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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.'
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.
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!
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)
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.
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?
They're not making hydrogen.
Yes they are... they're taking a bunch of protons and putting them together with a bunch of electrons.
They're just gathering the stuff that was formed at the start of the universe
There wasn't any hydrogen in the early universe; it didn't form until about half a million years later, once the temperature of the universe had dropped to around 3000K.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Seriously though, using water directly might not yield as much H but it is a much simpler process. If a nuclear plant is built then the electricity and distilled water is all you need to get some hydrogen. With this company's process you have to get the sodium from somewhere, then the silica gel. Anyone know of any pure sodium lingering around ready to be picked up, what about silica gel. All those chemicals need to be prepared, the energy to do so might as well be used to electrolize waterp. I personally would like to see more nuclear power plants being built in this country. Then we can use the electricity anyway we want.
"...if you're a dumb creationist."
You've repeated yourself.
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.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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.
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.'
if i only had some mod points... you have, good sir, embiggened us all with your cromulent analysis.
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
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?
Because much of it happens to be in places from which it is rather difficult to obtain it, such as in stars. Even here on earth the hydrogen happens to be bonded with oxygen, therefore we must seperate them first.
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).
Old school con, and very dangerous. By alternating the current, you will be generating oxygen and hydrogen at both ends, and it will recombine to release the energy you've put in through electricity immediately.
not so good fo return trade if you're ripping them open for that.
Liquefied Natural Gas is shipped in specialised tankers with a row of enourmous domes.
they look pretty cool.
here's one I prepared earlier.
(ok, i just googled it then)
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
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."
Seriously, I wondered about this. Because TFA says deprecatingly of methanol fuels cells that "methanol is flammable". And I thought, uhuh, these guys have invented non-flammable hydrogen, WTF good is that in an automotive engine?
OK cheap jokes out of the way, the process may be intended to combine hydrogen generation and re-absorption within one "closed cycle" container. Seems to me they might have a better chance of a prize to get the electrons directly off the sodium and eliminate hydrogen from the whole process...
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!
Well, according to BMW, hydrogen fueled cars are actualy safer than common gas fueled ones.- 2002/22966.html
http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/hydrogen/report_6
Ni.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, Hydrogen gas has chemical formula H2, and this is neither the same as, nor part of H20 or polycrystalline Na. So the claim to have created hydrogen gas is valid.
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"
This thread is so puerile.
Seriously though, this whole thread is refreshingly optimistic. Let me be the pessimist: it isn't just inefficiency that will stop the advent of this new technology. The oil industry is keeping a lot of powerful people rich, who could give a flip about anything new or better. It also gives a seemingly great reason for the US to exert its global muscle.
Now I want to respond seriously to the Anonymous Coward who frowns on the use of the word pedantic. Some of us have a vocabulary, something that's good for self expression. It does not make us pricks, we are not speaking with condescension (well you know, some of us). I really get riled when someone lashes out at another because they say "whom" or because they don't otherwise contribute to what is, in my opinion, the language being dumbed down.
If the Family Guy can get a new word out to the masses, then I applaud it (moreso). Screw you, consciousness shrinker.
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?
ethanol (AKA alcohol) doesnt take more energy than it produces to make.
...
1- crush sugar cane
2- burn the pulp leftp to produce steam power to drive the crusher
3- ferment sugar cane dip
4- distil the result of fermenatation using whatever is left from the pulp to heat the distiler
5- let the next sugar cane crop capture the carbon spilt in the atmosphere
6-
7- PROFIT!!!
this business model is what drives a considerable part of brasilian cars. my next car will sure be flex fuel, so i can choose between more power (with alcohol) or more autonomy (gasoline).
now, methanol i agree takes more power to produce than what it gives back when you burn it inside an engine
What ? Me, worry ?
As another alternate fuel - what about biodiesel?
I worked with a fuel company for a while, researching the possibility of introducing a bio-diesel blended fuel for trucks and heating. I'm fairly convinced that this will be one of those big milestones on the road to more environmentally friendly fuel. It's safer to handle, has a higher lubricity and cetane rating and reduces almost all the major emissions (except SO2). Not only that, but some of the newer manufacturing techniques really lower the impact of the manufacturing - using chemicals that can be reclaimed, room temp and pressure production etc. Plus, in low blends (~10%), you can stick it right into a diesel engine (at higher blends, usually the manufacturers get worried about warrently, and there may be some effect on certain types of rubber seals with really high blends). Not only that, but you can make it out of TONNES of stuff - we were working with soy based fuel, but we also had a bin of fuel from rendered animal fat. Not the greatest smelling stuff, and it wasn't as good as the soy, but they company we were working with was doing major reserach with a rendering plant - killing 2 birds with one stone - enviro-fuel and a way to recycle rendered fats. In fact, the most major problem to the introduction of these fuels is cost, and the gap between the bio (soy) diesel and the regular fuel is closing fairly rapidly. We managed to get to market for farm fuel with 2, 5 and 10% blends, and I think they're expanding those soon.
As the parent points out, hydrogen isn't the only alternate fuel out there, and it's a fairly long way off from being a viable source. Using stuff like ethanol and biodiesel would be an excellent first step, and would be way easier than transitioning to hydrogen, since the infrastructure is already in place. The current fuel prices are making this more viable than ever before.
...no two people are not on fire.
Before you make statements like that, you should consider how much water vapor is generated naturally on this planet. If we assume that on average 500cm of rain falls annually all over the earth, then 500l/m^2 of water must have been evaporated, mostly by solar energy. At 2260kJ/kg, that comes out to 5.8e23 joules of solar energy that goes into evaporating water annually. Since the human race currently uses only about 5e20 joules of energy per year, converting to all hydrogen would only create an extra amount of water vapor equal to about 1/1000 of the natural production.
Moreover, unlike CO2, water vapor easily condenses out of the atmosphere, and any problem goes away within a few days. It doesn't just keep building up.
- 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
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...
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
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