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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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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
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.
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.
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.'
It is calculated that, lets take the most promising figures available, the newly found oil fields will hold around a 4 month supply in the year 2020. Meaning we will be able to run only 4 months on these fields according to the oil demand in 2020.
And this is only the case if there is what they predict there will be.
Regards, Johan Louwers.
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.
OK, if you want to nitpick, H2 is not a primary fuel. You need some other energy source to create it. So it is more like electricity than crude oil. Of course, H2 will become a primary fuel the day we start mining Jupiter and Saturn for H2.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
..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 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."
Indeed, the Zeppelin company did a secret report on the Hindenberg tragedy and noted that the canvas covering was extremely flammable, to say the least. I believe on the Graf Zeppelin II (which did fly for a few years before World War II) they went to a less-flammable covering and also changed some of the canvas covering hooks to bronze, which did not transmit electrical discharges like steel ones do.
Ahh... You get my point. A little anecdote.
Jamaica produces Sugar from cane and sells it at a loss (weird Jamaican politics that I won't get into). However Appleton estate is profitable, unlike the rest. Why? they grow sugarcane to make rum. That rum attracts premium prices.
Rum is technically byproduct of the waste from sugar production. Just like Molasses and Bagas (wood substitute). Since these goys figured out how to cover the total cost off a single byproduct any money made from selling the other stuff is pure profit.
Same concept in my post.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?