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Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars?
thecarchik writes with this interesting excerpt: "It takes a lot of energy to split hydrogen out from the other atoms to which it binds, either in natural gas or water. Which means energy analysts are skeptical about the overall energy balance of cars fueled by hydrogen. Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidize (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine. Because urea's four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart."
Only if they relax the drunk-driving laws. I don't see any other way the economics can work.
first piss!
Sperm and now urine? I'll take a guess and say the next article will be about crap.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Well, if this does work, it looks like the waste processing plants will get a complete overhaul. But that assumes there is a easy way to separate the urea from the water and other things that flow down the sewer lines....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Try pissing in my gas tank now!
The cars powered by this will smell like Bourbon Street.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Cool. We burn our pee in the car, collect pure water from the tailpipe, drink the water and pee again.
Perpetual urination FTW.
Apparently, a lot less. From TFA: "Just 0.037 Volts need to be applied across the cell, against the 1.23 Volts needed to break down water."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Peeing in my neighbors gas tank will no longer have the desired effect.
I can see two possible problems with this. Urea is a product of amino acid metabolization, in other words, protein breakdown. Somehow I think it'd take quite a lot of energy to provide the protein to provide the urea.
Second problem, what're the reaction by-products? That wasn't clear in the article. If nitrogen gas is a by-product, that basically reverses the very energy intensive process of fixing nitrogen. We'd be better off using the urea as fertilizer to grow food rather than as fuel.
--PM
The problem isn't just getting the hydrogen, its storing and using it safely. This might make hydrogen dirt cheap, but it still doesn't really solve the problems that make hydrogen cars unworkable.
Are you the sort who gets up in the morning, observes that you are out of clean shirts, and trots off to do a quick load of laundry. But then say... "Hey, the problem here isn't just getting dressed, the car needs a boost and I can't remember where my wallet is." And then you lie back down in bed in defeat. The whole getting to work problem is just unworkable. ;)
When you have two problems and you solve one of them I'd call that progress.
The most common element in the universe is hydrogen. It will pay off in the long run to master using it for energy.
Urea will never be a significant energy source. Think about it, cars use far more energy than the total caloric intake of an animal (human or otherwise) per day. Yet WASTE product is supposed to supply all the energy needs of our vehicles?
Secondly, this would directly compete with our food sources even more so than biodiesel already does. Urea is a nitrogen fertilizer source that is in short supply. We already manufacture most of the world's urea supply from atmospheric nitrogen using up energy (mostly natural gas) in the process.
So in short, while this research may be of practical and academic interest, it is not going to usher in a new era of piss-powered cars.
the fuel will be called urinine, because after a lot of beer, I'm way way past urin8
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'd never have to stop driving to relieve myself again. Just make sure I've got plenty of water handy.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
You're right about the energy balance for the wrong reasons, and also the article submitter has screwed up. No one is suggesting urine, which the journalist made up on the spot, and which fails the capacity requirement to boot. The pure industrial chemical urea is mostly produced synthetically from ammonia and carbon dioxide, and ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen is currently produced mostly from natural gas and similar sources, which means it won't solve anything, and the carbon dioxide should be non-fossil also for the carbon cycle to be closed. In summary, what we have here is another way to produce synthetic fuel from natural gas or carbonaceous masses like coal or organic matter. The good thing is that the fuel precursor is noncombustible; the bad is that it's completely unproven and even hypothetical, and its energy density is not known.
... we run out of water, because we drink it all and instead of peeing it back on Mother Nature we break it into other particles?
While this sounds rather strange, you should realize that it's only a matter of "when?" instead of "will it?" Just for the heck of it, does anyone have any idea how this period can be computed?
but in this case it's a good thing.
The Romans made great use of human urine in their day; why shouldn't we do the same? In ancient Rome, citizens were actually "taxed" their urine; that is, the government required that they give it to them. And then they sold it back to them in more useful forms. Sounds like a great way to get our government out of the financial mess they're in!
Garrison Keillor once wrote
It is more worthy in the eyes of God if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.
I'm not entirely certain you've succeeded in changing my opinion of hydrogen, but you've definitely made a change in my thinking.
Now if I could only find my car keys ...
Every time I see people complaining about hydrogen storage, I find myself wondering what's so hard about it. You can store hydrogen fairly densely and easily by just attaching it to carbon atoms in a roughly 2:1 ratio. What's more, we already have the infrastructure in place to transport and use hydrogen that's been stored in this manner. And, even better, no high pressures, low temperatures, or special materials are required!
It only works that way in a self-sustaining reaction (one that produces enough energy to keep itself going). In this case, the hydrogen is being used to store energy, so the process is going to require input energy the whole time. They're taking from a lower energy state and pushing it up to a higher energy state so that at a future time, you can add in that bit of activation and let the reaction go, giving you energy in the process. It''s like pushing a rock up the hill - when you get it to the top, you can use all that stored energy just by giving the rock a little tap and letting it roll down. The advantage of using urea over water as a source of hydrogen, is that with urea, less energy is required to separate out the hydrogen. It's like starting pushing the rock from halfway up the hill.
If it works, it would be a very green... er... yellow solution.
Yeah, but that relys too much on using dangerously toxic carbon ....
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I've heard that a few grams of carbon injected into a polar bear at 100m/s can kill it instantly.
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Way to dangerous to use in cars and vehicles.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
they are just taking the piss out of us.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
My wife is going to be the Energy SuperHeroine. She has to pee about 20 times a day.
Either your wife has a small or irritable bladder, or she drinks a lot of water. In either case it's not going to help. If she has a small bladder she will be peeing all the time, but her total daily volume of urine will be within normal limits. If she drinks a lot of water, her urine volume will be above average, but the actual concentration of urea in her urine will be less.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
On the other hand, we doctors know that red meat and other protein rich foods - dairy products, eggs, etc - will substantially increase your production of urea (this is after all how the body gets rid of excess nitrogen produced when amino acids from proteins are turned into other stuff like sugars, fats, etc). So perhaps finally we'll be able to imprison all the snobbish vegans. Everyone will be forced to eat red meat and cheese all the time, and promptly die of heart attacks at 40, solving both the energy and the social security crises in one fell swoop.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Fertiliser production. Also using the Haber-Bosch process with obvious implications for the cost of food vs fuel.
There are 4 big things we can do to save the world, and dependency on oil.
1: Stop throwing away 60% of our energy through "waste" heat. Which is pretty much what every electricity generating plant does.
2: Stop using 50% of our 40% efficient electricity to move heat around... See air conditioning.
3: Stop using 17% efficient vehicles to move us around.
4: Stop generating artificial fertilisers.
The solutions?
1: District Heating and District cooling.
2: Insulation, thermal mass. District cooling and/or evaporative cooling.
3: Walk. Battery electric vehicles for relatively short journeys, personal rapid transit for intermediate and rail for longer journeys.
4: Stop discharging human waste into the ocean. Compost it to destroy pathogens and start using it as fertiliser. The current methods simply move NPK from the land to the ocean.
p.s. I don't expect any of this to actually happen. Humans are stupid animals and it's easier to kill others who threaten resource consumption than it is to change.
Deleted
Now if I could only find my car keys ...
Have you tried Google? They're doing some really amazing stuff with their engine lately.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
won't this produce large amounts of NO(x) pollutants?
Oil is two or more separable problems. Gasoline has environmental effects - we will never get it to burn cleanly enough in an application such as individual autos if they are at all widespread. The same goes for natural gas, ethanol, and all the alternates that involve any hydrocarbon compound - a few people with badly tuned engines can produce pollutants equal to what thousands of well tuned engines will produce, and even well tuned engines aren't really good enough when you expand use to hundreds of millions of consumers.
Then there's the geopolitics of who has oil and who doesn't. That remains a problem unless you get a substantial majority of hydrocarbon compounds from elsewhere or get off of hydrocarbons.
Here's the crux - there is a very real chance of both problems becoming critical. Nobody can make a real, high accuracy prediction of just how much damage our species will take because of burning so much oil, and nobody can make a high accuracy prediction of WW3 starting in the Middle East. We can't say the current rate of oil burning will contribute exactly X meters to sea level rise by year Y, and neither can we say that there is X probability of a brushfire war going Nuclear in year Y, but in both cases, some strong, negative consequences seem at least fairly likely. I don't think there are any good arguments that an environmental crisis will definitely be less serious for our species than a Nuclear war, or vice versa. We simply have to rate both as very grave risks with rather indeterminate deadlines for us to act.
Every resource we waste finding ways to wean ourselves off of Mideast oil rather than off of oil in general is actually part of the bigger problem, because it does nothing about the environmental side, and we have better chances overall if we act as though the environmental side at least could be as critical.
What puzzles me though, is what I don't see. For the environment, we have a substantial minority arguing that global warming is a hoax, and acting like the many other environmental consequences of burning so much oil somehow won't ever really matter just so they don't count as global warming. For politics, I don't see anybody claiming that the Mideast can't be the trigger-point for a major war. I also don't see anyone claiming that it won't be a big deal just so long as such a war doesn't go nuclear.
My whole country reacted to a non-nuclear spill over of the continual middle eastern disagreement as though it were pretty damned serious back in 2001. Was there anybody announcing then that it didn't mean a major war was any closer, or the terrorists didn't use nukes so it was no big deal? What's made a substantial group behave this way when it comes to air pollution?
Who is John Cabal?
Hold on a second. If the energy required to split urea into hydrogen is very small, you've just solved the hydrogen storage problem.
Crack the urea on the fly to hydrogen and combust it down to water. What are the waste products of the electrolysis?