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Ubiquitous Hydrogen Power Not Getting Any Closer
NewScientist has a story about the "hydrogen economy" that has been resting on the horizon for a decade or more. Despite a great deal of enthusiasm for and research into hydrogen-based power systems, the technology seems just as far away from everyday use as it's always been. A British startup, ITM Power, has recently claimed a breakthrough in lowering production costs by using a nickel catalyst (rather than platinum) with a membrane small enough for home use. But, even if their method is proven and adopted, it still wouldn't address huge energy efficiency problems in the process. "The point was made forcefully by Gary Kendall of the conservation group WWF in a recent report called Plugged In (PDF, pgs. 135-149). Kendall, a chemist who previously spent almost a decade working for ExxonMobil, highlights how the energy losses in the fuel chain - from electrolysis to compression of the hydrogen for use to inefficiencies in the fuel cell itself — mean that only 24 per cent of the energy used to make the fuel does any useful work on the road."
Are fossil fuels an energy source or a way of storing energy? Just a question of timescales.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Depends: Where is it?
If it's in the Sun, it's a source. If it's a tank we are shipping around, it's a way of storing energy, just like gasoline.
Storing energy. And apparently not a very efficient one.
But then again, the first internal combustion engines weren't very efficient either and look where we are now.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
I'd love to have an alternative - a real, no compromise one - for fuelling my activities without destroying the planet. Really.
But we ain't there yet. Not just because nothing - repeat nothing - comes remotely close to matching the energy density AND cost of fossil fuels. (And this after we've shipped the fuel halfway round the world).
No, the main problem is infrastucture. Be it public charging sockets for your Tesla or Chevy Volt, or H being available at your local gas (sic) station.
The only organisations with enough power - and money - to enable the promising technologies of the future to flourish is central Gov. As usual, they're doing nothing.
So how about it Pres Obama - ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit, and use them to build nuclear powerstations (no CO2) and a nationwide H and elec infrastruture. Now that would be change I can believe in.
I have a solution.
Clone dinosaurs. Bury them. Use the oil they turn into.
Cryogenic freezing in the meantime powered by the sun.
Over-seen by Skynet.
YAY.
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
Thats actually Wrong... I'm not a green freak (as can be attested by a number of my posts and the truth that real environmentalists commit suicide to lessen their impact on the planet...) BUT: I'd love a hydrogen vehicle... I don't care about the carbon being released by burning hydrocarbon fuels, etc... (Heck problaby more Carbondioxide released by brewing and drinking of beer...) I think we need a way to be free of the grasp of forign powers (some not so friendly) on our infastructure. My alternative to Hydrogen vehicles would be CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and even the CNG has home filling units available now. and CNG is something we have plenty of HERE at home (if you're a Non-USA Reader... Pardon the egocentricity of my post.)
Wind and Solar are ok ideas, but they can't be put into my tank...
So I put forward that for national security and protection of our transportation infastructure, that we need to CONTINUE to look for Hydrogen and/or CNG solutions for our transportation needs.
I've told my representative the same, but she replied back with a form letter about how solar is the future, etc... etc.. etc.. Even a solar panel on the roof of my car would probably just run the radio and airconditioning fans...
Just my .02 worth...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Sure it does. Most of the current hydrogen (in its raw form) is generated from hydrocarbons.
Not a typewriter
That's an important point but how come these issues are never brought up in discussions about the inefficiencies of conventional fuel? It takes energy to pump oil out of the ground, ship it to a refinery, distill it into gasoline, and transport the fuel to a gas station. With conventional internal combustion engines you get about 25% efficiency from the time you fill up at the gas station. Fuel cells get over twice that.
Sure you might still need to suck some energy off the grid to create enough hydrogen, but even if the grid is burning fossil fuels to provide energy, it's doing it a HELL of a lot more efficiently than a car does.
The key is to get everyone producing as much as they can at home, and then getting the rest off the grid. Then the grid can be converted to green over a long period of time and it will be seamless.
that converting chemical energy to heat, then to movement, then to electricity, then to hydrogen, then to electricity, then to movement might not be the be turning out to be such a great idea after all...
Deleted
We have net positive energy right now with hydrocarbons, and it's not because of perpetual motion. It's because the energy we put into it (drilling, transport, etc.) is less than we get out when we burn it. That's because the majority of the energy to make the stuff was already put into it by the sun with some geothermal processes thrown in.
Thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole. You can have net energy production or a decrease in entropy if you're limiting the scale (either in time or space) of your solution.
Not a typewriter
It is not an energy source - it is an energy storage medium, little different than a battery.
The same as fossil fuels. The only "energy source" is the sun, that moves the wind and powers the waves and makes the plants grow and eventually turn into the mush we call petroleum, and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs.
The smart bit is if you manage to find a way to harness a huge amount of a non-portable energy source - like sun in the desert or waves in the ocean - energy that is really available in excess, and use THAT energy to make smaller, PORTABLE forms of energy that lets us move about.
Either way our current society will end when petroleum becomes really scarce. There's no way we can maintain a world where everyone has a car. As you pointed out, the inefficiencies just won't allow it. Trains will be coming back in style in a BIG way, and there will HAVE to be changes to our town planning. History teaches us that probably quite a bit of people will have to die before we accept this as a society though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
... is hydrogen an energy source or a way of storing energy?
For the purposes the hydrogen fuel cells are aimed at, it's a method of storing energy, an intermediary much like a battery. Only, apparently, much more inefficient. Power still needs to be generated somewhere to produce the hydrogen, as it is not found in large underground deposits.
The only advantage I see in hydrogen power over pure electric vehicles is the convenience factor you get from being able to "fill it up". And while I know gasoline is explosive and we've done all right handling it so far, allowing the average person to refill a highly compressed cylinder of hydrogen in their car has always seemed like a bad idea to me. What if they drive off with the nozzle attached, leave the cap off, or get in a crash that damages the tank, as seems to happen a lot with cars that are out there today. Also, average person may be stretching it a little, as I've also heard there is not enough platinum in the world to convert all vehicles to hydrogen power. While that point may be moot with the new catalyst described they will still be awfully expensive to buy and maintain, especially if you get virtually no efficiency bonus over gas.
Overall, what I don't get is why we are not building charging stations. Even if the Big Three can't/won't produce electric vehicles, there are definitely companies out there that aren't quite so scared of change. *cough... hybrid... cough*
The "Hydrogen Economy" was partly the result of a stupid book by Jeremy Rifkin. Read it and note how little it says about where the hydrogen comes from. It was promoted by the Bush/Cheney crowd as a means for diverting attention from electric cars.
Using electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, then liquefying the hydrogen, storing it as a liquid, then recombining it in a car (either in an engine or a fuel cell) is incredibly inefficient. The only advantage over batteries is that it looked like it might provide more range. Battery energy density has improved in the last decade, though. Battery cost is still a problem. But none of the hydrogen cars are cheap. Nor do they really have that much range. Arnold's hydrogen-powered Hummer only has a 60-mile range.
BMW actually built about 100 "hydrogen powered" cars. But they mostly run on gasoline; although they can optionally run on hydrogen, that's mostly for PR purposes. The liquid hydrogen tank has a "use it or lose it feature"; the BMW vehicle will evaporate all its hydrogen in about 10-12 days.
It looks like an idea whose time has passed.
"As cheap as ever" is even an understatement. We're talking a couple pennies a mile if you could run your car off of electricity off the grid. Even if the hydrogen were an order of magnitude more expensive, if the car could be built so that it could run 50-75 miles a time on a battery, most people would get their commute drive for extremely cheap and it would offset the higher expense of hydrogen.
ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit
Unless I'm reading into this wrong, you're missing something...
For Obama's plan for the US to be the leader in alternative fuels we're going to need Detroit. He needs an auto industry that he can lay hands on and manipulate. Otherwise he's going to be relying on the goodwill of other auto makers to meet him half way to his goal and that's probably still going to involve subsidies. If these subsidies are going to exist either way I'd much rather have them here than abroad. By using resources in the US he will have some say and legislation will give him a hand to work with these assets.
We need to draw a line between the oil industry and the auto industry. As long as we treat them as the same we're never going to rise above the muck that keeps alternative fuels beached. It's a hard pill to swallow but it's still there regardless of our outlook on all of it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
actually as things go within 5 years it should be possible for even northern latitude homes to produce enough energy to cover 60% of there yearly energy use. Currently in active development between solar and vertical turbine wind generators the ability for roughly 10,000 watts to be generated at the average home. Now all wee need is a method of storage other than batteries, and a convertor that will allow the excess to dump back out onto the grid.(for when your not home anyways)
cutting down the need for home heating oils, and electrical usage will go farther in the short term than electric cars. of course that some storage cell will be good for electric cars too. Cars really don't generate a lot. they have been cleaning up their arse emissions for 15 years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I got all of those by doing a search here on /. Those are just some of the top ones too. These methods are to new to have become a fees-able opportunity so far; however, given a few years and another few gasoline panics (we all know they're coming), and they'll probably come around to being more standardized.
In the Pelosi-Obama-Reid recession
it would be rather more accurate to describe it as the Greenspan-Bernanke depression.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Flamebait? Who moderated this as Flamebait?
CNG is worth thinking about. South Korea has been pushing CNG (and natural gas, in general) for vehicles.
The politics implied by his post are worth thinking about. Paying a premium (even a 75% premium) may be better than sending our money out of the country for oil. Compare hydrogen's inefficiency to paying money to other countries, then using energy to transport the oil we buy.
And yes, some of that money we pay definitely does get spent on bullets on our trading partners' side, and causes us to spend even more on bullets on our side.
Don't like these ideas? Think they're not correct? Reply to the parent, rather than stifle with a "Flamebait" tag.
Neither, it takes more energy to make the hydrogen then you can get from it, and it is almost impossible to store...
Hydrogen is just a distraction, not a viable source of... well... anything really...
If hydrogen was so great, we would be all using it already, you can hose it directly into an IC engine and it would run with almost no modification.
The problem with hydrogen has been, and always will be 2 things.
1. Very difficult to produce, it takes a lot of energy, in the form of electricity. (Note: The concept of fuel cells is flawed inherently, because there is no way you can get more electricity out of the hydrogen then you put in to the water to make the hydrogen in the first place. Law of thermodynamics. I propose, we take that energy and store it in... say, batteries to power cars directly... There is no way that is less efficient then going from electricity to hydrogen to electricity.)
2. Very difficult to store. Needs to be kept under extreme pressure, and in some cases needs to be cooled.
HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL.
Not now, not ever, never.
WHY?
Because it takes more energy to MAKE hydrogen (i.e., snap the chemical bonds that embed it in various compounds) than you get out of burning it, EVEN AT !00% efficiency (which is impossible, of course.)
So, straight off, it's not a fuel. At best, it is an energy carrier.
TWO
IT SUCKS AS A CARRIER
A: Batteries and ultracapacitors are much better, and can be woven into the present infrastructure at a far lower cost.
B: There is no vessel on earth than can contain Hydrogen. It consists of a proton and an electron. Period. You cannot tighten the lid on a jar or whatever to contain it. It just leaks out. If it leaks out it either quickly bonds to something or it flies out of the atmosphere, gets ionised and then it's not even hydrogen - it's just an energetic proton. electronic bottles make the negative energy value of hydrogen as a fuel utterly farcical.
Therefore: HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL. IT IS NOT EVEN A GOOD IDEA FOR A CARRIER.
Those who seek "Business As Usual", i.e. the permanent continuance of the present energy glut circumstance are simply going to have to suck it up and deal with The Facts:
Petroleum is a limited resource that is either at or near peak or just recently past peak production. Its energy density and malleability are unparalleled - there is simply nothing like it. Hydrogen cannot substitute for it. We are simply going to have to re-order our society along the lines of the new reality. Don't like it? Tough shit. Those who resist will simply die off. Make plans or have them made for you.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Storing energy. And apparently not a very efficient one.
But then again, the first internal combustion engines weren't very efficient either and look where we are now.
Ha ha ha... Wait...
I assume that was a joke? Because ICEs are one of the most inefficient sources of energy in the world, they waste about %80 of their energy.
Exclellent movie, well worth watching. Really makes you want to see the big three go under rather then receive another big subsidy.
I would not say it's a question if timescales, but a question of energy balance.
No matter the timescale, you can't use X amount of hydrogen to get more than X hydrogen. You need extra energy just to get your original amount of hydrogen, and even more extra energy to get more than you originally had. So it's not a source, it's a storage with energy loss, it has negative energy balance.
But you can use X amount of oil (and no other energy) to survey and pump up more oil, and you'll end up with more than X. So it's a source, it has positive energy balance.
Of course at some point oil will stop being an energy source, 'cos pumping and refining it will require more energy than is recovered. Mineral oil can still be used as a very efficient energy storage for a long time, but the extra energy to pump and refine it will have to come from something else (ie. either from sun or from nuclear energy).
That's also the only comfortable solution to peak oil, if we start doing it early enough: build enough non-fossil power plants and use their energy to convert energy-negative oil reserves into usable oil and gas, ready to be transported and used like conventional oil products.
Specifically, from Natural Gas. Which mostly comes from Oil Wells. Which is what XOM is in in the business of finding and exploiting.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Even more accurately called the Franks, Dodd, Reid recession.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Let's see, ways to make Hydrogen:
1. Use algae to generate it
2. Direct solar conversion of water to hydrogen using photoelectrochemical semiconductor panels.
3. Using high temperatures from a nuclear energy plant to heat and crack water into hydrogen and oxygen
4. Oh yeah! Neanderthal-style electrolysis.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I assume you're rejecting the solution presently used by the fossil fuel industry, which is just to dump it directly into the environment at the point of generation, right?
'cause if that's on the table, well, problem solved.
But if you, quite reasonably, reject this solution then it shouldn't be permissible for the fossil fuel industry either. So comparing apples to apples we see that nuclear power is much better off.
--MarkusQ
While it's possible that one day hydrogen might be a real alternative, the way hydrogen has been pursued suggests to me that it's been little more than a cynical PR stunt for the American auto makers. Detroit has thrown a few million at producing some prototypes so they can say "Look at us, we really care about the environment!" Meanwhile, the bulk of the industry's efforts went into designing, building, and selling huge, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. If Detroit really gave a damn about global warming and dependence on foreign oil, they would have made a major push to reallocate their resources to producing smaller, more efficient vehicles, which would have major benefits today, instead of promising to solve everything with hydrogen at some indefinite point in the future.
Couldn't the safety margin be increased? i.e., if you have a tank rated for 2400 psi, you only fill it to 1200 psi?
Sure, but you just doubled the size and cost of the tank or halved the range of the vehicle. It's already uneconomical, they're looking for any way to cut costs.
Would that solve the hydrostatic testing?
Not really. At most you'd extend the testing period a bit. The whole reason behind testing is that testing is cheaper than just replacing.
I don't read AC A human right
Batteries can already store electricity at 90% efficiency.
Electricity -> Battery -> Electricity = 90%
Electricity Hydrogen electrolysis is not very efficient, using fuel cells to create electricity is not very efficient:
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity = 40%
Hydrogen will only work as a fuel storage mechanism if you have an abundance of very cheap electricity(nearly free).
We have the best government that money can buy.
Kendall is apparently one of the few people who can analyze chemical energy storage systems rationally; the sorry truth is that hydrogen GAS - its default phase at the surface of this planet - is one of the least energy-dense materials we have. It's complete lunacy to think it can ever be EFFICIENTLY used as a fuel or source of stored energy.
What Kendall said of the "hydrogen economy" is also sadly true of virtually every other form of stored chemical energy we have or can envision: it takes more energy to create the stored form than can be recovered later as useful work. That is just my own restatement of what Kendall said. This is true of petroleum (though Mother Nature paid down the energy cost for us over millions of years), biodiesel, hydrogen as a fuel, batteries, and all the rest. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal generation are different, since they are not STORED chemical forms of energy, though even they are heavily dependent upon at least one form in order to be fully useful (to modern human society).
From where does the energy come to create the stored chemical fuels in the first place? We might possibly use solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal systems, but if the creation is significantly dependent upon the use of the very fuels created then it's a losing game of slow energy starvation.
If that's going to be the case, then we'd best just start getting comfy with having and using a LOT less energy than we do now: no more street lights, no neon signs, no more endless numbers of "wall warts" sipping power 24/7, no stadiums lit up bright as day in the dead of night, no more computer screens running screensavers every idle minute, no more "security" lights appeasing fears, no more giant metal birds shooting across the sky... and no more two hour commutes in Lincoln Navigators or Hummers.
I've been suggesting for some time that the "petroleum age" has been an energy anomaly, and one that we have not exploited wisely; we still don't have a sustainable presence in space or on another planet, for instance. Once the petroleum runs truly scarce, we will no longer even have the means to establish that sustainable presence; the heavy industry necessary to accomplish it is utterly dependent upon limitless supplies of petroleum.
Wanna know the real reason why we haven't been visited by ET? Poor little ET's species wasn't any more disciplined than we have been, they had their own Peak Oil event on their planet, and got trapped on their little rock for lack of energy to finish the exodus.
The volume (and mass) of waste per kilowatt hour of power is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for fossil fuels.
Yes, but nobody's going to die from inhaling an equivalent mass of CO2 versus, say, a radioactive isotope of cesium. And if somebody releases a thousand pounds of CO2 over a populated city, I doubt anyone would notice... A thousand pounds of any radioactive compound and you're talking major ecological disaster. (and yes, everything is radioactive, for those in the peanut gallery... you know what we're talking about here though)
The bulk of nuclear wastes can be cost effectively reprocessed to make more fuel,
The bulk of nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed if and only if the plant was designed with that in mind. Most currently in production aren't breeder plants because they can be used for weapons programs. To say it in laymans terms... They've been neutered. They break the uranium down into isotopes that don't necessarily lend themselves to reprocessing in several common configurations. As well, breeder reactors are more expensive to operate.
Much of the remaining nuclear waste material has a short half-life
Much of it does, but enough of it doesn't and the stuff that doesn't lasts millions of years.
The remainder of the nuclear waste material is long-half life solids which, due to the very nature of half lives, aren't very radioactive
...and when you pack enough of it into a confined area, which is what we're doing when we store it... It's still lethal. The Chernobyl disaster area is covered in these "not very" radioactive isotopes. Do you want to live there?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Which is why we need to start building nuclear plants like its nobody's business. Aside from fast integral reactors available with current technology which greatly reduce waste, Dr. Bussard was supposedly on the brink of energy positive fusion reactions before his unfortunate death.
If we upgrade our power grid for more efficient transmission between different areas, built enough nuclear plants so we've got more electricity than we know what to do with, it won't matter as much that our storage mechanism isn't incredibly efficient.
I think in the long term our civilizations energy should come from giant solar collectors built in orbit (Earth, Lunar, Solar, etc.). Once we start collecting enough energy in space and refine our in-situ resource utilization and bootstrapping technologies, we can begin mining asteroids to build more solar arrays.
Of course these are long term plans, 100+ years out maybe before we get this setup expanding at a good rate, but recently a the worlds oldest person died at 115. At age 23, I'm optimistic that as medical technology advances, I'll still be around to see it become a reality. :)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
And why exactly are you comparing two, outdated technologies when you really should be comparing them to solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, hydro, tidal and geothermal?
It's because rusted on nuclear proponents are still living in the 70's and honestly believing that nuclear is so good compared to coal, but they can never win the debate against renewables.
The issue here is not production of H2 rather storage and transport. You can make H2 for ~$1.40/Kg from steam methane reforming, but it jumps to ~$10/Kg by the time it gets to the pump. The key to the whole H2 situation is driving down the economics of storage and transport. Moving away from compression and gaseous/liquid H2 transport. Cheaper electrolyzers etc. will just move us from centralized H2 production to distributed H2 production, which will help costs, but likely not produce the mass of H2 we need. That likely will come from SMR of biomethane, wind power, thermal power, nuclear power etc. all centralized H2 sources and I mean all of them not just one style. We solve the distribution issue the energy balance will be tighten to something useful. We need to stop thinking of one solution or ignoring a potential solution, it's going to take a lot more than one persons pet concept to solve the mess we're in.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Hydrogen is a power source, just bang a couple of atoms together with enough velocity and you get Helium + a lot of enrgy.
However we have not yet developed a working fusion reactor.
We'll just have to use the nearest one we can find, its only 93 million miles away, and has enough hydrogen to keep going for a few billion years.
Grams of Hydrogen in 1 liter:
Liquid Hydrogen -- 71 g.
Gasoline (C8H10) -- 118 g.
Diesel (C12H26) -- 130 g.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
And where does the energy come from to power that 90% efficient electric motor? Your local power plant will run at 70% efficiency if it is very modern, probably more like 50% if it is not so new and it most likely burns coal. If it does not then its efficiency will be even lower. There is a further loss involved in transporting the coal to the plant and digging it up in the first place. There is the other issue as to what we do with variable power, I believe much is lost to heat anyway at off peak times. There are losses down the tubes, then there are losses as you charge. Ever felt a power pack and battery when charging? Heat is energy, if something is hot you have lost energy.
The picture is not quite so rosy and simple as many like to think. If it made economic sense to be using electric vehicles right now we would be, but it does not so we do not. I doubt if it ever will - we are tooled up to use oil so we are more likely to synthesise it than completely restructure our entire industrial machine.
The thing people don't get is thermodynamic efficiency is always very low. There is a simple law and it is related to the temperature of your heat source and sink (reversible carnot cycle):
n = 1 - TL/TH
Where TL is the sink temperature (ambient in the case of air cooling) and TH the source temperature. So, what this means is that for a perfect, lossless heat engine, 100% efficiency can only be achieved with an absolute zero heat sink, or an infinite temperatured heat source.
Using this equation and some approximate figures from a quick google, the Carnot efficiency of a typical ICE is in the order of some 42%. You cannot exceed that level of efficiency without violating some laws of physics. Given that modern ICEs run at some 30%+ efficiency, which gives you a figure more like 70% efficiency in terms of what is possible. The truth is that ICEs are in fact very efficient within the realm of what they can achieve. But hey don't let physics get in the way of environmental dogma.
Thermodynamics is a bitch isn't it?
The really inefficient part of driving a car is the dead weight you carry around with you, factoring in how much energy moves the driver I think you are down to 1% efficiency. If you do the calculations on electric vehicles the numbers a similarly dismal. Truth is we aren't admitting to ourselves what the real problem is: our expectations of what "personal transport" is.
The bicycle is still the most energy efficient personal transportation machine devised by man. Use it, if you care.
Actually you can skip two of those steps, jumping directly from heat to hydrogen in a "thermochemical" process such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur-iodine_cycle
How about the "Americans are idiots who spend money they don't have and now they defaulted on their loans" recession.
The average American carries $150,000 in housing and credit card debt. There is no other adjective that fits that situation than "idiot".
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Mazda has abandoned the ICE and replaced it with a rotary engine. In theory it should be as efficient as a rotary electric motor, but in reality it leaks hydrocarbons like a seive and just-barely passes California's ULEV requirements.
So they are trying, but so far not much success has been achieved. Others are experimenting with battery-powered electric cars, but they still have not overcome the minimum two-hour recharge time. Gasoline/diesel still has the advantage there of being recharged in just 5 minutes.
The best approach so far is to combine both electric and gasoline/diesel into a single car
(i.e. a rechargeable hybrid, preferably from a solar roof).
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Um.. The Wankle rotary is an ICE. The primary advantage with the wankle is power/weight ratio, not efficiency.
Oh and regular piston engines are used in all Mazdas except the RX sport cars.
What you fail to mention is that the far majority of hydrogen is generated by electrolysis.
The algae thing is rather new, and takes up a lot space, and generates almost no hydrogen (last I checked) and is nothing but a mere curiosity, almost like a science project to say "look what I can do".
Then, as for solar energy, just make electricity, thats what we want at the other end anyways. If we generate hydrogen its just to make electricity, so just make electricity and be done with it.
Nuclear energy, see previous comment.
And lastly our "Neanderthal-style" system, is pretty much the only one used.
But, you know, even if that all was magically solved, because we all farted hydrogen, and cows farted hydrogen, and cars gave off hydrogen instead of CO2, what you always come down to is: How do you store the hydrogen? You can't! It is very difficult to store hydrogen in a compressed from.
So, the final nail in the hydrogen coffin is you cant store it.
That should be default answer I think.
Hydro- YOU CAN'T STORE IT
Breaking news: new method of hydrogen instantly coverts anything people touch into hydrogen without any effort or energy! - But, we still can't store it!
Guess what, I have a magic lamp, and my first wish was that all the water in the world becomes hydrogen. To bad we can't store it. (And that were all dead because there isn't any water in our bodies anymore)
Billy: "Guess what Bob, I made a fuel cell car in my garage!"
Bob: "Excellent Billy, to bad there is no way for you to carry around enough hydrogen for your car to actually be useful."
Billy: "Thanks for ruining my life's work Bob, go get hit by a bus!"
Bob: "Oh no! 32 bits of data!"
Sigh, I think I've just lost it.