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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."
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 ?
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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.
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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.
"We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
There. nuff said.
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.
You don't need clean drinking water for electrolysis.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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)
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?
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
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.
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/2195
No changes to human behaviour required.
Deleted
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
.. sure not by re-burning hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen requires a complete redesign of the sales channel. Alcohol doesn't.
Hydrogen requires a large amount of electricity to generate. Alcohol doesn't.
Hydrogen requires a large amount of electricity for cooling during transport. Alcohol doesn't.
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.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
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?
The trouble with using accuall batteries in electric cars is the time it takes for a recharge cycle. If your driving from new New York to Detroit and you have to stop to refuel you don't want to have to wait 6 hours at the "gas" station for your car to recharge. While with a hydrogen fuel cell it would only take about as long to refuel as it does now.
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.
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);
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
Alcohol is one answer, but it's not exactly perfect either.
. Converting a perfectly viable fuel like Alcohol into hydrogen is pointless: You lose energy in the conversion and you still release the carbon into the atmosphere.
The carbon you are releasing is carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. It's called 'Carbon-nuetral' for a reason.
reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE cars. So while you have less energy to use when you put the fuel in the vehicle, you use less energy to get the same output from the vehicle using hydrogen.
Metal hydride storage uses some pretty expensive, toxic and dangerous materials and still does not achieve the hydrogen storage density of more common and safer-to-handle fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel.
This is a technical problem awaiting a solution. Same as the efficiency of harvesting hydrogen. Using current technology, it would be impossible to replace 100% of the US's road fleet with hydrogen. But, given 20 years of technology and investment, I wouldn't be surprised to see 30% of the US's road fleet to be replaced by hydrogen.
People love to shoot down alternative fuels because they aren't able to replace ALL of the vehicles on the road. It drives me crazy. There is no singular fuel source that will. Sure Diesel's can use soy and algae, but you'll be hard pressed to get the fuel production high enough to grow the diesel market greatly. Ethanol is a craptastic option (in the US) but it will reduce the consumption of petroleum gasoline. Improvements in the quantity and cleanliness of centralized power production will also help pave the way for pure electric vehicles. No single option will be able to replace 100% of our current petrol based fuel economy, but a combination of all of them will likely replace enough of the market, that the instability in the oil segment will be heavily mitigated.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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.
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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Sigh... So we can't use petroleum because it raises the temperature of the earth. We can't use water because some people don't have water. It's posts like this that really seem to confirm to me that "environmentalists" are more about restraining economic activity and prosperity than really caring about the environment.
*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.
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.
The carbon you are releasing is carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. It's called 'Carbon-nuetral' for a reason.
Of course this is correct. I'm a huge supporter of biofuels as a renewable energy source (obviously) and I think carbon neutrality is a major selling point. However it's still wrong to say that Hydrogen is a carbon-free energy system when it's refined from a hydrocarbon source - especially a fossil fuel.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE cars. So while you have less energy to use when you put the fuel in the vehicle, you use less energy to get the same output from the vehicle using hydrogen.
While burning hydrogen may be slightly more efficient, the energy density is significantly lower resulting in more fuel being burned for the same output. In the end, pound-for-pound, Hydrogen seems to offer no significant advantage.
When you consider the requirements to manufacture and store the Hydrogen, I challenge that the efficiency from energy source to point of use is actually very poor.
People love to shoot down alternative fuels because they aren't able to replace ALL of the vehicles on the road.
Hydrogen is not an alternative fuel. That's the problem. So far, whatever source of energy you're using to make the hydrogen - electricity, natural gas, etc. - can be better used directly instead of pissing away half of it using hydrogen as an intermediate.
I completely agree that there is no single solution, but I do not agree that pure Hydrogen as a primary link in the energy flow is ever going to work. Biofuels are a much safer bet, being renewable, carbon-neutral, 100% compatible with existing infrastructure and closer to the energy source.
=Smidge=
"if it takes a lot of energy to create the water used to create the energy, you're headed for trouble."
And the whole point of a hydrogen carrier for energy is that there is no lack whatsoever of energy; there's a lack of energy where it's useful and an overabundance of energy where it isnt.
Coincidentally, water has the exact same problem; there's a whole bunch of it where you dont particularly need it and not enough where you do.
So put water pipeline from the atlantic to the middle of sahara, drive hydrogen plants with solar concentrator driven turbines, split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, hand out clean water to the thirsty, combine the hydrogen gas with nitrogen from the air, and pipe ammonia back. Both problems solved at once. (plus ammonia is vastly simpler to transport than hydrogen, and can be used in fuelcells).
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.
1) Hydrogen requires a long-overdue redesign of the sales channel.
2) Hydrogen requires a large amount of nearly-free electricity to generate.
3) Hydrogen requires no transport, and no cooling during storage.
A hydrogen fuel station could be built with various electric generation systems on-site to generate hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for medical purposes, and even feed unneeded electricity back into the grid. Most gas stations in the USA (I don't know about other parts of the world, but I assume they're similar) have a huge canopy over the pumps. It's just a few girders holding up some fancy-looking sheet metal. There's nothing else up there except some wiring. That's a wasted platform. The girders could support many times the weight of what's up there. So put some solar electric panels up there. Or a trombe-wall-like surface. Something to capture solar energy. Use that energy (directly or converted) to perform electrolysis. Sell H2 as vehicle fuel. Sell O2 to local hospitals. Sell excess electricity to the power company. Tell the Teamsters (who are going to be pissed because your station makes them obsolete) to procreate with themselves. The same goes for the fuel brokers, centralized fuel suppliers, and the transport services they're in bed with. You'll be able to sell much cheaper than anyone else in the area due to a distinct lack of middlemen, and you'll soon be able to expand the business.
Of course, none of this can happen until hydrogen cars are available to the general public.
Not so much potable as not seawater. To generate hydrogen in the amounts needed to power transportation you are going to have some serious issues with chlorine and insoluable percipitates.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Hydrogen is just an energy transportation system, not an energy generation system. And it is a very bad one at that. Batteries (even curfrent batteries, with large advancements coming every year) are almost perfect for transporting energy. So hydrogen is useless, I agree with the article on that. But the water scarcity claim is bogus. Not only there's not a shortage of water in the world, there's not even a shortage of fresh water or clean water (and for generating hydrogen, any relatively clean water is just about the same). It is just that in some areas there's overpopulation and water is not expensive enough to be worth the transport cost. But in areas such as most of South America there's enough fresh water to source the whole planet several times over. And in the Antartica there's enough water for all our possible needs for eons. So water will never be scarce. It might become more expensive as it needs to be transported, but oil is already in that situation and it is not THAT expensive.