However, I encounter quite less traffic on the 4 lane highways here vs the 10 lane highways than I would in Atlanta. Maybe more people cars down there... I dunno, but there are actually more people moving too and from the city in Atlanta.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Q: What do ER doctors call motorcycle drivers and passengers?
A: Organ donors.
Why do you lefties always want to "require" industry to do things. If people want to pay $3/gallon to fill up their SUV, let them. If you want a high mileage car, go buy one. If you want a city that is "good for walking" go build one and entice people to live in it.
I used to own a V8 car that got worse gas mileage than the Hummer 2 in city driving, and you know what, it was the greatest thing I've ever owned in my entire life.
The earth isn't yours. You did not pay for it. There's no special thing to protect that gives you the right to dictate the way I live my life. If you want to save some scorpions and rats, go ahead and buy some land and raise scorpions and rats.
This is my sig.
If they had a genuine battery that could be charged in 60 seconds and drive 300 miles, someone would be selling it. But they don't have that battery.
This is my sig.
... silicon gel ......
the thng looks more like another investor trap.. ... an dso near to real use with cell phones ... investor's worst nightmare of the battery running out just when that gold quote ticks by ...
targeted audience, he?
Sure, 9# are transformed to whatever...
91# are then what, garbage? hazardous waste?
I won't mind the cell phone power, just the trolley with the hydrogene generator .... very difficult to get that on the plane....
Someone refresh my memory on something. I read or watched something a while ago discussing how to get fuel for hydrogen engines.
Someone somewhere offered methane as a source of fuel. And the methane would come from algae's "resperatory system" while they fed on sewege and breaking it down. I remeber there being a lot of happiness over this as it solved two problems.
Can someone explain this further to me?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Michael Moore is a great man. You are a Bush-lover. I mean George Bush, not the kind of bush that slashdot members rarely see.
Bush was a load Barbara should've swallowed.
Something smells funny here... and it ain't the hydrogen. This Na-Si powder sounds like it must be pretty energy-intensive to make, so exactly what's the point? Expending all that energy just to create a stored chemical energy source, from which combusting it one gets back only a fraction of the input energy used to create that stored potential energy in the first place?
Yep, that sure sounds sustainable to me.
That's entirely possible, but its chemical properties will remove it long before it reaches that height. You see, our atmosphere is a bit atypical in that it contains oxygene, which pretty much reacts with anything, and certainly with hydrogen.
1) There is a company that makes an ammonia fuel cell but I can't remember the name of it.
p ?id=start
....... well you just have to see for yourself on this one.h tm
We can enslave bacteria that make ammonia for less cost than most other things.
2) The first thing we should think about is trying to recover the CO/CO2 and NOx being emitted by vehicles right now. I've seen a patent on this which basicly has you actively grinding up soft iron wire and throwing it into the exhaust stream while your car is running to capture the S, NOx & CO/CO2 by turning it to siderite, foolsgold, rust, and Fe3C. This would take a lot of iron but the advantage is that after that you are left with hot water, N2 that wasn't invloved in anything, and some hydrogen. Any leftover NO would get reacted with hydrogen to make ammonia. So maybe it is possible to have a hybrid vehicle with an ammonia fuel cell hooked up to your car exhaust that gets its feedstock from your exhaust.
3) There is a guy that just showed an overunity hydrogen device to the UN secretary general
http://www.gifnet.org which is just recirculating the hydrogen over and over again and working off of a little technical detail regarding the difference in Tunsgten and hydrogen temperature reactions (or something like that).
4) There is a company called Alternate Energy Corporation
http://www.cleanwatts.com/default.as
which also has a catalyst that makes hydrogen at very good efficeincy that is "on tour" right now demonstrating their alloy that they say is made from very cheap elements. The big mystery is what is it made of.
5) Milleniumcell also is doing this "hydrogen from water on demand" thing but they use borax and a catalyst. They have signed a deal with DOW (yep that's DOW Chemical Corp.) to take their customers used borax and recycle it.
6) Genesis Scientific which is very controversial, but they also claim amazing hydrogen power from water which
http://www.genesis-scientific.org/newsroom.
I think the point about using hydrogen is about energy freedom and diversity and trying to bypass the CO2 thing. The oceans will become acidic from all this CO2 in the next couple hundred years if we don't start diversifying from oil.
auto makers and oil companies would lose out
right now because of patents, and in fifteen years
when the patents expire they'll continue to provide us with cars and oil, i mean hydrogen
Trials are underway to stuff carbon back into the drilling holes instead of releasing it into the air. That shuld keep oil and natural gas CO2 emmission close to zero for power plants.
... that's no great surprise.]
I take it that you refer to the CO2 reinjection on the Slepnir platform? It is the only commercially active one that I'm aware of (but I work for a living drilling holes in the ground, so what would I know?)
The Slepnir program has to separate CO2 from the gas at the wellhead for 2 reasons - the reservoir produces about 9% V/V CO2 (unusual in itself for a non-carbonate-hosted field - probably an indication of substantial bacterial degradation of the hydrocarbons. I'd be interested to get the MS sicced onto that); and the export lines mix in with other fields output before they make landfall. The CO2 production from the reservoir means that the CO2 must be reduced in the exported gas at some point, because gas with over 2% V/V CO2 attracts a seriously decreased price. (Americans reading this should reprogram themselves to read "gas" in the sense that the world does, not their local dialect) But almost universally, that processing would be cheaper and easier to do onshore (compared to offshore). The fact that other fields feed into the Slepnir export lines downstream from Slepnir however means that the fines for contaminating their output and the increased processing costs ashore bump the cost-benefit in favour of processing it at the rig.
How marginal this cost-benefit calculation is you can tell from the fact that the tax benefit from disposing of the CO2 down a cuttings re-injection well (instead of venting it to atmosphere) is only $140,000 per day. That would be in the region of 5 or 10% of daily costs. Appreciable, but not in itself urgently compelling.
[I'll flesh those figures a bit : A conventional cuttings re-injection plant needs a running crew of 3 on day shift and 2 on nights, so for permanent plant you'd need to account for about 4 staff on the permanent crew of the rig (~$4000/day bed-night costs, plus ~$3000 a day wages); add in the costs of their onshore relief crews (Norway works 2+3+2+4; 2 weeks on-rig, 3 off-rig, 2 on, 4 off. If you want to argue about it, go stand for Parliament in Norway - you'd lose.) and you're running standing costs of around $10,000/day. Now, the intermittently running CRI (Cuttings Re-Injection) plants that I work with routinely have about a 20% downtime, but for continuously operating plant on a vapour input that's going to be lower. Say 10%. Factor another couple of thousand a day averaged for the costs of spares, spares fitting, spares storage and spares shipping. In the order of 10% of your tax savings are eaten up by the running costs of your equipment for the savings. And if the tax regime changes, the running costs won't. That make it a comparatively marginal investment. But since Statoil have been quite public about making this a public experiment in developing the technology
Incidentally, I see that some of the reports on this field are saying that the re-injection is into the "Utsira" reservoir. This is not the producing horizon for this field (I think it's a combination of Statfjord group and Brent group; below the X unconformaity for certain); it's at about 1/3 of the depth of the producing horizons. This is one of the things that concerns some environmental campaigners - the Utsira, in this area, has never had a cap rock sufficiently competent to contain hydrocarbons or CO2 (in other areas the Utsira is a producing reservoir; but not here). Consequently there are good grounds to believe that the residence time of the CO2 in the formation will be shorter than the geological timescale which other people shout about. The estimate of 100,000 years containment might sound impressive, but since the records of the LPTM indicate that blast of global warming took more than 120,000 years to return to "normal" climate after the discharge of the "hydrate capacitor". So, a containment of 100,000 years would simply be lengthening the duration of the problem (anthropogenic atmosphere modification), not a cure for the problem.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
This said, I'll let you savvy people in on the future. The cars of the future are going to be several generation advanced hybrid cars. They will be flexible fuel hybrids that you can directly charge with your house's power. They will also be augmented with solar panels on the roof, which will also be used to charge the batteries.
Don't sound so smug. Other people have been to Epcot too.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Sorry, this was a stupid post, it knocked me back to +1. I thought it would be funny, but it wasn't. I know hydrogen is as safe or safer then petrol. Sorry again.