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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."
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
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".
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.
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
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!
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.