Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water

An anonymous reader writes "Traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen are either extremely expensive or release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with drastically more affordable materials. Goodbye platinum; hello nickel and ammonia."

Comments

noobs....

[Anonymous Coward]

old story for the internets .... and crappy synopsis as usual...GO SLASHDOT!

Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they're converting it all into flammable lifting gas!

Whatever will we do?

Will it work?

[Auroch]

This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.

Unfortunately, many people don't believe that spending money now is in our best interest - they'd rather wait until gas hits $10/gallon to invest in reducing the average price of energy. There are already many semi-viable alternative fuels, but for some reason, a large majority of people are content to continue "as-is", and let the current energy crisis continue.

Most of those people though, claim "What energy crisis?"

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Few are content, but far fewer can do anything about it. We live in a capitalist society, and our challenges are cost and logistics, not complacency.

Re:Will it work?

[Githaron]

I want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation. The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe. Renewable energy is a nice thought but it is not going to do it in the short term. Perhaps in the future when it is more advanced but not right now.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is because "most people" refers to the 1% who have the money necessary to invest in this sort of thing. And of course they don't believe there is an energy crisis they aren't effected by it.

Re:Will it work?

[Delarth799]

Most people could care less about the future. Thinking ahead seems to scare a lot of people so they concentrate on the here and now until that future they ignored comes and smacks them in the face.

Re:Will it work?

[ColdWetDog]

The problem with this particular approach, if it does turn out to work well commercially, is that GW Bush will then have shown to be prescient in his hyping of the Hydrogen economy.

I, for one, have some very serious issues with this concept. Very serious indeed.

Re:Will it work?

[PaulBu]

This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy storage that we'll need to rely on.

FTFY

I also hoped that that would be some fancy catalyst to convert sunlight + water into O2 and H2 -- sadly, it's just improvement in electrolysis catalist.

This is total BS (from the article):
The electrolysis of water, or splitting water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2), requires external electricity and an efficient catalyst to break chemical bonds while shifting around protons and electrons.

Hell no!!! I remember as a kid, after overgrowing joys of running around electric toy trains, I repurposed pretty heavy-duty DC current supply (couple of Amps up to 24 volts, I think) to doing much neater experiments, and water electrolysis using just a pair of steel nails was the simplest one. If a 8-10 year old in Soviet Russia could do it withouot fancy Pt-based catalyst, I would expect BNL geeks to know how to do it as well -- but no, I would not expect green-washed hyped-up "science" journalists in this country to have a slightest clue! :(

Paul B.

Re:Will it work?

[Stewie241]

The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe.

I think you answered your own question there.

Re:Will it work?

[Svartalf]

The only semi-viable fuels are Oil-Algae derived biodiesel, possibly TDP derived diesel, and possibly cellulosic butanol.

Pretty much everything else ISN'T viable. Not ethanol. Not really CNG. Without subsidies, Ethanol's just another waste of time. CNG's buring just a different "fossil" fuel.

It's not so much "what energy crisis", as people are already saying enough's enough. As for not wanting spend money now...that's more due to the economy and people seeing the Obama administration (and similar) pour money into failed projects like Solyndra. Seriously.

Re:Will it work?

[hairyfeet]

Blame Wall Street friend. Myself and many others have said that long term research is essential for the very survival of our race and its pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that wars for resources will replace wars for territory in the future. the problem is on wall street if you don't say "Damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" then your stock is gonna take a big old dump and bye bye buddy.

Personally i believe in a broad approach, i think we should be building at the very least small scale test reactors for thorium and for reprocessing our nuclear waste into usable fuel, we should be investing in battery tech and fuel cells and every other possibility that has any real chance for success because frankly the one that trips over a viable replacement for gasoline is gonna make Gates and Buffet look poor and whatever country they are in will probably have a new golden age but sadly the USA is just too short sighted thanks to the government sucking the dicks on wall street to do anything that the money men don't approve of.

I bet the next big breakthrough will probably come from China, they are investing heavily in science and like Japan in the 50s they are learning and improving daily thanks to all the work we have given them. Remember when made in japan meant shit? In a decade i wouldn't doubt if the same change happens in China. Looking at history one has to wonder if this is not inevitable, if once an empire gets to a certain size the wealth becomes too concentrated and apathy and trying to hang onto what those at the top have becomes more important than innovation and stagnation simply can't be avoided.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, okay, I'm sure electrolysis via steel nails is economically viable.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people could care less about the future.

Couldn't care less.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solyndra did not fail because of any technological fault or even internal corruption.

They failed because China shattered the price on solar panels, with their own subsidized production, which meant Solyndra couldn't effectively compete.

People are seeing the wrong lesson from what happened. It's like the flooding in the upper Mississippi. People got all worked up over the dams and reservoirs not working, but they never noticed that the reservoirs were kept full because of their use in fishing. Which made people money. Or like the California power crisis. Everybody swore up and down that the problem was California hadn't built power plants or some such, but they didn't notice that it was Enron's deliberate shut-downs of functional plants in order to create an artificial crisis. So they could make money.

Perception and reality are often quite different.

Re:Will it work?

[ae1294]

You didn't tell us if your toy trains always ran on time in Soviet Russia?

Re:Will it work?

[PaulBu]

;-)

Mine was high-end, actually built in Eastern Germany, so it *was* possible for it to run on time -- but when power supply cranked all the way up it was also relatively easy for it to derail, depending on how track was assembled...

Satisfied your curiosity? ;-)

Paul B.

Re:Will it work?

[BlueParrot]

Your way to do it probably had shitty efficiency. 1-2% of the electrical energy probably ended up used to produce hydrogen. With fancy catalysts and carefully controlled temperature, it's possible to improve that efficiency by a factor of 30 or so, with the best methods now getting efficiencies between 30 and 60%. The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).

What the article seems to speak of is that they've found a catalyst that drastically improves the efficiency of electrolysis, without resorting to expensive materials.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.

So, you're thinking that, if we burn enough hydrogen to produce the equivalent amount of energy we consume daily, now, that it will not have an effect on the natural cycle? How much water vapour do you think Mama Nature is capable of enduring?
I'm not disagreeing with you, burning hydrogen has it's place, but it will be a mix of all sources that gets us through, in the future.
Personally, I'm digging on Thorium fast breeder reactors, and we eject the spent fuel rods into the sun. But that's just me.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.

Nuclear plants simply can not fail which is why they make them so massively redundant, expensive and exhor. And yet if humans are involved in the design, planning, construction or operation of something, there will be failures.

Newer nuclear plants are indeed 'safer' than previous ones. So is my 2000s honda safer than my 1980s honda. People still die in cars. Nuclear plants will still fail. None has yet failed in a truly catastrophic manner thankfully, but no other source of power has such potential destruction if it does fail catastrophically.

Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area. Likewise mining and coal slag ponds are limited to their destructive area. Hydro-dams can be planned around for failure and you can walk in the next day to do clean up.

We need to be investing heavily in renewable techs and energy storage so that it can be grid scale ready down the road, yet we're still giving 40 billion a year to the oil companies who make nearly that much profit each year.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's somewhat negative, don't you think? We just need to build the nuclear plants in a manner that will prevent failure from affecting large areas, as opposed to being all negative and panicky about it. They test nuclear warheads all the time, underwater, underground, in the desert - countries have enough of them to equal thousands of nuclear power plant explosions, yet everyone is terrified of the clean energy source because it's dangerous... if we spent nearly as much energy and resources as we do for the "green" initiatives, to improve nuclear energy safety, we'd be rocking portable generators in our homes by now, with no emissions.

Re:Will it work?

[nbsr]

Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.

All strong sources of energy are inherently dangerous and expensive (in absolute terms). They differ enough from each other to make you choose your poison, that's it. For the amount of energy nuclear plants produce, they are relatively cheap and safe.

Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area.

Coal plants are failing continuously (as a part of their design), and by doing so they affect much larger area than nuclear plants will ever do.

Re:Will it work?

[shutdown -p now]

Consider this.

Apple's cash reserves are $110 billion. Microsoft has $60 billion. Google has $40 billion.

U.S. is spending $8 billion per year for TSA (and growing).

Direct spending on Iraq War is over $800 billion. In Afghanistan, over $400 billion.

According to MIT fusion researchers we've had here on Slashdot the other day, we could have had fusion today if we were willing to spend $80 billion on it in the last 20 years. If true, it means that Apple alone could fund it if they wanted!

Let's assume that they are overly optimistic, and increase that figure by an order of magnitude - even then it's what was spent with zero benefit on Iraq alone.

When we fuck up our civilization by over-reliance on a single oh-so-convenient power source, we'll have no-one but ourselves to blame.

Re:Will it work?

[nbsr]

That's where speculators come in handy. Hypothetical situation: people don't care about energy, use plenty of fuel for as long as they can (come on, production of gas isn't all that more expensive, is it?), and, suddenly, they wake up with gas prices od $100/gallon. It's hypothetical because there are people who try to predict the future. If they are right - they get plenty of money, if not - they loose (pretty damn good incentive for being right). If many of them expect a hike in prices of oil - the prices will slowly ramp up and at the same time some amount of oil will be stock piled for later use. Voters don't like that ("let's just burn all the oil now") and politicians are pushing for moving the reserves back into retail. But, voters don't care, and politicians only care about the next election. Who do you believe then?

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "Nuclear plants" with "airplanes":

"Airplanes simply cannot fail which is why they make them so massively redundant and expensive. If humans are involved in the design, planning, construction or operation of something, there will be failures."

I suppose that means we should stop using airplanes as well... after all, they're not necessary. You can get anywhere you need to go using a combination of cars and boats, it's just less efficient.

Re:Will it work?

[Charliemopps]

Gas IS $10/gallon in many countries. Just not in the USA. Even in those countries where gas actually is $10/gallon, people are still buying it, and no one's selling electric cars. That's should tell you something.

Re:Will it work?

[NemoinSpace]

My friend, please compare the energy density (in Mj/L) of gasoline, coal, and hydrogen. - I'll even allow you to use liquid hydrogen.
There is a reason engineers choose the materials they do.
Another hint: the price of oil is not based on the amount of it in the ground. We'll burn gas till the last drop. If you think gas is expensive, wait till your plan comes true and see how much you pay then.
If it makes you feel better, the entire planet receives lots more energy from the sun than we use. Sunlight is free, yet we don't use it. Why? - energy density. Converting this almost limitless source of energy into useful energy is not only inconvenient, but also because it's expensive.
Most people like you will still claim "the sky is falling." Relax. We are engineers. We will do it for you. When the time comes.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the parent meant that people care quite a bit about the future, therefore 'could care less' would be correct.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing a necessary fact, which is that electricity to power the process of electrolysis can be produced cheaply from the Sun. So who cares if it's an inefficient process as long as it's an effective process?

Re:Will it work?

[nbsr]

This may change overnight (I've seen that in some coutries where, at least at some point in time, majority of cars on the road were using LPG).
Performance of EVs is no longer a problem - there are batteries, which can take you 300 miles on a single charge. They are just not yet economically viable for lower segments of the market.
The good news is that there is absolutely no reason for the batteries or other EV components to be more expensive than, say, a gas engine. They are a lot easier to manufacture and take less resources (amount of lithium in an Li-ion battery is pretty miniscule). It's just a matter of ramping up the production.
Also, markets don't respond linearly, especially in emerging applications (Apple didn't just put a hardisk in an iPod - they put a disk big enough to store all you music in it). There's almost always a threshold "good/cheap enough", which makes all the difference. But, if you want to cross the threshold you have to reach it first (which isn't nearly as flashy). OTOH, once you're above it, it doesn't matter if your camera has 10Mpixels or 100Mpixels - you're probably better off fighting challanges that matter.

Re:Will it work?

[ShanghaiBill]

I want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation.

Nuclear is dead. The reason can be summed up in two words: Shale Gas.

Besides, nuclear is a way to generate electricity, and TFA is about hydrogen which is used as a vehicle fuel. These are two separate markets.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either an idiot or a shill.

Re:Will it work?

[hairyfeet]

But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.

The entire system IMHO has been taken over by leeches, you have corps that literally are doing NANOsecond trades, now how is that in ANY way helpful to innovation? The original intent of trading stock was like what kickstarter is now, you have an idea and need funding, others believe your idea will work and provide funding for a piece of the proceeds. I would argue that the lack of tech actually helped because one had to focus on the long term.

But now the entire system is completely short sighted because any other view is crucified by wall street, it is the reason why you have companies sitting on piles of money instead of investing it into more plants or better infrastructure, simply because anything that affects the bottom line in any way that isn't immediately positive is shat upon. in my own area neither DSL nor cable has moved a single foot in over a decade, even though the town has grown by over a third, why? Because they are both publicly traded companies and their stock goes down when they spend money on lines but goes up when they buy out some other company, so that is what they do instead.

Like I said looking at history i have to wonder if this is simply inevitable because in every empire you see the same progression, first growth and innovation followed by wealth concentration then finally stagnation and downfall. Just as once the sun never set on the British empire so too it appears our own day in the sun is setting, most likely to be replaced by China and India. lets just hope they find the answer before we are all out of time.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course that electricity could also be used elsewhere. So an efficient process still wins.

Re:Will it work?

[Hognoxious]

Apple's cash reserves are $110 billion.

But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.

Cash is cash, it's totally unaffected by the stock price.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Horseshitfeathers.

The 1% (or rather, their corporations)already fund research into this stuff because they know there is an energy crisis, and a corporation with the essential patents on renewable fuels stands to make a killing off it. They don't do as much as they should, because of Wall Street's focus on quarterly profit, but it does happen.

Re:Will it work?

[jo_ham]

You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.

It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.

Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).

The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Most people in the USAcouldn't care less about the future.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Will it work?

[jo_ham]

Apple's stock price has no bearing on funding fusion if they wanted - they have $100 billion in actual cash assets that they could simply withdraw from the bank in quarters (if they wanted to be douches) or dimes (if they were total douches). Well, assuming the bank could raise that sort of money in cash on hand in one place.

Re:Will it work?

[jo_ham]

This is the biggest annoyance that scientists have at the moment. So much is said about the "wasteful" spending on things like the LHC or fusion research, or various other "big budget" science projects, and people lap it up because they don't get a sense of scale. Sure hundreds of millions of dollars is a lot of money in real terms, but compared to the 8 billion spent on the useless TSA, or the $20 billion spent air conditioning Afghanistan?

Fusion needs a cash injection that we (as in, humans) could easily afford, but instead the media talks instead out the the two main competing research streams competing for the comparative scraps of money provided. Why not fund both?

Fusion power is not out of our technical reach, it's just out of reach right now because the funding is a comparative trickle compared to two useless wars for oil in the Middle East. The real worry for energy companies is that fusion becomes commercially viable, then the price of oil will plummet (it will still be an essential commodity, but the days of it being the thing we invade countries for will be over).

Energy independence and near-limitless power from commercial fusion plants is a very scary thought... for those in control of the current energy supply (oil, gas, coal etc).

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

Re:Will it work?

[Hognoxious]

GW Bush will then have shown to be prescient in his hyping of the Hydrogen economy.

This has got to be wrong. I seriously doubt he could even pronounce it.

Re:Will it work?

[Karmashock]

How many times have we been offered a magic solution to all our problems if we just stuff all our money in the man's bag... an then trust him to spend it wisely and in our interests... while of course keeping our hands over our eyes and not peaking while it sounds suspiciously like he's running away giggling?

We're all out of trust. If you've got a magic solution that will fix all our problems not theoretically but ACTUALLY then we'll give you trillions. For your promises hopeful assertions though? They're not worth anything. Airplanes don't fly on wishes. I don't eat dreams. And good intentions don't make the harvest come in.

This tech sounds promising and we all look forward to results that are useful. The big corporations are just as interested in getting out of the energy trap as anyone. Think the big companies like paying lots of money for over priced and often unreliable energy? They do not. Not all companies are the oil companies. For every company that profits from high energy prices there are a thousand that don't.

But if you want people to switch, you need to deliver the real deal. Lots of businesses have put solar panels on their roofs to show solidarity with the environmental movement or to improve PR. But how many of them have actually cut their net energy expenses by doing so? None of them. Until it is even technically possible to do that, no one is going to make the plunge.

Think of it like the days when everything was horse power and here comes along this guy trying to get everyone to buy steam powered engines.

Do you know what the first steam powered engines looked like? They were pathetic. Hardly any power, very energy inefficient, they broke constantly, and they were very expensive. Where as the horse was a fairly abundant resource. If you've got fodder you can double your herd every year with literally no industrial base what so ever. The skill set required to keep horses happy and keeping the machine working are totally different as well. The conversion from one system to the other is not easy.

Just as we saw in the past, the first people making the leap are wealthy enthusiasts. The first people to own cars were wealthy people that could afford to spend too much on what amounted to a technological toy. Horse drawn carriages remained much more practical for many years. They were cheaper, much more reliable, "fuel" was more widely obtained, and if there were a problem it wasn't hard to find someone in the area that knew how to fix it. Try getting a gallon of gas in the 1880s throughout much of the world. What happens if a tire pops or you need a mechanic? Have fun. And that was the point of those cars. Mostly toys.

But eventually the technology progressed and it out competed the horse. Not because there was a law or everyone said they should rally against the evil horse. It was just naturally out competed. The quality of the cars improved. The prices came down radically. And the infrastructure to handle them was expanded to the point where they became practical.

This is all happening with various types of new technologies but it isn't reasonable to expect this to be instantaneous especially when the prices are often much higher and reliability is a very serious concern.

Even the evil oil companies between mouth fulls of baby flesh (/s) will admit that renewable energy is the future. The future isn't now. Now is now. And now if you want the jet to take off the field you had better top off the tank with jet fuel or you're not going anywhere.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend, I'm afraid that basic economics disagrees with you.

If the nett asset value of a publically traded corporation greatly exceeds its market capitalisation, everyone with half a brain will buy as many shares as they can collectively either 1) liquidate the company for an immediate profit or 2) fire the managers and hire someone who knows how to exploit the company's assets for a longer-term profit, which would raise the share price (and thus translate into an immediate profit).

Re:Will it work?

[tirefire]

The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).

(emphasis mine)

What is the problem with expensive catalysts? My chemistry knowledge is not the greatest, but I thought that catalysts were not used up during chemical reactions... meaning that even if you needed to buy an expensive chunk of platinum to get this electrolysis doohickey working, it wasn't a big deal because you could always salvage the platinum and liquidate it (in the financial sense) if you wanted to shut down the operation for whatever reason.

Re:Will it work?

[bogjobber]

want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation.

I know it was a rhetorical question, but it's really simple: fear and ignorance. When a nuclear plant fails it's on the front page of every newspaper in the world for months, and a significant percentage of our population doesn't even climate change is happening.

Re:Will it work?

[mug funky]

dunno about that. economically it makes sense, and has a similar amount of environmental concern surrounding it.

a frack is cheaper than a new nuke plant, and governments are more willing to sign off on one.

Re:Will it work?

[mug funky]

short sighted energy companies will shit bricks. but smart energy companies will fund fusion etc. and own it all.

Re:Will it work?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

The future is in solar power satellites.

Re:Will it work?

[Frenchman113]

I am a chemical engineer by education, if not by practice. There are several reasons why catalysts are degraded despite not being consumed in reaction.

The issue is that catalysts are typically formed into fine, spherical pellets to maximize the surface area of catalytic material exposed. This is because catalytic reactions are characterized by an intermediate reaction between the reactants and active sites on the catalyst. As a result of their being made into pellets, a variety of things can occur that reduce the active surface area. As a result of temperature and pressure, the pellets may adhere to form larger particles, which will hence have lower surface area. Additionally, chemical entities present in the reactor may physically adhere to the pellets creating a diffusive barrier to the catalyst. The catalyst can probably be recycled after its effective lifetime, but the cost is certainly not zero (probably similar to production costs in ore refining).

Additionally, although catalysts are not consumed <b>in the reaction they catalyze</b>, they may take part in reactions other than the one of interest. In this way, catalytic material may degrade over time, although platinum is fairly inert.

Re:Will it work?

[cupantae]

Another portion of society don't even all the words in their sentences.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perception and reality are often quite different.

Not in TEXAS, apparently.

Re:Will it work?

[hairyfeet]

You might want to read the excellent "barbarians at the gate" to see how it really works friend. As the AC above you pointed out when your capital is much less than your assets it can make those that buy up the stock quite a bit of money to simply liquidate the assets. This is exactly what the corporate raiders did in the 80s which is what the above book is based on, specifically the RJR Nabisco takeover.

So if Apple were to withdraw that much money instantly their assets would be much more value than their actual capital or profits and would make them a prime target for liquidation. as i said wall street rewards short term thinking ONLY and long term thinking such as you are suggesting would destroy any publicly traded corp.

Re:Will it work?

[jo_ham]

I understand that, but the original comment was that Apple couldn't simply get their hands on 100 billion dollars because when people *say* that's what a company has, or when it buys another business etc, they really mean a combination of assets, capital, stock price etc. My point was nothing more than Apple actually has 100 billion *in just cash* available if it wants it, without having to use stock price or other assets to reach the figure.

It's unusual, since most companies won't leave that sort of money to simply stick around in the bank (either issuing a dividend with it or using it for other purposes), but Apple's never been a normal business case when it comes to its cash reserve - it has simply allowed it to pile up over time.

At no point did I advocate that Apple should withdraw it all, or that it was a sensible idea.

Re:Will it work?

[Githaron]

You want to perpetually beam a highly focused energy beam over long distance aimed at a relatively small target? If the angle is only slightly off, you would are risking running the beam through a town. I trust our nuclear energy technology a lot more than our ability to keep an huge array of satellites perfectly aimed.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Proper filtering of the emissions would prevent the operational issues associated coal plants. We choose not to do this for financial reasons. As you said these are 'by design' and therefore by definition are not 'failures'.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

No other power source has the potential for disaster that nuclear does. They were seriously considering evacuating Tokyo until they got Fukushima under some semblance of control. Name anything else that you can't plan for (hydro) that has the potential to force the evacuation of a city 100 miles away.

Nuclear is radioactive, it is lethal even through walls and miles of distance. We build massive amounts of redundancy in because of this. Yet you claim it isn't more dangerous than other sources?

Re:Will it work?

[hairyfeet]

But since they can't actually USE that 100 billion you are trapped in circular logic in that 1.-They have the money but 2.- If they were to actually use that money they would get a "barbarians at the gate" and no longer exist so 1 doesn't really matter.

So you see friend THAT is the problem with wall street in a nutshell, if you use your assets for anything OTHER than VERY short term gains the system will turn on you and destroy you, either through a takeover or by the street shorting your stock and sending your value into the toilet.

That is why I said we need to have taxation of capital gains based on how long they hold the stock to remove these leeches to the system. say 90% tax over 30 day, 85% over 60 days and so on until the tax is very little for those holding the stock long term like say 5 years or more. because as it is now it only rewards short term thinking while punishing those that think long term.

As i said your stock price will go up when you buy out other companies but go down when you invest in infrastructure or other things that will benefit the company long term. its stupid and frankly dangerous to tie so much of the wealth up into short term thinking simply because it ends up with a sort of "race to the bottom" where companies focus on shorter and shorter term gains strictly to pump the stock. A good example was Circuit City or even IBM now, both gutted experienced workers for short term stock gains and while it destroyed CC by leaving them unable to compete with rivals we'll have to see with IBM but I bet it'll seriously hurt them as their support suffers and corps go elsewhere.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Negative? Having to evacuate Tokyo is negative? You're damn skippy it's negative. Did we end up having to do that? No but it was an actual considered plan if they couldn't get Fukushima under control.

They test nuclear warheads all the time, underwater, underground, in the desert

You're comparing 1 time events with something that has to operate successfully for 50 years. Not exactly a apples to apples comparison.

But you do make my point. We test nuclear devices 100s of miles away from populations for the very reason. It's dangerous.

if we spent nearly as much energy and resources as we do for the "green" initiatives

We aren't spending money to resources on green tech, that's the problem. Far more was just guaranteed to the nuclear industry by this Administration than has been spent on green perhaps in total. We won't even talk about the 40 billion per year we're giving to the oil industry. Yet people scream about 500 million lost on Solyndra as being so wasteful as to stop all green investing.

If we spent as much on nuclear as we did on green tech, we'd likely all be dead since it wouldn't be nearly enough to build the necessary safety measures.

Nuclear fission is a finite resource anyway. Once the uranium/thorium has been mined it's gone. We have to switch to things we can never run out of within reasonable time frames.

Solar, hydro, wind have no realistic fuel limitations. They have energy density and storage issues that research can solve.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Airplanes do not affect 100 sq miles when they fail. And the 'miracle on the hudson' completely refutes your concept that when plains fail, people die.

Hell, Cessna's can now come with built in parachutes so that when they 'fail' you have survivable landings. There are no such safety guarantees with nuclear.

My point is simply the scope, range and potential damage of a catastrophic nuclear disaster is orders of magnitude beyond any other power source. We don't build them to be so redundant for fun. It's because there is serious potential for disaster when using them.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Heck how about that Hawaii flight where the top of the fuselage ripped off and yet it still landed safely.

The actual point is still that when airplanes do fail, they affect the people in them and a 'few' people on the ground. And 9/11 was not airplane failure.

In a catastrophic nuclear failure, 100 sq miles will be rendered uninhabitable for decades - hence the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone still in existence today 30 years later. Something about not fit for habitation for 20,000 years. Workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophogus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest.

400,000 people evacuated and resettled. Show me *anything* else that can do that kind of damage.

And that wasn't even catastrophic.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Nuclear exists because of global warming. We have plenty of coal to power our needs. Shale gas is still a CO2 emitter is it not? It doesn't solve the problem that nuclear does solve. Of course there's also the water table pollution issue...

You can generate hydrogen through electrolysis, so your electrical source is very relevant to the article.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

If something is expensive, generally speaking it is hard to create or simply hard to find. Basing the world transportation network on something like that would be problematic, so if you can do it with cheaper more available components, that is always a good things.

Now cars already contain platinum in the catalytic converters so thankfully we aren't talking going from zero use, but when those things fail they are expensive to replace. Cheaper (monetarily) is always better.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

And which party has continually said it was worthless to subsidize solar/green energy? If WE had done this 20 years ago, we'd be the leaders in the manufacturing of solar. But the GOP in their anti-climate change mantra wouldn't even build the tools the entire world was clamoring for. The party of 'business' my ass.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Yes, it is $10/gallon because it is heavily taxed and used to subsidize the 'socialist' agenda (not a bad thing). You don't NEED a car because they have actual public transportation systems that work and run on time. Even far out suburbs have well running bus systems to get you where you need to go. London's subway system gets you within 3 blocks of your destination anywhere in the city practically. NYC is our best attempt at decent public transit.

Europe for example, you can tell - to the minute - when that train will arrive and on which track in the station. We know how to do this, because we helped them build the damn system after WWII. Yet here the auto and air industries has taken over and so only roads and air get government subsidies, whereas rail has to basically cover it's own costs.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Solar energy density is low for sure. But we have LOTS of roof space and deserts. Storage of that energy is the biggest issue holding back solar energy's practicality.

Gasoline and coal energy densities have built this world, but they now threaten to radically alter it, perhaps even beyond our ability to 'fix' it.

Re:Will it work?

[jaymemaurice]

It goes beyond filtering... after you filter, what do you do with what you filtered out...

Coal slurry accidents have killed thousands and poluted thousands of acres of land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_slurry

And then you have all the scientific papers about coal ash itself being/not being radioactive then nuclear waste...
And then you have all the mining accidents... both environmental and human.

The only reason coal even has a leg to stand is that people often see the pollution which is not the case with nuclear. People are scared of what they don't see/understand.

Re:Will it work?

[jaymemaurice]

But, airplanes, when they fail, they can impact a very populated area, instantly killing thousands++... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks

While I do not dissagree with your point "scope, range and potential damage of a catastrophic nuclear disaster is orders of magnitude beyond any other power source" - I counter that in that the total impact of all the little disasters of every other power source per watt being far worse then nuclear - resiting progress in fear of unknown danger is just unscientific in the least... the biggest challenge in nuclear is that we are too scared to progress further because we had a couple fires and blew up some water tanks dispersing radiation and are affraid of people building atomic bombs - ignore the sucessful generation of millions of kWhrs and 50+year old designs.

And to the previous posters point and your point, where would we be without airplanes? airplanes are safer now. Nuclear is safer now too. Fukushima, unlike chernobyl, was not a catastrophe.

Re:Will it work?

[jaymemaurice]

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone would now technically make a great site for a Nuclear reactor...

Re:Will it work?

[jaymemaurice]

I'd like to point out... in the UAE, petrol prices are set by the government. The price is ~$0.45/L or something like that, it costs 120aed to fill my land rover (full service even) from empty so I don't even look at the price. The US, and Canada have about as much oil as the UAE so the only thing I understand is that I don't understand.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because most of those people are rich and can handle the current prices of petrol.

I and what seems like nearly half the US population however considers the current cost of petrol to be laughable, because we can't even afford a car.

So go right ahead humanity, burn it all up, its not like we're going to find any more of it once you do, all of you scumbag brains will just have to learn the hard way, as usual.

Re:Will it work?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

JAXA is working on a 1GW orbital power plant that sends energy down to a 1km wide rectenna, birds could fly through it without harm. Of course they say it won't be economical until launch costs drop to 1% of their former amount. And hey, look, here's a Star Tram to do just that! :D

Re:Will it work?

[mug funky]

wow, downmod? i'm only telling the truth. i certainly don't like it.

Re:Will it work?

[LifesABeach]

The price of Gas just has to hit $5 a gallon and people begin to make decisions.

Fuel Cell Senario: Pour in a liter of Sea Water. Output is Electrical Energy, and what ever is left. It would not be easy to solve, but I am hopeful.

Re:Will it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

The catalyst is to weaken the bonds so that it uses less electricity to do the separation.

Duh.

Re:Will it work?

[Anguirel]

No other power source has the potential for disaster that nuclear does. They were seriously considering evacuating Tokyo until they got Fukushima under some semblance of control. Name anything else that you can't plan for (hydro) that has the potential to force the evacuation of a city 100 miles away.

No problem: Coal.
Previously: Also coal. Oil.
Future: [insert image of SimCity 2000 Microwave Plant mis-fire here]

IIRC, Fukushima is an old design that was already running beyond its originally estimated life span. Modern reactor designs are set up such that an emergency situation would cause reactor shut down -- they need a constant controlled feed to maintain the reaction, rather than a needing a constant controlled feed to limit the reaction. Shut down the entire control system in some catastrophic fashion and it'll quietly shut itself down. Can the containment be breached? Sure, a significant enough event could do that... Of course, a significant enough event could shatter a major dam and cause destruction all downriver.

I'm a big fan of Solar and Wind power, and I don't see any particular way those are likely to cause any sort of failure-disaster on the scale of anything else (at least until we're beaming it in from space), which is nice... However, I see modern Nuclear Fission reactors being relatively reasonable as a middle-point and as something that can help easily absorb loads when wind or solar have poor generating conditions -- of course, if you aren't running it at full capacity, it becomes rather expensive to maintain just as a back-up generation method, which could be problematic without government funding (or at least regulation for the general power grid architecture to require enough funding get to the back-up systems).

Nuclear is radioactive, it is lethal even through walls and miles of distance. We build massive amounts of redundancy in because of this. Yet you claim it isn't more dangerous than other sources?

Nuclear is not lethal through walls or miles of distance any more than anything else that can contaminate ground water -- it's the contamination that's a problem, and you see that with any chemical-consuming power plant. A hydro-fracking-related accident could potentially generate an earthquake to level a city (unlikely), or seriously contaminate an aquifer causing the entire region, and possibly all areas down-stream, to be unlivable (quite possible). Or an under-water drilling operation could impact, say, a gulf in the ocean, contaminating all of the fish caught there to the point where people starve. And I already pointed out the coal fire. So yeah, I'm quite willing to say Nuclear isn't necessarily more dangerous than all other sources. Just differently dangerous.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

It goes beyond filtering... after you filter, what do you do with what you filtered out...

We already have that problem with nuclear waste. So I'll take a lack of 100 sq miles being evacuated and deal with filter cleaning thank you. Is it an issue? Sure, but it's 'operational' not 'failure'. BIG difference.

Again, everything with coal 'failures' you can walk into the 'disaster' zone the very next day wearing a wind breaker and clean it up. Not great, but it's not the scale or hazard that nuclear presents.

The only reason coal even has a leg to stand is that people often see the pollution which is not the case with nuclear. People are scared of what they don't see/understand.

No, coal has issues of 'design' and 'operation' but not failure issues. Acid rain caused by power plants was solved. When the issue becomes significant enough we can choose to fix them because they are operational issues. Lead in the environment was solved. Operational issues can be fixed. Failures can't because by definition they have failed and your safe guards have been overcome.

You can't 'fix' a failure where the area is contaminated so as to prevent human presence.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

9/11 was not a failure of aircraft. It was a calculated attack so as to maximize damage.

But if you want to go that route, how about a 9/11 hitting a spent nuclear fuel pond which is NOT hardened against attack? Double whammy.

If the gov't hadn't lied to people about the dangers of ground zero, I have friends who worked there from day 2 for weeks btw, proper safety gear could have been worn and prevented the problems you claim. They were told it was safe when we knew, or at least should have known, that it could very possibly not be safe.

You also make my point. Manhattan is not evacuated and uninhabitable. A nuclear disaster at that site would have rendered the entire island off limits for decades.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

It is ironic indeed. I was amazed to find out that they kept 3 other reactors running for years after the disaster. They finally closed the last one though and there are no plans to go back in.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Centrailia, PA is about 1 sq mile. And people still live there. Evacuation of a few thousand people perhaps. Not Tokyo sized by any stretch. And it's not 100 miles away from the problem, it's right on top of it.

Acid rain, again, operational issue that was FIXED not a failure issue. No evacuations of major cities.

Cuyahoga River - yep, sure glad we had to evacuate Akron and Cleveland...oh wait.

None of those things are at the scale of nuclear.

Gulf disaster. Last I checked nobody was starving.

Fracking, guess what I'm against that too. They claim it's 'safe' though. Doesn't require evacuation, just water delivery.

RENEWABLE is the only way forward though we will need these techs for the next 50-100 years. Which is what I said and you seem to agree with.

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[Anonymous Coward]

Flammable lifting gas? Are you trying to tell us you don't know how important the Hydrogen extraction process is for our future fuel and energy needs?

Affordable

[Dan East]

Cat pee and pocket change. I can handle that.

More seriously though...

[axlr8or]

If you combine this catalyst and gravity? Free energy for the mechanical limits of the device. And all it would use would be gravity.

Re:More seriously though...

[muon-catalyzed]

Free energy? "Electrocatalyst", you also need to plug some electric juice to split the water, and the process is "under unity" efficient, that's for sure.

Re:More seriously though...

[SurfsUp]

Solar panels perhaps? And use the hydrogen to store the intermittent solar power.

Re:More seriously though...

[wiedzmin]

Solar panels perhaps? And use the hydrogen to store the intermittent solar power.

Maybe, once we're generating enough solar power to have an excess of it.

So where is my car?

[Anonymous Coward]

That runs on water?

Re:So where is my car?

[user flynn]

Silly mortal, only Jebus runs on water.

Re:So where is my car?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jebus...and a bunch of Lizards. Who have begun to invade Florida.

Careful, the native Floridians might adopt a new God.

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[Anonymous Coward]

Light a match and BOOM! More water :)

THIS IS IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is teh year of Hydrogen!

That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Solandri]

I wouldn't have made this post a few weeks ago, but reading other people's comments about hydrogen fuel made it painfully obvious that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the hydrogen economy works: There is no free energy. You cannot convert water into hydrogen with little energy, then burn the hydrogen with oxygen to get lots of energy.

The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.

With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.

The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Grayhand]

Yes but the cost of Platinum has been holding back the wide adoption of fuel cell technology. At one point only NASA could aford to use them. Most of the cost of a fuel cell is in the platinum. Say you want or need to live off the grid, this process can make afordable equipment possible for producing hydrogen at home. You can use it to store energy for lean days or refuel the car. Not caustic and expensive batteries and the fuel cells can be recycled. Hydrogen was never a solution. Bush only pushed it after it was pointed out to him that most hydrogen in use now is produced from fossil fuel. How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas! No line loss and you can have a car hydrogen fueling station on shore. Hydrogen does escape mostly at fitting and valves since it's so small it's nearly impossible to completely contain hydrogen but in a closed line there would be less loss than the bleed that happens in power lines which could offset some of the energy lost in producing the hydrogen.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[bolt_the_dhampir]

Unlike the batteries however, it can be stored indefinitely without degrading, and be "charged" (tank filled) in a matter of seconds. Also it doesn't wear down (to anywhere near the same degree, anyway) when recharged.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[loshwomp]

Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

Don't forget that you have to compress the H2 before you can use it, too, and that takes a huge amount of (usually electrical) energy. Enough energy that you could put it into a battery electric car instead and drive a significant fraction of the distance the fuel cell would take you without the stupid fuel cell.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[loshwomp]

Say you want or need to live off the grid

If you need to live off the grid you're already such an edge case that we don't need to be optimizing for you. Living off the grid is expensive. And if you just want to live off the grid, then you're obviously not optimizing for 1) low cost or 2) efficient use of resources, so why should I care about your problem?

How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas!

Yes, it's crazy alright, but what good is that? The electricity->H2->electricity round trip efficiency is something like 25%, and that's not counting the massive amounts of energy required to compress the H2. 25% sucks bad enough that you can't change things with handwaving as you scale that efficiency to the transportation sector.

Put the energy directly into the battery (we already have better batteries than H2 fuel cells) and drive several times as far. There's a reason electric cars are here today, but fuel cell cars are not.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I'll just steal the hydrocarbon fuel I need...

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[jmerlin]

Gasses can be condensed using temperature as well, imagine this process happening in space, where an absence of heat is abundant. Gaseous hydrogen will gladly float beyond our atmosphere, at which point it can be easily compressed and then gravity will bring it back down to earth. I don't think this problem has to require an enormous amount of energy to solve. And that process of moving hydrogen to space can also generate electricity...

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[ljw1004]

The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

You think so? I reckon you're missing the "thermodynamics of capital". If you have to borrow $10k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will have to cover the $1k/year repayment on that loan. But if you only borrow $1k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will only have to cover $0.1k/year repayments.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[wiedzmin]

While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself.

That kind of attitude will leave the hydrogen industry, that will replace the oil industry in the future, unable to arbitrarily raise price at the pumps when some Platinum manufacturing country starts a civil war... you cut that out. Now.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Anonymous Coward]

the hydrogen is exceedingly thin up there, how do you propose to collect it? how do you compress huge volume hydrogen at near vacuum pressure and wind up with anything more than a drop?

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[QQBoss]

Ummm, yeah, sure. Tell you what, you go get a container made out of the material of your choice (not including unobtanium, that would just be cheating) able to hold a meaningful level of PSI (or the metric of your choice) of hydrogen. Hermetically seal the container (I won't even expect you to have a hole in the container via which you can connect it to whatever you plan to generate work with).
Come back in a day, a week, a month, a year....

Then realize your concept of "stored indefinitely without degrading" probably needs some significant rethinking. Even if the hydrogen is still hydrogen (not physically degraded), it can't do you any useful work if it is sneaking out of any container you can make and off wafting through the atmosphere looking for other atoms to get jiggy with.

This is only one of the reasons why the ability to generate hydrogen on demand as close to the source that will use it is fairly essential for a hydrogen engine to be viable.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[KittenJuicer]

What would be interesting would be a catalyst that could use brownian motion or something to split hydrogens off oxygens in water ... the energy of the motion would automagically slow down the ambient motion of the other molecules, so you'd have an "over-cooling" problem where the water kept freezing around the catalyst if it was very efficient. I'm not sure if that's how these things work, but all you'd need would be something that could efficiently turn heat into hydrogen splitoffs then there you go (could use the earth's heat, maybe slow down global warming, who knows.)

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[nbsr]

One thing he is right about, though, is that battery cells developed for portable applications aren't particularly well suited to EVs.

Don't get me wrong - it is fantastic we have them, and have them manufactured at a mass scale. This way we can piggy-back on decades of intensive R&D that went into them. Without that there wouldn't be mass manufactured electric cars on the road now. Portable batteries have even proven pretty good in that application, but it doesn't mean we can't improve on that.

In a long term we probably want batteries where reactants are not stored in a solid form, separated only by a thin layer of electrolyte. We can afford having a pump here and there, or add a couple of (refillable?) tanks for keeping reactants and their byproducts. There were already some attempts of doing just that, but at the moment such batteries simply can't compete with the whole industry backing up the development of portable batteries. This will have to wait until EV's gain more market share.

Although I consider hydrogen a dead-end (maybe except for special applications, like airplanes), the research that goes into fuel cell may produce something useful (who says the reactants must be "H_2" and "O_2" after all?).

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Hognoxious]

According to Graham's law, it would appear that the solution is to make the molecules bigger. However hydrogen doesn't seem keen to associate into groups larger than pairs.

Some have suggested that attaching the hydrogen atoms to chains of carbon atoms (say, six to ten of them) might do the trick, but I reckon that's crazy talk.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Anonymous Coward]

> there would be less loss than the bleed that happens in power lines
Not if you use DC transmission.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas! No line loss and you can have a car hydrogen fueling station on shore.

No line loss? hogwash. Pumping anything means a pressure gradient;; work is done to compress it, then lost to frictional heating.
Hydrogen's only selling point is energy/power density -- batteries or electric transmission lines are better in every other way. And for typical applications, it doesn't even win there anymore.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Hognoxious]

You just need the right catalyst. Something like powdered unicorn horn should do it.

Gotta go, some guy called Maxwell on the line...

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[QQBoss]

Damn good thing I have a keyboard cover, I don't own a mechanical keyboard I can just toss in the dishwasher anymore!

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Anonymous Coward]

No, have the wind farm produce hydrogen, then combine it with carbon (preferably pulled right from the air, or from biomass) to make methane (CH4).

Hydrogen is difficult to store and transport (it slips through metal and also weakens it over time) and has low energy density. Electricity from wind/solar is terribly expensive to store at grid scale, particularly over time periods longer than a day or two. But having wind farms and solar installations produce synthetic methane would allow indefinite grid-scale energy storage (to deal with night time, cloudy windless weeks, etc), easy transportation of energy using existing technology, and the methane could run Bloom boxes for electricity, or be further refined into liquid fuels (gasoline, diesel, JP) for vehicles and aircraft. If the efficiency of methane and fuel generation can be even 50%, this is probably the only way to introduce renewables into the energy stream without the double-cost of building and maintaining a separate fossil plant to back up every renewable plant (which is a tough sell in developed countries, and in China/India/Africa the idea is a total joke). Well, assuming the cost of (wind/solar source + methane sythesizer + bloom boxes or methane-to-LF refineries) can be brought to rough parity with fossil plant + fuel costs, which may be a few decades out yet.

That's why, when someone tells you wind or solar is soon to reach (or has reached) cost-parity with fossil, they're probably lying, because they're only comparing the cost of the renewable plant, and they're quoting the power output at peak (1000 MW of solar is 1000 MW at noon on a clear day in July, not the average output). When you build a 1000 MW coal plant, you're done, just feed it coal and it generates power whenever you need it (well... the coal costs money, and you do have to factor that in). When you build a 1000 MW renewable plant, over behind the hill where nobody can see, you also build a 1000 MW gas-turbine plant to back it up on windless or sunless days, or you build energy storage (but since no energy storage currently available can handle grid scale quantities over days or weeks, you STILL build the fossil backup).

Then again, the bloom boxes and/or methane-to-LF refineries are essentially gas-"fired" power generators which you can run off natural or synthetic methane, so I suppose there's no real way around the economics until the fossil gas becomes expensive enough that the cost of building renewable plant + storage/conversion plant is near or less than the cost of building a gas-fired plant + the cost of gas over the plant's lifetime. And don't forget the cost of land for the renewable plant, though that can be BLM or other government subsidized land, or dual use like windmills on farms.

The economics of this is just hard. Especially when you consider the growth in energy use that's coming, to bring China, India, and Africa to rough parity with western countries' standards of living (think 6-9 billion people all using roughly as much or even maybe just half as much energy per capita as the 1 billion developed countries citizens do now). I think it's going to be getting pretty hot in the next century or so... too bad, I like to ski sometimes.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[mug funky]

you get all of my imaginary funny mods.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[mug funky]

wtf man?

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Locke2005]

But, look at all the waste products produced by use of hydrogen fuel -- where are you going to dispose of all the H20???

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[Locke2005]

The current problem with wind and solar generated electricity is that they don't reduce the number of traditional power plants needed to meet peak demand needs (if your peak demand occurs at night with no wind). So you do need some energy storage mechanism to make wind and solar useful. The question then becomes, what is the most efficient energy storage medium? I agree that hydrogen sucks in terms of energy density, but I don't know enough to say what the most cost-effect energy storage method is... it may be something as simple as just pumping water uphill. Energy storage for portable devices (e.g. cars) is a separate problem which is currently being addressed poorly by batteries. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem associated with vehicle fuel sources: nobody will develop the necessary fuel distribution network until there is sufficient demand for the fuel, and nobody will by devices that use the fuel until there is a workable fuel distribution network in place. In other words, but hydrogen and methane suck as vehicle fuels simply because a million gas stations aren't going to suddenly start selling hydrogen or methane.

Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from

[jmerlin]

I thought it would be obvious that you'd elevate it in some kind of container, not by just letting it freely escape into our atmosphere. I can imagine designs from a balloon-like apparatus designed to sit at a certain height in our atmosphere and be collected by a series of satellites to something as outlandish as an enormous space-elevator for hydrogen (essentially an enormous tube connected to earth and held in position by inertia and earth's gravity). The only problem with that idea is it requires you constantly maintain the density of gasses at all elevations in the tube. If the tube is airtight, you could potentially fill it with any number of very heavy gasses (moreso than O2/N2). Then you pump hydrogen in from the ground level and it would rise to the top and increase the pressure of the system. With a good distance in density from hydrogen from the filler gas, a very hard barrier should exist at the top of the tube, and at any given pressure, no more hydrogen would be introduced from the ground and several minutes later all hydrogen at the top would be removed (easy, the tube is pressurized, so the denser gas should push the hydrogen right through an opening on the top). Once pressure is re-normalized, repeat. I'm just a software engineer with a very basic understanding of fluid dynamics and Newtonian physics and I don't have any problems coming up with solutions here. Surely Ph.D.s and researchers in this field would be able to create something fantastically efficient.

EI/EO is all that matters

[nickull]

Most people do not understand that Hydrogen, due to it's inherent instability and desire to chemically change in a volatile manner, is simply an anergy storing devices. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. Understanding it's role is important to determining whether or not to us it as it essentially acts as a battery. If you have X units of energy (electricity), the key question is how many units will you get back out of the hydrogen. So far most the most advanced systems have show that Energy in (Ei) has an Energy out (Eo) roughly equal to Eo = Ei/10. Not anywhere near as efficient as a lithium ion battery. Even lead acid batteries have better performance.

Re:EI/EO is all that matters

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anywhere near as efficient as a lithium ion battery.

You're comparing apples to appleseeds. Electrolyzing water to get hydrogen is more like creating batteries, literally because the electrolysis device is not required to be connected to the system that uses the hydrogen (in other words, the gas is portable, the generator doesn't need to be attached).

Are batteries capable of storing energy cheaper than hydrogen gas? At a very small scale yes, but on a large scale to store a gigawatt with batteries would be too costly. It is possible to do with hydrogen gas - a couple billion joules housed in a big storage tank.

If you're storing energy from wind or solar, when you generate more than the capacity of the battieries, the excess is wasted. Creating fuel is a solution to deal with excess energy production.

That said, I'd personally use gassification rather than electrolysis to generate hydrogen, then use any elaborate catalysts to create hydrocarbons. All because liquid fuels are much easier to deal with.

H2 is not a form of energy, it is energy storage

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't say anything at all about future energy. It presents a cheaper way to make a catalyst that performs as well as platinum. It still requires an external source of energy to actually do the H2O splitting. Because the catalyst is efficient the H2 created will store *almost* as much energy as it took to split apart the H2O.

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! Instant water, just add()&(&7987 NO CARRIER.

Its probably 5 to 10 years out

[asm2750]

Seriously I am tired of all these researchers saying they found a way to break bonds in water to make hydrogen a feasible long term energy source or a new photovoltaic technology that has 40% efficiency and then say down the road "oh the commercial version is 5 to 10 years out". Its always 5 to 10 years out, heres a suggestion how about announce your results or accomplishments when you ACTUALLY have a working commercial product that is in production. Maybe then I'll give a fuck.

Re:Its probably 5 to 10 years out

[nbsr]

That's a broader problem with the way the science works. Scientists are rarely interested in applications. The have to give some "justification", which looks reasonable enough to earn them a grant. But that's where work on applications often ends.

Remember, you get, what you measure. What matters in the academic world is the number of publications (and to a lesser degree their quality). Making breakthroughs isn't the best, or certainly the easiest way of becoming a successful scientist. It's way better to throw ideas left and right producing incremental (if any) improvements, and not to dwell on a single idea for too long.

Re:Its probably 5 to 10 years out

[jo_ham]

You're blaming the wrong people. Scientists do this work and publish it, knowing full well it;s not commercial yet and needs a lot of work, or is 5% efficient etc. However, that's not sexy enough for the media, or likely to generate many ad impressions, so they draw ridiculous conclusions that are a long way away from being reality.

Scientists may say that *in the future* a mature process might provide a viable way to produce hydrogen from water (low energy catalytic splitting of water to make hydrogen/protons and oxygen in a mimic of Photosystem II is one of the holy grails of energy research), but they're not saying it's anywhere near ready.

Your suggestion that they wait until they have an actual commercial product is nonsense - they are not working on a commercial product, they are doing research into the processes behind science that can be maybe be used in the future in a commercial product. It might never be used - it might be a dead end. That's all part of scientific research.

Re:Its probably 5 to 10 years out

[Locke2005]

Once again, hydrogen is NOT an energy SOURCE, it is an energy storage medium!

HOPE

[glorybe]

Time will tell how well this process works for both small and large scale production. I live in a condo with 160 apartments. We have huge spans of roof space including the roofs over our covered parking. It is perfect for solar power or even solar water heaters and we have enough wind that a windmill would also be productive. But most of the residents are retired or view their ownership as temporary so getting people to vote on that kind of upgrade simply will not occur until they get their finances so twisted that they start to want change. Most would probably prefer death to change. Oddly they will spend money on cosmetic items but nothing that improves function is considered at all. The best hope for all of us is to reverse population growth. That is the big secret that politicians will not discuss at all. technology can not sustain us with any degree of reliability. We can keep the technology but need to reduce population such that if technology breaks down life goes on. As it is we could have mass starvation in one week with great ease. Disrupt the flow of oil and we would have total failure and chaos.

Re: HOPE

[QQBoss]

While I am completely with you on the solar water heating (especially for a community pool to make it useful at least 8 months a year instead of the 3-4 that most of them are good for where I live), and possibly even solar power if the demonstrated efficiency year round proves it to be viable, the fact that you are suggesting people put windmills on the roof to generate electricity suggests to me that you have never stood anywhere close to windmills that actually generate meaningful amounts of power. No matter how quiet the mechanics of the windmill are, those blades swooping through the air will not be a sound that lulls you to sleep, from experience, unless the unit is so small that you are only trying to power a handful of LED light bulbs on occasion and not a meaningful amount of the power consumption of 160 units of people trying to live with modern conveniences. To have them at a business where no one sleeps can be meaningful, though (just ask Jay Leno).

As for the Malthusian nonsense, you first.

Re: HOPE

[Locke2005]

"The best hope for all of us is to reverse population growth."
You know, good folks like those people at Al Qaeda are working on that already, but the US government seems to be doing everything they can think of to stop them!

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[jenningsthecat]

Flammable lifting gas? Are you trying to tell us you don't know how important the Hydrogen extraction process is for our future fuel and energy needs?

Sheesh! I'd mod you down for this, but I can't find the selection for 'utterly lacking a sense of humour'.

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[Anonymous Coward]

I often wonder how many people would even come here if they suddenly found a sense of humor. Some seriously hilarious shit goes down here but there are a large number of people who just. don't. get. the. joke.

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[Pathoth]

put these things in the ocean and let it all burn

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[dwye]

Just repeat after me:

Whoosh!

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[gentryx]

Easy: just put a cup to the exhaust of your hydrogen car, add a bit of Earl Grey and you'll be good.

NO!

[Internetuser1248]

This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.

Please people. I love clean renewable sources of energy and argue in favour of them at every opportunity. Hydrogen production is not a source of energy. The primary cost of mass producing hydrogen is not platinum. Hydrogen is merely a very inefficient and unsafe way to store energy. Hydrogen is produced by expending twice as much energy as the thermal energy it contains. This means that even if you can burn it in an engine with 100% thermal efficiency you are roughly on par with a finely tuned engine burning any other fuel. But you can't burn it in an engine with 100% thermal efficiency and you never will. So it is worse. It is worse than petrol, it is worse than diesel. If you make hydrogen using electricity generated from brown coal, it is the most polluting fuel you could ever run an engine off. Energy crisis does not mean we have a crisis of not enough ways to waste energy. Hydrogen is a dead end, combustion engines are a dead end, private vehicles are a dead end. Move on please.

Re:NO!

[pixelpusher220]

You do realize i can produce hydrogen using zero energy right? Or at least zero energy I have to put in, the sun gives all the energy we need to make our hydrogen.

So no it is not as efficient, it is much more efficient because the fuel is quite literally 'free'. You don't 'burn' hydrogen in a fuel cell. Burning anything is by definition inefficient. Hydrogen is your battery and it stores the energy imparted when you split water. That energy can come from the sun as I said and so you have no energy costs to create your 'fuel' which creates your battery - the hydrogen itself.

Or rather the efficiency matters a whole lot less when your fuel is free and infinite. You just build more capacity.

When gas was $0.25/gallon, cars got maybe 10 miles/gallon and nobody cared. Why? because fuel was cheap and plentiful.

I can now give you a fuel that is quite literally free and infinite. Efficiency matter a whole lot less than the size of the tank of your fuel.

Hydrogen Win-Win factor

[ElitistWhiner]

Intellects love to proselytize against Hydrogen's long checklist of negatives. The ONE advantage it holds is ' Single Point Capture'.

The manufacture of Hydrogen in vast quantities at a fixed plant location enables economies of scale to be leveraged upon a single point to capture, control, clean and manage pollution at the source. A hydrogen powered economy promises to replace the millions of pollution sources in the Oil powered economy providing a structured ecosystem that enables the replacement and elimination of millions unmanageable hydrocarbon pollution sources with zero-emission hydrogen power.

The difference with a distinction...Hydrogen is ecologically manageable.

Best in class

Re:Hydrogen Win-Win factor

[Locke2005]

Just bear in mind that hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy storage medium. It doesn't replace fossil fuels, it replaces batteries (or perhaps ethanol).

Re:Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

[kurzweilfreak]

Whoosh, incidentally, is also the sound that the flammable lifting gas-filled balloon makes as it either flies over your head or ignites. :P

JOKECEPTION!

Re:Of the 8 scientists involved in this project ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry pal you mistyped the url this is Slahdot not Stormfront.

Re:Of the 8 scientists involved in this project ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot.