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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.
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.
When did they make volts a unit of energy?
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.
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.
What they didn't tell you is that it takes about 33 times longer. They're not sure why, though.
I don't care how much less it is... There is simply not enough urea made in the entire country on a daily bases to produce enough H2 for fuel for even a small city.
Really, how many gallons a day do you piss? Considder then that urea is only a fractional percentage of that pee. (about 95% of typical urine is water, the rest is a combination of mostly urea as well as other contaminants removed by the kidneys).
I'd have to piss somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 gallons a day to have enough fuel just to handle my daily commute. Then there's the energy loss seperating the urea at the water treatment plant, hooking houses on septic up to sewers to collect the additional urine (about 35% of the country doens't have a sewer), then transport of the seperated urea to an H2 processing plant, and THEN, what do you plan to DO with the H2? We can't afford to run it in our cars... (current fuel cells cost about $750,000 once you take away the government subsidies. They THINK they can make em for about $100,000 in 15-20 years....
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
but in this case it's a good thing.
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.
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...
I like the idea. Anything that involves aiming a stream of urine towards our national leaders is fine by me.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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?
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?