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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
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
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.
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.'
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
They have energy independance because they found a bunch of oil off their coast. The E85 helped but contributes only a modest amount (just under 15% or so of oil use) to their overal fuel use. Also, corn is much less efficient at converting solar energy to ethanol, so the US would be relying on imported sugar or ethanol anyway. Brazil is only declaring energy independance because they also have a plentiful cheap resource today, namely petroleum.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
"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?
"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?
This is mentioned in TFA (second page, heading "SOLID-STATE"). IIRC there are more materials that can do this, collectively they're called metal hydrides. Metal hydride tanks are heavy and expensive: Mercedes built a car with a metal hydride fuel tank about 10 years ago, the tank alone cost $100k.
The temperature needed to release the hydrogen is about 300 deg C.
Rather than "it's about protecting the environment" we should be saying "it's about not being dependent upon the Middle East".
How about telling the truth, just to be different?
KFG
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.
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.
Way to take a quote out of context!
Immediately before that quote: Skeptics say that hydrogen promises to be a needlessly expensive solution for applications for which simpler, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already exist. (Emphasis mine)
In other words, for many applications Hydrogen is the Rube Goldberg machine of energy management.
=Smidge=
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.
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
..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."
The posting that you are responding to claims that we shouldn't generate the hyrdrogen at the source of the energy production, but rather convert it to electricity and then use the electricity to generate hydrogen at the gas station, or whatever. I'd beg to differ on that point myself, but that's hardly an argument against a viable hydrogen economy!
|>oug
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.
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.
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 ?