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Nanoparticles Could Make Hydrogen Cheaper Than Gasoline
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, a California-based company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years. The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving."
*cough*bullshit*cough*
What's with all the science articles lately that are basically investor scams?
I already make my own combustible gas while I drive. I just need a motor that will work with it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Here's a two sentence summary for the people who don't read articles:
Instead of using a really good conductor to make the electrodes used for electrolysis, these people propose increasing the electrode's surface area 8,000 times by coating an ordinary steel electrode with butt loads of nanoparticles that are optimized for surface area and conductivity.
That sounds feasible to me.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
Related post: Nano particles could make hydrogen cheaper than [some other very expensive commodity whose price has been driven up artificially]
I want a wind powered car! A flying wind powered car. A flying wind powered car that drives itself.
And a pony.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Exactly as likely as you having an unfortunate accident, because you're a crazy conspiracy nutcase.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Everybody giggling about this would mean the end of "Big Oil" forgets that gasoline is only one of many petroleum based products. Plastics are still going to be a huge market, for example. The oil companies still won't like it, as their profits will no doubt go down. On the plus side, the profits for terrorist funders (Saudi Arabia) would go down, too.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The article says "Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
That's a completely baffling statement to me. So baffling as to trigger my BS detector.
Presumably the point of producing it in the car is to avoid the need to store the gaseous hydrogen. But electrolysing hydrogen requires energy--the hydrogen is not a source of energy so much as it is a storage medium for energy. So where would that energy come from?
From a gasoline-powered generator in your car? Or what?
Sounds like a smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who's answer to everything is "yes, we've solved that problem too."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No to speak for any of those companies, but if this or other technologies are as good as they claimed to be and if Exxon/Shell/big-oil buy the technology, why would they shelf it in the basement of their lawyer's office? These are just for-profit companies. As such, they don't really care what they sell. If shits can power cars better/cheaper than gasoline, they will sell the shits because they have a competitive advantages compared to others in their business. Why would they pay the Saudi emirates if they can just monopolize the production of energy at home?
The commentary on the original article, though, links to the the press release which clarifies it. The application they're talking about is a plug-in rechargable car. When you're at home, you plug it in, the car electrolyzes water to produce hydrogen, and then, when you unplug it, you run the car on the hydrogen.
The application, then, doesn't address the problem of how to store hydrogen, only the problem of how to produce it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There are plenty of problems with hydrogen powered vehicles, but you really aren't hitting on them. Safety isn't the issue.
You talk about propane leaks, but propane is heavier than air and hydrogen is lighter. You aren't likely to asphyxiate from a hydrogen leak. It's not likely to accumulate in a low space and cause an explosion. Tank bursts are typically directional, and the force can be dampened; it's not like a bomb going off..
Other responders have already pointed out the inaccuracies with your pressure analysis.
You talk about the expense of distilling water, or piping distilled water around and neglect the fact that we power our vehicles with truck delivered distilled product right now. And that product is flammable during trucking and distillation.
Garages? Gasoline fumes are very explosive. That's why cars have one-way venting systems on their tanks, and boats have fume alarms. Yet we don't have gas stations and garages blowing up all the time, because we've engineered our way out of the problem.
Your alternatives are just as poorly thought out... Ethanol sounds great, but causing grain to be priced as energy won't work. There will be wars and famine (we're already well on the way in the latter department) before ethanol becomes our primary fuel. Photovoltaics are promising, but just plain not ready. They require a breakthrough large enough that we can't accurately predict how far away practicality is. You didn't mention wind, but others in the thread have... It has promise, but geographical and political concerns will keep it as a niche solution. Neither wind nor solar are transmission solutions either. They're just production. So how do you get the solar or wind power to your car anyway?
Your information about H2 technologies is amazingly flawed. They're not made out of metal, they're made out of graphite composite. They can just about drop those things out of passing airliners without cracking them, and they don't have to be "several inches thick".
Pipe water using our existing system? most cities are already at or beyond capacity of their systems today, let alone adding this load.
You're obviously not grasping the scales involved here. The US uses somewhere on the order of 150 billion gallons of gasoline each year. We use three times that much water every DAY. I think that the system can handle it. Purification isn't nearly the problem you suggest it is. Existing filtration systems would be more than adequate to supply water to your typical hydrolysis system.
not only is parking a leaky tank in a garage a bad idea, so is any underground parking lot, dense parking area with low wind, or other places
This is amazingly poorly thought out. It's based on gasses that are about the same density as air. Hydrogen is much less dense than air (think twice as boyant as Helium), and doesn't require anything resembling a wind to disperse upwards. This stuff seeps through solid metal, you think a parking garage ceiling is going to stop it?
The entire logic of your argument is based on bad science and the idea that things will never improve. I don't buy it.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.