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Hydrogen Buses In Iceland
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jan 12, 2005 07:39 PM
from the clean-air dept.
from the clean-air dept.
dapyx writes "As part of the shift away from the fossil fuels, Iceland began its switch to hydrogen-powered buses, which are now used on the streets of the capital, Reykjavik. About 70 percent of Iceland's energy is already met by green power. Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050."
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Hydrogen from where? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not intended as a troll, honest question.
In the case of Iceland... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:In the case of Iceland... (Score:5, Informative)
For those not in the know: Iceland is blessed with an abundance of geo-thermal energy which dramatically lowers their electricity and heating costs.
Parent
Re:In the case of Iceland... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:2)
It doesn't. It simply centralizes it. Think of hydrogen fuel cells as good batteries.
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:2)
It doesn't. It simply centralizes it. Think of hydrogen fuel cells as good batteries./fI
Only if you generate your electricty by burning hydrocarbons. Iceland does not.
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:3, Insightful)
elsewhere, you got this 'nukularrrr' reaction that you can use to create power to break down that water. but don't tell the ecomaniacs, they wouldn't want you to save the earth.
(honestly, that's just about the only REALISTICAL option for breaking water down to hydrogen on big enough scale. hydrogen is just a way to store energy in this case and the energy HAS to come from somewhere, and the 'eco' sources are not that plentiful or viable to be used
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:3, Interesting)
As you will notice, you'll have hydrogen bubbling and virtually NO heat. Heat is the waste product here. There is no heat, so there is no waste (more or less).
What you are referring to is the fact that it's a very energy-expensive process. But so is electrolysis in aluminium - the price of which is around 90% of the cost of the electricity - yet tonnes upon tonnes are made. The people that discovere
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't one of the best sources of hydrogen for such things hydrocarbons?
Hydrocarbons have hydrogen that's easy to liberate - that is, you'll get more energy out of burning hydrogen than by separating it. You get less energy than you would by just burning
Re:Natural gas is the alternative source for Hydro (Score:3, Funny)
TACO BELL!
Re:Hydrogen from where? (Score:3, Insightful)
With distributed computing catching on, this might not be such a bad idea. How many people own or otherwise use exercise equipment? (i know, wrong place to ask). It shouldnt be too hard to convert those machines into generators and have them dump their power into the grid. Individually, each person may generate an insignificant amount of electricity, but it all adds up.
I'm picturing a World War II style government propaganda blitz with "victory workouts" replacing victory gardens.
Totally oil free? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Totally oil free? (Score:2)
Re:Totally oil free? (Score:4, Interesting)
By 2050, I'd expect so. Plenty of plastics, paints, and lubricants made from biomass today.
http://www.google.com/search?q=soy+plastic [google.com]
Now whether using soy-based plastic is actually more efficient than using oil-based plastic is a different story, but oil has all sorts of political/social/economic inefficiencies that just don't show up in the base cost of production.
Parent
Oil free? (Score:3, Insightful)
Progress (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, the U.S. doesn't approve of this, as we reject the Kyoto Treaty.
Re:Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Complaining that something isn't effective because it doesn't do enough isn't exactly a good reason to reject it - it's a good reason to adopt it AND push for going further.
2050 should be a interesting year (Score:5, Funny)
Iceland is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st Century (Score:5)
Thanks to Iceland being basically one Giant Volcano, they've lots of Free Geothermal energy to make electricity and (bonus bell rings) it's surrounded by water. Put the two together and bingo: hydrogen.
It's going to be funny to see the Icelanders, who are already an incredibly literate and well educated people, will do with all the loot.
Personally, I look forward to our new Viking Overlords.
RS
Re:Iceland is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st Century (Score:4, Informative)
I don't understand: WHAT exactly will Iceland be exporting that will make all of them billionaires? Saudi Arabia is rich not because it USES oil, but because it EXPORTS oil. Exporting hydrogen is stupid. exporting electricity is impractical. What they can export (for a limited time) is technical expertise and technology. That will only last until the quickest reverse engineer takes and improves on the process. The United states, Canada, Russia, and other countries of that size will NEVER run out of available energy: they have a magnitude of the same resources that Iceland has.
Ummmm, no.
They can export Hydrogen. Why? Because Iceland is mostly a rocky desolate volcano witha cold surface, and it is surrounded by a few thousand miles of the North Atlantic Ocean. The Volcano they call "home" provides the entire country with free electricity i nthe form of Geothermal energy. They are barely tapping the energy of the place. All they need do is exploit the geothermal energy to crack te water and make hydrogen, and then sell it to the Americans.
Bingo. Instant Billionaires.
The USA does have extensive geothermal sites - Yellowstone park is a perfect example. but if you turned that into a water cracking plant, every Greenie would come out of the woodwork and decry the loss of Yogi's wilderness. There are some other sites that have decent geothermal: Hawaii, Parts of CA and NV. But NV has no water, and where CA has geothermal is nowhere near the water.
Iceland has both. In spades.
It's really pretty simple math, really. Also: Iceland has a BIG incentive: their present main industry is fishing. As the fish stocks dwindle, they will need a new industry to pick up the slack. Cracking water will do nicely.
Your notes re: the regs and patents is valuable, but beside the point. An even greater point beyond all that is the fact that there are too many god damn people and if we reduced population, none of this would be a problem. But that is also besides the point of the discussion.
Go to DIEOFF.ORG [dieoff.org] for details.
RS
Parent
Re:Iceland is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st Century (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone living with an islandur, and having worked in Iceland a few times, there is a lot of 21st century products they can export. Knowledge, information, and beautiful women (and guys, supposedly, I'm no judge).
Iceland has an amazing internet infrastructure and very cheap electricity. I'm always astounded when I visit, because everyone leaves the heat (100% electric) turned up 24 hours/day, leaves their computers on all the time, have broadband and use it as much as I do. Their electricity is about 3% the price of what I pay at home, basically close to free. If you live with an Icelander, its a constant battle to get her to turn off lights when leaving the room, keep the heat at a reasonable level and turn it down at night.
On top of extremely cheap energy, they have good schools, excellent health care, and a standard of living supposedly the best in Europe (couldn't possibly be, beer is too expensive). The only downside is the constant rain and occasional snow. With fish stocks in the north atlantic dwindling, they are turning their skills towards information, the petroleum of the 21st century. Reverse engineering and process improvement are becoming their stock in trade, and slowly they are coming around to the idea they have to train up their young people to the highest level possible in fields like Information Science. The biggest problem is that when they send their young people to universities in Europe and America, there is a tendancy to stay abroad. They return when starting a family to take advantage of the social safety net that doesn't exist in places like America.
Don't discount Iceland, they do have a political will to make significant changes, and a per capita GDP to make it happen.
the AC
I can't believe I'm defending Iceland on
Parent
Peak Oil (Score:2)
Best of luck to them: lots of people out there are saying that we're going to reach peak oil (the point at which supply of oil can no longer meet demand) much sooner - in which case, Iceland and, well, every other country won't have any choice but to be almost entirely oil free by 2050.
If only every country was at least this forward thinking and we didn't all take energy for granted.
Here's a few references: 1 [oilcrash.com] 2 [oilcrisis.org] 3 [peakoil.net] 4 [dieoff.org] 5 [after-oil.co.uk] or just Google for peak oil [google.co.uk].
Geothermal is useful (Score:3, Informative)
It is good to see countries taking positive steps though: if you have a surfeit of electrical power readily available, why not make the move to hydrogen powered transport? Hopefully a few other countries that are naturally well stocked in clean electricity generation (eg. those with a good supply of, for example, hydroelectric power) can make similar moves. The road ahead looks like it will be an interesting one.
Jedidiah.
Green power? (Score:2)
Err .... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Err .... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was wondering, if a large number of vehicles on the road are hydrogen fuel cell powered, won't there be a big problem of the vapour affecting visibility for drivers? I wonder how that will be dealt with.
Just a thought.
Energy independence is a national security issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone interested this topic should checkout the Rocky Mountain Institute [rmi.org] and read up on the ideas of Amory Lovins.
Vapor Cloud ! (Score:2)
This is a big deal. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a big deal folks. Geothermal is quite abundant [doe.gov] but it is relatively low grade energy. If you can get drilling costs down and figure out how to use the low grade energy along the lines the Icelanders are doing, you can not only resolve most subsistence energy problems, you can localize most food production for consumption in colder climates with articficial hot springs [jardhitafelag.is] just as the Icelanders are doing.
Very Small Country (Score:5, Informative)
While I commend the notion, Iceland has a unique feature not mentioned in the article -- an extremely small population. According to the CIA [cia.gov] (spare the check-your-facts comments, thanks), it is currently less than 300,000 people.
To put that into perspective, there are over 1200 CITIES [mongabay.com] in the world with more that 300,000 people. Seriously, more people live in Toledo than all of Iceland. As far as the Hydrogen economy goes, it's a start, but such a very small start. By 2050 I sure hope we're further along worldwide.
Looks decieve... (Score:3, Interesting)
Those 300.000 people also operate one of the biggest and most modern fishing fleets on the planet. In view of that fact being oil free by 2050 becomes a bit more challenging. Running cars on alternative fuels is one thing but extending that to deep sea trawlers and bulk cargo carr
Global warming (Score:3, Funny)
Give them a chance people (Score:5)
So far half the high rated comments have been either, "hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's an energy store", or "huh, how will they survive without plastic/lubricants etc".
It's normally dangerous to generalise about
Hydrogen
---------
No, hydrogen is not a fuel. Yes it is a storage medium. But more importantly it is an energy *transmission* system. It allows you to generate energy in one place, and then use it somewhere else. Ideally we would just send electricity down the power lines and store it in batteries in our cars, but until someone makes some serious improvements in the energy density of batteries, that isn't going to happen, and hydrogen remains one of the best alternatives.
Yes you can use *dirty* methods of generation to generate the electricity you use to make the hydrogen, but at least you have the option of using clean methods where they are available. You can use what is appropriate. The Icelandics are using Geothermal, good for them. Until you take that step and move to using hydrogen, you don't have a choice over clean or dirty, you only have oil (for cars that is).
"Green" Generation
----------------
Another prime one for the "but I want it perfect and now, and with a pony" crowd. Every time someone mentions a method of power generation like wind, solar, or tidal, someone will go "but that won't work where I am so it's no good and we should just carry on using coal". I live in the UK, and lets face it, we are never going to get much of our power from the sun, but there is work going into building an increasing number of wind farms and experiments with tidal systems, because that is what we have. Most places have something they can use to generate power, the Icelandics are just lucky that they have so much. The Aussies have loads of sun, and Colorado (right state?) gets most of its power from hydro. You use what you have as the tech comes available.
Plastics
------
Stop being so unimaginative. There is absolutly no requirement to use oil in the production of construction materials. There are huge numbers of people and companies working on plant based alternatives. In fact the car industry has already started to use some of these for certain components. We can't produce all the materials we need yet, but we are getting better, and one by one the challanges are being overcome; science just tends to take a little while.
The point (yes, there really is a point) is that all these things move us gradually towards a (slightly) better world. They might not get us there right away, but it's one step closer, and if all the whingers on
Another quick rant while I'm at it - Global Warming
Everytime anything like this comes up on
Misconception (Score:5, Funny)
Iceland is rather green. It's Greenland that has the ice.
Parent
Re:Misconception (Score:2, Funny)
Re:70%? Impressive. (Score:5, Funny)
One of the advantages of living on a geologically active island...
Let us not explore too much the disadvantages.
Parent
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:5, Informative)
The funny thing is, it's been incredibly well debunked:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/L Z129fire.pd f
The main issues:
1) An electrical spark would not have had sufficient energy to ignite the paint
2) Even if there were a spark, it couldn't have jumped in the required direction (Bain indicated that it only would have worked in one direction)
3) The rate of burn of the paint is orders of magnitude too low (about 1000x), and is not "rocket fuel" by any standard. Even if it were coated with *real* rocket fuel, like used in the shuttle's SRBs, it would take 10 hours to burn. Instead, it took 34 seconds.
They address numerous other points. For example:
* You can very easily see that individual cells are burning and others not burning by the unnatural lines that the fire traces along the surface; they discuss where the cells are, and it becomes very obvious that the fire isn't spreading along the (quite continuous) surface but only spreading as new cells catch fire.
* The "color flame issue" is nonsense, because even the earliest blimps (not coated with any similar material) burned with a similar appearance (the appearance is due to the burning of the skin at such high temperatures, making it act like a glow mantle of a gas lantern).
* The tail remained level as one would expect given a huge updraft of the hydrogen that was supporting it previously and was now not only buoyant, but very hot
* The panels were not electrically isolated from each other, as called for by Bain's guesswork
* The Hindenburg had actually survived several lightning strikes in the past that burned right through the paint; plus, the Hindenburg, at the time of ignition, was wet (it was raining during approach, and was 98% humidity), making the paint even harder to ignite. The spark would have had to first vapirized the water, and then with the remaining energy ignited the paint (something lightning failed to do previously)
* Electrical current takes the path of least resistance - i.e., over the wet surface, not through the fabric. The dielectric strength of the cellulose acetate is 100kV/cm; there's no way the current would go through it.
* The energy needed to ignite the paint is 23 joules; one charged panel could have held a maximum of 0.01 joules. To get his sample to light, Bain used a bloody Jacob's Ladder on dry fabric, and even had trouble igniting it with that.
* The very reason why there are so many scraps of Hindenburg fabric available to collectors (and people like Bain) is that, once it was lifted by updrafts out of the heat of the hydrogen fire, it was insufficient to keep itself burning.
* The paint is continuous between cells (unlike Bain's mistaken conception that, because they used separate pieces of cloth, the paint wasn't continuous, and thus charges could build up). It was painted after assembly, across the whole surface.
* The wet, continuous skin, by all effective means, would be an equipotential surface. Consequently, such a spark would be perpendicular to the surface, a situation that Bain couldn't even cause to light the fabric in the Jacob's Ladder - either from the airframe to the exterior, or from the exterior to the air (coronal discharge, i.e., St. Elmo's Fire)
* The skin is not a "rocket fuel" because it has no oxidizer, which is critical to the rapid combustion of solid rocket fuels.
* Cellulose acetate (which was used) burns (relatively) poorly in air, unlike cellulose nitrate (which wasn't used) out of concerns of saftey.
* Solid rocket propellants, which it has been compared to, have about the burn rate of sparklers in atmospheric condition. However,
Parent
Current not confined to path of least resistance (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not arguing one way or the other about the Hindenberg, but I would like to warn about misinterpreting this urban myth about the flow of electricity. In a parallel circuit (i.e., a circuit with different paths), electrical current will flow along all of the paths, the amount being inversely proportional to the resistance of each path. For modelling two or three dimensional objects, integrating over all of the different paths electricity can take to figure out how much current will flow through one region of an object versus another can be quite complicated.
Parent
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:2)
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:4, Interesting)
If this country (USA) wants to get off its coal, natural gas, and petroleum dependency, it has to build new nuclear power plants to power homes and use that to generate hydrogen to power vehicles. No new nuclear power plant has been built since the Three Mile Island incident, which similar to Chernobyl, was a combination of untrained workers and poor design.
It's not a popular idea around here, but huge amounts of greenhouse gas and radiation could be saved from entering out atmosphere if we used more nuclear power.
Parent
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the least of the reasons why hydrogen isn't a good alternative fuel supply. The main reason being that it isn't a fuel supply at all. It is a storage medium... and not a very good one at th
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:3, Funny)
As long as that seat is clearly marked, I see no problem with this.
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:3, Funny)
This sub-thread is now officially closed.
Re:Hydrogen? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, seriously people:
1) Hydrogen *does* explode far more readily than gasoline. That's why it is the fuel of choice for deflagration to detonation transition experiments. That doesn't mean that everything with hydrogen is a waiting timebomb, but it is a fact that hydrogen is a relatively easy substance to detonate.
2) The cause of the Hindenburg fire is still unknown, but it is *not* an open and shut case that the skin was the cause; there are a number of refutations out there for that theory which show that the skin, in fact, was not that flammable. Additionally, clearly on video, the hydrogen is burning; however, thanks to the properties of hydrogen, the flame tended to be carried up and away from the passengers. Also, thanks to the poor mixing and low pressure, it was a high intensity deflagration, not a detonation.
3) Gasoline does not explode in the vast majority of situations (hydrogen and propane - gasses at STP - are much greater deflagration and detonation risks). Now, gasoline will burn hot and for long periods of time, which is it's own risk - but life isn't a hollywood movie where cars explode at the drop of a hat.
4) Hydrogen is not this low-risk substance that you portray it as; if you don't believe me, read a manual of guidelines on how to deal with hydrogen some time. Hydrogen causes embrittlement of metals, collects under overhangs (and has been responsible for blowing many roofs off at research facilities), burns hot and invisible, leaks out of far smaller pinholes than other materials, tends to flow through plumbing if it leaks underground, and all sorts of other stuff that you don't want to happen.
This doesn't mean that it can't be dealt with! But it's not some wondrously safe substance, either.
Parent
Re:I hate the term "green power", article full of (Score:2, Interesting)
http://hotrock.anu.edu.au/cooper.htm
And the geothermal energy doesn't have to be next door. I'm sure there are plenty of geothermal sites in North America. They may not be enough to supply the whole nation's ebergy requirements, but they might cover some of it.
Re:I hate the term "green power", article full of (Score:2)
Re:I hate the term "green power", article full of (Score:5, Informative)
Now, some people may debate exactly how 'green' hydro dams are, but they are certainly more green than fossil fuels. However, there is one strange twist here, which is somewhat offtopic: more than a few dams in Iceland, including a massive one that is currently being constructed at Karahjukar [bankwatch.org] are erected for the exlusive purpose of providing power for aluminum smelters, which are not that green.
Hydrogen generation is at least a noble attempt to use some of the available electricity for slightly more eco-friendly purposes, and surely causes less polution than fossil fuels if it is powered by hydro power.
Parent
Re:Got a bet for you all (Score:3, Insightful)
...
Oh shit.
We're fucked, right?