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America's First Pipeline-Fed Hydrogen Fueling Station
hasanabbas1987 writes "Shell has opened America's first pipe-lined hydrogen fueling station in the town of Torrence in Southern California. Shell wasn't alone in this project as Toyota also helped them in this green deed, all of which was funded by the government. At the moment other hydrogen stations around the US still depend upon trucks to supply them with fuel. This marks a new era of green fueling and hopefully this pipeline spreads to other stations. Many of the big car makers like Toyota, Honda and Mercedes have indicated a mass market for hydrogen powered cars by 2015."
While I do think that Hydrogen based cars is a great idea I know that a problem in their development was safety. Is having a direct connection to the pipeline at a publicly used service station a good idea? We see stupid things people do resulting in problems at regular gas stations all the time, will it use full time attendants or will just rely on people being smart while fueling up?
Hydrogen == natural gas.
One has to wonder which would be greener? Just using the Natural gas in an IC Hybrid or Hydrogen in a fuel cell?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Say parts that are un/under utilized?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Is it any worse than a government-funded boondoggle of foreign oil? Perhaps the hydrogen is generated by burning oil, dogs, or babies... but that isn't the pipeline's fault. Someday the hydrogen could be made by cleaner schemes, and the infrastructure could already be in place.
This part made me laugh though:
Toyota also helped them
But
all of which was funded by the government
huh?
THL phish sticks
I have a hard time keeping up with what's hip in the green world, but I thought electricity was the green thing that we're supposed to fuel our cars with now. Didn't hydrogen fall out of favor with the greenies a few years back?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There are no vast fields of Hydrogen waiting to be mined (at least not on this planet). Hydrogen is an intermediate energy storage medium most commonly extracted from fossil fuels. It can come from water via electrolysis, but there's a lot of waste energy form that process so as far as I know it's not done on a large scale.
What is the overall efficiency of a Hydrogen powered car (including the energy cost to extract the hydrogen) as opposed to one that runs directly off of fossil fuels?
I didn't see anything in the article about the size of the pipeline, where it came from, what diameter pipe it is, or what material it's made of. But the number one question is, what odorizer is in the hydrogen? Hydrogen is explosive over a greater range than methane, and natural gas pipelines have to be regularly checked for leaks. Without leak surveys and with no odor in the gas, hydrogen transported by pipelines is going to be extremely dangerous.
Oh, my job for the last 35 years? Checking natural gas pipelines for leaks.
The sooner we can stop buying gas from the Middle East, the better.
It'd be cooler if Hydrogen didn't come from fossil fuels.
This article, from a 2008 edition of Skeptic magazine, spells out the good, bad and ugly of using hydrogen to power cars.
In short, not a good or easy thing to do.
The article.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
To add information to this discussion, here's the net system efficiency, well-to-wheel, of different energy sources:
Link
That graph is from this paper:
Link
All issues of fuel cost, fuel cell vehicle cost, safety, ozone damage, infrastructure cost, and so forth aside, one of the big complaints about hydrogen is that it's just not that efficient.
Could chocolate let me finish?
So they are running hydrogen pipes to all the fueling stations now? What sort of hazard is that going to provide? Are they going to put odour generating chemicals in the hydrogen like they do with natural gas, so that you can tell when there is a leak? If so, are these chemicals going to play nice in the engine? What happens when there is a leak in the pipe? Hydrogen/oxygen flames are nearly invisible to the naked eye. Are we going to have to add other compounds to make any flames visible?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
subject line says it all (as does TFA)
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
I used to live in Torrence, CA. It was really fun living there, even though the place doesn't exist.
You should know that there were people who thought that the federal highway system was a waste of money too. Sewers, and subways also had their detractors (still do). People never change, tea party, John Birch, know nothings, the names change but some people will always fight the future.
One might also note that pipelines like it might just as easily be good for 'regular' gas stations. I'd guess that keeping the delivery trucks off the road could be a real cost/environment savings (once the pipeline has been in place for 10 or 15 years)
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Hydrogen is NOT green - not until they find a "green" way to produce it. It is NOT an energy SOURCE (like fossil fuels, and nuclear), it is an energy CONVEYOR. I wanna save the planet as much as anyone, but as long as fossile fuels are used to generate the hydrogen, it actually makes more sense to just burn the stuff in an internal cumbustion engine. /me waits to get modded down :-/
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Yikes! I think I will wait for natural gas (methane) fuel cells to be rugged enough for use in vehicles. Much safer than hydrogen.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
It'd be cool if we weren't burning stuff to make power.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
* there are a number of pathways to make h2, which allows you to make your desired tradeoff between cost, quantity, carbon footprint, etc. Some pathways: petro natural gas, landfill gas, power plant electricity to electrolysis, solar panel to electrolysis, coal gasification. what's cool about this is that h2 production technology can improve over time, and you can establish the FCEV market now that will fund future development. pathways ftw!
* FCEVs are a form of electric vehicle so they get EV efficiency ~85%, while natural gas cars are still internal combustion so they get ~30%. efficiency ftw!
*unlike BEVs, FCEVs avoid the range anxiety issue, and can be filled up like a regular car instead of needing 8 hour charge. convenience ftw!
There are more, but that's all I have on short notice. BTW I just learned what ftw means. loving it!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
From below, I posted about the efficiency. Here is a graph from this research paper. To sum it up, if you're burning the H2 in an ICE, you're only making the situation worse. PEMFCs can be a little better than ICE vehicles, but they pale in comparison to electric cars.
Could chocolate let me finish?
As I said in my post, I thought electricity was the green thing that we're supposed to fuel our cars with now.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not about being "hip"; it's about where the state of technology is. And yes, the tech for hydrogen sucks. But that doesn't mean that there's not still funding for it.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Yet another government-funded dead end.
Like the Internet? And water treatment plants?
Toyota donated lobbyists.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Ethanol is a very good analogy. Even after hydrogen as a fuel vehicle has pretty much been panned by scientific review in contrast with electricity, it continues to receive funding because the companies working on it are so entrenched with the political establishment. When Chu tried to kill off the hydrogen funding a year or so ago, congress forced him to put it back in.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Yet another government-funded dead end.
Like the Internet? And water treatment plants?
Don't forget that good for nothing space program, AND the military... Between that, libraries, and fire protection, the government clearly can't get ANYTHING right...
Call it what you like, all I know is that my environmentalist friend is always changing his story every few years. One day he's telling me how great hydrogen fuel is, then it's ethanol, then it's electricity. I remember one time when we were in college it was methane. I keep telling him they need to decide on one thing and stick to it, but then off he goes on some new thing that's going to save the world. Tomorrow it will probably nuclear fusion, or sails on the cars, or god knows what.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Making power is easy. Storing it, not so much. Storing it in a cheap, safe, and efficient form? Worth trillions of dollars.
It'd be cool if we weren't burning stuff to make power.
Hydrogen fuel cell powered cars technically aren't "burning stuff" (depending on your definition of "burning")
Amen. Hydrogen is fuel as much as electricity is fuel.
Same applies to corn ethanol, BTW. EROEI1.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I suspect the reason this doesn't apply for gasoline and diesel has to do with the available variety of blends and octanes. You can't just install a single pipeline for gasoline the way you can natural gas or hydrogen.
EROEI<1
Damn markup rules.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The other risk is pooling. You're absolutely correct that there are anti-pooling countermeasures which not only can be taken, but essentially must be taken when dealing with hydrogen (aka, this isn't stuff you want sitting around in just an ordinary garage). Even still, even in structures designed to prevent pooling and detonation, it still happens. Fukushima being a glaring recent example, but there are countless others. Hydrogen detonates just so damned easy.
I'm having trouble figuring out how the least-dense substance known can "pool" anywhere. Under any normal situation, it's just going to escape into the air. Yes, it's flammable, yes, it can ignite easily in air. But the real danger with substances like gasoline is that the vapors are heavier than air, and can travel horizontally to an ignition source.
What's wrong with burning hydrogen in a controlled manner and a confined space?
Sure you can. That is how your fuel is transported right now over long distances. They use a pig.
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Makes sense to me. Expanding gasoline delivery to pipelines will increase the underground volume of fuel, and the amount of area with gasoline underground certainyl will increase the scope and frequency of leakage groundwater contamination spills in general.
We should probably reconsider using MTBE, since it's water-soluble and would. fit. right. in. with this change.
Change is good, no? And getting those nasty trucks off the road has to be worth the risk. I kinda like the idea of the occasional hydrogen flare to liven things up. Gasoline spills just make your water taste like, well, gasoline, and the cancer risk takes too long to develop. Color me impatient, but this future is so bright...
While we're on this subject, is there some strange and hidden agenda the Tea Partiers have to challenge the use of sewers and subways?
Your sig certainly says it all. Bravo. Putz.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You do realize that water vapor has an average atmospheric residency of under two weeks, right?
The real problem is that hydrogen vehicles have a grossly inefficient fuel cycle. Also, leaked hydrogen destroys ozone. But your water vapor argument is one of the dumbest anti-hydrogen claims you could have made.
And, FYI, most of the environmental community wants *battery-electric* vehicles, not hydrogen. Hydrogen vehicles are a "solution" being pushed on the "GreenTards" that they do not want.
Could chocolate let me finish?
Wow, great to know that your single idiot friend is the bellweather for both the science behind a technology and the opinions of an entire movement.
Could chocolate let me finish?
I stand corrected on the long distance transport. I was thinking of the smaller infrastructure where such a system doesn't make sense they way it does for natural gas. It makes perfect sense for regional transport to larger distribution centers though.
Why? Burning hydrogen with oxygen makes:
2 H2(g) + O2(g) 2 H2O(l) + 572 kJ (286 kJ/mol)
You don't like water?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Environmentalists have always supported the Electric car, and a hydrogen car is simply a different type of electric car (the battery is replaced with the fuel cell). I've not met any greens who were anti-hydrogen, since it is a clean fuel. Some are anti-natural gas but most think H2 will eventually be produced from solar panels.
Personally I think H2 is too difficult to handle. I think after a few cars blowup, the consumers will flee. -or- If the manufacturers do manage to make safe, impervious hydrogen cars, the pricetag will be so high (~$100,000) that nobody will be able to afford it. The same flaw that plagues pure EVs.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
He's just great at talking about some new technology that's going to save us, and then changing his story and moving on to some new "savior" when the previous one (inevitably) doesn't pan out. When I first met him, for example, he was big on hydroelectric power. Then someone told him that dams kill fish and suddenly he was preaching against them and had adopted some new cause. Wash, rinse, repeat. That's Kevin.
He's the kind of guy who wanted to save the whales, but only in the 80's when it was in vogue.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Jesus Christ Slashdot, if you're going to eat a symbol, don't show it in the preview. Not much of a preview, now is it? Anyway:
2 H2(g) + O2(g) --> 2 H2O(l) + 572 kJ (286 kJ/mol)
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
How do we get the Hydrogen? Unless the energy needed to extract it comes from solar, wind, hydroelectric or nuclear, we burn fossil fuels to extract the hydrogen. Currently hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source.
Yeah, it's more like.. exploding.
So far we're all dancing around what should be the key issue: H2 is an inefficient medium.
If you make H2 from natural gas, you would get better end-to-end efficiency by simply burning the natural gas in a combustion engine--basically the same engine that's in your car, but with a different "carburetor".
On the other hand, if you make H2 using electrolysis (water + electricity), the round trip efficiency is about 25%. In this context, the H2+fuel cell is acting like a battery, and we already have MUCH more efficient batteries. (Never mind that the fuel cell uses PLATINUM, which isn't exactly going to get cheaper in quantity, and only lasts a few years.)
And in case you were planning to counter the above with "yeah but we'll just use renewables to create the electricity so efficiency doesn't matter": It still matters. Right now we get about 1% of our energy from renewables. It's utterly asinine to claim that we could (much less should) get 400% of our energy from renewables, just so we can throw 75% of it away on the electrolysis->fuel cell cycle.
if I had mod points... they would be yours right now.
Collector's Edition
im sick of you communist libtards throwing my tax money away on sewers. what gives you the right to take my hard earned dollars and 'redistribute the wealth' to 'those according to their needs'. you need to shit? not my problem.
what we need is a privatized toilet system; wherein everyone has their own toilet, disconnected from the centralized, marxist sewer network that is controlled by an overweilding big brother government.
imagine it; each of us free with our own chamber pots, burning our own shit as free Americans, watching it float away into the night sky.
i kneel down and i cry, i weep, when i think about our children, who will be forced to shit into the government controlled, marxist lenninist sewer system, run by do gooder liberals who want to control our 'gaseous emissions' in the name of global warming (a hoax dreamed up by saul alinsky).
furthermore i... oh fuck it. Glenn Beck, are you out there? did you get my lettters? I LOVE YOU GLENN THEY NEVER SHOuLD HAVE FIRED UUUU
How do we get the Hydrogen? Unless the energy needed to extract it comes from solar, wind, hydroelectric or nuclear, we burn fossil fuels to extract the hydrogen. Currently hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source.
That's why I said "it depends on your definition of burning". One of the most common ways to get H2 from Natural gas is a steam reformer where the natural gas reacts with steam at a high temperature giving H2: CH4 + H2O CO + 3 H2
Combing water with a gas isn't typically what most people think of when they think of "burning" something.
(granted, the high temperatures likely come from burning fossil fuels, but I don't think you'd say that the process is markedly better if it used alternative energy to heat the steam)
Why? Burning hydrogen with oxygen makes:
2 H2(g) + O2(g) 2 H2O(l) + 572 kJ (286 kJ/mol)
You don't like water?
If you're burning H2 in air (as opposed to pure oxygen), there are a bunch of other byproducts generated like various NOx pollutants.
ok let me equivocate. If you use a coal power plant to produce electricity to electolyze water, then yes you're burning stuff. But that's tertiary burning at best.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
Even if an efficient method of producing hydrogen is discovered, the waste product, H20, is a worse greenhouse gas than C02.
Yes but the federal highway system doesn't have the problem that, if you store it in a tank made of 3 inches of solid steel, it somehow magically leaks because the atoms are smaller than the gaps between the metal atoms in the containment vessel. Storing hydrogen is not easy and requires liquid nitrogen cooling.
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So far, Hydrogen is just plain BS. Bush used it as a lame trick to direct our attention away from efficiency or any sort of oil policy changes that would have been correct (albeit always unpopular with someone).
Hydrogen is just storage, not energy. Now if we had an infrastructure of nuclear (ohhh! even better Fusion!) plants pumping out clean inexpensive electricity, and wanted to use that to make hydrogen, it might make sense. Without the magic of electricity being cheap enough that efficiency doesn't matter, it's just stupid.
I think, what we need more than anything, is better batteries. We're really close to having what we need now, perhaps just need to get costs down through volume production... ALL the cool energy sources we all love- wind, solar, tide, geothermal, unicorns on a treadmill, etc.- pump out electricity. I need to put THAT in my tank, not a difficult to store low density gas. I don't even consider it particularly hazardous, just not desirable.
Now, at the same time, I'd love to be able to run natural gas in my diesel, and need a high-density low-pressure tank to do that, probably using some of the new nano-porous schemes. I like natural gas because at least for now it seems abundant, and it burns relatively clean compared to oil. (It "sucks less".) But when it's time has passed I need to move on to electric.
"Currently hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy source."
Hydrogen has been the major source of energy for the universe for the last 13 billion years or so, and in this neck of the woods for nearly 5 billion, just look up in the sky sometime.
diesel is the future. Peanut oil works in diesel engines directly; we could refine and modify (chemically) peanut oil to work in current diesel engines easily. It can transmute into kerosene rather easily too (jet engines). So what we could do is get rid of that petroleum fertilizer shit farmers use and instead do crop rotation. Harvest the peanuts, crush and extract, refine the oil, modify, ship as diesel fuel; use the crushed peanuts as feed crop for pigs and goats; burn the peanut bushes and shells; till the land to move that burned plant fiber into it; and plant corn over it. Rotate like this forever. Burning the plants is fine because the CO2 you release is what came out of the air anyway; the same goes for the oil, so now your car has no CO2 footprint.
Seriously, do you need me to solve the world's problems for you? Here's an easy one: there's a capitalization error somewhere, solve that.
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Gasoline cars blow up all the time, but don't make the news. The first time a hydrogen car does, and it'll be over the news for weeks (twice as long on the conservative stations). It's not the actual risks, but the perceived risks as influenced by the media who love sensationalism.
Learn to love Alaska
So Kevin got new information realized his previous idea had a side effect he didn't like so he changed his mind?
how horrid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lol, you should tell him it's back in vogue again and have him watch a few episodes of Whale Wars. Then get him mad at Iceland for whaling. Then get him interested in geothermal power, and then show him how Iceland gets 99% of their electricity from renewables, to see if you can get him to do yet another about-face ;)
The world can be complicated, and little is truly black or white, that's for sure.
Could chocolate let me finish?
It might be produced from solar, but it won't be panels.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, you're wrong. What we need to do is develop a large number of promising ideas in parallel and see which turn out best.
Hydrogen doesn't come from fossil fuels,
The number one source of H2 is from fossil fuels. It's cheaper to get it from there than any other source.
I understand what you are saying, but when they want H2, they dig up the ground and make it from that. Which, for every definition of "make" other than yours, means that H2 is made from fossil fuels, not the other way around.
Learn to love Alaska
Personally I think H2 is too difficult to handle. I think after a few cars blowup, the consumers will flee. -or- If the manufacturers do manage to make safe, impervious hydrogen cars, the pricetag will be so high (~$100,000) that nobody will be able to afford it. The same flaw that plagues pure EVs.
Because conventional gas tanks never explode, gas engines never catch fire, and we're paying a fair price for perfectly safe gasoline storage and transport?
Never mind the studies showing that hydrogen is safer than gasoline in real-world situations. It's not the safety mechanisms that make the present technology cost $100,000 per car, it's the fuel cells themselves, and the cost will only come down over time because of mass-production and technology advances.
Yes but the federal highway system doesn't have the problem that, if you store it in a tank made of 3 inches of solid steel, ...
You've got to admit, that'd be a really cool tank. Not sure where we'd put it though.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Hydrogen leakage RISES and disperses quickly, unlike LPG or gasoline vapors. Not much of a safety hazard, not poisonous, and gas handling has been well understood for more than a century.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
if you are literally burning it (as opposed to using a fuel cell) you are also going to be producing nitrous oxide too, unless your oxygen is from a pure source instead of just using air.
All hail Jimmy Carter!
Making power is easy. Storing it, not so much. Storing it in a cheap, safe, and efficient form? Worth trillions of dollars.
Also, a reasonable amount of portability is a big plus...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I'll be able to re-inflate my solar-powered dirigible's nacelles, and escape the traffic!
He's the kind of guy who wanted to save the whales, but only in the 80's when it was in vogue.
Frickin' whales. What have they done for us lately?
Think they're so high and mighty with their tails and flippers. Sipping plankton and munching cavier sushi. The SUVs of the ocean. The whale vote probably helped re-elect Bush, and I'm sure they engineered the banking crisis.
Frickin' whales.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"There are no vast fields of Hydrogen waiting to be mined (at least not on this planet)."
Who says energy has to be 'mined' anyway?
And theres a few gazillion tonnes of hydrogen about 93 million miles away - where do you think the energy to make the deposits of carbon based fuels came from in the first place (and most of the other forms of energy we can use. The only exceptions are nuclear fission and geothermal.)
Better batteries? Pure electric? Look, I'm not just trying to be an argumentative jerk, but we're back to: HOW do you generate that electricity? The most environmentally friendly, and VIABLE, is nuclear. But the media and TMI killed that off - and the crisis in Japan ain't gone make it viable any time soon. Do you know how many people have been killed in the US by nukes? THREE - all army contractors that made some really STOOPID mistakes out in the Idaho desert. TMI didn't hurt a soul, and, just like the Army contractors, the operators pretty much did everything they could to break that plant over about a 3 day period. The US and western allies operate a BOATLOAD (no pun intendeed) of reactors, (SSNs, SSBNs, CVNs) NONE with a containment building. Chernobyl? HORRIBLE Russky RBMK design, the miracle(s) with Chernobyl are 1) only one has gone BOOM, and 2) some Eastern bloc countries are STILL operating those stupid things. Look up "positive coefficient of reactivity" and "negative coefficient of reactivity" - long story short: western designs tend to power down the hotter they get, RBMK and like get HOTTER as they increase in power, making them tend to run away. PLWR, CANDU pebble beds, those are the way to go.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
dude, fuel cells don't burn hydrogen! it's an electrochemical thing. the membrane separates the hydrogen proton and electron. proton goes to the other side of the membrane, while the electron races through the circuit to catch up. on the toher side, proton + electron + oxygen combine to make water. there's no combustion going on. no burning, no worries!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
dude, fuel cells don't burn hydrogen! it's an electrochemical thing. the membrane separates the hydrogen proton and electron. proton goes to the other side of the membrane, while the electron races through the circuit to catch up. on the toher side, proton + electron + oxygen combine to make water. there's no combustion going on. no burning, no worries!
Dude, you're replying to the wrong post. I was replying to the parent poster who said "Burning hydrogen with oxygen..."
Cool. We can inhale the NOx and have a happier commute.
If hydrogen is to be compared to something, it should be compared to the (in-) efficiency of a car battery and generation of electricity. So far, everything is very experimental, but some optimistic predictions percieve the following:
* VHTR reactors produce hydrogen directly, which raises overall efficiency and safety.
Note: Experiments have been dissapointing, but overall the development is moving in a good direction.
* Hydrogen is not pressurized while stored in a vehicle, instead it's bound to solids, such as metal hydrides. Reduced efficiency, but dangers are eliminated.
* People may use wind, water or sun power to top up their car hydrogen tanks.
* Hydrogen may be produced more efficiently than electricity from some of the less usual energy sources.
* Other added benefits are vehicles with much higher performance and/or engine simplicity, reducing the overall mass of the vehicle. ;)
Every reduction to the mass of a the vehicle is guaranteed green
With that being said, I think we can all agree that the following situations would be stupid:
* Producing hydrogen from fossil fuels
* Driving around with a high pressure hydrogen tank
at first I thought that this was a specious comment, but thinking about it more I see s/he has a point. there are many power sources (major and minor) that don't require combustion: 1) hydroelectric dams 2) nuclear power plants 3) geothermal 4) solar PV 5) solar molten salt 6) wind For transportation: * Fuel Cells * batteries * i've seen proposals for linear induction and maglev.
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
That is indeed the problem with hydrogen fuel.
Science magazine had an article about that. Hydrogen leaks through thick tanks, it leaks through thick pipe walls. It's hard to send it through a 100-mile pipe and get anything left at the end. Amazing stuff, hydrogen.
That's why I was so interested in this story. How have they fixed the problems of hydrogen leaking through the pipes? Too bad they didn't say.
Put out that cigarette.
If I see one more comment by people saying that "hydrogen is dirty because the most common way to make it uses fossil fuels", I'm gonna puke.
Here you go:
1. Build a big pipeline from California to Arizona to carry seawater to AZ.
2. Build vast fields of low-maintenence Stirling engines (I believe Motorola has one that generates 1.5 megawatts on .25 acre of land) to make electricity from sunlight.
3. Use the electricity to split the seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
4. The hydrgen is then a storage medium. Use in fuel cells to power electric cars, or use compressed for hydrogen internal combustion engines, or ship it to power plants to burn for grid electricity.
Some calculations regarding volume of water required, land area required using maximum efficency stirling engines, and the like would be required , but I know 20 years ago a lot of very smart scientiss thought it was doable.
When I first met him, for example, he was big on hydroelectric power. Then someone told him that dams kill fish and suddenly he was preaching against them and had adopted some new cause.
New Scientist had an article comparing the fatalities from different sources of energy recently. As I recall, coal power was the worst, but after that came hydroelectric.
Dams fail. There were dam failures in China several years ago that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Good intentions without understanding science can do more harm than good.
Your friend should have had a good engineering professor to chew him out.
For every successful government-funded program, there's a dozen massive failures. Plus, there's the issue of state vs. federal vs. local. Libraries and fire protection are actually local initiatives, not federal.
As for the military, exactly how has that been useful to the country after WWII? Were the Koreans threatening us? Or the Vietnamese? Or the Iraqis? Why do we need military bases in 100+ foreign countries? Most of our military actions in the last 60 years have been total shams; not only a waste of money, but completely counterproductive in that we've murdered countless civilians and created more enemies. There's been a few justifiable actions (e.g., air strikes to defend Kosovar citizens from genocide), but that could have been done with a military 1/4 the size of our current one, with the resulting budget savings.
Liquid rockets aren't as simple as mixing LH2 and LOX and throwing a match at it. Rocket engineers like to say that they're really a turbo pump with two tanks and a bell nozzle bolted on.
404: sig not found.
I believe there have been good results with a type of "honeycomb" fuel tank that seems to greatly reduce evaporation lost. It's been a while since I looked at it, though.
wtf do you think gasoline does?
Having worked with fuel cell R&D for a number of years at one of the major vehicle manufacturers, I can say this: Hydrogen powered vehicles is a bad idea. Everybody doing the actual research realizes this very quickly, but their jobs depend on continuing the work so information tends to get filtered as it passes up through management. Even at the top of the company they have probably realized by now, but the H2 program is almost entirely paid for by government subsidies, so the show goes on. Why is H2 a bad idea? There are a number of technical reasons, but the easiest one to explain is this: It's too expensive. H2 is made from natural gas, and some energy is lost in the process. Therefore it will always be more expensive than natural gas. H2 is also much more difficult to handle, and gives shorter range, because it occupies more volume than natural gas. Making H2 from water+electricity? You can make a battery car go twice as far with the same amount of electricity. That car will be cheaper to build, too.
You can make hydrogen out of water and heat, or water and electricity.
You can also make it by fermenting biomatter, or by processing the gases that come out of landfill sites.
Stalin expected to fight a nuclear war with the U.S. and win. That legacy was built into the Soviet military machine.
Was Korea threatening us? No. However, they had no love for Japan and would happily have picked a fight with Japan. The current little runt got his philosophy from his daddy.
Vietnam probably should never have happened. Not sure about Iraq, they didn't call Saddam the Butcher of Baghdad for nothing.
The thing about military spending is that you never know what you avert by having it. So your 20-20 hindsight is what I would call shallow thinking.
No, he just latches on to the next fad.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not just with fuel ideas. He keeps changing his story on how the world will end too. It changes from decade to decade, and sometimes even year to year. One day, overpopulation will get us. Then it's the depleting ozone layer. Then its nukes. Then it's lack of fresh water. Then it's global warming. He's like a Chicken Little who can't decide which sky is falling.
But it is great to get him going. Whatever his doomsday scenario du jour happens to be at any given time, he can preach a the-end-is-nigh sermon better than any millenialist religious zealot. He can't decide on what's going to kill us all, but it WILL KILL US and it will kill us SOON!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not only a problem, it's a legitimate engineering problem. Space and highway funding are one thing: pipe dreams that, while feasible and viable, are giant money sinks with no apparent value until they're put in place. Hydrogen based cars, on the other hand, need serious material science to work: you need a material that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and also seals that'll prevent hydrogen leaks, and valves, etc. You need 3 or 4 materials at least to pull this off; putting it all together is trivial. These materials must also be cheap and durable, otherwise we're talking about major economic costs that we can't justify: dumping all our energy into making an alternate pipeline that costs 500 times as much as a regular pipeline just to pass an intermediary energy storage medium (hydrogen is not fuel, it's generated by burning fuel to break down another fuel (CH4) or feed stock (H2O)).
In other words, it's a problem that's huge and complicated, and we should ignore it in favor of doing something with much greater benefit and utility that's far easier. Hence the peanut oil thing: what benefit is there to running hydrogen anyway, when everything peanuts belch into the environment is draw out of the environment by growing peanuts?
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Take your Hydrogen and shove it. We don't want another fracking commodity cartel to control our lives.
:T:R:A:N:S:
with California earthquakes, that'll be fun!!!