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Hydrogen Won't Save Our Economy
anaesthetica writes "Physorg.com is featuring a story asserting that hydrogen is economically infeasible as a replacement for our current energy sources. The premise is that isolating and converting hydrogen into a usable energy source takes up a great deal of energy to begin with, and that subsequently converting that hydrogen fuel into usable energy results in an overall efficiency of only about 25%. Apparently, the increasing scarcity of water is going to make hydrogen too costly and just as politicized as oil." From the article: "[Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel's] overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense. The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."
we're going to have to keep the rising water levels in the oceans down somehow right? ;)
sun and wind power are, IMHO, the alternative to oil and coal. hydrogen should be used just as storage/transport of energy.
but even this will be useless if we don't put serious brain power into improving the eficiency of our gadgets/cars/homes/etc.
What ? Me, worry ?
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
It doesn't really matter if water is scarce or not, since contrary to gas/oil it can be re-used; it's only an energy carrier. Also, 3/4ths of our planet is covered in the stuff.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
It seems unlikely that some magic bullet will come and solve all our problems. The largest part of any solution has got to be a dramatic downward trend in energy consumption regardless of the source.
I read somewhere that some consider hydrogen to be sort of a liquid battery. It costs energy to make it so it's really just a transference mechanism between the source of the energy and your car. The benefit is this, though: That source does not have to be oil. It can be anything. Wind, nuclear, squirrels in hamster wheels, anything. It will not solve our long-term energy problems, but it could help relieve our dependence on foreign oil.
"We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
There. nuff said.
Well, it has happened before and it might happen now, that we find out that nature's way of doing things is not so bad for us. Nature stores it's hydrogen in all kinds of sugar. Pretty harmless and pretty efficient way of transporting hydrogen through a large system. We'll find out.
Just because it takes alot of energy to create the fuel, doesn't mean the fuel isn't usable on cars. You don't see a whole lot of space shuttles running on coal.
God spoke to me.
Before that, hydrogen is a cumbersome, impractical, lossy way to transport energy. We might as well look into synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O instead of just splitting water into H2 and O2. Any hydrocarbon is less troublesome to handle than hydrogen. If we make the chains long enough, we might even end up with stuff that's pretty much identical to oil-based gasoline.
The hydrogen economy was an idea dreamed up by those with a vested interest to divert attention and money away from more promising and immediate technologies which compete with their own investments. Still, the government got to spend lots of money.
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You don't need clean drinking water for electrolysis.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So you need to put your hydrogen plants where you have both water nearby (ocean, desalinate?) and energy (sun?). California maybe? Sounds like a big enough market.
C - the footgun of programming languages
As far as I can tell there is no scarcity of resources such as oil or gas - any supply constraints are put in place by OPEC to ensure the price of oil does not fall below an economic level. There is enough known resource to last for 200 years at current rates of consumption.
As for wind and sun as sources of electrical power, can I ask what we do when it is dark? Or there is no wind blowing? These are lovely ideas but if wind was any damn good the Dutch would still be using it, but they have stopped further wind turbine installations.
It is time for real engineers to make the decisions on how we proceed and not unqualified "experts" of which there appears to be an almost limitless resource.
Could someone explain in lay terms exactly how water can be deemed to be scarce when the Earth's surface is two-thirds covered in the stuff?
Scarcity of pure, clean water - now that I can believe.
First of all: Hydrogen as an energy carrier IS feasible, just not as 'attractive' as fossil fuels. Second: soon fossil fuels are not going to be an option at all, so you'd have to compare hydrogen with other alternatives for energy carriers, like synthesized alcohols. Hydrogen then becomes very attractive.
And it underlines a point that I'd like to see raised more often: a lot of people are looking for a "magic bullet", meaning some sort of drop-in replacement for oil, whether it's bio-fuels, or hydrogen or something else. They want something that would solve all of our energy problems in one fell swoop. And that's just not going to happen.
Think about the early 19th century, for instance: oil was just one energy possibility among many others. Most people used wind power to process cereals into flour, or mechanical water power. They used coal or wood to warm themselves and candles or whale oil to light themselves. They also used solar power, for instance in salt flats. Then came steam engines -- again wood or coal -- and so on and so forth.
Of course, the 21st century is a much more advanced society, but the energy possibilities are also much more numerous: from bio-fuels to nuclear, with solar (photovoltaic and thermal), wind power, bio-mass, natural gas, tide power, etc... etc... Our technology level has progressed by leaps and bounds and may well end up covering most our needs, IF we also improve efficiency and energy savings (= no more gas guzzler for you, sorry). But the key idea here is this: the 20th century, from and energy point of view, was an historical abberation: a time when we solved most of our energy needs on one solution. The 21st century may well see us come back to a more diversified picture, and something more in line with the previous centuries.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You didn't read the article. Hydrogen is just a 25% efficient battery. We already have much better batteries.
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Considering that 3/4 of the planet is covered with oceans, at some points kilometers deep, I fail to see a "water shortage". There may be a shortage on fresh water, yes, but salt water elctrolyzes just as well (even better, since it contains ions). To boot, you end up with sodium, chloride and some other chemical elements that can be sold as by-product.
The real problem with hydrogen is that it's an inefficient way to store energy. Plus, storage is difficult since it's a very tiny atom (one proton only...) so it tends to seep out of every container; it's highly flammable, and to store it effectively you need either very high pressure, or very cold temperatures (20K). Gasoline really isn't that bad for a fuel...
No, the real boon would be to either store electricity very efficiently, or somehow convert the CO2 in the atmosphere directly into fuel again, using some form of renewable energy like the sun.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
just ask this fellow at the H pump. He could not have figured out a better distraction for the American public.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Efficiency is irrelevant. Fossil fuels are essentially fully charged batteries. Water is essentially a flat hydrogen battery. Of course using an already charged battery is going to be more efficient than charging a flat battery.
The problem with fossil fuels isn't that they are efficient. That's their sole benefit. The drawbacks are pollution, global warming, scarcity and terrorism.
The hydrogen economy has absolutely *NONE* of those problems. The only problem it has is efficiency. We have to first charge the battery (separate H2 from H2O). Fortunately, there is a virtually unlimited supply of both H2O (the ocean!) and energy (the sun, wind, waves, etc). We can tap both the fuel supply (water) and generate hydrogen from it, even at extreme inefficiencies, without *ANY DRAWBACKS WHATSOEVER*, once the initial investment is paid for.
Cheaper, cleaner, doesn't fund terrorism, doesn't emit greenhouse gasses. What's the downside?
it's one of the laws of thermodynamics, along with "it takes money to make money". Though the thermo laws dont strictly apply in this case the principal is similar.
To get energy out of hydrogen you have to get the hydrogen out of water, which itself takes energy, lots of energy. This indirectly makes the process similar creating a hydrogen based battery. You put the energy in in the seawater processing plant, and get it back out to drive your automobile, if the voltameters at the plant are solar powered you might as well have a solar powered car and cut out the middle step. However, if the plant were fusion powered then it might be a different story.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is an energy storage.
what we should do is make a giant ram scoop that orbits the earth and funnel the space hydrogen back to earth to use as fuel.
nasa has got nothing better to do at the moment.
We need to stop relying on one single solution.
In the future (if there is one once we get our act together soon enough), the "solution" has to be a combination of solutions. Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Nuclear (yes, Nuclear - although it's gotten a bad rap, it's actually a pretty good source), and perhaps Fusion, in addition to Hydrogen. The Earth's Oceans are a huge source of Deuterium, which can be used for Fusion (if we have it figured out), and possibly we could even use it as fuel (burning it). But I'm not sure of the effects of having slightly radioactive water vapor. Maybe it's not a good thing.
I know there's a lot of IFs, but the sooner we start...
Discovery had a good show today, outlining doomsday scenarios because of our overdependence on fossil fuels. It seems the Pentagon is actually seriously considering the implications to National Security from Global Warming and the rising cost of Oil, especially when it can involve droughts, and lots of war.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Someone needs to remind this guy that drinking water is not needed to make Hydrogen. We have a whole sea of suitable materials.
Great Intellect...
C2H5OH with [H2SO4] as a catalyst -----> C2H4 + H2O
and with that cute little double bond, I can make any hydrocarbon you want. Where do we get the ethanol? There's plenty of arable land left for now - so much so that certain governments pay their farmers NOT to plant crops. Instead of making energy to create H2, perhaps we should use the sun's energy to work for us, as we have been doing anyway for the past few billion years...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The cheapest way to make hydrogen would be to develop a bacteria which lives in water and converts water into hydrogen and oxygen. IIRC someone developed a bacteria just like this that needed just a small bit of electricity to do its thing. (Which is a good thing, since it allows us to control the process.)
Pour some of these into the sea in some sort of screened-off area and the only technical issue is to separate the hydrogen gas from the oxygen and transport them. A plant like this would require next to no maintenace, and costs otherwise endured would be minimal. If hydrogen efficiency is only 25% you just increase volume by 400%, since it's dirt-cheap!
All rites reversed 2010
Others have pointed out as well, but anaesthetica seems to have fallen victim to the common misconception that plagues hydrogen discussions; specifically, incorrectly identifying hydrogen as an "energy source". I suppose, then, some blame is also to be shared by kdawson for posting this most frequent of mistakes.
As hydrogen is not readily available in atomic or molecular form (even tho it is plentiful in H2O) hydrogen (H2) must be created USING another energy source. The liquified or compressed gas hydrogen can then be transported, combined with the O2 readily available as ~30% of the atmosphere, and releasing the stored energy. Contrary to the author of this particular article, I still believe there are a number of applications for this type of energy system.
[/sarcasm]
We will have to come up with something. They say peakoil was in 2005 November... That means every year less energie. After 2010 3 to 5 % less oil each year. The energy crunch will be devastating if we don't change or out smart this problem.
I think solar power is the only option. I read on slashdot it goes now to 40% efficiency.
one way would to use dams to make ...
:P
hydrogen.
now just a side note:
hover dams "drop" water onto a turbine which
turns a generator, which converts to electricity.
fortunately water is pretty heavy/dense, but if
water is "split" into oxygen and hydrogen, well
hydrogen is lighter then air.
so, if one would make hydrogen at the bottom of a
hydro-dam, let it naturally float up (say inside
a pipe) and then burn it at the top of a hydro dam,
the resulting water could be "dropped" back down
on the turbine, which turns a generator, which
hmmm, something must be wrong
One of the most interesting uses of Hydrogen is not just as an energy source or storage. Hydrogen may change the centralized generation paradigm in use. In the same way that the Internet changed the way information was created from individual sources to end to end communication, Hydrogen may allow smaller generation plants.
While one method is to switch to bigger and bigger energy plants and more massive interconnected networks, the other is to swith to individual generation facilities, where dependence from traditional utilities is reduced.
"...availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."
Water Rare????? People need to stop with the stupidity NOW. Water is 3/4 of the planets surface area, and that means that the VOLUME of water on the planet is absolutely insane compared with the volume humans take up on the planet.
There is no shortage of water, the only shortage is in infrastructure and technology.
Anyone who says there's a water shortage anywhere on the planet is missinformed. You might have regions on the planet without access to water but again, that is a problem with infrastrcuture.
The average depth for the planet's oceans is 4km! Give me a break.
But even then lets do some analysis:
"Turkmenistan withdrew more than 5 000 cubic meters per person per year, with Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan all withdrawing 2 000 cubic meters or more per person per year. By comparison, per-capita withdrawals in the United States were around 1 800 cubic meters, in France 650 and in the United Kingdom 200"
"1.268 × 10^9 km3" is the approximate volume of water on the planet.
Now 1 cubic kilometer = 1 000 000 000 cubic meters.
So, assuming everyone on the planet used up (the water vanished totally or was 100% contaminated) 5000 cubic meters per year we woulda have:
Earths Population x 5000 cubic meters = 6,562,976,420 x 5000 = 38,214,882,100,000 cubic meters of water used per person per year (assuming every person used up as much water as Turkmenistan withdrew.
Now the total water on the planet is 1.268 × 10^9 km3 x 1 000 000 000 cubic meters
= 1.268 x 10^18 cubic meters.
So, Total Withdrawl of humans on planet if we all withdrew as much as Turkmenistan
3.821 x 10^13 vs 1.268 x 10^18 cubic meters of total water.
This gives 33,185 years of water if 5000 cubic meters of water dissappeared per person on the planet per year (assuming population remained constant).
There is no water shortage on planet. If there is a local water shortage it's due to bad infrastructure and again, it's only a local problem where that may be the case.
People (especially the media and school textbooks) need to stop talking about a water shortage on the planet.
That, scarcity of clean water, should not be an issue. There is certainly not a scarcity of salt-water. As hydrogen is produced from (for example) electrolysis, this will work for salt water as well.
Yes, there is a scarcity of clean drinking water - but we do not have to use that water for this purpose. I call this particular point moot.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
There is no "electric car with regenerative breaking". There may be a few golf-cart sized vehicles with or small cars with limited ranges, but a practical, mid-sized sedan with acceptable range on electricity only is far from a reality. Also, he seems to forgete that the batteries have to carry themselves, lowering their efficiency. Of course this is true of liquid fuels as well, but their energy density is much higher, so this issue is much less of a concern.
It seems that the title of this article should be "hydrogen infererior to magic batteries".
Whoopdie doo...
And it gets worse. Assume we're not going to use 100% *cough* renewable electricity. Assume your energy comes from a local coal power station. They're about 35% efficient, so your 25% efficient battery actually gives you an overall efficiency of 8.8%. You're taking your scarce energy resource, burning it and making use of less than 10% of the energy in that resource.
Until we are using 100% renewable or magical *cough* fusion you're throwing around 90% of your energy away. Afterwards you're throwing 75% away. Either scenario is just fucking dumb. Our existing energy strategies fit into the du
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And it gets worse. Assume we're not going to use 100% *cough* renewable electricity. Assume your energy comes from a local coal power station. They're about 35% efficient, so your 25% efficient battery actually gives you an overall efficiency of 8.8%. You're taking your scarce energy resource, burning it and making use of less than 10% of the energy in that resource. Exactly how clean do you think that strategy is?
Until we are using 100% renewable or the magical *cough* fusion you're throwing around 90% of your energy away. Afterwards you're throwing 75% away. Either scenario is just fucking dumb.
The existing energy strategies of many countries fit into the dumb category, particularly knowing the resources are generally going to increase in value in the future.
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The Danish have done it: http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=1071 They take cow-dung and take the methane out of it. Why not use a platinum catalyst to catalyze methane's decomposition? Semipermiable membranes could be used to extract the hydrogen with particulate platinum. Sounds feasible to me, considering they can power towns off of the methane produced by cow crap.
Call me crazy (or just lazy because I don't feel like looking it up), but doesn't electrolysis happen more readily in salt water?
I seem to recall needing to add salt to the mix whenever we did electrolysis experiments in junior high science classes...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Well, they were saying more or less the same in the 1890's: railways won't save our economy, they are too slow and too attached to a fixed path...
... ... ...
And just some years later man **began to fly**
So
a) We may think today that hydrogen won't save our economy. But we are also unable to predict the discovery of _________ (insert your favorite here).
b) It may come out, though, that Hydrogen *does* save our economy in a way too different from what we know NOW.
these arguments about the future keep boring me.
State the obvious or what!
I will absolutely *NOT* assume such a thing. If we use fossil fuels to generate hydrogen, of course it's foolish.
Which is why I'm not promoting either. Seriously, get your strawman off my lawn.
The (physical, not economic) efficiency of hydrogen compared to fossil fuels is irrelevant so long as we don't use fossil fuels to create it. And of course I'm not advocating using hydrogen to power people's homes. Better to just use the existing electrical distribution system we already have in place. On the other hand, for circumstances where dedicated electrical transmission is not feasible or ideal, such as in transportation and portable electronics, why not use hydrogen? I'm sure even a significant loss in efficiency is more than offset by the benefits.
The article seems to have a basic flaw:
"In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own source of energy, i.e. with ("green") electricity from the grid," he says. "For this reason, creating a new energy carrier is a no-win solution. We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
Why do we have to use electricity from the grid to generate hydrogen? Why can't we use floating arrays of photovoltaic cells to crack the water on the ocean? Or we could use large banks of mirrors to power an array of Stirling engines to generate the power to crack the water? It's not as if you need a large voltage to do the job, I think there are many ways of getting the power other than off the grid.
I have to admit I'm rather partial ton the idea of using arrays of mirrors to power a series of stirling engines - apart from possible loss of heat transfer fluid, and wear and tear (which is minimised by the typically low RPM of stirling engines) it should be very cheap power once you amortise the cost of setting up the thing. There are several places in the world (in the USA, South America, Africa and Australia at least) where you have ubiquitous sunshine at beaches where desert (or otherwise low-productivity land) comes down to the beach. The real problems to be solved for Hydrogen as a stored energy source are purely matters of storage and shipping. There are several technologies for renewable energy that could power the cracking with relatively low research costs to get them to a point where they would be usable.
Basic laws of physics also say that energy can't be created, it can only be converted. Therefore, sooner or later, hydrogen as a carrier will be quite feasible, due to depletion of gas/coal/oil deposits.
Conventional energy sources have had 100+ years of intense research and development to make it effecient. Engines running on fossil fuels were not as effecient in the beginning as it is now. I am 100% positive that if we by some magic accident (legislation for instance) were _forced_ to use renewable energy sources exclusively, there would be much more brainpower going into this and much more technological advancement, and that we _would_ be able to sustain humanity energy-wise. But it is not going to happen if we keep things in the lab and wait for hydrogen to suddenly becoming an instant economical win.
The sooner the better it is used as widely as possible the better it is for everyone on this planet!
Plus it makes cash-poor farmers net-energy producers instead of net-energy consumers. Biodiesel fuel crops including flax, hemp, and canola grow in poorer conditions than many food crops, and if they were segregated you could safely use the non-processed recycled water.
It's still a carbon emission, though.
I see the dependancy on rare metals as the bigger block to hydrogen fuel cell technologies. They might be more feasible in dense urban areas than they would in rural districts. Imagine the size of the fuel cells a midwest farm tractor would require!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They said ridiculous, they said unimaginable. now whole world is using alternative current as a means of channeling electricity.
Read radical news here
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/2195
No changes to human behaviour required.
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Actually both are space hogs, especially if you are talking about actual wind or solar 'powerplants'. However each has the potential to produce say... very rough guess here... up to 10% of the energy needs. In Europe wind is extensively used, farmers often set up wind generators on their fields and sell the electricity they don't need to the energy companies for extra income. If you drive through Denmark, Holland, or N-Germany you will see wind generators by the dozen in the wheat fields you drive through. I don't think either wind nor solar will replace coal and oil for all sorts of reasons of which the physical space they take up is only one reason, they will remain important supplementary energy sources. Large solar power plants are not all that common here in Europe but people have begun to combine improved insulation of their houses/apartments with measures like mounting solar cells on the roof to reduce the amount of energy they have to draw off the electric network for heating/cooling or lighting in their houses. Basically I think we can get far by encouraging the use of wind and solar and combining those with measures aimed at increasing the efficient use of energy but even all those measures together will never enable us to replace oil and coal. Unless somebody finds miraculous new energy source and invents room temperature super-conductors in the near future, conventional Nuclear power may prove the only viable way to phase out fossil fuel use in power plants. Nuclear leaves nasty waste products that will be hard to deal with but at least it doesn't cause a rise in sea levels and climate change. The choice we have at the moment is:
It's a choice between bad and worse.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The energy required to create it can be obtained
through Solar, Nuclear, coal or hydroelectric
Who cares if takes 5 times as much solar energy to create hydrogen
as it produces
The fact is
-hydrogen is portable , electricity is not
-You can pump hydrogen out of a fuel pump when you are away from home
-You dont need full power electricity to pump hydrogen(hurricane wilma knocked the power out
in my area for 11 days)
Everyone should see "Who Killed The Electric Car":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
Save the water for life - it is a scarce commodity, more of a sacred object to be appreciated, not split up for cars.
Wind,Solar,Hydro,Wave,Geo - California has some of the most wind, almost the most sunlight, and a huge coastline of crashing wave power,
not to mention any hydro-dams that could be built.
California could power everything west of the Mississippi river if all energy sources were tapped, especially the coastline.
100 % tax credit should be given for every renewable energy project done by business & individuals.
Schools and Government buildings should lead the way by updating their facilities to run on grid-intertied renewable energy.
Burning Dead Dinosaur Juice is just stone age primitive.
Perhaps everyone should run out and buy LV CPUs systems from Intel and Energy Star flat panel LCD monitors?
Time to give up the egg-cooking Pentium space heaters and giant glass CRT light bulbs!
It would be interesting to read the actual study. The actual claims quoted in the article seem to be misleading:
The third world has already solved the problem: bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles. Carry less mass. If we spent a tiny fraction of the money we spend on energy research and energy politics on designing roads safer for two-wheeled transportation we would be much better off. You can go to someplace like Cambodia or China and see when the future holds. You can fit a lot more motorcycles and mopeds on a given road.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
sea levels CAN'T rise.........after all, no matter how much water is in the ocean...SEA LEVEL is SEA LEVEL LOL.
Let's say we have massive scale h2 production- they're splitting h2o and bottling the h2. What are they going to do with the O that's left over? Oxygen is a poisonous gas in large quantities. I can see it becoming an "Oops forgot about that" sort of an issue once the levels begin to rise out of control.
You're wrong:
Hydrogen can be produced from alcohols by cracking and water-gas shift reactions.
Hydrogen is rarely produced by electrolysis because of its power demands.
Hydrogen can be stored as a metal hydride at relatively low pressure then released at atmospheric pressure.
MOD PARENT DOWN, DUMMY
Until the problem is so critical that people rise up and slaughter one another until the problem solves itself. Bitch hand of commerce will solve all.
For one bright shining moment, dot.com executives were zipping about the cities on skateboards. Then some idiot starting selling skateboards with motors and handlebars and the dot.coms all collapsed... We could have had it all. Richard Branson is our last hope.
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I think it's worth noting that this article is filed in the "Opinions" section of physorg.com. It was written by Lisa Zyga who has a degree in Physics? Nope. Engineering? Nope. Err, any hard science? Nope. She has a degree in: Rhetoric (http://www.trustyguides.com/team.html)
Rhetoric -- the production and use of texts for distinct audiences and social contexts
Has anybody seen that documentary movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" In it, they look into hydrogen vehicles and the auto industry's support for it, but get a technician involved to admit that these machines are nowhere near being available to the public. This idea, along with Bush's much vaunted "hydrogen economy", is nothing more than a white elephant -- a strategy for getting the public think that the industry is doing its best, while in actual fact hydrogen powered vehicles are a dead end. They pay lip service to the idea by investing few million a year into their hydrogen research projects, while in the mean time moving along with business as usual.
As the movie points out, electric cars are the real answer: they're simple, cheap, fast, efficient, convenient and low maintenance, so there's absolutely no need for hydrogen to enter the equation. Hydrogen just makes these cars more complicated and less efficient. The only thing holding back the electric car is the will of the industry. For instance, Chevron holds the patents for one of the most promising battery technologies, but they specifically forbid the current manufacturer to sell them for use in private vehicles (only public transport).
I suppose you could argue that the auto manufacturers the oil companies are only acting in the best interests of their stock holders, and that's probably true, but at this rate they might as well be evil.
Seriously. If you haven't already watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, you should.
Although I'm skeptical about it, they claim that hydrogen is merely a ploy of the energy/car industry: hydrogen wouldn't work and would be much more costly (both in fuel and replacement parts) than simply stuffing a car full with batteries. Don't forget your tinfoil hat.
This sig is intentionally left blank
and yet, it still says idiotic things...
/drinking/ the hydrogen... I don't see that as being a big issue.
As far as the hydrogen goes - it's a good point, it's not a fuel source, it's a transport mechanism, since we don't have a lot of easily collectable hydrogen around - we have to obtain it by expending energy. Hydrogen should be thought more in the lines of electricity than of gas, just that it has different uses.
As for "water running out"? WTF? Clean water may be diminishing, but the amount of water on the earth probably hasn't fluctuated by even 1% over the past billion years. Seing as how we aren't
And anyway, take the hydrogen out of unclean water... Well, when that hydrogen mixes with oxygen, I gurantee you the water will be clean.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Two questions. First, "increasing scarcity of water"? What, 72% of the planet's surface is water. I don't see that changing too dramatically in the next few centuries. I wonder if OP means "scarcity of FRESH water"? Desalinization is expensive and energy-intensive, and that would mesh with his statements better.
Second, energy efficiency. There seems to be some confusion or lack of clarity as to where the inefficinecy is at. Is it in the process of creating the hydrogen (from water, presumably), the storage of hydrogen, or in converting the hydrogen back to energy? Electrolysis is a very easy way to make hydrogen from water, and I thought it was fairly efficient, generating very little heat and no waste products. (unless you count oxygen as a waste, you could keep it for later use in making the hydrogen burn better anyway) Converting back to water is just igniting it. Internal combustion engines are not terribly efficient even though they have been around forever, I can see that, but it's no worse than the efficiency of burning gas, is a renewable resource, and is more environmentally friendly so all other things being equal I don't think we care that it's not all that efficient, since efficiency is basically the same as a lot of otherwise worse alternatives.
The main problem I see is the storage of the fuel. Hydrogen is very low density except under very high pressures, and this makes it hazardous. Gas stores its energy in liquid form making it a reasonably high density and reasonably safe form of energy transport. Batteries store their energy through chemical change, and have the advantage of not generating problematic waste products since there is no "exhaust", but their storage density is not as high. Hydrogen can have very high storage density if it is under very high pressure, but in that case the energy actually exists in two forms. First there is the hydrogen which can be burned to release energy while transforming to water, and second there is the pressure itself. Pressure is a form of stored energy too. But as with most forms of stored energy, accidental release can be dangerous. Gas burns easily and can explode, batteries can burn things with spilled acid and also have an explosion risk, even fertilizer has been known to explode. So hydrogen is probably nothing new from the danger standpoint, it's just a different sort of hazard, and we will have to get good at safely handling it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What will become scarce is the potable, clean water for us humans to drink. The volume of water available in the planet is constant. And anout the (lack of) efficiency of the process... ANY NEW TECH starts ineficent an then evolves... the market will take care of this. At Colombia, the oil production is taxed at 80%+ and it still viable...
The article's premise is flawed. The author writes about using electrolysis to produce hydrogen and then compressing and cooling it for transport as a liquid. Neither of these are preferred methods. The costs of compressing and cooling hydrogen to liquid form can be offset by not being stupid. Rather than carrying around hydrogen, it is far easier to carry around a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Alcohols can be broken down to yield some hydrogen and some carbon-oxide byproducts. Carbon monoxide, one of the byproducts, can undergo a water-gas shift reaction to produce more hydrogen from water, yielding products of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Carry around a tank of hydrocarbon fuel and make hydrogen as-needed for much greater energy density during transport. If you really must store hydrogen, use a metal hydride. Lanthanum-nickel (LaNi5) can absorb hydrogen at relatively low pressures (about 3-4 atmospheres) and then release it at atmospheric pressure. As an added bonus, the amount of hydrogen than can be absorbed into the bulk structure of LaNi5 is greater than the amount of liquid hydrogen that would occupy the same volume. \begin{tinfoilhat} Which oil company sponsored this research? The guy only looked at failed, poorly-though out solutions. \end{tinfoil hat}
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Hydrogen and helium atoms are about the same size (both have S1 as their outermost shell); oxygen and nitrogen are about twice as large, give or take a little depending on how you measure (e.g. van der Waals vs. covalent bond length).
--MarkusQ
Why are we continuing to push the idea that we need a distribution system?
We lose a lot of energy pushing electrons around the stupid grid.
The beauty of solar panels and windmill driven generators is that you can put them on every rooftop, in every back yard. We could make every home generate it's own electricity.
This would make people watch their own meters. This would make them more aware of wasteful usage. The problem won't get better unless we have a cultural shift and making each home responsible for it's own electrical generation would help with that.
On the technical side we are not wasting energy in distribution any more. We could use the existing grid as a power backup for emergencies.
But of course, we can't have people be independent. No! They must suck at the teat of some large company or another... My gods, if people did this, next they might start growing their own food in their back yards. What Havoc that would portend! Then, they might learn to sew. Think of the fashion industry! Next... independent thought! No no... better not to start down this road at all... People of the Earth, you must buy everything. Consume... That's nice...
Whoops, I ranted. Sorry, that slipped out. My insane grudges aside, it's still a fine idea.
-T
Who said hydrogen must be as efficient as oil and gas? We often abandon checmical for lesser effective alternatives sinec they are also less harmfull. Same should go for energy. We need to take a wholesome look at the future, and think that it will be a combination of nuclear, fusion, wind, wave, solar power, with delivery systems such as bio-ethanol, hydrogen and batteries depending om what best suits the need. There isn't a single magic formula that will replace oil, but a bunch of good answers to individual questions that will be able to cover our needs if used together. It's like "Web 2.0", or "Oil 2.0". There really isn't such a thing. It's a collection of things that sums up as "progress".
So someone outside a blog has stated the obvious that it just might take quite a lot of energy to free available hydrogen from its bonds relative to the energy released in "burning" it? I guess it is progress in popular chemistry awareness. Next up: take journalists out to a playground and have them give the swings a push. The point isn't the miracle that the swing comes back at them but that they had to invest the initial energy to get it moving in the first place and that there is inefficiency in the conservation of that energy invested.
Until we uncover the elemental hydrogen and oxygen mines, the whole hydrogen meme should be fodder for bemused sociologists, not policy-makers and technicians.
Big solar farms are a likely target for hydrogen production. Likely located in Arizona Desert or similar location where any water will be relatively rare.
Water is about the least likely initial source for the hydrogen to be used in a hydrogen economy. The hydrogen contained in oil and gas is far easier to extract than the hydrogen in water. So, we'll simply be using an oil or gas fueled extraction plant to pull hydrogen from oil or gas. Hydrogen is not an energy source, just a means of centering all the pollution output to central sites where there is a possibility of containing it. For example, if you did it all right at the oil fields, you could pump the CO2 and all other waste products right back into the ground, thus producing a nearly pollution free overall system since nothing but hydrogen and materials for use in making plastics, tires, etc. leave the field.
There are new windmills going up in the flat countryside. They're barely making the payments on the initial costs, but they're relatively affordable. It doesn't take huge amounts of wind to make decent amounts of electricity, it's just not as affordable for the companies trying to make a profit. Here's a helpful website, I am not affiliated with http://www.greenenergyohio.org/page.cfm?pageID=108
Agreed, of course, but there is something fishy about the article.
FRAUD??? It's true that making hydrogen is not an efficient way to store energy for use later. However, this quote is partly nonsense: "... the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare..." Water is not rare, and is could never be a problem with the production of hydrogen. I doubt that a reputable publication would print nonsense like that.
Not only is something very wrong with the article, but something is not right with the article's source, Physorg.org. Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom - See who's pumping cash by making oil for $13.21. And selling for $59. And another: Free Top Energy Profits - 5 Triple-Digit Investment Gains in Today's Alternative Energy Boom." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.
This article on the same web site seems like the beginning of fraud to me: A Printer that Delivers 1,000 Pages a Minute?. There is NO printer. There is only a poorly edited article in the online (not peer-reviewed, apparently) edition of Applied Physics Letters. The idea is called JeTrix (Jet Tricks) by the supposed developers. The idea is that a printhead that covers the whole sheet of paper can print faster than one that is small.
Recently, Slashdot has been carrying discussions of "scientific breakthroughs" that are in actuality attempts to get money from investors. The Slashdot articles are, in reality, press releases for extremely poor investment "opportunities". Is a Slashdot editor taking money to run these?
Choose 2, you don't get all or even three. Clean, Cheap, Safe, Plentiful Sometimes you won't even get two though.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
This is why we need to push the plug-in hybrid. Most people don't drive further than 25 miles from home in a regular day. With some slightly improved battery technology, we will be able to run off of grid electricity for short regular trips.
Hydrogen (or even some ethanol or gas or diesel) could be used for purely long-distance trips. Plug in at your destination to recharge as much as possible, keeping fuel usage down. I'd like to see a study on what percentage of fuel usage we'd be able to cut out in this fashion. I imagine remembering to plug in your car at the end of the day would be an easy transition, given that you'd burn $20 of fuel the next day to get to work instead of recharging for $.50 (numbers pulled from air).
I am not an official "analyst" but this seems to me to be what we'll be transitioning to anyway, without intervention. I imagine that in a few years, assuming rising oil costs, plug-in hybrids will become more/very common. Oil will slowly transition to a lesser used fuel as its cost skyrockets, to be replaced by whatever can be found (ethanol, methane, hydrogen, bigger batteries). It's inevitable, mark my words.
Cons: Yes, I am going to throw in a couple downfalls of this method. 1). Your fuel engine/cell will possibly be idle for long periods of time, making sudden long-haul usage risky. That once a month you visit Grandma 100 miles away would really be the only time you'd find out there's a mechanical problem with your vehicle.
2). Electrical transmission lines across the country would have to be updated. As it is, there are brown and blackouts due to lack of enough power. Upgrading existing lines wouldn't be enough: the pattern of usage would change with residential areas using a lot more power to charge their cars, as well as anywhere else those cars might be charged at (parking lots with meters?).
Yes, because it isn't like our planet is 80% water or anything.
...is way ahead of the rest of the world after all like their propaganda proclaims. :-P
What, with their wood burning cars and trucks and eco-friendly nightly blackouts it's a vision of the future to come.
Actually, I was watching a program last night on the History Channel -- not exactly peer reviewed scientific literature, I realize, but IMO on par with TFA -- which was talking about the viability of wind power in the United States as a renewable energy source.
They pointed out that although wind does take up space, it's not as if the space it "takes up" can't be used for other things. They had some interesting shots of farmland out in the midwest where there were wind generators standing in the middle of the fields. The actual footprint of the generator on the ground is pretty small. Though I suppose its shadow might reduce crop yields in the surrounding acres slightly, one assumes the electricity generated must be enough to make up for this cost to the farmer. Probably the biggest drawback of having them all over your field is that it becomes harder to spray your crops using aircraft, but that doesn't seem like a total deal-breaker.
There's a whole lot of farmland out in the middle part of the country which also has pretty steady winds, and is already being used for what basically amounts to an "industrial" purpose (large scale high-yield farming). If you can show the owners of that land that they can increase their financial yield per acre by adding wind turbines to their fields -- basically giving them another cash crop besides food -- you probably wouldn't have as much of the NIMBYism that plagues wind projects in more residential or coastal areas. (Although I think eventually, those people are just going to have to suck it up and learn to enjoy looking at turbines; 100 years ago, people probably bitched about having a lighthouse mucking up their view, but now they're considered a beautiful addition to the landscape. Surely generators could be the same way in time.)
Although I think in the short term, nuclear (fission, obviously) plants are probably our best bet towards cutting carbon emissions and reducing our dependency on foreign energy sources, wind turbines seem close to being practical. Most of the objections to them seem to be aesthetic, and when it comes down to having your lights go out, or having some sort of power plant in your backyard, wind turbines seem a whole lot nicer than a coal-burner or nuclear facility (or being flooded out for a hydro project).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You need energy to generate hydrogen and lots of it. The efficiency of the process depends on the source and so does how clean the process is. The efficiency of converting hydrogen to other forms of energy varies a lot. If you just burn it in your car than it will be close to 25% but if fuel cells are used that could reach something close to 80%. But this problem of water cost? When people say that water is going to be a problem they don't that water will disappear, just clean, drinkable water. I don't think you need this kind of water to generate hydrogen. Probably filtered ocean water could be used. And once the hydrogen is burnt, it will become water again. The problem still is how to generate hydrogen. But many uses of energy don't need hydrogen. Just plug it in the power grid and there will probably be a larger overall thermodynamic efficiency.
The parent post is not a flame it's an insightful.
Install COX in your backend today!
But, funnily enough, nobody wants to buy an electric car, despite the fact that they'd probably be cheaper to run. Why? Because the range and performance is unacceptable to most people. And it's the same with a fuel cell vehicle compared with a battery-powered electric car. Sure, the hydrogen might be more expensive than the equivalent power straight from the grid. But the car's range and performance will be much better than the battery car.
Furthermore, he makes the strange assumption that the hydrogen will be coming from room-temperature electrolysis. That's highly unlikely. It's much more likely that hydrogen will be produced using chemical processes on fossil fuels (using geosequestration to dispose of the resulting CO2), by using a nonchemical source of heat (such as a nuclear reactor or solar furnace) in high temperature electrolysis, or through all manner of nifty renewable hydrogen sources that don't involve producing electricity and then doing electrolysis.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The article itself has comments from readers two days ago that state its ignorance. It should have never seen the light of day here.
"On 11-Dec-2006 by travis
The author seems either biased or ignorant. There are several new technologies being developed in this area that he apparently ignored. Many of them have been covered by physorg.com at one time or another. Solid state hydrogen storage. Solar powered electrolysis. Bacteria powered electrolysis. Nano-tech boosted efficiency fuel cells. And although it's possible that even should all these technologies work out the bottom line energy analysis will not change, by failing to mention any of them in the analysis, his credibility has been shot to hell."
But wait, I bet a buck that when we first developed the gas engine it wasn't that efficient. Our first computers weren't that efficient. I bet it is safe to say that all brand new things aren't that efficient. It makes sense that our first implementations of hydrogen energy sources will not be efficient. That is the cool thing about human innovation ... we continue to improve upon these things.
Ben Kenney: I totally agree that hydrogen is much less efficient than batteries. Just from quick back of the envelope calculations, if somebody drove a hydrogen-fuelled cell car, say 35 kilometers everyday, then the amount of extra electricity that you have to use to make that hydrogen is pretty much the same amount of electricity as the per capita electricity consumption in Germany.
So it seems that these guys know what they are talking about: the global efficiency of pure hydrogen is lower that alternatives, such as the electric grid.
for special applications. In space, it's the ideal rocket fuel, and in fuel cells
for generating both electrical power and drinking water. On earth, hydrogen fuel
cells might make sense in places where batteries don't fit. For example, there is
a company that is working on small hydrogen fuel cells to power lap top computers.
The power density of these promises to be better than Li-Ion batteries (and maybe
even safer given Li-Ion batteries often catch fire).
We just need to keep in mind that hydrogen is NOT a power source. It is a fuel that
needs to be manufactured, better yet, it is a battery that needs to be charged.
Remote? I live in Niagara you insensitive clod!
Isn't the earth like 73% water? How can there be a scarcity of it? That's st00pid. It's still understandable though that it's not a great alternative. Didn't they already decide this awhile back that we're going to have to do something besides hydrogen? Fairly certain they did studies on this a couple years ago and found that we'd be using almost as much energy to make energy from hydrogen as it would produce. I too think we'd have to do something like solar power. We don't use that big ass fireball in the sky except to get skin cancer right now, so let's make something productive out of it like POWER. Power > Cancer. How smart is that?
It's early where I am, so I'm sorry if I'm not fully awake.
But, I thought that when hydrogen was combined with oxygen, it turned back into water. No?
I think I'll keep my cultural values just the way they are TYVM. Why don't you go ahead and define some of these "superior" cultural values you speak of.
I would argue that, as a whole (and speaking from a U.S. citizens perspective) our cultural values are about as good as you can get. We as a society give endlessly to the needy around the world. We volunteer and contribute, while all along providing a fairly utopic environment for our children(comparatively speaking).
As for "sharing" resources with you, ok, I MIGHT entertain some of those ideas, but I think you are going WAAAYY out into left-field with your suggestions. The problem with sharing resources like a home is, quite frankly, I don't trust you to take care of it the way I want it taken care of. We (U.S.) used to do this very thing a few years ago. Noone had home gyms in the 60's and 70's, people went to the local YMCA, or local school gym to get their workouts. Where are the YMCAs now? Sure, a few still exist, but have you been to one? I would bet not. They are old, dirty, and, for the most part, undesirable places to be. Why did this happen? Because the 1% of the population who shares and doesn't care ruins it for the other 99%.
"How much money would be saved on social programs if governments gave tax breaks to people that took the disabled, homeless, etc into the free space in their homes rent free, etc?"
You're have got to be kidding!@! Do you have any REAL understanding of the types of individuals who are homeless? I do, and without going into a big long sermon on why people end up in these types of situations(at least here in the U.S.), I'll just say that a fair number of them are there by their own designs.
Are you really advocating inviting those people into your home, to sleep with/near your children? Its absolutely insane to suggest something like this. I'm all for providing shelters on my tax dollar. I'm all for volunteering to help those out who really want to lift themselves out of their situations, but I'll be damned if I am going to invite some drunken lunatic into my home to share a bed with my daughter.
As for the disabled, the challenge with doing as you suggest is that many have "special needs". Are you really suggesting having homes all across the U.S. install ramps and escalators in an effort to help the disabled? Talk about a waste of resources. I wan to help the disabled as much as you, but from a resource perspective, it makes far more sense to (as we do and continue to do in the U.S.) build institutions capables of catering to those with special needs. Then, go out and solicit the public for support.
For those without we have a multitude of solutions available for them (again, at least here in the U.S.). As for other nations, I can't speak to all their problems, but I can say that it most often does not come down to overcrowding and resource use, it has more to do with THEIR social values (10 kids per family with no sustainable income, civil unrest, inability to form a workable government). Now you may WANT to blame all of us for these issues, but when you strip everything away, your arguements crumble into dust.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
I had no idea it was good for my car.
The root cause of all these problems is the demand for personal rather than mass transit. Houses can be insulated, trains can run directly on electricity, airplanes and cars must carry stored fuel.
Pining for the fjords
Saturn EV-1, Tesla Roadster, Stealth Brothers Fury. General Motors made a pure electric vehical that would smoke a Civic, then Tesla, a devision of Lotus, started smoking Lambos and vipers with its Roadster. My brother and i build an electric car for under 20,000 with easy to find parts and used laptop batteries. I drive it to work every day. I charge it at night.(only takes 2 hrs) With a top speed of just over 100 miles per hour, and close to 300 miles of range (297miles) i dont know why no one pays attention to them.....oh ya.... big oil is having butt sex with our government.....i forgot..... oh well.... but really, im 18, my bro is 21, and we built a working electric car to sit next to our 73 dodge charger big block, just for fun ^-^
Also one interesting point is that more fresh water is used to produce 1 gallon of gas than 1 kilogram of hydrogen, which have equivalent amount of energy of 1 gallon of gas.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom ... Free Top Energy Profits ..." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.
If they are using Google to sell ads they don't control the ads. Their site relates to energy issues, so ads for energy-related scams will match in the placement algorithms.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What a load of rubbish.
burning H + O (in the air) = H20
Magical we split water into hydrogen and oxygen and then recombined them
what do we have?
Well glad you asked. WATER!!!!
Water is just an energy carrier.
we do NOT run out of it.
But the energy must come from some where, ie. Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, etc...
And yes I am a bit drunk at the moment.
That with ALL the global warming going on, and ALL our glaciers melting (I'm SUPER SERIAL!)... we'd have plenty of water for these purposes.
Just ask Al Gore.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Please don't forget that Tesla has a working Electric Roadster http://www.teslamotors.com/
If we were to nay-say every possible revolution before it even got off the ground there would be no incentive to MAKE that solution work. People have big incentives to make an energy solution like hydrogen work. It would be widely profitable if it could just be made profitable at all. This is where R&D comes in.
Just because something is not via able RIGHT NOW doesn't spell the doom of it. Cell phones used to cost a fortune to use/buy. Now they are ubiquitous. People thought we would never fly. Now we do. Solar cells used to cost a fortune and be extremely inefficient. Nay-sayer, like the OP, pooh-poohed solar energy as something that would "never work." The list goes on and on.
Don't underestimate our ability to innovate. This is where Capitalism shines -- with a real reward for hard work. (Yes, I know not everyone who invents something, etc. reaps the rewards, but it is the thought that pushes people to innovate.)
The Sun dumps up to 1KW:m^2 on the ocean 71% of the Earth, all day long, every day.
361M km^2 is 3.61E14m^2, or maybe 1E14KW: a billion MW. That's a starting point for 150MW per human, throughout the day. 2/3 of humans live within 150Km of a coastline, probably growing to 75% by the time hydrogen fuel would replace petroleum/gasoline as the main energy carrier. In faster growing countries, like China and India, the fraction is even larger and would be larger still if energy and fresh water were more plentiful there.
Cracking seawater with sunlight is clearly a revolution for sustaining human energy consumption. Starting with seawater also pumps more oxygen into the atmosphere, compensating for some trees and sealife we've killed, and some CO2 we've pumped into the air from petrofuels. While leaving the remaining petrofuels for easy production of plastic and other carbon manufacturing. And making more potable water, rather than less.
Petrofuel wars are notorious for creating war and strife. The whole bloody 20th Century was underwritten by wars for access to oil in the Mideast and Russia, while the 21st Century has already been defined by little else. Water wars are coming, and already at base of some intractable conflicts, like Israel's borders.
Then we get "experts" like Boessel, whose g-g-grandfather invented the fuelcell in 1838 Germany, saying
Which doesn't even add up. Not to mention that his 25% is gated through the current 40-50% fuelcell efficiency, rather than the theoretical maximum greater than 85%. And that the current (pun intended
For Boessel, 25% surplus energy isn't enough for a clean, even often renewable resource. For the rest of "out economy" (our civilization), it sure beats the petrofuels which are killing us even before they run out.
--
make install -not war
And due to the high levels of farming in places like the mid-west, we are depleting our supplies of groundwater. If we suddenly relied on that to fulfill our energy storage needs, we will see catastrophic effects.
Obviously these people are missing the big picture.
Thanks to Global Warming the polar ice caps will be gone within 40 years thus puting more water into circulation and making the articles concerns irrelavent.
See! We have all been panicking for nothing! Big oil is right and climate change is a force for Good, not Evil!!!!!
To produce the hydrogen we need, we require water and energy. Look to Iceland, home of tremendous amounts of geothermal energy. In fact, they also have hydrogen gas pouring out of geothermal boreholes - it only needs to be purified somewhat before use.
a s-vast-resources-to-produce-hydrogen/
Iceland will be the new center of the world in so far as power supply. They have abundant geothermal resources that allow them to produce - are you ready for this - hydrogen - without the need for a fossil fuel energy source.
Check out a Google search on Iceland geothermal hydrogen, and you will get abundant information on the hows and whys.
Or, for you lazy bastards, copy link here: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/11/25/iceland-h
The Western US also has geothermal areas which could be harnessed, but they happen to be inside national monuments, and so harder to access in a industrial sort of way (thank goodness. Can you imagine Old Faithful with a big metal cap on it, and around the monument are gauges to show the pressure, and photos of how it used to look? ugh.)
Putting any energy savings (or lack of) aside for the moment, I think that fuel cells for transportation are good idea simply because they let us move the pollution away from where we live. Internal combustion engines used for transportation put their pollution right in our residential and commercial areas. But with hydrogen and fuel cells we can move the pollution to areas where no-one lives (that is, we can place the hydrogen and electricity generating plants in out of the way places).
Now, environmentalists might be aghast at the idea of pursuing something just in order to hide pollution under the rug, so to speak. But as a dweller in an urban area, it sounds like a damn good idea to me.
Recently at the NREL energy convention (PA 2006), the question of water scarcity was raised in connection with bio-fuels as well.
Yes, one can "make" water from brackish water given enough energy, but that's partly the point, if it takes a lot of energy to create the water used to create the energy, you're headed for trouble.
As for collecting the water at the end, I suspect the amount of water is small compared to the effort (and energy) of collecting it.
I would concluded, that there are some really nifty ideas - like running your car on used cooking oil, which are fun to read, but fall far short of contributing substantially to the energy needs of a civilization.
Water-dependant schemes are prone to the constraint of water; bearing in mind many of the poor lack fresh water today, we would (are currently*) diverting fresh water from the poor to make pretty golf courses. Taking more water from the poor to power a Hummer doesn't appear to be a moral victory.
AIK
*The Rio Grande used to bring water to Mexico, which it no longer does do to consumption in southern California - part of the reason in fact that many Mexicans now come north to farm.
There was simply no purpose in writing this article. It makes as much sense as wondering if electric batteries will ever be able to replace coal as a source of energy. The entire premise was disturbingly pointless.
I'm stunned that a professional science editorial staff is confused about the difference between an "energy transport" and an "energy source".
For those few who don't already know:
Hydrogen can only be used to transport or store energy. As such, it makes no sense to compare hydrogen to energy sources such as oil, coal, and nuclear.
(The only exception is if somebody actually finds a natural deposit of hydrogen gas somewhere, but that's usually not what people mean when they talk about hydrogen.)
However, it makes perfect sense to compare hydrogen to electric power lines or batteries. I.e. they are infrastructures that we invest in to transport or store energy.
Since it produces more energy than it consumes it should be easy to produce a full working example. For example a device consisting of a generator that feeds it's output to an electric motor that powers the generator.
"We have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy."
davecb5620@gmail.com
I'll be the first to say that I don't know the efficiency ratings of most modern power plants, but I can say that when I was in the Navy we did calculations of how efficient our nuclear reactors were and while I'm not going to say what the number was, I will say it was significantly lower then the 25%. Granted our systems were closed-loop reactors instead of the open-loops (more efficient, but also dirtier) reactors that are usually used in commercial systems, but it still doesn't seem that 25% is all that bad in the scheme of things.
Save the economy from what? I don't see "government" anywhere mentioned.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
All other forms of 'power' are just storage mechanisms or transformations for nuclear power:
Solar: Converting radiation from Nuclear @ Sol
Wind: Nuclear @ Sol -> differential heating -> wind
Hydro: Nuclear @ Sol -> evaporation -> water runs down hill
Geothermal: Nuclear fission within the earth -> hot core -> heats water for geothermal
Biomass: Nuclear @ Sol -> photosynthesis -> energy storage
Fossil Fuels: As Biomass -> burried over long periods -> concentration of stored energy
It's _all_ Nuclear at some point. Once we accept that and work toward building safe reactor designs we'll be able to get on with "progress" without destroying the environment.
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Here is what I think to be the reason for the current war in Iraq. At some point, the major economic forces of the planet will have to switch from oil to something else, be it nuclear, hydrogen, ... or most likely, a mix of several of those. If the US/Japan/EU officially schedule such change for a certain period of 10/20 years while there is still oil or while the oil producers cartel is in charge, it is likely that the oil price may be manipulated to force things back to their original course. Now if the USA rule Iraq and Kuwait, then the stability in oil price that is required for the switch may be achieved.
It is amazing to me that people just don't see how foolish the basic conjecture and suppositions in this article are.
....
1) water is not scarce, nor will it ever be. "Industrial Hydrogen" is a silly term. You have hydrogen or you don't. Simple science, an easy high school experiment can produce the needed product.
2) oil is disapearing because we are taking a complex molecule and breaking it down and have no way to recover it without 3 to 4 times the energy we get out of it. Think of it as a -350% efficiency renewable resource.
3) hydrogen usage requires oxygen to combust, leaving you with...... ready?
Water.
And as you can see, even at +25% renewable efficiency, that's an improvement of what?, 1400%?
So the initial costs to pull hydrogen from water are touted as the prohibitive factor. Ok, you cannot have a perpetual motion machine, granted, but add an outside source of energy, combustion, and it is not perpetual motion.
And as another idea; What if we pull all the loose hydrogen floating in space? Of course then we might deplete our atmoshere of oxygen and drown ourselves... heh Just a thought...
.
here's a really thorough look at crunching the numbers on a real hydrogen economy
The earth is covered in it!!! There is more water than there is land! who wrote this an oil executive?
It's true that we need water to produce Hydrogen, and that it's inefficient, and that using salty sea water may be even more inefficient, but if we have hundreds of thousands of cars spewing out steam instead of CO/CO2, wouldn't that help SOLVE the water scarcity problem? Isn't all that steam going to come down as rain. And since we've transorted it from the coast inland, isn't it more likely to come down over land? Someone will probably chime in with a scathing reply about it not being enought water to be to make a difference, but isn't that what we though about oil-based combustion products.
I think all of his argument goes out the window if one remembers that the Japanese are building a laser that will solve all of our free Hydrogen problems.
Why would you need to use clean, drinking water to make hydrogen? Why not just use undrinkable water?
How about putting some serious brainpower to changing cultural values?
Solving the engineering problems associated with power consumption are far easier than the social issues at work here.
I'd argue that we'll probably have unlimited free energy from nuclear fusion or microwave satellites or millions of gerbils running on wheels before we'd make any significant progress on getting people to live in smaller homes by choice. It just ain't going to happen. Bigger houses have equaled more wealth and status for thousands of years. I bet before there were even people, the proto-human with the biggest cave was probably envied by his peers.
You'd be better off trying to do some germline genetic engineering and produce people with gills that can live underwater, or tolerate extremes of temperature and live without artificial cooling in non-temperate regions, than try and modify social values so radically.
I don't know any attempts at top-down social engineering like what you're proposing, that have ever succeeded in the long term. The only way you'll engineer the type of society you apparently want, is if the people living in it aren't humans in anything like the current sense. You might as well discuss a robot metropolis.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder if the blood protein discussed here yesterday impacts this somewhat.
So basically, you're suggesting taking the energy that the sun currently transfers into the oceans? Because.... the ocean doesn't really need that heat energy anyway, and it couldn't possibly be environmentally catastrophic if done on a massive scale? No thanks. Let's stick to nuclear.
I think you missed the point right there.
The article says "In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own source of energy," to which you reply:
"Why do we have to use electricity from the grid to generate hydrogen? Why can't we use floating arrays of photovoltaic cells to crack the water on the ocean? Or we could use large banks of mirrors to power an array of Stirling engines to generate the power to crack the water? It's not as if you need a large voltage to do the job, I think there are many ways of getting the power other than off the grid."
The point here is that the energy generated by those photovoltaic cells or stirling engines could be better put to use on the grid rather than using it to create hydrogen (which loses some of the energy you managed to capture in the process). Sure, they don't have to go on the grid, but if they did you'd get much more of the energy they create for general use. It just doesn't make sense to piss away a good portion of your produced energy just so you can have a fancy and inefficient carrier.
We actually spend more time per day in an agricultural/industrial society fulfilling our basic needs than we would in a hunter-gatherer society.
Huh? How about a source on this, because I am not buying it. People in hunter/gatherer societies basically spend all their waking hours providing for their basic needs. They're either hunting, or gathering, or building shelters or making weapons or moving in search of better game. Very little occurs in those societies that isn't directly related to food production or shelter.
Even in a society that's doing subsistence agriculture, individuals have a lot more free time. If they didn't, they'd never be able to differentiate into specialized occupations, develop industry, write books, etc. In modern industrialized societies, if you spend a few minutes a day actually providing for your own continued existence in any direct fashion I'd be surprised. E.g., I pay rent in order to have a house, in order to pay that rent I work at my job, but less than 20% of my income goes to rent, and probably less than that to food. If we say I spend 40% of my time essentially paying for my own survival (and really, it's far less than that -- if I bought food based on calories or raw nutritional benefit per dollar, I could survive on a few bucks a day), that's 60% of my day going to other ends. And that's only working about 40-50 hours per week! There's no way you'd be able to approach that as a hunter-gatherer. There's no such thing as a 9-5 occupation in the pre-agricultural world; you'd starve to death if you tried.
What you're saying directly contradicts almost every theory of the development of civilization (from labor surpluses which occur as a direct result of sedentary/agricultural living) that I've ever heard, including other works by some of the authors you mentioned (Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, for one) not to mention sheer common sense.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder what makes earth radiate off way more heat then it absorbes? Is'nt the earth a giant nuclear reacter?
tube w/ tungsten as a coating on either side.(Diamonds as a vacume gap)2 circuts(one too cool the assembly, one too generate heat from lava)---Conducted through soil.
Energy is and always will be free, the only thing holding it back is greed.
The real solution to the entire problem is to eliminate the use of Money.
Well, we could always go back to direct barter, but have you ever tried to stuff live pigs into your wallet? Sitting on them gives you a real crick in your back, let me tell you.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
from NEI: Producing hydrogen with the use of gas-cooled, high-temperature nuclear reactors: A demonstration gas-cooled, high-temperature reactor is expected to be operating by 2007. The coolant temperature will be around 900 degrees Centigrade, and the reactor is intended to produce hydrogen through high-temperature electrolysis or thermochemical water splitting. The sole purpose of these reactors could be to create hydrogen which can be used as a liquid fuel or in fuel cells as discussed in other posts here. This would be a replacement for gasoline and other portable energy sources.
The "hydrogen economy" has all of these problems (plus one more) because the the second half of the second sentance above is false--or rather at this point in time we can't tap those renewable sources well enough to matter. In order for the hydrogen economy to be clean we would have to go nuclear and that doesn't seem to be politically feasible, at least in the US. Sure you can get the energy from burning coal, but coal is generally even more dirty than oil and coal gasification or liquification is more feasible than electrolysis to produce hydrogen and would reuse a lot of existing infrastructure once we run out of oil.
The second problem is that it is currently impossible to store hydrogen the molecule (H2) long term. It leaks from any container we try to store it in. This isn't anything that's going to be easily solved. The current solution is to make hydrogen as you need it from steam reformation of hydrocarbons (from oil or coal) or a similar process. This doesn't solve our dependence on fossil fuels. It may increase the efficiency over burning the hydrocarbon in an engine, but not by much.
The third problem is that hydrogen has lousy energy density because it's a low density gas. You either have to store it at high pressure (which exacerbates the leak problem and is too dangerous for consumer applications) or really low pressure to make it a liquid (-423 F = -253 C = 20 K--which is way too costly energy-wise and too dangerous for consumer applications). Liquid hydrogen will NEVER work on Earth (maybe it would work in space if solid/liquid hydrogen is mined from comets or other bodies). High pressure gas may work for large scale applications where you can afford to have a think-walled tank, but compressed gas is really dangerous and I'm doubtful it would be approved for automobiles.
The only real way to solve the energy density problem is to adsorb (look up the difference between adsorb and absorb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption) the hydrogen onto a high surface area pourous solid, but we don't know how to make this work with current technology. Some challenges off the top of my head: desorption of the hydrogen to free it (if its adsorbed too loosely you have a leak problem--too tighly and you can't use it); keeping the adsorbent material clean (it is often poisoned by things such as carbon monoxide, sulfur, etc.; reactivation of the aged adsorbent material; controlling the temperature of the adsorbent material tank; gas flow through the packed bed of adsorbent material; crushing of the material resulting in less surface area (and therefore less storage) as time goes on; it's possible that you just won't get enough energy density to make this more attractive than alternatives; weight of the adsorbent material. It's possible that all that can be worked through given enough time and ingenuity or there is some other adsorption scheme that is more feasible, but I bet we can come up with a better battery that is more feasible than a fuel cell before we come up with a feasible method for transporting and storing hydrogen.
By the way, fuel cells are batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell). The difference between fuel cells and conventional cell batteries is that you can have a steady state replacement of the anode and cathode materials quite easily because they are gasses. Other conveniences of fuel cells are: no byproduct to remove on the anode side, you get the cathode material (oxygen) for "free" from the air, and the only byproduct on the cathode side is the ubiquitous water. It's a great concept battery that has real world problems.
There are thousands of reasons why Hydrogen is not an ideal fuel source. The top ones being
Hydrogen is the lightest element. Any natural hydrogen floats off into space or is re-combined into other molecules. This lack of density also means that it is costly and time consuming to compress hydrogen into a container for storage, and that the size and weight of that container will contain less potential energy than fossil fuels. IE a hydrogen gas tank that takes 45min to fill and is the size of a small refrigerator will get a car about half as far as a tank of gasoline half that size.
Because hydrogen doesn't occur in it's pure form in any significant number, we have to extract it using energy. Currently we spend far more energy creating the hydrogen than we get back by burning it. Since it takes power to make power, hydrogen is nothing more than a glorified battery, you use electrical energy and convert it to chemical energy, then back into electrical (fuel cell) or burn it.
It is far more fuel efficient, and better for our environment to drive battery powered electric vehicles supplied from the grid and supplement our energy needs with clean Nuclear power.
Currently most of the electricity in the USA is made from coal burning power plants. If you really want to save the world from CO2 and sulfur emissions then build more Nuclear power plants and run more vehicles on electricity. Nuclear energy is a zero emission technology. There is no exhaust. The fuel is plentiful, and reactor designs like the pea bed reactors, are safe, and immune to melt downs, and the radioactive by products are useful in the medical and defense fields and can be safely stored.
Look, this whole fear of nuclear technology thing is overblown in face of the risks with global warming. Radioactive materials are already on earth, in our soil, in our mountains, it's already out there in nature decaying. Isn't it better to remove it from the environment and do some good with it? Whether it decays on a mountainside, or decays in a reactor, does it make a difference? It's already there and it would be fool hardy to waste it. People act like nuclear dumps are un-natural. What do you think happens to uranium and other radioactive substances when they aren't mined? They sit there in the rock, same as a barrel would.
Any technology that 'burns' a hydrocarbon or hydrocarbon derivative is a dead end. Water -> H2 + O2 -> water gives no net gain - it may give you a fuel to burn, but the energy to get the H2 could have been left in 'electron form'. Use the damn electricity generated by a nuclear fission/solar plant to directly power your machinery. Why convert it to hydrogen?? The way forward is to use developments in nuclear technology to build safer power plants (pebble bed reactors?), research fusion, and continue to improve solar cells and battery technology. There is no profit in this model for our current energy suppliers so it will not happen soon. The largest corps from the 1800's are by and large dead - this will happen again to energy companies when - to use management speak - paradigms finally shift and we move on by necessity to more refined ways to harvest electrons to do our bidding.
The benefit I see of hydrogen is that energy can be stored via the electrolysis of hydrogen. First of all, it's absolutely false to say that energy and water are rare. Go to the US Southwest and you'll find more solar energy than you can ever handle. Convert dirty water to H2 via electrolysis and store it or transport it. Hydrogen may be inefficient, but it's energy that can be stored. All we need are machines that can generate it in an automated fashion via sunlight and water. Imagine electrolysis factories in the ocean near the equator. This article is classic PR FUD. Someone who has an interest in the status quo has bought this study. Read "Toxic Sludge is Good for You." for other examples of how PR masquerades as science or journalism. Don't be fooled when the vast majority of the scientific community support H2 as an energy source and some lone person who calls himself a scientist speaks in the interests of the petroleum industry.
..taking the energy that the sun currently transfers into the oceans?
Are you fucking serious?
Sheesh, one of these days one of you envirodiots is going to make make so mad, i'll club a seal or two, just for the fun of it.
and get rid of 90% of the people.
We're headed there in a hurry, anyway.. better hope those free energy guys are right. Until then, the best thing you can do for the environment is not have any children.
..don't panic
Yeah I know, think of how catastrophic it would be to not have to deal with natures natural way of cooling down the oceans. You know, hurricanes.
/Wait for troll to say they're glad I'm not in charge in 3...2...
In all fairness, smart people would need to be in charge to get something like that just right and not overdone, and smart people in charge are a rare commodity.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
It would take about 2 million square km of cheap amorphous solar cell to give every man, woman, and child expected to be living worldwide at the population peak in 2060ish as much electrical power as people in the US use per capita now. We can treat this as a reasonable limit case for how much we need.
The earth has a surface area of around 510 million square km.
We'd preferentially want to use equatorial waters, which limit you to about 200 million square km, but that's still only using about 1% of the total ocean surface area.
Those solar cells tend to have a similar reflectance/absorbed as heat ratio as ocean water; that heat will end up slightly more preferentially in the air rather than in the water, but that's not a huge effect. Only about 10% of the total solar energy will come out in electricity and be "lost" compared to water's thermal absorbtion.
The total impact here is not negligible but is pretty minor. We shouldn't ignore climatic issues, but they are likely to be small, and in the opposite direction from global warming's impact.
You'd think they actually hurt someone, by all the Vitriol against environmentalists.
Well, some of them actually do. The "greenies" who are constantly saying things that aren't quite true, or who exaggerate facts in order to push an agenda, are responsible for the less-than-serious face that the public puts on the environmental movement in general.
They damage the cause they claim to be supporting, in the same way that the ELF/PETA folks damage the credibility of the mainstream animal rights movement, by making everyone easier to marginalize by association. Having people who are trying to do the right thing the wrong way, undermines folks who are trying to do the right thing in the right way, and the net effect can actually be regressive (as it obviously is with the ELF -- I mean they're a terrorist organization for the love of God).
I am a person who is concerned with environmental issues, but I'd never call myself an 'environmentalist' because it's practically a dirty word, at least in my social circle. It has a perception as being an arational point of view (even though I think it's the most logical stance to take) and emotionally-dictated political views are nothing I want to associate myself with.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You do realize that nuclear power plants use ocean/lake water to cool the rods, transfering that heat back to the ocean/lake. Do you suppose that could have some impact on the ecosystem as well?
I dont see why a water shortage is an issue... Hydrogen is water-neutral. The process doesnt consume water. It temporarily separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, so maybe large storehouses of hydrogen could cause a shortage... but that would have to be one hell of a storehouse.
Lets put a stop to this silly and pointless discussion.
Look, the answer is actually in the question.
All we have to do is change the laws of physics, and Voila !
(Please remember to disconnect your sarcasm filters and re-read)
8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
This point has been made before; Ulf Bossel was quoted in Robert Mcleod's blog back in July. Robert summarized the argument perfectly here: http://entropyproduction.blogspot.com/2006/07/hydr ogens-death-knell.html
"That leaves producing hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, which is the supposedly 'green' option. The reality is that the electrolysis to fuel cell path is a terribly inefficient method to convert solar, wind, and nuclear energy to useful work. Let us consider the production of hydrogen from wind power. First you have to rectify the alternating current to direct current to power the electrolyzer, which is about 90 % efficient. An electrolyzer is optimistically 75 % efficient so you lose another quarter of your energy there. Then you need to store the hydrogen, by say compressing it under high pressure. This would consume about 20 % of the energy content of the hydrogen, and distributing it perhaps another 10 %. Now we finally have the hydrogen at the fuel cell but then we have to remember that the fuel cell is maybe 50 % efficient. The product of the fuel cell is direct current electricity, so in the end we've gone through a whole bunch of steps in a big circle. When you multiply all these factors together you find that the well-to-wheel (or source-to-sink) efficiency is only about 25 %.
The obvious question that Ulf Bossel and people such as myself ask is why go to all that trouble? Why not just transmit and use the electricity directly? High-voltage direct current electricity transmission is just as efficient as pipelining hydrogen. If we allow for 90 % efficiency for rectifying and 90 % for transmission we end up with 3.3 times more energy for the electricity economy than the hydrogen economy. If you want to include batteries the math doesn't change much because the round-trip efficiency of batteries is really very high - 90 % for lithium-ion batteries. As Bossel states, hydrogen cannot compete with its own fuel source in this case, electrons. This poor efficiency of the hydrogen economy that I've talked about is not something that has a solution through improved technology. The laws of thermodynamics maintain the limiting factor here. All the extra steps in the hydrogen case produce entropy, and there's no way to get past certain theoretical limits to the efficiency of each stage.
The inefficiency of hydrogen isn't something that we can afford environmentally. Would anyone consider it better to have three wind turbines rather than one, or three nuclear power plants rather than one?"
Oh the humanity!
How ya like dat?
And where is this 100% renewable energy going to come from? Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to build a wind turbine? How much energy it takes to produce solar panels? All of THAT energy comes from fossil fuels. Fuel to forge the steel. Fuel to make silicone. Fuel to transport and install the materials. Hell, even oil for the ball-bearings on the turbines. So you're spending energy, and therefore polluting, to build all this infrastructure...and now thanks to the wonders of hydrogen, you need to spend 4 times as much resources, and produce 4 times the pollution, because you need 4 times the infrastructure. Not exactly what I'd call a great deal.
Think of the children^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfish!
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I dunno about that. Seems to me that if the government and/or private sector was willing to invest a few hundred billion dollars, we could construct arbitrarily large solar/wind farms out in the middle of nowhere. There's also tidal power, geothermal power, hydro power, and nuclear power (I know we haven't built any new reactors in a while due to public hysteria, but if it was built 100+ miles away from the nearest heavily populated area...) All of these energy production types are limited by geography (e.g. wind and hydro and geothermal power can't be set up just *anywhere*) and/or objection by the local residents. You can't overcome these limitations via powerlines--it would be just too damn costly to maintain. However, if you can figure out a way of storing the eletricity for a reasonable length of time, suddenly the distance issues becomes much less problematic. There is also an even greater upside to energy storage vs. powerline transmission--you can run your generations at full capacity, 100% of the time in order to build up a surplus. Yes, you lose a lot of energy in the storage process (whether you're storing the energy via hydrogen electrolysis or some other method) but you gain efficiency in the sense that your power plant designs can be optimized to run at full strength 100% of the time, which is something our current plants are not designed for. Nuclear, in particular, can be "overclocked" pretty significantly.
Now, I'm not arguing that hydrogen is the most efficient form of energy storage at our disposal, but I do think that energy storage is a lot more important than energy production. There are plenty of renewable/non-polluting/non-fossil fuel options at our disposal; more than enough to supply the entire country's energy needs, I'd wager. Figure out a way to cheaply mass-produce an efficient, low-maintenance windmill (e.g. slow moving so there are less dead birds) and you can just rack 'em up in the windy areas of the country. Take the U and Pu out of our decommisioned nuclear warheads, build some reactors out in the middle of Montana and you'll be cranking out the petawatts in no time. Cover the deserts with solar plants. Tap every last one of our geothermal vents.
Honestly, though I'm not arguing that hydrogen is the most efficient solution, no one has yet proposed a better non-polluting, renewable storage and I just don't see how the inefficiency of hydrogen will get in the way. Given a few specially-designed high-output "power farms", we simply don't NEED to be efficient. This isn't something that's going to happen tomorrow--we need to design cost-effective high-output power plants and we need to design the large-scale electrolysis farms designed to utilize every last watt of power and most importantly, we need billions (if not trillions) to build 'em. Once built, though, hydrogen can indeed become a very cheap, portable power source. 25% storage efficiency won't matter--do our current systems run at 100% power output all the time? HELL no. So we probably have plenty of eletricity to spare now, even without building specialized, high-output power farms.
And it's not like we're going to run out of water anytime soon...
Aha! So that's what people will be complaining about, a hundred years from now. I always wondered what people will be bitching about in the future. Now I know.
Until then, the best thing you can do for the environment is not have any children.
Actually, you could go a step further and simply die. Not only would you stop consuming any resources at all, you would contribute all those nutrients currently locked up in your body back into the environment. Net positive gain.
Ah. Recent solar cell technology would beable to supply the world's energy need if we had a solar array that was a square 265 miles on a side. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/ 06/027228
Read your /. everything is there. Put one of those babies on the ocean and it won't even feel it's impact.
Pushing the problem down the pipe doesn't adequately address the issue, I think.
If you tax energy, you tax businesses more than individuals -- arguably proportionally more, but more none the less. it would fall heavier on businesses than individuals by virtue of the fact that businesses consume more energy. Your whole point is that those who use more energy will pay more tax, after all. That may very well drive efficiency, but not at first I think. If the customers are meant to pay, then that means the price for products and services will rise. Rising prices, even in the face of a greater share of one's own paycheck, doesn't sound like a good idea for the economy to me.
But then we'll allow that a more-efficient, and therefore less-taxed, competitor comes into the picture and the company loses customers. This may mean that the company drives toward more efficient means. Or it could mean, as I posit, that the company lowers prices to the customer at the cost of employee salaries. Or, more severe, the company buckles and begins to lose jobs. That doesn't sound good for the economy, either.
And none of this addresses my concerns for the little guy vice the established corporations. A large business can bleed revenue a lot longer while it tries to ride the market and either (1) change it's business practices appropriately, which takes time, or (2) outlive it's competition. The little guy, or the start-up company can't bleed as much as long, which means they'll have a harder time getting going, higher prices and lower salaries -- generally, they will be at a great disadvantage. Which, again, sounds bad for the economy.
I still like the idea. But I'm now less convinced that it's practical.
A 'hydrogen ecomony' makes little more sense than a 'battery economy'. The world needs energy? Just get batteries! Problem solved!
I think this mis-thinking actually indicates a more general problem with the public's thinking -- we accept most of what we can buy as manna from heaven. We don't realize how much goes into every little modern convenience we have, from water and food to electricity to clothing to whatever. If I can get it delivered or it's on the shelf at wal-mart then there's an endless supply and it should be cheap.
I think there is an advantage to abstracting our portable energy container/transmission technology. In other words, a way to split the means of energy production (coal, nuclear, sun, geothermal, etc.) from how and where it is used. Hydrogen is a candidate for that. Modern batteries suck. Flywheels are interesting but seem unfeasable. The main problem I see with hydrogen is how difficult it is to transport, though there may be other bigger challenges. Biodiesel is interesting, but isn't as flexible in production methods, and may be a net loss at this point.
Anyways, it's a super interesting field, but it doesn't seem like people are even asking the right questions yet about these technologies.
Cheers.
Using 1% of the total ocean surface, in equatorial waters, would equate to what? Taking away 10% if the ocean's thermal input? That would make the long-term global warming trend look laughable by comparison, and yes, it would unfortunately be in the opposite direction. I don't think we know exactly what the tipping point is for an ice age to start, but once it starts, we have no way to stop it. (And then, incidentally, 99% of the human race would die of thirst or starvation.)
... so there's no need. Their main descendants are chloroplasts, but things like the originals will still be hiding in hot rocks or hydrothermal vents.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Sure, but (a) the heat energy transferred to the environment from a nuclear plant is a small fraction of the energy it produces for consumption, whereas the heat energy transferred out of the environment is necessarily more than 100% of the energy produced for consumption; and (b) it's (IMNSHO) more harmful to transfer heat out of the environment than to transfer it in.
The low paid and unemployed could be given subsidised or free efficiency measures during the 10 year transition period.
Deleted
Right now the U.S. is still locked in a long-term struggle with Mexico over the fate of the columbia river which no longer makes it to Mexico but disappears into the sand somewhere in the southwest. China's plan to build the 3 Gorges Dam has lead to severe drought in some of the neighboring areas and many people cite global warming when talking about the scarcity of fresh water in the tropics.
Hell Maryland and Virginia are or were locked in a court case involving the water rights to the Potomic river, rights that referenced land grants made at the time of the Jamestown and Roanoke Colonies (circa 1690).
A brief glance over the map of the middle east shows the supreme value of watering sites and the extent to which they formed nations.
At what point "might" water become political exactly? And how will we know, since wars apparently aren't any indication?
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." -- Mark Twain
The Tesla Roadster is one of the first electric cars I would consider buying (if I could afford it :). Its not cheap, but it has decent range, great performance and its SEXY. I'd like to see this company succeed and produce other cheaper vehicles that average joes like me can afford.
How is it that in 2006 we still have so many prognosticators getting published with this sort of fundamental misunderstanding of hydrogen-based energy systems?
For the farking 1 millionth time: THERE ARE NO HYDROGEN DEPOSITS ON EARTH!!!
Comparing hydrogen to fuel oil is inane. What's next weeks subject? "the many reasons why oranges will never be used to make apple pies"?!?!?!?!
Hydrogen energy systems as they exist on earth today are only BATTERIES. How many times do we have to say this?
We can manufacture hydrogen from water or other materials, store it, and harvest energy later by turning it into water. This is basically equivalent to charging your re-chargable battery and then using the battery the next day.
Now when we're out exploring the universe we may well find hydrogen to be a wonderfull SOURCE of energy as there are lots of hydrogen 'deposits' out there. In the mean time we have: solar, nuclear, hydrothermal, moon energy(tidal), fossil fuels and biomass-based energy sources.
Using 1% of the total ocean surface, in equatorial waters, would equate to what? Taking away 10% if the ocean's thermal input?
You made this up.
That would make the long-term global warming trend look laughable by comparison, and yes, it would unfortunately be in the opposite direction. I don't think we know exactly what the tipping point is for an ice age to start, but once it starts, we have no way to stop it.
Exactly what we're doing now? Incidentally, having the cells absorb the sun's energy won't reduce the total solar energy input into the ecosystem, because it's still being absorbed. Unless the solar cells increase the albedo of the ocean, which seems... unlikely.
(And then, incidentally, 99% of the human race would die of thirst or starvation.)
You made this up too.
TFA fails to see the big picture and that compatative cost is not the only value.
0 releases/20010528_first_service.html
r ticleID=00003872-159C-1498-959C83414B7F0000
Heres how it could be made to work.
Liquid hydrogen is the coolant for superconducting wires for your power grid.
These reduce the energy lost between power plant and the home.
Seeing as you are pumping hydrogen around anyway... you may as well go into the distribution business.
A quick google found these links
http://www.supercables.com/News_and_links/press%2
http://scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?a
and
http://www.conectus.org/xxtechnology.html
Has some cool pictures
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
All searches past that point turned up little, other than a nanotech instruments company called "Omicron" which may or may not be the same company. --That and a company which appears to be working on a project with a bunch of other big European partners to make the web accessible for the blind.
But other than that. . . Who are these people exactly, and what was their motivation in running a science news site? Is it similar to Slashdot's origin but the idea is to promote the popularity (and sales) of nanotech related technology?
If that's the case, then I guess editors with a bias against hydrogen energy may simply be the unforseen fallout from a grassroots PR project.
-FL
Good thing you're not in charge!
What is the point of life if not to enjoy it? I want to enjoy the short number of years given to me on this planet and for my own enjoyment I will do everything in my power to achieve physical/emotional/psychological balance. This includes having my own space seperated from your space with enough space in between us that can be only easily breached by the Internet, where I can just turn the computer off and go read a book while you are excercising your right to voice your opinion.
I want the privacy that prevents me from listening to your opinions and I get it at place where I live, far away from you.
You can't handle the truth.
Just look at the real technical values of the BMW showcase. You'll see that hydrogen makes little sense as a means of energy transport and storage.
That really depends on location. There's at least one place where hydrogen makes a lot of sense, Iceland, where it is gaining strength. Because of Iceland's volcano they are able to economically generate hydrogen and are able to use it locally. Many public transportation buses and some commercial and private vehicles use hydrogen for fuel. Elsewhere, as in the US, there is ongoing research in using algae to produce hydrogen. Using methods like this hydrogen could be produced locally in many places which then leaves storage as a concern, however some tyme back I read about some research in using nanotubes to build storage tanks.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I doubt he is suggesting that we move to never never land, but look at the comparative costs here. As the price of oil goes up due to increasing scarcity lots of other alternatives start looking a lot better. As the price of gas produced from oil goes up to $10/ gallon, the costs associated with powering a car with hydrogen start looking a lot better.
Even the environmental costs that you allude to for the infrastructure necessary to support a hydrogen fuel structure don't matter as much when you realize that the fuel is as clean as hydrogen would be.
Anaesthetica has solid bone or rocks for brains
? id=17774&ch=energyr ecord/2100-11395_3-6141527.html7 228.shtmlt aics.pdf
/. - Tell-us-something-we-don't-know.
Anaesthetica should have saved this bullshit for 2007/04/01, or anaesthetica is another one of those ignorant politicians' staffers or lobbyist. If anaesthetica is a staffer or OPEC or AgriBiz lobbyist, then they need to be honest enough to identify themselves as expressing corporatist interest and just spinning-truth to fit lies.
Last I checked, our planet's surface is about two-fucking-thirds water. For our/global economy and environment, Hydrogen and SolarCell technology is the only way to solve energy/fuel and air-pollution problems permanently.
I hate stupid staffers, lobbyist, corporatist, and damn fool dogmatist with faux-answers.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/39936.pdf
Results from the Vehicle/Infrastructure Learning Demonstration Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx
Cheap, Superefficient Solar Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the sun are becoming more viable.
http://news.com.com/Solar+cell+breaks+efficiency+
Solar cell breaks efficiency record
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/12/06/02
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35174.pdf
Progress in High-Performance PV: Polycrystalline Thin-Film Tandem Cells
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0360-3199(97)00102-X
Affordable hydrogen supply pathways for fuel cell vehicles
http://dx.doi.org/index.html
http://www.greenwatts.com/docs/ProgressInPhotovol
Energy Pay-Back and Life Cycle CO2 Emissions of the BOS in an Optimized 3.5 MW PV Installation
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I feel like people are too quick to say anything when it comes to energy. I see a continuous line of, OH! This is the answer! I think that we should continue trying to make all sources of energy more efficient. More efficiency from fossil fuels, hydrogen, solar cells, wind etc etc I believe it's irresponsible to attempt and rely on any source of energy, only to try and move the least clean ones to the peripheral of our energy needs if it can be done. We don't have to have giant solar farms to benefit from solar cells. we can start to lower the power requirements of things by adding little power boosts here and there. This could include things like more solar water heaters (I'd like one here in America, I hear they're available elsewhere.) Overall, I think that we should continue to advance all of the technologies that we have available and we will start to see more and more energy savings and can use that as a springboard to greater advances in low-energy hydrogen production or fusion.
Since when is water the only source of hydrogen? It makes up 75% of the mass of the known universe. It can be produced by plankton in large quantities, and countless means other than extraction from water. This argument is like saying that sand is a precious item, since refining cement sidewalks back into sand is expensive.
Anaesthetica has solid bone or rocks for brains
? id=17774&ch=energyr ecord/2100-11395_3-6141527.html7 228.shtmlt aics.pdf
/. - Tell-us-something-we-don't-know.
Anaesthetica should have saved this bullshit for 2007/04/01, or anaesthetica is another one of those ignorant politicians' staffers or lobbyist. If anaesthetica is a staffer or OPEC or AgriBiz lobbyist, then they need to be honest enough to identify themselves as expressing corporatist interest and just spinning-truth to fit lies.
Last I checked, our planet's surface is about two-fucking-thirds water. For our/global economy and environment Hydrogen and SolarCell technology is the only way to solve energy/fuel and air-pollution problems permanently.
I hate stupid staffers, lobbyist, corporatist, and damn fool dogmatist with faux-answers.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/39936.pdf
Results from the Vehicle/Infrastructure Learning Demonstration Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx
Cheap, Superefficient Solar Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the sun are becoming more viable.
http://news.com.com/Solar+cell+breaks+efficiency+
Solar cell breaks efficiency record
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/12/06/02
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35174.pdf
Progress in High-Performance PV: Polycrystalline Thin-Film Tandem Cells
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0360-3199(97)00102-X
Affordable hydrogen supply pathways for fuel cell vehicles
http://dx.doi.org/index.html
http://www.greenwatts.com/docs/ProgressInPhotovol
Energy Pay-Back and Life Cycle CO2 Emissions of the BOS in an Optimized 3.5 MW PV Installation
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The only evidence is that, after years of no such articles on Slashdot, there began to be many articles about "science breakthroughs" that are not really breakthroughs and are about groups trying to find investors.
The author of the article referenced by Slashdot did NOT write the article for PhysOrg.org. That article was written for IEEE Education. PhysOrg.org seems to be using the article and Slashdot to get people to see the "investment opportunities" that are advertised there.
It could be that the problem is only that Slashdot editors have played too many video games rather than learning about the actual world, and they are fooled by the scams.
Aquifers in the US are sinking (some with alarming speed).
As with the Ogallala Aquifer. At Black Mesa, on the Hopi and Navajo reseravtion in Arizona Peaboby Coal was pumping out millions of gallons of water that was used to make a slurry to pump the coal mined at Black Mesa to a power generation plant in Nevada. It was only recently that this stopped, because the Mojave Power Generation station was forced to close. It was either close or make expensive pollution upgrades to the plant. Falling aquifers is a big problem in China and India as well with water being pumped out much faster than it can be replaced. This is happening all over the world.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You're talking about congress here.
What do you mean by "replace" exactly?
You haven't seen Mythbusters Episode #67 "Firearms Folklore" yet have you? :)
No, but thanks for the reference.
My current sig is in response to the bogus anti-gun argument that arming yourself for self-defense is useless because the bad guys will just get bigger guns. (I coined it, launched it here, and will be interested to see if it becomes a soundbite in the gun debate.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IMNSHO?
... slashdot ... nevermind.
What makes it so not humble? Are you an oceanographer, climateologist(?), maybe even a highschool physics teacher? Or a computer programmer that simply thinks they have some sort of internet authority and false sense of elitism? Oh wait
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
I'm an American but lived 10 years in Mexico. Mexicans don't come north because there's no water in Mexico to irrigate. They come north because regardless of water, they can earn 10 times as much in the U.S. That is completely unrelated to water.
There are other reasons Mexicans go north as well. Like NAFTA, in part because of NAFTA US agribusinesses can grow corn and other produce then sale them in Mexico. And because of the massive farm subsidies the government gives to these businesses they are able to sale the produce cheaper in Mexico than Mexican farmers can make growing produce. This drives many farmers off their land and some migrate north. Or to the cities and this drives those already in the cities north. I bet if either Mexico were allowed to impose an import tax on US produce so Mexican farmers could work on a level field, or if the US were to stop the billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies the immigration of "illegal aliens" would become a trickel if not stop.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So basically, you're suggesting taking the energy that the sun currently transfers into the oceans? Because.... the ocean doesn't really need that heat energy anyway, and it couldn't possibly be environmentally catastrophic if done on a massive scale? No thanks. Let's stick to nuclear.
And nuclear isn't environmentally catastrophic? Nuclear power is very much bad environmentally. don't believe me? Check with Indigenous communities that have to deal with uranium mining. Forget about where the waste will be stored, mining for fissible materials is frought with environmentally distructive perils.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ask yourself.
e x.htm
Who needs all these fucking lies?
1. Peak Oil
2. Electric Shortage
3. Water Shortage
1. http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/peak_oil/ind
2. http://www.mises.org/story/1053
3. http://waterpoweredcar.com/stanmeyer.html
Hydrogen is the end run around EPA and all the people yelling, not in my back yard! The energy producers can have their reactors hosted in another country and ship the energy in by Hydrogen tankers. So much energy can be produced by nuclear reactors that the conversion loss could be much worse than it is and still be acceptable. There are already new designs for nuclear reactors that actutally directly produce hydrogen way more effiently than ordinary electrolysis.'
The poor countries that host the reactors will readily sell land for storage and disposal of radioactive waste to the energy producers.
Minimum cost occurs at about 80 feet, with windspeeds of 12.26 mph, producing an average 162.8 kWh/month worth $11.40. The tower at that height costs $2000. Payback time, ignoring interest, is 27.79 years. That's not economical.
A couple of things were left out. One is inflation, excepting maintainance, all of the costs are upfront and once paid for it doesn't need to be paid for again. Power from the grid though always raises. Say you pay $.10 pe kwh now, in ten years you may be paying $1. Okay ten tyme as much may be radical but the point is that if you gemerate your own electricity your energy was paid in the beginning and you don't pay more later but if you get your power from the grid you'll always be paying even when prices rise. The second think overlooked are rebates or tax credits. Governments, both federal and many states offer tax credits. DSIRE lists what is offered in each state in the US.
The biggest thing a person that's thinking of generating the power they use can do though is replacing the things that use power with energy effiecent replacements. Those 75 watt bulbs replace them with 15 watt cfls, compact florescent lights. The old washing machine and dryer or frig, replace them with a new one that has a good Energy Star rating. The idea being you want negawatts, energy conserved and not produced, rather than "new" methods to produce more megawatts of energy.
You're interested in installing a wind genie? Have you checked into Home Power magazine ? Also, though "Solar" is in the name, Solar Today also has some articles on wind genies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Well, some of them actually do. The "greenies" who are constantly saying things that aren't quite true, or who exaggerate facts in order to push an agenda, are responsible for the less-than-serious face that the public puts on the environmental movement in general.
Oh, like all environmentalists and only environmentalists "exaggerate facts"? Bush evoked a mushroom cloud hanging over a US city to justify his Iraqi invasion, well I'm still waiting to see all of those stockpiles of WMDs. People of all stripes and not just environmentalists "exaggerate facts".
They damage the cause they claim to be supporting, in the same way that the ELF/PETA folks damage the credibility of the mainstream animal rights movement,
Agreed.
I am a person who is concerned with environmental issues, but I'd never call myself an 'environmentalist' because it's practically a dirty word, at least in my social circle.
Same here which is why I started calling myself an ecologist. While I support some of the goals of some of these people, I don't support some of the tactics used by them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
and can recharge in five minutes.
Sorry, range and refueling issues are still a major downside to pure electrics.
In any case, the point I'm trying to make is even if it is cheaper to run a battery car than a fuel cell car, that doesn't mean people are actually going to do so.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
So? Has anyone ever calculate how much energy and water it takes to:
1. Pump crude out of the ground.
2. Ship it to a refinery.
3. Refine it into something usefull.
4. And don't forget all the un-usefull byproducts that have to be disposed of.
The premise of the article sounds like it is FUD purchased by the oil industry.
Are you one of those who wants to site nuclear waste in an area that is siesmically active, that has suffered earthquakes, and that is near a volcano?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Get nuclear fusion right, and just 'mine' the ocean for tritium and deuterium. Possibly very little environmental impact, unless we are thinking of the white dolphins again.
And the waste, shoot it up to the moon I say. Preferably to the "Dark Side of the Moon", to make those radiation freaks feel better.
Actually, most marine life lives close to land and in the shallower water. So you just do it in the middle of the Atlantic, away from all manner of sea dwellers, and you mostly avoid the problem.
And oh, there is no way we are going to keep up our current confortable existence (heating for the home) and all without some environmental impact. We are part of the damn environment.
Get nuclear fusion right, and just 'mine' the ocean for tritium and deuterium. Possibly very little environmental impact, unless we are thinking of the white dolphins again.
Nuclear fuel might be mined from the oceans but how vast would such an enterprize be to mine enough fuel? Then what of the waste of such mining? For instance the lead or mercury that would be left. And what about the location as well as marine life? There may or may not be much environmental impact, I don't know.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That doesn't mean fusion is without it's prolems though. The reactors will be hugely expensive, the reaction will need to be shielded from radiation by materials not invented yet. and those materials will become very nasty waste when the reactor is shut down. Oh yeah, and nobody's actually made it work yet.
There is a large mountain near my town that increased use of uraniam would turn into a viable mine, so I hope something else comes along.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Best damn post I ever read on slashdot.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Project Iter (http://www.iter.org) which has started recently.
It reached an agreement amoung developped countries, but been delayed till now, 3 years by president Bush for political reason (the project takes place in France).
President Bush wanted the project to take place in Japan, which japan obviously agreed on, but all others didn't.
Project Iter is a major project for the 50 years to come. Nuclear fusion has already been achieved in the CERN (http://www.cern.ch - major nuclear research arena, funded by europeans, which is located half in France and the other half in Switzerland).
Nuclear Fusion works, but they still have major issue, like find some material to be able to sustain the heat for longer then a few seconds.. etc.. all which need to be solved before going commmercial, which is expected to happen in 30-40 years from now, but you'll know more by looking at the web site.
The idea behind all this, is to use the unprecedent level of energy (not as dangerous as nuclear fision) to make hydrogen, and fill our cars, in the future.
I was surprised not to hear anyone mention this project, which is a major official project, to address the energy needs of the future.
I don't want a golf cart. I want a car - something that can go just about anywhere, can refuel quickly, haul at least four people comfortably, etc. We do not have the battery technology to do this, nor it is likely that we will unless there is an absolute transformative change in batteries. Unfortunately, they are a mature technology and improvement has been incremental for decades. I doubt I will see batteries with double the charge capacity (by weight and/or volume) in my lifetime.
Hydrogen is NOT in fact economically viable if you currently sell oil, which is who undoubtedly funded this paper ;) A rapid decline of income to the richest (and I mean richEST) people in the world scares them for some reason. Ever hear of Stanley Meyers? He invented a water splitting system that could replace the spark plugs on cars. What happened to him shortly after he announced he was going to start selling conversion kits for $1500 a pop? He was fatally poisoned. Link below if you want to see his invention in action. It's absolutely amazing.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-333399219 4168790800&q=Stanley+Meyers
(Clip from a longer documentary called Equinox - It Runs on Water (Free Energy - 1995), also on Google Video)
"Ahh, the utopian idealist. I love comments like this, they reinforce the fact that many people that think they have solutions to problems really don't have all that large a worldview."
What you call "idealism" I call unrealized goals, think about how many goal chasers (or your so-called 'idealists') of the past created modern technological culture. Think of how many 'idealists' created religions that changed the face of human behaviour and thought (christianity, buddhism, philosophy, etc).
Are people who support anything "idealists" in what they support? That would mean we have open source idealists, capitalist idealists, communist idealists, it's all in the way you frame someones goals. You say someones goals to change society are "ideals" no, they are goals, like we have a goal to create a machine that can fly and transport people and equipment for our benefit - so we create airplanes, are those people "technology or transport idealists"? Were computer scientists "technological idealists" with a worldview "not all that large"? You're like the man who said men would never go to the moon, or that man would never fly, or that man would never harness the power of sun or the atom.
It's the dreamers and visionaries which people attack as "idealists" that change the world. You must have been asleep in history class, where would Martin Luther king be if he gave up on his "utopian ideal" of equal rights for blacks, or women's "utopian ideal" for gaining rights to vote? You see it is you sir who have the small world view. So-called idealists are leaders and problem solvers that are the movers and shakers of world history.
'Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds' - Albert Einstein
The cost of hybrid technology by itself adds 3000k to the value of the vehicle. And the gas savings alone won't make up the difference. That is not even talking about the cost of the batteries required to make it fully electric. EDrive systems will offer a Li-ion solution for $12000 (http://www.edrivesystems.com/faq.html)
r ic_vehicle
I can't say how much energy it takes to produce a battery, But it certainly it does take some energy along with other natural resources. Judging from the price it may take more energy to produce the battery than the energy used throught the lifetime of the vehicle.
The biggest problem is that our current source of energy (fossil fuels) is terribly cheap, at the the expense of global warming ect... In average we only spend $1000 - $2000 a year on gas. This is what makes the choice of technology so difficult. It is very easy to come up with very energy efficient solutions at a high price and make vehicles that won't sell.
I personally don't even know what the price of fuel cell technology is. And how will the price decrease as production scales up. It may very well be that the price diferential that we now see for small production quantities reverse when production ramps up. Even when we might expect new battery technology to be cheaper and more efficient. This depends on new discoveries and developments in electrical/chemical processes that may not happen. This is true of other technologies too. Attempting to solve the problem from different angles seems a sensible thing to do.
An interesting reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid_elect
If this article is about how Hydrogen will "save" our /economy/, then it's a little out of place...
/cost/ of hydrogen fuel to be similar to gasoline (say 20 MPG average for gas @ $2.50 per gallon => 12.5 cents per mile). So, each gallon of hydro-fuel would have a market value of $12.50 per gallon. That makes the profit for the firm $12.49 per gallon.
/eventually/, this incredible profit will draw enough hydro-producers to the market to drive fuel prices down in general (firm vs. firm competition). However, you can also imagine international coalitions come together similar to OPEC, causing artificial shortages and keeping prices up.
/economy/. It means the US will most likely shift its attention away from military operations in the Middle East and concentrate more on competition with China.
There's no question that getting off of fossil fuels will help reduce pollution, greenhouse gasses, reduce our political / military entanglements, etc. etc. .
The economy is another thing altogether. If a company were somehow able to create an amazing hydrogen-rich fuel for only $0.01 per gallon, and special hydrogen vehicles could drive 100 miles on each gallon, market forces would push the
Even if some extra competition lowered fuel costs by a whopping 10% (11.25 cents per mile), that still means the hydro-fuel will cost consumers $11.25 per gallon.
Now,
OPEC is already thinking of cutting production to buoy prices back up, as well as switching off the falling US dollar because of currency markets.
Ironically, it's the transformation of political and military tension that can have the biggest influence on the
When you could have one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rh2tka0P6M
Hydrogen is not an alternative fuel.
Yes, it is. You mean it's not an alternative energy source.
I think you just mistyped but the inability to make a distinction between an energy source and a way to store energy or, a fuel, makes alternative energy debate in the media and with joe voter almost impossible and it's one of my pet peeves.
Except you won't get any electricity at night (if you're using solar power), or on calm days (if you're using wind). Most of the renewable sources of energy are sporadic. Directly using electricity from these sources is not so cheap if you have to include the cost of rainy day storage.
With a hydrogen economy, you could generate hydrogen while the sun is up, when the wind is howling, or while the nuclear plant is humming. Then you are free to burn the resulting hydrogen any time you like, anywhere you like. Hydrogen means freedom in time and freedom in space.
Freedom of energy usage (in cars for example) is more important than absolute efficiency. If you are using a huge renewable source of energy, such as solar power, you can afford to waste some of it when you generate hydrogen.
Thanks, parent -- wish I had mod point for ya.
-kgj
-kgj
But manmade fuel is still cost efficient if the productive value of the work hydrogen does is greater than the cost of producing it. It doesn't matter if a unit of energy costs $10 instead of $8 if you get $20 instead of $18 worth of goods and services out of it. (OK, it matters if you're poor and can't spend $10 instead of $8 to get your energy, but that's a separate issue of wealth distribution.) The environmental benefits of using hydrogen in lieu of oil provide the needed increase in value.
The same is true of energy efficiency, the crux of this article's criticism of hydrogen fuel. It doesn't matter if hydrogen production's energy efficiency is only 25% if we have ample inputs.
We have to get oil out of the hydrogen production process, obviously. But its current presence does not make hydrogen impractical permanently. It's just another problem that can and will be solved.
Just as the economic cost of energy's storage in oil is not borne by humans, the environmental cost of releasing oil's energy is not fully borne by those who release it. Instead, that cost is spread over all of humanity. To create an equation that will induce economically rational creatures (i. e., corporations and self-interested humans) to use hydrogen instead of oil, we must find a way to charge the full cost of oil energy's release to the individual creatures who release it.
This whole article ignores a lot of new technologies coming out to synthesize usable hydrogen. As long as there is enough water for plants or water in the oceans - we are fine on clean energy. If there is no water for plants or fish, we have other problems.
Foresight Challenge: Providing renewable clean energy
Headline: Nanotechnology advances the efforts to achieve artificial photosynthesis
News source: NanoWerk by Michael Berger
Artificial photosynthesis, using solar energy to split water generating hydrogen and oxygen, is often considered a 'Holy Grail' of chemistry which can offer a clean and portable source of energy supply as durable as the sunlight. It takes about 2.5 volts to break a single water molecule down into oxygen along with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. It is the extraction and separation of these oppositely charged electrons and protons from water molecules that provides the electric power.
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=1098.php
Hunger is the best sauce.
JASON ON ENGINEERING MICROORGANISMS FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION
A recent report from the secretive JASON scientific advisory group considers the feasibility of using microorganisms to produce fuels as a metabolic product, such as hydrogen or ethanol.
"Microorganisms present a great opportunity for energy science," the JASON report to the Department of Energy said.
"Microorganisms are simpler than plants; they have smaller genomes and proteomes, and are easier to manipulate and culture. The enormous biodiversity of microorganisms presents a broad palette of starting points for engineering. Microorganisms already make many metabolic products, some of which are useful fuels."
"Boosting the efficiency of fuel formation from microorganisms is an important research challenge for the twenty first century."
The JASONs do not publish even their unclassified reports in an orderly or consistent fashion. A copy of the new report was obtained by Secrecy News.
See "Engineering Microorganisms for Energy Production," JSR-05-300, June 23, 2006 (92 pages, 1.1 MB):
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/micro.pdfI am single and rarely even have a second person the vehicle. On occasions that I am travelling in groups, it is virtually certain one of them will have a car.
The need to have a second car (or rent a car a few weeks per year) easily negates any savings from the electric.
Ok, here is a full US wind map http://www.nrel.gov/wind/images/wherewind800.jpg there are more detailed ones, but notice the majority of the contental costline is =5.
So how much more radioactivity will water gain if it flowed over the crush containers? (Assuming that the area will be wet in the future, and water will flow through the storage area.)
First it has been shown water does flow away from Yucca. I didn't find what I was looking for but I did find this about a study DOE will do, DOE to Study Yucca Mountain Water Flow and DOE did not apply its own geologic site criteria (pdf), this subsection is about half way down. Now onto how much radioactivity water will pick up, if the casks are crushed water won't just flow over the top of the casks, water can enter the casks as well. Water will then be irradiated itself as well as carry off radioactive particals that have dissolved.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm sorry, but your logic just doesn't follow. As a prior person mentioned, the difference is that with oil, you START with a 'charged' system, whereas with Hydrogen, you start with a 'discharged' system. You have to spend the energy to get Hydrogen to a 'charged' state, but if the energy source for this 'charging' is renewable, it doesn't matter!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Just because water is irradiated doesn't necessarily mean that it will become radioactive.
Assuming that ground water is flowing through porous rock, the dispension of any particles should be limited as well.
You're not getting the big picture here. I never argued against alternate energy sources, what I'm saying is that even if 100% of your energy sources are clean, you're going to require 4 times as much infrastructure if you use a storage system that's only 25% efficient as opposed to 100% efficient. Of course, there's no such thing as 100% efficiency, but even if you have a storage system that's only 75% efficient, that's still 3 times less infrastructure than what you'd need for hydrogen. Having to build 3 windmills instead of 1 just because you have a crappy storage system is NOT a good deal. Not to mention the problem of trying to keep hydrogen in a liquid, and the extra precautions required to keep it safe in case of accidents. We should be working on developing better batteries, not trying to convert to hydrogen.
i thought most estimates were that Hydrogen would be a better 'storage medium' than batteries? For example, United Nuclear was developing a conversion kit that would convert any standard gasoline car to run on Hydrogen. (They put the project on hold due to supply issues, they say that the CSPC is trying to ban one of the chemicals necessary for their system.) But they got a Corvette to go 650 miles on one 'tank' of Hydrogen. (This is combusting Hydrogen, not turning it into electricity via a fuel cell.)
Sounds like it has at least comparable energy density to gasoline, when stored and burned this way. Yeah, fuel cells are inefficient, but it doesn't mean ALL Hydrogen systems are inefficient. This is also a system that just takes in water, slowly converts it to Hydrogen and Oxygen, then stores the Hydrogen in their special tanks. It can be powered solely by a solar panel, but it is slow, taking two days to generate enough Hydrogen to drive a couple hundred miles. So it would be well suited as a 'commuter car', but not necessarily for long trips. Of course, as soon as there are 'Hydrogen stations' that you could refuel at, that would change.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Well yes, if you combust it, it's comparable to gasoline, but if you're burning it you're still creating pollution. One of the main draws of hydrogen fuel cell technology is that it doesn't release any pollutants. What's the point of using hydrogen if you're going to burn it?
The other system you speak of is simple electrolysis, and is also extremely inefficient. You can power it using solar panels, or use the grid, but either way you get very low efficiency as opposed to, say, charging a battery. And the BIG problem with trying to use an electrolysis system at home is that you'd also need some way to liquefy the hydrogen. Otherwise, if you're storing it in a gaseous state, the average gas tank would take you maybe 80 miles if you're lucky.
My main point is that, for most consumer vehicles, batteries would be much more efficient than a hydrogen system. For instance, the Tesla Roadster uses a rechargeable battery pack, and is able to achieve a range of 250 miles per charge. Of course the big problem with battery powered cars is that they require time to recharge - in the case of the Tesla roadster, a full charge takes about 3 hours. This could be rather inconvenient if you're planning a 2,000 mile road-trip. But the overall efficiency is a hell of a lot better than any hydrogen vehicle, and the cost-per-mile is astronomically lower. A hydrogen vehicle would initially be more expensive to operate than a gasoline powered vehicle, and would at best at some point in the future achieve parity. So you'd still be paying the equivalent of $2.80 a gallon, or whatever you yanks are paying these days. Whereas with a battery powered car you'd be looking at spending between $0.01 and $0.05 per mile. For the average vehicle that'd be the equivalent of between $0.30 and $1.50 per gallon. Like I said, it's a HUGE difference.