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Crunching the Numbers on a Hydrogen Economy
mattnyc99 writes "In its new cover story, 'The Truth About Hydrogen,' Popular Mechanics magazine takes a close look at how close the United States is to powering its homes, cars and economy with hydrogen — including a calculation of where all the hydrogen would come from to meet President Bush's demands. Interesting that they break down the future of hydropower not by its advantages but by its challenges: production, storage, distribution and use."
With all the problems that hydrogen has, a good stop gap would come with the advent of an affordable fuel cell. With a fuel cell in each house, you could essentially generate hydrogen from water and electricity at night when the power plants are idling in inefficient speeds. During the day, you could do the opposite and generate electricity from the hydrogen generated the previous night. This would work well for shaving energy consumption during peak levels. With discounts for off-peak electricity, this sort of system could pay for itself while providing backup generator services as a side effect.
Then again, so would a huge flywheel or a bunch of batteries.
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Interesting that they break down the future of hydropower not by its advantages
I do not think it means what you think it means.
I thought we were talking about Hydrogen Power, not HydroPower. (water power) Or is this another Bushism?
Nope, looks like the submitter just has no idea what it means. Only reference to that in the article is an link to another article that does indeed talk about water power.
As far as 'where to get it'... I've always wondered where they thought they'd get unlimited amounts of any limited resource. We can't destroy the oceans for it, and we can't scoop it out of the sun. (At least, I think we can't.) The article talks about nuclear and fossil fuels... That's the problem we already have... How is this a solution?
We're going to have to sit down and decide to be responsible about the environment some day. We can't keep putting it off forever.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
replace element with compound and you have the same arguement for Petrol and Diesel.
easier to make a bomb with Diesel then hydrogen
Ohh the humanity.
Gasoline is so safe you can light it on fire and it won't explode.
Stupidity IS more abundant than hydrogen after all...
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Not a single mention of Iceland in the article, I guess it is only an option if it is a 'Made In The USA' thing.
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
Having hydrogen piped to your house would be, well really really fun. a few old weather balloons and a bow and arrow with a flaming end.
Well at least they are looking at it..... right?
With oil running out in +/- 43 years we are already started very late to start working on good solutions. I think that we, in the end will be working with the coal liquefaction solutions. Creating oil from coal is already done on large scale in South Africa.
We will not be able to change all current diesel driven machines to a other power source so I think this will become to gap closer until we find a better solution. I really wonder what the governments around the world are doing on this subject? Can some people please comment on this to give some insight?
Regards, Johan Louwers.
You are right. Hydrogen production takes energy to "make" and releases less energy when "consumed". You need another source of energy to supply the energy needed to Hydrogen will store. That brings us back to Fossil, Nuclear, Solor, Geothermial.
The only advanage that Hydrogen really supplies in my mind, is that "making" will be ran 7x24 at near continous optimised loads, where the power that is being consumed is at or near maximum efficiency. Like Diesel-electric locomotives, that run the main 2-cycle engine at continous peak proformance, and use the electric switching to handle torque convertion.
I was fooling around learning about elements not too long ago when I learned something interesting about an element called Palladium. It has a strange ability to, at room temperature, absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen. It is not known if it really is a true chemical compound as PdH(2)or not. An interesting ability, but could it be used for storeage of hydrogen? When heated enough, the hydrogen diffused out of the palladium, so perhaps it could be used as a storeage medium. But I'm not a chemist; does anyone know how much palladium would be necessary to create a viable storage medium out of it? What kind of heat is needed to get the hydrogen? Palladium is a kind of expensive element, are there others with a similar property?
Demented But Determined.
FTA: " "You have to step back and ask, 'What is the point?'" says Joseph Romm, executive director of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions.
It is this type of closed mind thinking that prevents innovation. When Brazil started the initiative for a total E85 fuel infrastructure if people listened to people like Joseph Romm saying "Whats the point, we have a plentiful cheap resource already, gas!" they wouldn't be declaring energy independance today. What's the point? Isn't it obvious?
Dr. Ulf Bossel, organizer of the Lucerne Fuel Cell Forum, about his announcement that hydrogen will no longer be a topic of conversation at the conference
/. readers), Dr. Ulf Bossel, or some hack writers at Popular Mechanics and President Bush?
Please also note that because of the staggering loss of exergy, use of
electrolysis for bulk hydrogen apps is a really, really dumb thing to do.
It is the equivalent of exchanging two US dollars for one Mexican peso.
"Hydrogen power will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas admissions"
- Speaking on the topic of energy independence, Washington D.C., February 6, 2003 Or how about the mere announcement of spending "In 2003, President George Bush announced an $1.7bn investment to turn the US into the world leaders of hydrogen-powered automobiles."
Now....who ya gonna believe....Don Lancaster (who has more geek cred than most
It's established beyond doubt that it does do this - there's no belief required. We're not discussing religion, it's not controversial - we're discussing thousands of real scientific studies. We don't have to believe anything - unlike religion it exists whether we believe in it or not. I mean, I don't have to believe that my powerbook is hot and heats up the table - it just fickin happens. When will these people wake up from their self induced delusions?
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
How is hydrogen not a fuel? I always thought fuel was a substance that when it goes through a chemical reaction releases energy. While many fuels are burned, the process of generating energy in a fuel cell is still a chemical reaction.
Secondly, aren't there other fuels that have to be made before we can use them? Gasoline and diesel have to be refined -- it's not like we find them naturally in the ground.
So hydrogen is just a way of "storing and transporting energy". I thought the use of fuels was a way to "store and transport energy".
Synopsis For years, people laughed at Bragi Arnason - a pudgy Icelandic Professor who had a dream of society powered by hydrogen. Now they're feting him as a visionary, as Iceland embarks on a radical plan to get rid of all fossil fuels in the country in the next fifty years. Europe Correspondent Geoff Hutchison explores the stunning vistas of Iceland, a remote island high in the North Atlantic, and home to one of Europe's last pristine wildernesses. Settled by Norwegian Vikings in the 900s, it's a land of glaciers and arctic deserts, and - most importantly - rivers and volcanoes. Iceland has no fossil fuels of its own, and in the oil crisis of the 1970s, the fiercely independent Icelanders realised that their high standard of living could not be sustained so long as all fuel had to be imported. But abundant supplies of water means cheap, clean electricity, and it's here that the clue to the hydrogen economy lies. Thirty years ago, a plan was hatched to heat the capital, Reykjavik, with steam-powered turbines using Iceland's huge reservoirs of hot underground water. It worked, and today, hot water from Reykjavik is piped all over the country. But it was a massive step from geo-thermal power, to cars running on water. Now, that's about to happen. And it's all down to Professor Hydrogen, as Bragi Arnason is known today. In the 1970s, Arnason was living on top of a glacier and mapping Iceland's underground water reservoirs as part of his doctoral thesis in chemistry. The reservoirs were no secret, in a land where people have been known to cook by burying boxes of bread in the ground. But the professor was the first to map the extent of Iceland's geothermic energy reserves. He began to wonder why, if Iceland could heat its houses, it couldn't fuel its cars - and thus the idea of the hydrogen economy was born. He spent the next few decades trying to convince his colleagues, and the government, that his vision could work, but it wasn't until 1999, when Daimler-Chrysler arrived in town to set up a joint venture with the Icelandic government, that the sceptics were finally silenced. In a couple of months, Iceland's first hydrogen-powered buses will be on the streets, filling up at the world's first hydrogen filling station. "This is a new energy resource coming into the market, and we as an energy company want to be involved in the future," a Shell representative tells Geoff. The key to producing power from H2Ois to zap it with electricity. This splits the hydrogen from the oxygen. The hydrogen is then passed through a fuel cell that powers an electric motor. There are no pollutants, just steam. Iceland currently owns more cars per head than almost any other nation on earth, and is the largest per capita producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases, due to its huge fishing fleet and metal smelting industry, so the benefits of a switch to hydrogen power will be global. Not only that - Icelanders are hoping that they can serve as a laboratory for the rest of the world. "If it comes together in a positive way we can show the rest of the world that it's possible to have an entire society based on a new kind of energy," President Olafur Ragnar Grimmson tells Geoff. "Energy that doesn't threaten the life on earth, doesn't threaten the climate and is friendly to the future of mankind." Of course there are still many hurdles to overcome - at the moment it costs twice to three times as much to produce hydrogen as the equivalent amount of oil, and the buses cost around six times as much to manufacture as their conventional counterparts. The cost of replacing an entire infrastructure based around oil will also be huge. Shell Hydrogen estimates it would take at least $US19 billion to build hydrogen fuel stations in the US. But because Iceland is so small, the cost will be millions rather than billions - making it the ideal location for a grand experiment. It's also a nation accustomed to being in front - famous for its innovation, and the imagination of its people. It seems that once more, Iceland is ahead of the rest of world. "I will see the first steps," says Professor Arnason. "My children will watch the transformation, and my grandchildren will live in this new energy economy.'
God help us if they ever get access to oxygen.
The fixed or stationary energy use, at homes, offices, and factories is not in as much of a crisis as the transportation sector. For electricity generation, there are alternatives like coal (yeah, it is dirty), or nuclear (yeah, most people fear it) or tar sands (yeah, it is expensive to recover) or wind (yeah, it has some problems), solar (yes, it needs high investment). There are problems, but USA is self suffiicient in them, and we wont be held hostage by foreign powers. There is breathing space to develop really good alternatives.
On the other hand, in the transportation sector is in crisis already. So much of personal transportation depends on gasoline and freight depends on diesel and air transportation depends on kerosene. No serious alternatives are emerging and the time is running out on those sectors. Most predictions of peak oil is around now or 2010. Even the most optimistic estimates about the Hydrogen powered cars or biodiesel driven trucks talk about widespread adaptation around 2020.
America is particularly vulnerable to this energy crisis. It is not as densely populated like Europe or Urban India and China. It is not easy to switch USA to use electricity driven public transportation. So much of the economy depends on the high home values of the sprawled cities and the humongous fleets of trucks delivering goods. So much of the infrastructure is built around the idea it is very cheap to transport goods over 100s of miles. And America is not self sufficient in this energy sector. This is a grave crisis.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Oh yeah! The recent Darwin Awards just haven't had that same 'sparkle' that they used to.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Penguin stole his enter/return key so nobody could read his comment and we'd slip deeper into global warming and bring about the inevitable next ice age!
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
This is "reporter speak". There are two sides to every issue and they have equal validity...at least thet's the way the mantra goes. We shouldn't ever cloud the issue with facts.
"With oil running out in +/- 43 years we are already started very late to start working on good solutions"
I've seen this prediction-of-doom vary from 10 years to 50 years.... projected at various points over the last 30 years. Chances are, you'll be able to see some headline in 2070: "Oil Running Out in 20 Years!!!"
Where were you when the voynix came?
Oh yeah, cos absolutely no one has access to something as dangerous as, say, natural gas, or even electricity.
"easier to make a bomb with Diesel"
After XXX, Riddick and A Man Apart, Hollywood knows how easy it is.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Until then, it is just a problematic way of storing energy. If we're going to synthesize it as fuel for cars and planes, we might as well look into synthesizing something that is easier to store (preferably liquid at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, but if it doesn't diffuse through almost any material, that would be a start). Yes, this might mean that there is carbon in our synthesized fuel, but if we take it out of the atmosphere (technically or biologically) instead out of underground deposits, it is just as CO2 neutral as hydrogen.
burning, mostly.
Like every other article on Hidrogen vs. Petrol, it fails to point one little detail: the auto industry isn't the only one directly connected to petrol production. It's the raw source, in majority, for the chemistry industry. Without it, forget about plastics and medicine.
Well hooray for Iceland. Too bad the article did not mention the LOW EFFICIENCY of making hydrogen by electrolysis, or the difficulties in storing and transporting huge quantities of the stuff. I hope some Icelandic economist gets a Nobel Prize for pointing out the true costs of oil versus hydrogen. A little more sanity is needed if we're going to survive.
Transporting it will be the main issue.
Distribution of hydrogen like Petroleum is what is needed. Its a classic case of chicken and the egg.
Our Govt. could step in pump in its own money to build the necessary infrastructure (or subsidize it with our tax money) so that companies can solve the chicken-egg problem.
Instead of wasting money in Iraq (which is a dead-beat case), we could spend the 1 billion at home every month to fund distribution pipelines for Hydrogen, build processing,routing plants, build initial nuke plants which would break down Natural Gas or water into hydrogen.
But then our Prez is well known for his mouth in a*s approach to this, and instead will continue to expect insurgency in Iraq will end so that Texmaco and BP can pump cheap oil (it ain't cheap)...
For once we should vote against this as*shole and tell him we should not waste anymore lives for oil when we can use that money to build an economy of Hydrogen...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The most likely method of production of hydrogen (as a useable fuel for cars, etc) is probably via a process similar to photosynthesis.
Sunlight energy + water (with catalyst present) ==> hydrogen + oxygen
You let the oxygen escape to the atmosphere (just like the plants do). You keep and store the hydrogen (possibly using nanostructures as a carrier).
In a vehicle, inside a fuel cell you release the hydrogen, let it react with oxygen from the atmosphere. This would balance the oxygen you released into the atmosphere in the earlier "photosynthesis" step.
oxygen + hydrogen ==> water + electrical energy
This way, your deserts can become resources. Vast areas of former desert given over to hydrogen fuel farms. You just pipe water in (possibly from a nearby ocean), add sunlight in the presence of your catalyst, and you make your fuel.
You make your fuel using a resource that was previously a wasteland. You supplement the natural action of forests (phootosynthesis). You collect fuel for the cost of maintenance & transportation. Your fuel is pollution free, and 100% renewable.
This is the basis of a hydrogen economy. Despite the naysayers, it should be quite achieveable.
Leaving aside the various technical problems with the "hydrogen economy", the biggest hurdle I see is that there may be no incremental way to make it work. You need the distribution system to exist to make developing the technologies for generating and using it practically and vice versa. To transition to a hydrogen economy would take the kind of concerted national effort we haven't seen here in the US in sixty years.
Hydrogen is not an energy source, it is transmission medium. We already have a highly effective transmission medium: electricity. Improvements in our electricity generation and distribution systems would be a simple, incremental means towards a more diverse energy generation portfolio.
The main problems are battery technology for mobile applications, and long distance transmission. The inability to ship electricity across the continent divides our nation into geographic markets; it is not possible to harvest wind energy in North Dakota and sell it in California. In my state of Massachusetts there is a huge brouhaha over a massive ocean based wind farm right off the coast of our prime tourist area. This farm would be unnecessary if we could buy wind power from distant land based wind farms.
The answer would be a national superconducting electricity grid.
One advantage of a national super grid would be that it would create a superior storage medium for renewable but variable sources, such as solar voltaic, wind and tidal power, by converting them to natural gas and diesel fuel reserves with near perfect effiency.
Huh?
It's simple: we have already natural gas and diesel plants that burn fossil fuels and supply a major fraction of our electricity. If they don't burn as much fuel because a distant, renewable source is providing power to the local grid, the difference in fuel is saved. From a national viewpoint, if that renewable energy had been magically converted into diesel oil, tbe practical result wouldn't be any different, on the "penny saved is a penny earned" theory.
A superconducting grid may also be the missing incremental step towards increased hydrogen use. The superconducting transmission lines would have to be cooled. If liquid hydrogen were used as a coolant, then it would provide an alternative (but less efficient) form of energy storage to saved fossil fuels. The producers would provide a mix of hydrogen and electricity and inject them into the transimission line. On the receiving end, the hydrogen would be gasified and converted into electricity at a rate sufficient to maintain cooling in the transmission line.
This would provide a local source of liquid or gasified hydrogen that could be piped or tankered to power hydrogen fleet vehicles at the outset. An example might be post office delivery vehicles, for whom a daily range of a couple of hundred miles is acceptable; or possibly some mass transit buses that take many short distance trips and could be refuled during the day. If there were other local uses for the hydrogen, then the local terminal would request more and the producers would alter their electricty/hydrogen mix. However if hydrogen is outstripped by battery technology, then the basic infrastructure is still useful.
The best part of this is that it could be done much faster than a fossil fuel to hydrogen transition.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This project is a new concept for indirect solar power generation system with a focus on on-farm electrical power generation and the system will store large amounts of thermal energy which could be used to create large methane bioreactors. Another idea is to reduce the fossil fuel inputs in agriculture by growing smaller plants that have a shorter growing season and can be more readily adapted to being farmed with a system that is completely electrically powered. Once the fossil fuel dependency is lowered in agriculture, clean energy products (ethanol, biodiesel, methane, hydrogen) can be produced on a large scale without the high fossil fuel input.
It's still easier and more efficient to transport hydrogen with carbon as in ethanol. If ethanol or biodiesel can be produced with renewable energy, they are carbon neutral and much easier to handle than pure hydrogen.
Know how dumb the average person is?
dumb enough not to know the difference between the average and the median?
Smart enough to not post as Anonymous Coward? From dictionary.com:
Average - typical; common; ordinary: The average secretary couldn't handle such a workload. His grades were nothing special, only average.
Seems to me that "average" is correct. If this crap got 5 points for being "funny" although wrong, I should get 5 points for being right.
Hydrogen is nothing but an energy storage medium. There will be an energy loss converting to hydrogen, an energy loss converting from hydrogen. A whole infrastructure to build for conversion/delivery. Storage issues in cars....
9 /1715549.html (ultracaps)h tml (advanced flywheels)
Wouldn't a better battery be a much better solution. We already have the distribution network(electric grid). EEStor ultra capacitors seem to be that better battery if they deliver on promises, but there are also advanced flywheels (composite wheels in a vacuum, superconducting magnetic bearings, turning neark 100k rpm). These can be charged or discharge quickly and should last the life of the vehicle.
http://tyler.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/1
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/flywheel.
Fuel cells don't solve any energy creation issues and as a deliver mechanism, it doesn't seem so hot, I would much prefer to stick with mechanisms we aleady have like the electric grid.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
http://www.csiro.au/promos/ozadvances/Series14Arti fical.htm
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr09090 3.htm
http://www.climateark.org/articles/2000/4th/rework to.htm
not particularly. The point the GP was attempting to make was that not half of the world are below average, because average doesn't mean median.
;)
So while average is correct in the sense of "think how many people are average", it's not strictly correct in terms of "half of them are dumber than that"
of course, while average is a general term referring to one of the three averages (mean, median, mode), in general, when none is specified median is assumed to be the "average" that we are talking about.
So in reality, the GP was just being a smartarse and there was no problem with the OP
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
19 Billion dollars is just chump change for Shell and other oil companies. In the last run up of gas prices to 3.50$ a gallon, they made 10 billion dollars in profit per quarter. Come on. Get real.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
over lead/acid batteries? Because that's what you've just described. A battery charger.
Best Slashdot Co
Copper is cheap to run to homes. Pipes that carry natural gas are so-so in costs. Pipes that carry H2 are EXPENSIVE and silly (a million/mile according to the article). Instead, use the piping to go to distributed storage stations. Locate a fill-up stations AND large fuel cell there (perhaps one per neighborhood or one square mile). The advantage of this, is that a site could store several days worth of H2 for doing generation. Even if the main grid is taken down, these might provide power for the local area. Nice in a disaster such as storms, earthquakes, or even just losing the entire eastern grid again.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
median
noun
3. Arithmetic, Statistics. the middle number in a given sequence of numbers, taken as the average of the two middle numbers when the sequence has an even number of numbers: 4 is the median of 1, 3, 4, 8, 9.
average:
3. Statistics. see arithmetic mean.
arithmetic mean
Statistics. the mean obtained by adding several quantities together and dividing the sum by the number of quantities: the arithmetic mean of 1, 5, 2, and 8 is 4.
(Also called average)
Since the OP is attempting to be humorous with the mathematical usage of the word average, it would be nice if it was at least correct. it was not. Unless you could demonstrate that in a large enough population the mean and median approach the same value, then it would be correct.
You should get 5 points for being right WHEN you are right. But you aren't. so can it.
Hydrogen transportation dose not make sense. 18 weal tankers loaded with the stuff going from plant to Gas stations? Pipelines? Nope.
What I envision is small scale (relatively speaking) Hydrogen production plants for gas stations. Simply a box to which you connect an electric line and a watter pipe. On the other side you get out Hydrogen which can be stored in underground tanks and pumped into cars. You also get oxygen which can be pumped into the air or sold to hospitals and welders for less than they pay now.
With research and competitive engineering the amount of electricity required to produce a litre of Hydrogen will come close to the amount of electricity required to propel an electric car of similar capabilities as far as a hydrogen car will go on a liter.
The other gunk in tap watter can be pumped directly into the sewers where it belongs.
The biggest obstacle is once you get to the point of manufacturing hydrogen from two established and well distributed commodities (electricity and watter) on a small scale (like what would be needed at rural gas stations), The none commercial fuel pump becomes more common. It will start with large companies and government agencies.
I don't suspect the Oil companies are oblivious to this so look out for a fight.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Yeah, wow, that is a lot to invest in the future when you take into account that: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12 393.htm The cost of the Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion. But who needs new fuel when you can cause civil wars in countries instead.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
um no, average=mean, and when we talk about average, we are talking about the mean, not the median.
From wiki article:
the average in ordinary English, which is also called the arithmetic mean (and is distinguished from the geometric mean or harmonic mean). The average is also called sample mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean
natural selection.
It's not as clearcut as you make out. Try reading some actual scientific papers on the topic, instead of just listening to the media and politicians with an agenda. Scientists make a distinction between their actual scientific correlations and their preferred personal interpretation --- the latter is not Science.
Climatology is full of uncertainties, and the general agreement among scientists goes only so far. The most important area of agreement is that CO2 operates as a greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution within the overall system is commonly misrepresented.
CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas, by a long chalk. Water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas on Earth, directly responsible for 95% of the global warming that keeps the planet from freezing solid to a dreadful -19 C or so. Global warming is essential.
Climate modellers who want to highlight CO2 choose not to make that known to the man in the street, and the way they treat water vapour as a "feedback" in the GCM models instead of as a key mechanism of "forcing" tends to brush the importance of water vapour under the carpet. It's a somewhat questionable scientific approach because pure feedbacks should really be invariant linear amplifiers and not highly variant in their own right (as is water vapour), but what's worse is that this creates a hugely inaccurate public perception.
The simple fact is that we live on an ice, water, and water-vapour covered globe moving in a somewhat complex way around a somewhat variant Sun, and that is the PRIMARY driver of climate, with water as its main agent of heat distribution and with just enough natural global warming to make it liveable, in between ice ages. CO2? Yes, it's relevant and it does have an effect, but it's not even close to being a primary player, and reducing our CO2 emissions will not have a significant effect in anybody's realistic scenario.
And that's not under dispute by any scientist --- they know the maximum extent of possible direct warming per ppm of CO2, and they also know the maximim warming amplified through water vapour feedback in a cloudless atmosphere. But they're not even close to understanding well the magnitude of interactions in the upper atmosphere nor being able to model cloud formation well enough to determine what the real effect of 2X or 3X CO2 would be. To claim that anything in that area of climate forecasting is "established without doubt" is a total distortion of the truth.
What's more, the natural variation in temperature across glaciation cycles totally swamps the changes calculated by any existing climate model, which just shows how we know very little in the larger context. We're right at the "natural" end of the current 18,000-year inter-glacial period, so expect a massive drop in temperature any century now. Can the GCMs predict that? Of course not.
The uncertainties in this area are LARGE. They will be worked out. In the meantime, only non-scientists claim clearcut knowledge.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The Hindenburg fire was NOT caused by hydrogen, but rather by a new exterior covering that the Zeppelin company was trying out - a butyl rubber fabric coated with iron oxide and powered aluminum - in other words, a formulation very close to what the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters use for fuel.
In addition, the skin panels were not electrically bonded to the superstructure of the ship and formed a series of capacitors which were highly charged - when the ship was grounded by the mooring lines, the panels discharged, some through the wet cords binding them to the ship, some by arcing (and thus setting themselves on fire).
www.eFax.com are spammers
Great. Does this mean we'll have to invade Iceland for their hydrogen now? It will be tough to do it under the cover of 'regime change' this time--I don't think Iceland even has a government, let alone a dictator (liberate Iceland!). Maybe we can claim that they're ignoring UN inspections or something. I mean, when was the last time the UN got to inspect Iceland? They could be doing anything up there with all that 'hydrogen' power. You don't know.
steampunk web design
Granted, they say that H2 will be produced via electrolysis from the heat of the nuclear reactor (rather than from the electricity produced by the NR), but they show that there will need to be 2000 600MW nuclear plants, as opposed to 1000 275MW coal plants.
With 1200GW nuclear vs. 275GW coal, couldn't they just use the surplus electricity to electrolysize the water, and cut WAY back on the number of nuclear plants required? If they figure it will only take 275GW of electricity (based on the coal estimate), then why not just build the ~460 600MW nuclear plants required, and use both the heat and electricity to make the H2? That brings the costs & nuclear fuel requirements WAY down for nuclear, and no CO2 emitted.
That's 1/4 the original nuclear estimate, bring the cost down below coal for "Price per GGE", as well as dropping the total cost FAR below anything else.
Was this a typo? Oversight? Study backed by coal? (how is the "Price per GGE" SO little (minimum: about half) for coal when the "Total Cost" for the plans are relatively close?)
I read through the Popular Mechanics article and one thing it didn't mention was that if the U.S. was to use solar, wind, and/or nuclear power to create hydrogen to use in cars the dependence on Middle East oil would be greatly reduced; the article said cars accounted for 2/3 of the oil usage in the U.S. This would have many benefits besides just purely economic. After all, many of the terrorist's financers made their money in oil (practically the only Middle East export of value).
It's just an engineering problem.
In that sense, so is the mass market flying car that I'm STILL waiting for.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
..already have such stations built and operating. BMW's uses mains power and makes hydrogen onsite, and honda uses solar power at an R and D place for their hydrogen research. There's more too. Here is the hydrogen station current overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_station
We better raise our voices against it now, before we have "out of frying pan into the fire" situation.
First of all, we need to obtain strong and abundant sources of energy before we get to solving the problem of transportation methods. This (these) source(s) must also provide additional energy needed for "terrareforming" (restoring environmental balance) of Earth.
Second, using and handling pure, unbound hydrogen for energy transportation is plain wrong. You can never handle a substance as volatile, leaky and so light that it fast gets to the top of atmosphere, on massively large scale without using tons or hundreds of tons of it each year. When free hydrogen is released to atmosphere it is soon gone from it for good. CO2 may be a problem that plants and photosynthesis may cure, but losing hydrogen and lifting oxygen level on a planetary scale is much more environmentaly dangerous. From present perspective it may look like just a theoretical drawback but so it seemed about carbon based fuel burning, back then at the dawn of industrial revolution.
Hydrogen is mostly safely tucked in in compounds it makes and it should stay that way if we don't want to lose it (and its compounds we need for life).
What we really need as energy transmition means is not another, harder to handle, kryogenic or high pressure kind of synthetic fuel, but drop in synthetic replacement for heavy fuels we use today, obtained by extracting CO2 and H20 out of environment and combining it thru addition of energy (be it a photosynthesis or some new, yet to be discovered industrial method) in effect reversing all adverse consequences of burning it.
We have the excess CO2 in atmosphere and if we don't make an economical incentive on pulling CO2 out of it, by making this extraction part of the solution, it is going to float around for quite some time and may cause more trouble.
Storing CO2 underground is unefficient. It will leak and difuse into air. Storing pure carbon or heavy molecules of hydrocarbons is much more space-efficient (yes, I do propose pumping oil, or even better, heavy tar, or coal(soot) suspension back underground).
I believe someone powerful has a plan to make us all "jump hoops" and upgrade everything we use today just to solve...nothing... and fill own pockets on selling "new, modern" versions of what we have today. Throw your vehicles and machines on junkyard and get yourself hydrogen powered ones. I bet the same trust of corporations already have whole tech covered with their patents and all our migration expenses will be their net gain.
This hydrogen-as-fuel idea is simply... too raw, something an elementary school kid would think is good, before learning the realities of physical world.
dumb enough not to know the difference between the average and the median?
In a large enough sample, the median is the average. (When the probability distribution is symmetric, which it generally is for functions we care about.)
Just to point out the obvious, Popular Mechanics is right to talk about the challenges posed by the so called hydrogen economy. To an Engineer, challenges = cost. A hydrogen economy isn't impossible, just more costly (and inconvienent) than society is currently willing to pay.
For my two cents, methane will likely be our next major transportation fuel. It's nearly as energy dense as diesel/gas, is highly renewable (generated by the tons in landfills and commercial farms), and only demands minor changes in standard combustion engines to burn. There are already companies out there that can take waste gas from landfills and produce LNG (basically liquified methane). See http://www.prometheus-energy.com/
It's disavantages are: crygenic liquid requiring special handling, and it still produces CO2 when it burns. The good news is that on a per therm basis, the CO2 produced from methane is much less than gas or diesel. It's not a absolute solution to the energy crisis, but a good middle step.
Less than $600 billion to build a biomass infrastructure that will reduce the cost of transportation fuel by a third, eliminate net CO2 emissions for autos, strengthen our agricultural sector (putting an end to farming subsidies), and end our dependency on the Middle East. We'll probably spend that much on the Gulf War alone. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
Besides, that is what Darwin's theory really needs to apply, anyway. Let the lot of them blow up. The world needs more clever people anyway.
But here's the thing about Iceland though: they can tap into easily-available geothermal power (thanks to Iceland being one of the world's most active volcanic regions) to generate the large amounts of electricity necessary to produce hydrogen on a fairly large scale. Also, due to the relatively low population of Iceland, they don't really need to make that much hydrogen to support local energy needs.
Here in the USA, a potentially better solution is to develop better means of electric power storage to take advantage of wind power and solar power across the USA. Thanks to that recent breakthrough announced by MIT earlier this year of a new type of nanotube-based supercapacitor to store electric energy on a relatively small unit, that opens the door for true distributed power generation where every home has a solar panel to generate power, a means to store all that power generated, and to even distribute the excess power generated to other users.
The primary advantage of Hydrogen is efficiency: even using natural gas as feedstock, it is more efficient to convert it into hydrogen (70% efficient) and then use a fuel cell (up to 90% efficient) - the maximum efficiency is 63% (although with current commercial fuel cells the efficiency is lower, about 40% or so from gas to electricity)
The secondary advantage of Hydrogen is that it is an energy transport, not an energy source. That means that is doesn't matter where the original energy comes from - which means that as technology develops, the source can go from natural gas, to wind/solar, to nuclear, and to fusion. (Basically, we don't have to all go out and buy new cars every time someone comes up with a cheap energy source.)
Sometimes working towards a solution means first creating something equivalent, but a little more flexible first. Come on, you guys are programmers, right? Don't you do that yourselves?
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
The main point of trying for hydrogen or something else for transportation is from pollution islands that exist in heavily populated urban and suburban "metro" areas from burning fossil fuels for transportation there. It is a huge problem, has actual economic cost, physical cost to humans who get ill from it, environmental cost, etc. We need to somehow let people move around freely like they do now, using their cars and trucks, etc, yet not dump massive amounts of toxic and corrosive gasses that get trapped in those heat islands which most urban areas are. This is a critical factor in why they are trying to figure out a way to use hydrogen, it is just clean, really really clean. So far, the more practical efforts are not with fuel cells, but just with normal ICE engines that can use hydrogen. BMW has a new car that uses both, two tanks and a switch, so the driver can choose, in town, burn clean hydrogen, out of town on the open road, switch to gasoline (or eventually ethanol or biodiesel or whatever). You have to look at all the costs, not just the energy conversion costs. Leaving out the health costs-which are considerable- and you are ignoring a lot of the realities and data there.
I'm not saying there is no such catalyst, because I haven't looked into it myself, but if your going to put forth this amazing solution, YOU had better be able to say what it is. The only such substance that I know of is chlorophyl, and that only works within the environment of living plant cells -- which incidentally, consume the resulting chemical energy all by themselves, without even offering to share.
Ever heard of the Law of the Excluded Middle, sometimes known as the Law of Underpants Gnomes? Without Step Two, (identifying and supplying the mystery catalyst), your whole plan is worthless.
Hydro = water; gen = precursor ("from which something comes"); hydrogen = precursor to water; hydropower = "water-power", not "hydrogen-power".
And while I do recognize that common usage in chemistry vernacular of "hydro-" (for instance in "hydrocarbon") does in fact refer to hydrogen and not to water, I must also point out that common usage of "hydropower" certainly refers to power generated from water and not from hydrogen!! ;>
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
More likely 15.9 million MMcf, or 15.9 million million cu. ft, a large fraction of current U.S. annual consumption (21.9 million MMcf in 2005). An average home consumes 6 Mcf (thousand cubic feet) in a month, and the gas consumed by 2500 homes in a month will not power the nation's cars for a year.
Additionally, solar and wind densities do not compare to absolute amounts of coal and biomass required annually.
Tell me how many acres of solar panels.Don't tell me:
Tell me how many wind towers.Don't tell me:
Does anyone care about number anymore, or are they just sprinkled about haphazardly to imbue the article with a sense of authority?
The Hindenburg might be a good metaphor for the Bush administration ('rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic' isn't a strong enough metaphor anymore), but in a country where over half the population doesn't even believe in evolution, that 70 year old footage in the hands of the fossil fuel lobby might be enough to stop the H2 economy.
I don't think the volatility of pure H2 is a deal breaker. We run our cars on liquid explosives, and we power the rest of our gadgets with an energy source that moonlights as a form of capital punishment. Concentrated energy is dangerous. The cool thing about H2 is that, unlike electricty, it can be stored and transported without losing any punch. When the Very High Temperature Reactors come online, couldn't we could make huge farms of them in unpopulated areas and move the H2 to the population centers?
One thing the article didn't mention was the role that Platimum group metals will play. Each fuel cell needs a few ounces of these metals, and they are very rare on the Earth. Some estimates claim that the environmental impact of mining and refining the amount needed for a full-blown H2 economy might be worse than sticking with fossil fuels. Of course, they are abundant in space, maybe even on the Moon.
FYI, the Hindenburg's canvas skin was painting with a doping compound that was mostly powdered aluminum and iron oxide, which is basically rocket fuel! Ever notice how amazingly quickly the skin burns off in the footage?
I hear citing where you get something is a good idea...
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s949324.htm
Page is off for the moment, but was online earlier.
They have *zero* oil but a lot of "hot" and available water. Oil stuff they have to purchase on the open market with hard currency,let's call this expensive, whereas with hydrogen from geothermal and elctrolysis they can produce what they need internally and keep the icelandic buck at home. Let's call that not nearly as expensive and as time goes on gets even better. How is this not economical for them?
Now other areas besides cold northern iceland can do very similar, turn it around to an incredibly hot place, some mideast desert nation with access to the ocean. You can get a lot of cheap hot with solar thermal concentrators, just for instance, then do roughly the same process the icelanders are doing. And even if they have oil, that is what they export right now for cash, that's their main income right now,so they can use some of their profits to setup an internal "good to go" for the next few hundred years power infrastructure by doing that. It still looks economical if you take the longer view.
Even saudi arabia is going to run out of oil some day, it already takes a lot more barrels of energy in to get barrels of energy out of their fields than it did in the 50s and 60s. A whole of fields now require pumping in water, or co2 just to squeeze the oil out, whereas in the beginning it just "gushed" out. That just isn't the case anymore most areas. And should you as a society wait to runout,wait to instigate your mitigation efforts, then start actually deploying alternatives, or do a smooth transition into it while the oil resources are still cheap enough and abundant enough so it isn't a huge tax on the economy in general terms?
Now to me, it seems like a smoother move to start your transition while it is still quite affordable, knowing you will have to one way or the other sometime. That part is debaterable of course on what you personally consider affordable or not and is a variable, but just in general terms, right now, IMO, is a nice place in time to start doing the actual work. The quicker we as humans actually build this stuff, the quicker it will get really better and more economical. Like most folks here, I was a somewhat earlier adopter of computer tech, and it took all of us enthusiasts, hobbiests, business techies, and manufacturing concerns etc, dropping serious cash on what are now antique pieces of low powered junk-yet we did it, because we saw the long range benefits of getting the show on the road with computing beyond huge expensive mainframes.
Alternative energy in all its forms is exactly the same. I started using solar PV as part of my electrical needs going on 8 years ago now, because I really like the tech and want it to get better, and don't regret one penny I dropped on it so far, exactly the same as with the various computers I have bought over the years, because the industries involved need the interest, need the enthusiasm and need the cash.
It's that simple really. No investments=no returns. Just talk and waiting for the future doesn't accomplish a dang thing, stuff has to be built and used to get any better. some will suck, some will be mediocre, some will be outstanding, but we won't really know which is which until we *do it*.
That's the real "bottom line" simple basic economic science.
Is an industry tool. Their main job is to peddle industrial porn to the less-than-brightest.
Consume this new scooter! The television of the future! Petrochemicals will produce better farming! 9-11 is not a conspiracy! Look what tomorrows SuperCops can do today!
It is shocking how Scientific American is rapidly becoming PopMech, with equations.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They are lucky they live where they do.
While it's true that they get basically free energy, it comes at the cost of the island that they're living on, tearing itself apart.
In some (geologically) short span of time, Iceland is going to separate into a variety of parts and probably recede underwater. There is a fault line running not far from Reykjavik that grows apart a few inches a year.
In the short term, though, it's great.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think that methanol would be much better. First, it is a liquid which makes it much easier to store and transport. It can be used in most combustion processes with minor adjustments. Significantly, it can be created from existing agricultural waste and other processes which take up CO2 from the atmosphere so there is no net increase in CO2 from it's use. It does have it's issues but overall the technical issues are more easily addressed than those of hydrogen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
This is a true statement. However, what you're not really discussing -- and what really lies behind the worries of people discussing Peak Oil -- is what the social consequences of that increase in cost will be.
As energy becomes more expensive, the lifestyles that we currently have (particularly in the United States) become untenable. This could be particularly catastrophic if the run-up in prices occurs quickly, rather than gradually. The increase in energy prices could also trigger hyperinflation, lower real purchasing power, and decrease the quality of living of millions of people.
In short, even if the world doesn't run out of energy -- even if the lights don't suddenly go out, without proper planning ahead of time, it might become too expensive for most people to keep them on.
The threat is not that there won't be any energy, the threat is that it'll be so expensive, only a very few people will be able to afford it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Maybe I'm taking you too literally here, but remember that no fuel cell system aimed at the mass market take pure hydrogen as an input, mainly because of it's inherent danger (think Hindenburg).
I can name another substance which is also seriously dangerous. Flammable, volatile, explosive, and has additives that cause cancer. Can also spontaneously combust in the presence of some common chemicals, like Drano.
Gasoline.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I think fusion power is overrated. It is too complicated and expensive to be commercially viable within the next 50 years. By contrast, you could make more fission power plants using proven designs which just shovel dirt into the reactor (cheap natural uranium or thorium, which are plentiful and come from the US, Canada, Australia, etc). Use a breeder reactor and reprocessing, and you have essentially unlimited fuel. It's just a matter of capital costs to build more plants.
What I'm trying to say is that it is a misconception to think that fusion power will somehow immediately cure all of the world's energy needs. You still would have to build and feed the plants. In practice they would function much the same as fission plants do now, they would have higher capital costs but lower fuel costs, just like the difference between coal and fission plants do today.
Anyone out there with mod points, please use them here. The grandparent quote was clearly taken out of context. The point is to make a cleaner fuel, hydrogen isn't necessarilly cleaner because of how you make it, so presumably the question is..."What's the point?"
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
...if you consider that the WTC attacks were a one-time event...
And yet in that one moment, they still managed to kill as many people as would've died in car wrecks over the course of roughly 1/5th of a year, using the same numbers provided above....
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
If you care so much about numbers, start using SI units, please.
In my opinion, hydrogen is a distraction by the petroleum industry, which would be the primary source and that is why G.W. supports it. The problems with hydrogen are stated as "production, storage, distribution and use". It seems to me this is true of any energy source. However, I believe that we have solved all but the storage issue for electricity. We know how to produce electricity in great quantities and new means of production are coming on-line every day (solar, hydro, wind, etc.) and these techniques are ever improving. We have a distribution system in place for electric, which just needs to be expanded. Use is also covered as electric motors are far more efficient than fuel engines. That only leaves storage. Research monies should be spent on engineering storage solutions for electricity instead of solving all of the above stated problems for hydrogen.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
With the first major hurdle being the production of hydrogen I'm supprised that no one has mentioned bacteria. I seem to recall a previous article on Slashdot which indicated that a biological production method was the 'way of the hydrogen future' I relize that bacteria would ultimatly be powered by the sun, but they would still be much more efficient than electrolosis by solar cells. S.
You are so wrong, liquid gasoline doesn't burn at all; you can put out a match in it; gasoline vapors are extremely explosive; there is no in between if it will burn, it can do so explosively.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
According to the NHTSA, 42,636 people were killed in traffic accidents in 2004.
Here is a list of the top fifteen causes of death for 2004 from the CDC:
1) Diseases of heart;
2) Malignant neoplasms;
3) Cerebrovascular diseases;
4) Chronic lower respiratory diseases;
5) Accidents (unintentional injuries);
6) Diabetes mellitus;
7) Alzheimer's disease;
8) Influenza and pneumonia;
9) Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis;
10) Septicemia;
11) Intentional self-harm (suicide);
12) Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis;
13) Essential (primary) hypertension and hypertensive renal disease;
14) Parkinson's disease; and
15) Pneumonitis due to solids and liquids.
The bottom on that list accounts for over 15,000 deaths. I wonder how much the government spends fighting these compared to terrorism?
Yet another person who doens't know what distribution is? Here's one for you: most people have more than the average number of eyes, ears, fingers, and legs. Why? Because there are plenty of people missing some (and only a few with extra), so the average number of eyes is 1.9+ but less than 2.
Now, the median is defined such that it's actually in the middle, so half are below and half are above it. So half of the world has lower than median intelligence.
If you really wanted to defend that, you might instead point out that IQ tests are made to fit a normal distribution.
Ammonia is a good candidate for hydrogen storage. An extensive infrastructure for it already exists, in terms of transport, storage, safety procedures, familiarity etc.
And it contains more hydrogen per cubic foot than liquid hydrogen. No messing around with the high pressure hydrogen storage solutions that researchers are wasting so much time on.
The phrase "hydrogen economy" is an idiocy at best; a fraud at worst.
4 /renew-energy-batt/Stirling.html
e s
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Considering that hydrogen use be intended for vehicles only, and I think
bio-diesel is a better alternative to hydrogen in the near term.
Alot of what "kfg" says is relevant, but the quoted phrase is not, if some
ways to produce hydrogen are considered.
Such as:
Thermal Hydrogen production from sunlight, I'd like to see
something on the scale of a solar furnace array of mirrors
applied in Death Valley or the Sahara, and other low population
high heat areas.
http://www.hionsolar.com/n-hion96.htm
High Efficiency solar production of electricity that can be used
to produce hydrogen when the electricity demand is lower than production:
http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/200
The total amount of solar power reaching the earth's surface is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Advantag
122 Peta-Watts or 122,000 Tera-Watts, and we use 13 Tera-watts,
about 9,384 times less. Granted most of the earth we cannot
cover in solar furnaces, but some areas that are brutally hot
and not populated would be ideal for this use.
Passive low-destructive tidal power generators located at
the largest tidal shift on earth, non-dam type underwater turbines.
The Bay of Fundy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Fundy#Tidal_e
Each day 100 billion tonnes of seawater flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy
during one tide cycle more than the combined flow of the world's freshwater rivers.
Other high flow underwater locations are located around the world,
but none on this scale.
Hot spots like Iceland also exist in many places around the world and
could be used to make hydrogen.
Also wind power current makes 58 Giga-Watts, and is slated to soon be 120 Giga-Watts,
and a large ramp up could help offset costs to make hydrogen, unless a
better clean fuel can be derived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Large_sca
Eletric cars might be viable if they can perfect the Super Capacitors.
Solar, Wind, Tidal, GeoTherm, and others can help make hydrogen viable.
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Hydrogen is the new free energy machine, chain letter, or pyramid scheme - the bad idea that just won't go away.
It doesn't matter how much it costs, or how inefficient it is, The Hydrogen Economy is a religion, it's based on faith and facts are irrelevant.
I wouldn't be surprised if "we" spent 100 Billion on Hydrogen infrastructure before abandoning it because it's crap.
Humans have done many amazing and wonderful things. We've also done many amazingly stupid things. Just go down to your local Greenpeace or Sierra Club office, or to the EPA for that matter, and ask them how many people have died from DDT compared to how many have died from Malaria. Kudos to African nations who are starting to reverse this insane behavior, BTW.
I guess it's kind of like how command economies never go out of style, no matter how many millions of victims they produce. Why are good ideas so much harder to remember than bad ideas? What is it, love of the underdog?
Next thing you know, Cuba and China will be on the UN Human Rights Commission. What's that you say?
Hydrogen power is, and will always be, 10 years into the future.
The Hindenburg fire was NOT caused by hydrogen, but rather by a new exterior covering that the Zeppelin company was trying out - a butyl rubber fabric coated with iron oxide and powered aluminum - in other words, a formulation very close to what the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters use for fuel.
There was no butyl rubber involved, but other than that, you have picked up on the revisionist Incendiary Paint Theory. It is voodoo science, nonsense on the face of it, and has been completely discredited through logic, investigation, and experiment; see Definitive rebuttal and many good links. The best minds in the field of airship history hashed this out in extreme detail, going over and over every angle. I know because I was involved in some of the debates.
Incendiary Paint Theory proponents who completely reject evidence and experimental findings are never able to explain away the DOZENS of other hydrogen filled airships which were lost through catastrophic hydrogen fires. None of them were doped with the Magic Incendiary Potion.
Tesla motors details the advantages of say Lithium-Ion batteries as an energy-transport mechanism in their white paper "The 21st Century Electric Car". They say somewhere on their site that their 900 pound battery pack manages to store the equivalent of about 8 liters of fuel - not a lot, but their conversion efficiency being higher makes it go further. http://www.teslamotors.com/media/white_papers.php Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk seem like the dream team to me, the entire site is fun to read.
As a statistician (out of practice) there are THREE common averages: The mean, the median, and the mode. In a normally distributed sample these values coincide.
He's not wrong, merely imprecise. You might be considered either wrong, or ill informed. Your choice. I can't just pick overly critical, as that doesn't fit. (Well, it's true, but it's not the point I'm addressing.)
It would have been more correct to point out that dumb means unable to speak rather than unintelligent. This is at least formally true.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you look at the whole thing from a rational, technical point of view, the right thing to do is to build nuclear power plants in the middle of big cities like LA. TFA refers to three issues: production, distribution, and storage. Of these three, building a nuclear plant in the middle of a city takes care of the first two. It gives you an environmentally benign way to produce the hydrogen, i.e., without producing greenhouse gases. It also cuts distribution costs, because you have 10 million people within 20 miles. They quote costs of a million dollars a mile for pipelines, and that's very doable if you just need a network that covers an urban area.
Of course people who can't add fractions would freak. You'd get NIMBY, bigtime. To their credit, many environmentalists are willing to reconsider nuclear power in light of global warming, but many aren't. And many people also haven't adjusted to the new reality, which is that the real nuclear danger on this planet is nuclear proliferation, not nuclear power plants:
Find free books.
Stop talking about hydrogen, and start talking about methanol. Everything you can say about hydrogen, you could say about methanol, except that you can pump methanol in an ordinary kind of gas pump. Hydrogen is just a huge pain in the ass to handle.
Methanol is what we should be thinking about. You can convert any energy into methanol, and burn methanol to make energy. You can even for methanol into heavier molecules to make things such as plastic polymers.
METHANOL. Goddammit!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's easy to increase the known reserves. "Known reserves" usually refers to oil already found and figured to be economically feasible to extract at current market prices. Just treble the oil prices and watch the reserves increase.
http://xtronics.com/reference/energy_density.htm
The government is testing us with the "hydrogen Economy" to see if they have sufficiently destroyed the education system to start putting in place the infrastructure of totalitarianism - looks like they met their objective.
Always replace the words "hydrogen Economy" with "Snake oil Economy" to get a better read on these articles.
Stupidity IS more abundant than hydrogen after all...
But can you put it in a bottle and power my SUV?
Anyone who says something like that has never used an oxy-hydrogen torch. It makes a nice clear flame that burns at about 5400 degrees F. You connect the hydrogen hose to the side of the torch marked "fuel".
By the same logic that says hydrogen is not a fuel, I could say that any fuel we use is an energy transfer medium and not a fuel in itself. That includes food. Ultimately, every energy source we have started as a result of gravity.
That was a good article, but I started to question that magazine's integrity over twenty years ago. They have really produced some bonehead stuff over the years.
We have some major political/economical/environmental problems because of our long dependence on crude oil. The answer is not going to come easily or obviously. In the early days of the automobile, gasoline was not the dominant fuel. Electricity and steam were extremely competitive until the invention of the electric starter for gasoline engines.
There are many promising alternatives to crude oil and we need to try each and every one till we suddenly realize that we don't depend on crude oil anymore.
Speaking of steam power: A steam engine will run off anything that will burn. Take your pick of fuels; liquid, solid, gas, or any combination. The fuels are not burned under compression which means that many of the harmful nitrogen compounds are never produced. All torque and horsepower produced, by the particular design, is available at any speed greater than zero rpm. Transmissions are totally unnecessary. Essentially, all you really need is a flash boiler, a small steam engine, and a condenser. Surely, with all the electronic control and modern steam technology at our disposal, we could make a practical car that didn't care what you used for fuel.
This article was not well written. It neglected to mention a very promising source of H2, and that is from algae. It has been discovered that depriving certain algae of oxygen and sulfur at a specific stage in its growth causes it to switch to an alternative, anaerobic, photosynthetic path.
But really, I am not so sure that Hydrogen is really such a great energy storage media due to the low temperature required to make it a liquid. Perhpas we can improve ways to entrap it in other liquids or solids, but that technology is far off. I think that the better fuels, for now, are biodiesel, SVO (straight vegetable oil), and Octane (the algae Botryococcus Braunii can create alkanes directly crackable to octane, i.e. good old gasoline!).
The farm industry has been wielding an inordinate amount of clout in influencing government interest in biofuels. They want to keep using corn and soy oils for biodiesel and alcohol, when these crops are quite inefficient when compared to the production capability of algae. While I agree that the greatest good of the country requires us to grow what appears to be a surplus of food (just in case there is a bad crop, we'll not starve), and that it is better to create corn/soy meal and oils from it, it would be inefficient to depend on these crops for all of our vegetable oil needs.
see title. all other hydrogen generting methods that are non nuclear are themselves polluting and draining of earth's natural resources.
I saw a story a few months back, but haven't heard any more about it. The plan was to use sodium and water to produce hydrogen on demand. Sodium strips oxygen out of water instantly, releasing hydrogen. When the sodium was used up, the canister would be exchanged for a fresh one and the sodium oxide would be smelted by solar heat. No other inputs - just water and solar heat. Has anybody else heard of this? Has the idea been "disappeared"?
Sir, I earnestly invite you to place a lit match in your can of liquid gasoline. You would be doing us all a favour.
The Prius engine is about 37% efficient according to Argonne, at its most efficient. When on its optimal demand curve the efficiency is always above 30%.
So far as the other efficiencies in the driveline go, 85% would be a good round number to use. Knock another 5% off around town.
The Prius engine is not all that fancy. It does conventional things well, rather than being strikingly different in design. In fact, for a given efficiency and power to weight ratio a VW turbo diesel is probably a better bet.
So, there is no particualr problem in getting the IC engine into roughly the same ballpark of effiency as your fuel cell. In fact if there was any economic desire to do so efficiencies in excess of 40% are not really very difficult. Oil is so cheap that is not economically viable.
But, a fuel cell car with the same range, passenger space, safety and performance as a Prius or VW Diesel Jetta, will weigh substantially more than those cars, and will be a lot bigger. So its 20% advantage in prime mover efficiency will be used to propel a larger vehicle, leaving you no (or scarcely) better off. If it uses a hydrocarbon reformulator then its efficiency will be no better than the Jetta, and it will cost twice what the simple fuel cell car would, and still be rather large.
Actually my main point was that the waste heat from a fuel cell is at 80 deg C, as the cooling system will have to be substantially larger (again) per kW than that of the IC engine, which rejects heat at around 105 deg C, and the rad size is going to be proportional to the deltaT to the environment, which around here is 35 deg C.
Also the BMW hydrogen car boils off 30% of its hydrogen every day, when it is parked. That would be a bit of a bummer efficiency wise, no?
Was I the only one reading that and thinking "a server powered by rodent shit?"
the GP said Gasoline is so safe you can light it on fire and it won't explode.
I said You are so wrong, liquid gasoline doesn't burn at all; you can put out a match in it; gasoline vapors are extremely explosive; there is no in between if it will burn, it can do so explosively.
I can not only put out a lit match in gasoline, I can make 250mL explode like a stick of dynamite; want to come over and watch?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I like this article. Gathers a lot of data from many places and comes to an important conclusion - It will be costly.
However, I'm missing an alternative of other solar plants then photovoltaic. They are critical, in the sense that the production of the silicon based photo cells require a lot of energy in the first place. There are alternatives, such as large mirror collectors to create steam and electricity. Don't know how viable they are.
Another conclusion I'm missing is conservation. It is a shame that a country like the US uses 4 times as much energy per head than comparably rich countries in Europe. Don't tell me that is a function of it being the richest country in the world. As far as I can see it is a function of it being one of the most wasteful countries in the world and also one of the richest to buy all those products that turn quickly into waste.
I think we could reasonably assume that half of energy consumption could be reduced and the price tab looks much smaller. I believe it is more realistic to produce products that last longer and save energy and money in the process of making them, than it is to find locations for 1000 coal plants or 2000 coal reactors.
And as mentioned, governmental leadership is needed. Europe reacted to the 70th oil crises by taxing hydrocarbons in a way to make them expensive to consume and to encourage conservation (including many other ways). Since then industry discovered that they can save money by producing more efficiently. In combination with other pollution prevention measures this is even more effective and cost saving. Look at economies like Ireland, or UK that flourished in the past 30 years or Germany that is still a production power house and world class in exporting products, despite its unfavorable demographics. Compare that with the US which does not know how to offset the imports from China.
Conservation must be a part of the answer in the US and even more in aspiring huge economies such as China, India or Brazil.
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
...to use the natural resources they have in abundance, geothermal heat and water. You can't export geothermal, but you can turn it into hydrogen which can then be used in substitution for expensive petroleum products for their various transportation needs..
It costs hard currency on the open market to get oil, yet they don't have a lot of cash, so what to do? They have apparently decided to go and use their number one natural energy resource, hydrothermal, in various ways, and it seems to be working out quite well for them. In a strict laboratory sense,it maybe doesn't make sense, in the real world of cash on the barrel head for stuff, it makes a lot of cents. And the hydrothermal resources will last a lot longer than even saudi arabias crude, their supply is regulated by the heat at the center of the earth-it ain't running out any time soon. they are very similar to some cash starved and oil lacking tropical nations, who can't afford to buy oil, but they can raise stuff like palm and use palm oil for biodiesel. You use what ya got, not what you wish you had and can't afford.
I just came in from running the splitter. We have propane heat, and a woodstove, and some small electric heaters. The number one heat we use, our primary, is the wood though, because it's is way way way cheaper for us, because we have trees, tractors, chainsaws and a splitter. There is absolutely no comparison, it's our most abundant natural resource. 10 bucks worth of diesel and two stroke mix makes me a few hundred dollars worth of heat, and even with the extra labor-well, I live here, this is what I do, farm action stuff, so the wood heat beats the pants off of propane at todays prices. If people want to pay a couple bucks more a lb for beef (over what I get wholesale at the auction now which is pitiful) and a quarter more for a chicken, swell, I'll use all propane, until then, you use what ya got that works the best with your resources. Checking mine, the international free market cash reserve wallet looks mighty thin, but the woods look slap full to bustin'-it's a no brainer.
You can either try to make more cash, or failing that, achieve your goals with useing little or no cash, and frankly, I prefer the latter as much as possible, especially as I am getting older. I strive to constantly eliminate bills, one of the reasons I started investing in solar PV as well, electricty keeps going up, what I have so far is paid off long ago and keeps pumping out the watts. It's also why we have a huge garden and a greenhouse, we eliminate a lot of middleman on the grocery bill, and if you were to see what we saved versus price of organic food at the store, it is rather a decent rate of return on cash and labor investment on our part.. And as soon as the smart guys get cellulosic ethanol production down good, the techniques, so we can use scrap wood that has been chipped up for it,because we have a decent large chipper, I'll start making ethanol and use that for fuel in what I can, at least the cars and smallish gas powered tractor. We aren't set-up to make biodiesel, we don't do a huge amount of oily row crops, no space or equipment for that really, but wood we got, wood and pasture, so that's what we exploit and use. Eliminate the middleman skimmers, always works to save you cash or make you cash.