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"H-Prize" Announced
An anonymous reader writes " The House passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel creating the "H-Prize",allowing scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes. The Department of Energy would put together a private foundation to set up guidelines and requirements for the prizes. Anyone can participate, as long as the research is performed in the United States and the person, if employed by the government or a national lab, does the research on his own time.
Best political Quote: "If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create." said bill sponsor Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C."
Its not everyday the government asks us to do dangerous things outside our work time especially doing things with hydrogen. I wonder if the other departments have been notified of this homework assignment?
Splitting the atom at work is fun, getting to take work home is just a bonus.
Now, where's my chisel?
liqbase
That's good news - hopefully, it will spur private enterprises in a similar manner to the X-prize.
However, I really don't think this admistration seems too interested in ending dependance on foreign oil, when they electric and natural gas cars to the tune of $500+/year.
Hydrogen would be great & all, but what really needs to be done is to improve America's public transport infrastructure & encourage people to start using it. A gradual raising of gas taxes until pump prices are around $7/gallon, with the money raised being pumped into (free) public transport would achieve precisely that.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
BMW has been doing research on hydrogen powersince the 1970s, and they even have a nice 7-series sedan ready to drive.
Does BMW win anything for its ingenuity?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create."
oh and uh, it might help the environment or something too.
-- lol pwned
It wont. On Earth hydrogen is an energy storage and transport medium. Essentially, a battery. The energy has to be put into it first before it can be extracted. "Going Hydrogen" makes about as much sense from the energy saving standpoint as "Going Duracel."
Because of the Second Law, for the time being there will be a net increase in the use of fossil fuels by using hydrogen as a fuel, just as there would be a net increase in fossil fuel use if everything were run by batteries.
When the fossil fuels get expensive, hydrogen will get expensive. When the fossil fuel runs out hydrogen will be forced to become things like solar power and be in as short supply as all other forms of solar power.
The power of the power of fossil fuels is that they are the stored and concentrated solar energy of centuries, which you can use all up in a single trip to the mall. When they're gone you'll need to learn to walk again, i.e. use only as much stored solar energy (in the form of liver glycogen) as can be reasonably concentrated in a timespan relevant to the human lifetime.
KFG
Do people not realize that Hydrogen is like electricity, it's only an energy delivery mechanism? There are NO free sources of hydrogen around to tap, to the best of my knowledge. You have to generate the hydrogen somehow...from oil, coal, or some other energy source In the amount of time that this idea has been bantered about, I have come to the conclusion that no one understands this point, including the President and the Secretary of Energy.
The reason that things like solar, wind power, or geothermal and the like have ben discussed as energy SOURCES is that they are just that; ways of extracting energy from processes on the earth. Hydrogen is an energy TRANSFER MECHANISM, not a source.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
Hydrogen would require plants, specialized chargers, etc. Keeping control for ourselves are we?
Some "we the people" eh?
I wish some more of us would wake the hell up. The Matrix has you, boys and girls, and you're loving every moment of vying for a few scraps from its table.
Enjoy yourselves, oh mindless slaves, and keep vying for what they tell you to vie for. After all, you're free to decide for yourselves, not free to think for yourselves.
~DaedalusHKX
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
So initially we used coal to power steam engines. Why? Because there were literally tons of it laying underground. So we strip mined America for a couple centuries.
...
It's long been known that oil (petroleum or organic) would fuel fire. And it was discovered that refining it lowered it stability and made it explosive. But where was an abundance of oil? Why, also underneath the ground.
The fact of the matter is that our energy concerns can't be solved by anything that requires more energy to make (insert corn ethanol reference here) than it produces.
So now we need to figure out how to use hydrogen and many car companies have done that but the form that hydrogen abounds in is gas--not liquid. And most hydrogen powered cars require refilling a compressed hydrogen tank. But to make this hydrogen requires electricity and this electricity requires some fuel or energy to make in the beginning
I think the real challenge here should be "just hydrogen" as an alternative fuel but instead "anything we got a lot of lying around in a ready form."
My work here is dung.
I think this is a good idea, but in the end the H2 has to come from some where and Nuclear power is the only real answer. I just love to hear about the genuis's that build a town around driving around in Electric Golf cart so they don't have to have cars, but the forget that the whole town gets their power from the Coal plant down the road. If we did not have the 70s/80s scare tactics about Nuclear power, the power grid would be better and we could make a conversion to Hydrogen easier. I really have no true love for Nuclear power but it is the better option to get away from foreign oil. Personally I think getting away from foreign oil, whether it be with ANWAR or alternative energy, is the best for this country. OPEC could destroy this country in one move and that has nothing to do with Oil companies gouging us.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Now that we have loads of federal money, we can finally create thousands of jobs, we can create new technology that wouldn't be possible without the wisdom of central government, we can be more environment-friendly, and of course we have already chosen the One Good new fuel that deserves to be funded. This is our new three-year-plan.
For just $10M we get a guaranteed great technology, and if it doesn't work out as well, we can do as with public schools and other government programs: just increase funding incredibly, so the darn thing will get done!
That would be a direct violation of the DMCA's provisions on reverse engineering.
Did anyone else instantly think this was some sort of prize for creating outstanding Hentai? =/
Hydrogen is not a solution unto itself, as it is an energy storage medium, much as a battery is an energy storage medium. Hydrogen still has to be procured from: 1. Natural gas 2. Bio-mass 3. Electrolysis of water 4. Ethanol, etc. Hydrogen then has to be stored or transported & then stored: 1. At high pressure inside of highly stressed tanks (many thousands of psi) or 2. In tanks with metal hydride structures or similar at lower pressures Hydrogen then has to be transported in a system we don't currently have in place: 1. In underground moderate pressure pipes 2. In higher pressure tank trucks in some areas The cost and time necessary to implement the whole building project to store and deliver the Hydrogen system above is immense, as none of it is in place NOW. The cost of delivering equivalent amounts of energy to EVERY CITY in the U.S. right now is already in place. It is called the electric grid. Power Plants (regardless of the type of basic fuel or energy source, coal, hydro, nuclear) are not only large but thermally VERY efficient (about 3 times as efficent at "burning" fuel as an internal combustion engine). Thus in the end there are lots of tradeoffs, and these have been endlessly analyzed in the private & public and university sectors. Hydrogen does not seem like a cost effective method when the infrastructure costs and times are looked at realistically, otherwise a company would have started doing it to make money already. Politically it looks interesting for votes. Super efficient, cost effective batteries may be the only reasonable way to tap into the power of the national electric grid and provide effectively delivered "power" to automobiles of the future. That may be why there are so many dozens of labs in the U.S. alone attempting to perfect more efficient more cost effective batteries. Politics rarely leads the pack in inventive matters.
Oh, I think they understand it just fine. The Whitehouse administration has been in bed with the oil industry from the beginning. The whole 'hydrogen economy' promotion is just an attempt to make it look like they are taking action towards energy independance and alternative energy source development, as to divert interest/funds for alternative energy research towards their fossil-fuel industry cronies.
The most tragic thing about this whole scenario is that it diverts resources away from alternative energy source developments which could have an impact in the immediate to short term future (like wind, solar and hydro-electric power, gas electric hybrid cars, and energy conservation) in favour of a pipe-dream that even the proponents admit is decades away.
The administration is shameless
>Everyone is focused on everything except one. WHY is the government not looking
>at NON centralized NON corporatist methods of achieving alternative energy sources?
I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have long suspected that the fear of losing their deathgrip on the control of scarce energy resources has been driving huge government and business interests to make sure other, less centralized options are kept off the table.
Energy is a multi-billion dollar industry. What would happen to that industry if anyone could make their own fuel?
What if anyone could buy a bottle of Iogen's ( http://www.iogen.ca/ ) new cellulase enzymes at the grocery store, just like we buy Rid-X enzymes for our septic tanks, throw it in a trashcan in the backyard full of water and lawnmower clippings, and make their own ethanol?
What if anyone really could easily and rapidly convert water into hydrogen? (spare me the jabs on how easy electrolysis already is, please)
I'm no tinfoil-hat guy, but there are huge, huge interests that would be massively hurt by such innovations.
Lately I've been doing a lot of googling on biodiesel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel ), ethanol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol ), and even wood gas generators (pyrolysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis )
From what I've seen, most of these processes are fairly simple to do, even at home. I don't think these processes would take much more technical innovation to make simple, practical, cheap decentralized fuel production a reality.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Well Republican Bob, you seem to know that the patent system is so corrupted that it will no longer drive innovative research, elsewise why the prize? How about fixing that little problem for us instead of hamming it up for the press with stupid quotes about job creation (which by the way has been the slowest under this administration than anytime in the last 70 years.)
I think the answer to our energy issues is to have as many distributed forms of energy production as we can. Right now we are very depedent on one. If we have supply problems it causes issues. As well it causes a type of monopoly. There are many oil companies, but they all kind of work in concert given that they sell the exact same thing.
We need electrical cars, fuel cell cars, hyrodgen cars, ethanol cars, and a whole slew of others so that the open market can thrive. Cars themselves should run off different sources as well. Charge themselves with solar when available. If they sit outside have some small wind turbines. I'm sure there is a way to convert the energy of falling rain drops if we think about it hard enough.
The first argument is always that we have to retro fit all our gas stations. I don't understand why this is such a big deal. I think we have gotten so used to the centralized controlled gas industry that we have lost touch. If a new stick of gum comes out the stores put it on the shelf. I'm hoping alternate energies will start up a grass root movement of new gas stations that off all sorts of fuel alternatives. A little push from the goverment wouldn't help either.
What we end up with is like the coke\pepsi model. Coke produces the recipe, and then individual bottlers make it throughout the country. When you buy a coke it was probably made pretty close to you.
Lastly we need to think about ways to generate things like ethanol by using renweable sources like solar panels. They can collect solor energy slowing, but then use it to produce more explosive energy sources. Fuel cells can run off natural gas which is plentiful and then use that electricity to create the ethenol. For instance there are self running sewage plants that extract the methane gas and run it through fuel cells to power the plant.
Products just lying around are really easy to work with sure, but they are rarely clean and renewable.
If we team up different energy sources and create a more diverse "energy ecosystem" then we'll be better off.
"If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create."
Imagine what it'd do for the economy if they reinvented the wheel!
Of course they are spending more than this saving the owls. Do you know how combustable those things are? You can get back and forth to work for a week with the energy generated by burning just 2 gallons of owls. If oil bottoms out before some of these experimental technologies prove themselves, we'll still have our trusted spotted owls to fall back on.
They're there affecting their effect.
I'm not that old, but i just don't understand when morality became part of the equation when it comes to using energy? Is someone in Botswana that lives in a hut a better person than a bloke in Surrey who mows a lawn with an electric lawn mower? If so, i don't seem to understand it.
And honestly, I don't understand - well maybe i do - why it is that people get all flummoxed at the idea of removing human transport devices from the global warming equation. Yes, yes, for now, it is just pushing the problem up the chain, but is that the job of the car makers?
If a car is fairly efficient, and it is no longer spewing out global warming gasses - what the hell else do you expect car makers to do? Not everyone - some could - but not everyone could survive driving a euro golf cart around because it wouldn't hold kids or baggage, etc.
If the car manufacturers are going to make devices that can run 100% clean and are saleable to the public meeting demand, then if you ask me, its high time we start coming up with energy solutions that are not dependent upon unstable thocracies and kingdoms in the middle east, hockey playing blue-nosers in north america, or corrupt countires like Mexico and the rest of central America. The car makers hold up their end, its someone else's responsibility to hold up the other end.
And honestly, we see that China is - amazingly enough - going to lead the way with pebble-bed reactors... 1 for each city or more. It is utterly remarkable to me that a communist county has the stones to get this problem figured out while a country like the US is handcuffed by granola munching tree huggers... except for the founder of the Sierra Club... he gets it.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
In honour of Ian Dury.
Taken from "There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards"
Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frighten everybody shitless
Not entirely the case. You can obtain hydrogen from methane or other hydrocarbons, then burn it in oxygen for a net energy gain. But if you're doing that, then you might as well just burn the hydrocarbons, which is what we do anyway.
If you're extracting hydrogen from water, then all methods cost more energy than they produce - second law of thermodynamics. But this isn't necessarily a show-stopper. Suppose you have a nuclear breeder reactor. It's an very efficient source of energy, and can manufacture enormous quantities of hydrogen which can then be shipped around the country to fuel cars; or it can supply huge amounts of electricity to recharge hydrogen fuel cells, depending on which way we choose to run the hydrogen economy.
Despite the fact that you're wasting energy by electrolysing water to make hydrogen which you then burn back to water, there are benefits. All the pollution generated is in a single, probably remote location, rather than on the city streets. And if technology changes at some point, you can replace the nuclear reactors with new superefficient photovoltaics, or fusion, or microwave relay or whatever it may be, and you don't have to refit a quarter of a billion cars.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
WAY TOO SMALL. A JOKE.
This just goes to show how Congress is out of touch. Just what do they think a company is going to be able to do with 10 Million? No way that would cover the development costs. This is a joke, too bad the members probably don't know how rediculously low this is for the kind of manpower that is needed. A 500 Million prize might have a shot. 1 Billion and I could bring on the right people for long enough, and equip them - and I'm not talking thousands of staff. Hundreds, yes.
Just for perspective, the avg daily PROFIT, for Exxon Mobil, the 4th quarter, ended Dec 31, was $199.6 million, EACH DAY. Revenues were $1.09 Billion, per day. Each Day. Don't forget, there are two other oil companies almost as large as ExxonMobil - Royal Dutch Shell and BP (British Petroleum)
Exxon Mobil numbers for 1st Quarter: Profit: 173.6 per day, Revenue: 997.8 per day
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
I might be inclined to belive that if the government wasn't actively trying to block the research and developement of Hydrogen based cars as witnessed here.
This is complete and udder fud.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
When I heard that my university academic advisor had been arrested for protesting at a nuclear power plant, I just had to ask him why? He was, IMHO, a very savvy fellow and I was frankly surprised he would be against nuclear power. When asked, however, he replied: "I have nothing against nuclear power at all ... I have something against the idiots at TVA running a nuclear power plant."
This was <cough> some years ago. Chernobyl and Three-mile Island have since demonstrated his point.
Gasoline go BOOM!, too. Anyone remember the Molotov cocktail?
Battery go BOOM! There's a crazy guy in Australia who soups up Priuses in his spare time. Last year he made some miscalculations in the design of his homemade battery charger, and posted some pictures of the resulting explosion and fire that came close to burning his house down.
And of course cell phone battery go BLFSTSZT! burn-um-thighs make-um heap big personal injury lawsuit. But a cell phone battery the size of a gas tank would go BOOM!
Anything that can crams enough energy to propel a car hundreds of miles into a space the size of a gas tank can go BOOM! Heap smart medicine-man engineer have-um job keep-um genie bottled tightly when not in use.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
for solar energy solutions. One approach could be in efficiency improvements like this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/ 25/2050253&from=rss, but only if they are commercially viable.
An other approach could complement the H-Prize, which is to use solar to directly create hydrogen. A solution would be a complete package: hydrogen from solar for energy storage and a complementary fuel cell.
I don't know jack about why they cost what they do.
Because we have a fossil fuel economy and a great deal of fossil fuels are burned in their production.
It's all about oil, coal and natural gas.
When I ride my bicycle am going "oil free"? Well, how do you think the bananas I'm eating to fuel my bicycle got from Argentina to upstate NY, bicycle there?
KFG
One: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The people in politics run with the corporate jet set. Powerful people tend to congregate together - there's noting inherently insideous about that. Those who spend most of their time trying to figure out how to make money (corporate money, that is), look for corporate solutions. You don't expect a carpenter to figure out how to use steel to build a house cheaper, you expect him to figure it out with wood.
Two: Decentralized generation of fuel sounds like a really good idea, until you realize that most people are too stupid to do this stuff themselves in a safe manner. Half the people who aren't too stupid don't have the spare time. You have, in fact, a relatively small fraction of the population (I'm going to guess less than 2%) that have the time, space, and resources to generate and store reasonable quantites of fuel safely.
I mean, sure, I can create my own fuel at home, and given advances in technology, it might even be somewhat safe. But now you're looking at doubling or tripling the volume of flammable materials in a typical residential setting, and you're adding a large amount of fuel, pre-fuel, and potentially dangerous fuel byproducts that are being transferred on a regular basis. Think about how much gas an American family will go through in a week. With three drivers (two adults plus a teen or elderly live-in), it can easily top 20-30 gallons. Now, switch to ethanol - you're up to 32-40 gallons. You'll probably not want to generate every week, so lets say you run your still twice a month, and you'll never want to drop below 20 gallons or so, or you might run out. Now you've got 100 gallons of ethanol sitting in your garage, in addition to that in your autmotive tank. In a medium-to-high density area, I would consider that an apparent danger that most municipalities would tend to discourage.
While it may become viable for those with space, it remains wholly impractical for everyone else.
Third (Okay, I'm one issue over...sue me): you won't be able to produce it as cheaply, on a continuing basis, in your back yard. Sure, you can make a bit from your brush clippings, or buy the materials in bulk, but to really be efficient will require the leverage of a large operation. We can all make our own clothes, but we don't. We could all grow our own food, but we don't. It just isn't cost effective. In the end, making fuel at home won't be either.
Sorry to be a bummer about this, but while the idea works well on an individual scale, it just doesn't scale to the society level.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
somehow it won't seem the same moaning about the corruption among the executives of Big Owl
"In a nutshell there are two ways to get hydrogen commercially. The first is striping hydrocarbons. They're called hydrocarbons because it diverts your attention from the very obvious problem with this approach. Hydrocarbons are foriegn oil (more accurately natural gas, but it is the same problem.) Remind me again what the problem is that prompted us to look at alternative fuels."
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Or, you could use the Fischer-Tropsch process to make artificial gasoline and hydrogen AT THE SAME TIME.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_proc
"The mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is called synthesis gas or syngas. The resulting hydrocarbon products are refined to produce the desired synthetic fuel.
The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide is generated by partial oxidation of coal and wood-based fuels. The utility of the process is primarily in its role in producing fluid hydrocarbons or hydrogen from a solid feedstock, such as coal or solid carbon-containing wastes of various types. Non-oxidative pyrolysis of the solid material produces syngas which can be used directly as a fuel without being taken through Fischer-Tropsch transformations. If liquid petroleum-like fuel, lubricant, or wax is required, the Fischer-Tropsch process can be applied. Finally, if hydrogen production is to be maximized, the water gas shift reaction can be performed, generating only carbon dioxide and hydrogen and leaving no hydrocarbons in the product stream. Fortunately shifts from liquid to gaseous fuels are relatively easy to make."
But we'd still have to use hydrocarbons to make it right? Yes, coal actually, which the US has a larger reserve of than any other country in the world
http://www.geohive.com/charts/charts.php?xml=en_c
Upsides are continued petroleum production, and a consistent source of hydrogen during the transition away from fossil fuels. No dependence on foreign oil anyore either.
Downside is greatly increased CO2 production.
You haven't looked at all the alternatives.
They also demonstrated that an unmodified diesel engine will run quite nicely on filtered used French fry oil.
The problem is that although this is feasible right now, it's not really possible for widespread use and hydrogen will probably cost more and get less mileage than a gallon of gas right now. Unless we nuke Iran and gas shoots up to $8 a gallon, anyway. The french fry oil does have potential and we're pretty close to the right price point for various nifty diesel fuels to be competitive with gasoline.
They're talking about repealing the tax on gasoline, but I'd suggest taxing the bejesus out of gasoline and dumping the proceeds into alternate energy research. Especially solar and fusion.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You idiot, you drop them into the Mr Fusion, not the flux capacitor!
Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP
Which is why, along with the gas tax, there should be Gas Stamps. These would work like food stamps: you could use the gas stamps to pay for gas. Gas stamps would be given out to the same people who receive food stamps, so the added government bureaucracy would be minimal. With gas taxed to $7 a gallon, the government would have plenty of funds for the gas stamps.