The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy

Sponge! writes: "The stuff that turns oil into margarine. The stuff that made the Hindenburg float. The stuff that combines with oxygen to make water and with carbon to make methane. The stuff that sends the space shuttle skyward and could someday power your car, office building, house, cell phone, even your hearing aid. That "Stuff" is hydrogen, and according to Amory Lovins, it is the future of energy. Here is an interesting article on Lovins and his view of hydrogen as the number one fuel."

Can we harness..

[LordOfYourPants]

Can we harness the hot air that Jon Katz spews once every week or so?

Re:Can we harness.. the organic Gasses of Jon Katz

[hillct]

There's always the Max Max strategy [perfectworldusa.com] for organic gas extraction. Or alternatively, we could just shove a hose up his A**. I doubt it would impact the quality of his writing (or at least the perception of his writing).

Re:Can we harness..

[TGK]

Not really. Fusion "containers" are massive electromagnetic coils which are themselves suspended in a vacuum chamber. The idea is to magneticly contain a 100,000+ C plasma until fusion occurs and hopefully produce more energy than you use. This is a ways off.

In answer to a question further down the page, hydrogen fuel cells are better than batteries because of the rate they can deliver energy. It's difficult to make an electric car that can make a decent top speed. Hydrogen fuel cells pack the punch to give you a good boost.

Last point -- Someone else was asking where the energy for this will come from, pointing out that you will always come up short if you're using water as your source of hydrogen. A reply indicated that other more hydrogen rich molecules would be used. I wish to clarify that this is the case, but only until either more advanced solar systems can be developed or until fusion power becomes more practical. The idea is not hydrogen as an energy source, but as a storage medium.

That is all.

Re:Can we harness..

[technos]

Fuel cells? Bleh. They're a new and expensive, unreliable and largly an academic item. Now look at internal combustion engines; They're well understood, reliable, and relitivly cheap.

Just make the goddamn engine run on hydrogen.

Re:Can we harness..

[pmc]

Just make the goddamn engine run on hydrogen

There is a very good reason not to do this - efficiency. An internal combustion engine is, deep down, simply a heat engine (that is, it converts heat to useful work). It is governed by the laws that tell you the theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine (which is (T[burn]-T[input])/T[burn] where T[burn] is the temperature of the combustion, and T[input] is the temperature of the combustion mixture beforehand). Typically you will get about 30% - 40% from an internal combustion engine.

A fuel cell (despite the name) is not a heat engine and does not have this fundamental limitation, so the maximum efficiency is 100%.

Incidently, fuel cells actually predate the internal combustion engine (1839 vs 1859).

Re: fuel cell... efficiency is 100%....

[pmc]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but fuel cells do have the same limitations -- known as Carnot efficiency, btw.

No they don't - see here [visionengineer.com]

You are talking drivel about the engine efficienies also - see here [ecen.com]

My source for info? a good introductory thermodynamics class.

Introductory? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Re:Can we harness..

[saider]

Just make the goddamn engine run on hydrogen.

A typical auto engine has difficulty burning hydrogen because the internal surface of the cylinders reaches a temperature which is sufficient to ignite hydrogen. This causes problems because when the hydrogen enters the chamber, it combusts. With the valve open and the piston in a less than optimal position, a good deal of power is lost (if it runs at all).

Rotary engines and gas turbines do not suffer from this problem (their intakes separated from their combustion chambers and are relatively cool) and are better suited to H2 as a fuel.

Re:Can we harness..

[IronChef]

hydrogen fuel cells are better than batteries because of the rate they can deliver energy. It's difficult to make an electric car that can make a decent top speed.

Not necessarily true. Some batteries do a great job at dumping current really fast. Electric cars have pretty good pickup. I have heard a lot of complaints about them, but speed isn't one of them.

Here's a link [evworld.com] where someone talks about how peppy the EV1 is. Even if he's exaggerating, the thing clearly isn't a slug.

Re:Can we harness..

[nukebuddy]

TGK wrote:
Not really. Fusion "containers" are massive electromagnetic coils which are themselves suspended in a vacuum chamber.

There are other types, as described in the very recent book _Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?_ [amazon.com] (pp. 254-255):

Proposals for the use of nuclear bursts to produce electricity were made during the decades when the United States had a substantial program in peaceful nuclear expolsions, which preceded but was smaller than the Soviet effort. In particular, one plan of Los Alamos, Project Pacer, called for the production of electrical power by the explosion of thermonuclear explosives in underground cavities filled with high-pressure steam. Each day, a 60-kiloton nuclear explosive would be detonated in a cavity to keep the steam hot, while a relatively conventional steam-turbine power plant would draw on the steam reservoir to produce electrical energy. Nuclear heat from the explosion would simply replace a day's nuclear heat from a reactor.

In 1975, one of the authors (Garwin) worked on an advisory group to the U.S. government studying the whole field of peaceful nuclear explosions, and Pacer in particular. Although it had been claimed that Pacer was a cheaper road to nuclear power than the reactors that were mature at the time, side-by-side comparison with a normal nuclear power plant showed otherwise. In addition, the scale of the nuclear explosive manufacturing and transport program was almost unfathomable. Each of the 60-kiloton explosives would have had an explosive yield some 4 times that of the bombs that devastated Hiroshima Nagasaki. For each of the almost one hundred nuclear power plants operating now in the United States, 365 such explosions per year would be required, -- 36,500 per year in total. It is unreasonable to think that humanity might consider technology of this kind, while it is still searching for satisfactory methods for properly managing nuclear power plant waste and trying to reduce the number of nuclear explosives.

Major projects continue to be set forth -- most recently by the Russian nuclear weapons laboratories. In an audacious scheme, scientists have analyzed an enormous steel pressure vessel using a year's output of all of Russian steel mills for the container, to be equipped with multiple fountains of liquid sodium inside, for the purpose of shielding the steel container from the force and radiation of the 20- or 50-kiloton thermonuclear bursts. The possible attraction of such explosives in peaceful use lies in part in the fact that the only relatively small quantities of fission products and plutonium are produced. For the Russian 120-kiloton explosive used in rock crushing, it amounts to a mere 300 tons of high-explosive equivalent from fission. This results in a factor of 400 less fission products than in a nuclear reactor; the rest of the yield came from fusion of deuterium. This approach would thus compete with approaches for extending uranium fuel supplies -- e.g., a breeder reactor -- or obtaining uranium from seawater.

In the mid-1990s, it was the turn of the Chinese to consider the possibility of producing electricity by means of nuclear explosions. They suggested that with underground explosions within the yield range of typical thermonuclear weapons (10 to 100 kilotons), energy could be produced from uranium-238, and thorium-232 could be burned, multiplying the accessible energy of any particular uranium resource by a factor of 100 or so with respect to what can be obtained with ordinary reactors that burn only the 0.71% of natural uranium that is uranium-235. In these underground explosions, thermonuclear reactions could provide 90%, or even 99%, of the nuclear energy released. According to the authors of the project, there would remain only a few modest technological problems to solve. This was not, of course, a brand new idea, but it was being taken seriously for the first time in China.

-nukebuddy

Re:Can we harness..

[markmoss]

hydrogen fuel cells are better than batteries because of the rate they can deliver energy.

Batteries can deliver enough current to instantly melt heavy wires. Their momentary output is limited mainly by the current-carrying capacity of the terminals and internal connections. Of course, they run down pretty fast when you use them this way, but batteries are definitely not the limiting factor in an acceleration test. The reasons electric cars might be slow:

1) The batteries are heavy, so the electric car is considerably heavier than the same model with gasoline power.

2) To get more range out of the batteries, the designers may have limited the motor power.

3) If you do run a battery-powered car at high speed and accelerations, you won't get far.

Fuel cells could help on all three points, not because they put out more current, but because they allow you to store more energy in less mass.

I am no expert, but I would expect short-term fuel cell output to be limited by the rate at which the fuel and air can diffuse to the electrodes and react. This is going to be a lower rate than you get from batteries where the lead and acid are already at the electrodes. Sustained output of both fuel cells and batteries may be limited by heat -- when you draw too much current, you increase the losses in the cells, and lost energy becomes heat, which must be removed or eventually the cells will self-destruct.

Re:Can we harness..

[mfarver]

In answer to a question further down the page, hydrogen fuel cells are better than batteries because of the rate they can deliver energy. It's difficult to make an electric car that can make a decent top speed. Hydrogen fuel cells pack the punch to give you a good boost.

This is incorrect, while hydrogen fuel cells can in theory develop more Watt/hr per kg than batteries none of the units produced have been able to do so. Most fuel cell powered vehicles will need battery or flywheel systems to store energy for peak loads.

The energy required to accelerate a car quickly is incredible. For example the Electric drag racers require peak current of over 1000amps at 300VDC (300kw, enough to power 75 homes) to run 12 seconds times on the 1/4 mile track. Most average cars Electric cars require 600amps of current. No hydrogen fuel cell on the planet puts out those current levels and can still fit in a car. For those current levels only batteries can deliver energy quickly enough.

Hydrogen's only advantage over battery power is you can refuel quicker.. it might only take 10 minutes to pump enough hydrogen into the car for another 100 miles of driving. Batteries might take 15 minutes to several hours (charge rates are mostly limited on how much electricity is available, most homes do not have sufficent power available to quick charge an EV).

Hydrogen's biggest drawback... its a bitch to store. It leaks out of almost any container you put it in. Its hard to store it as a liquid (have to keep it too cold) and as a gas you can't store enough of it. (hydrogen powered cars average about 100 miles before refueling, only slighty better than batteries)

Storage medium

[hey!]

I think hyrdrogen has potential as a storage and transport medium for renewable energy sources. Many of these resources have short term variations in their availability:

Solar: doesn't work at night;
Tidal: only works on the outgoing tide;
Wind: doesn't work when the wind is slack.

Conversion of the energy to hydrogen and transporting it by pipeline would buffer the variations in powerflow, the way a capacitor does in a power supply.

My favorite trait of H...

[tercero]

is that you can get it anywhere there is water and sunlight. Never run out of gas and be stranded again! Cool, especially if you're on a budget.

Re:My favorite trait of H...

[mallie_mcg]

I wonder how much if at all a Hydrogen based enerygy system would alter the weather, think of all the cars, sure they are emitting 0 pollutants, (barring a bit of Ozone from the electric motors, possibly some lubricants too [less than IC engine i know]) but what effects to the weather could/would happen? Would cities become really really humid or would it all be A OK?

Also do these vehicles store the water, and plug into the power socket to charge? Or do you need to fill them up with water? Or just with H2 [02 comes from the air for the purpose of making h20]? Where do you get nice clean water from so that deposits dont build up in your tank?

Re:My favorite trait of H...

[Dyolf Knip]

I wonder how much if at all a Hydrogen based enerygy system would alter the weather, think of all the cars, sure they are emitting 0 pollutants

Very good question. Even the smallest effect from a Hydrogen car would be multiplied by the millions of vehicles out there. But really, fog from H2 cars is better than smog from gas cars any day.

Also do these vehicles store the water, and plug into the power socket to charge? Or do you need to fill them up with water? Or just with H2

It'd be really silly to have the car store water and then charge from a socket. The whole point is to use H2 as a battery to power the car. How you 'charge' that battery is up for grabs. I imagine that the most efficient thing to do would be do make the hydrogen at industrial or even home-based systems and then fill-er-up with fresh tanks of H2. That way, you can build more efficient water-breaking systems and not worry about making them portable. See the arguments about electric cars charged from the grid vs ones that generate their own oomph from gas or whatever.

However, if solar panels become reasonable useful, it might indeed be feasible to put everything in the car. Start off with a tank full of hydrogen and an empty one of water. As it uses the H2 to drive, the car uses solar power to break up the waste water and fills up the H2 tank. It's not quite a perfect system, since you may do a lot of night driving or park in a garage and thus end up with all water and no hydrogen, in which case you'd have to tank up with H2. The system would also leak a small amount of water, which I supose could be replaced from capturing rainfall. Depeding on the efficiency of the electrolysis and solar cells, it becomes something between a gas mileage enhancer and a true self-contained car. But still, being able to drive for a few thousand miles before having to stop for fuel would kick ass to an amazing degree.

Short term/long term

[perdida]

We have been able to transfer a lot of our daily consumer power needs off the grid for years.

Unfotunately, any large scale production of alternative energy using consumables would require a massive capital investment by government and private enterprise that they have been postponing later and later.

We could have hydrogen powered cars and solar powered houses right now, if 40 years ago somebody had started a small factory making consumer goods that used these energy sources. By now, there would be lots of factories making the goods, and cheaper production methods would have resulted.

The short term planning orientation of energy companies and their associated enterprises is what keeps us dependent on fossil fuels today.

Only now are corps like BP investing in alternative energy. And BP isn't advancing the field much, it seems to be buying up small alternatives industry firms and keeping them in a technological and marketing holding pattern.

In my opinion, private enterprise and government won't invest the massive amounts required to scale alternatives production until the cost of fossil fuels is so prohibitive that they are (short-term) forced to do so.

By then, it will be too late.

I wish I knew what to do about this.

Re:Short term/long term

[Darth Turbogeek]

Convincing Industry and Govt of the Big Gobs Of Money to be had with alternate energy should be the first step. Unless they see a buck in it and preferably an easily redemable one, Alternate energy isnt going to go far.

That being said, Does anyone realise Texas is one place where this happen and hence Wind Turbines are being built. Odd that it is in Geoge W Buhs's state - but I can say it was NOT done to save the enviroment. It was dnoe because there was shown to be a buck in it.

Soory Greenies, that's the way it works. You want to save the enviroment, prove to someone with dollars that there is more dollars to be had and quickly. Convince the money men of that aand watch how fast these clean technologies get built

Profitability

[Once&FutureRocketman]

Soory Greenies, that's the way it works. You want to save the enviroment, prove to someone with dollars that there is more dollars to be had and quickly.

Couldn't agree more. It's been done. Read Natural Capitalism [amazon.com] by (among others) Amory Lovins.

Or, to paraphrase The Natural Step [naturalstep.org], every business, regardless of industry, produces only two things: Product, and non-product. Selling product makes money. Non-product is, at best, worthless and is frequently a liability.

The ratio varies by industry of course, but when you trace through the entire supply chain, usually only 5-10% of the materials stream winds up in product. Improving this figure is a huge opportunity to add money to the bottom line, and generally speaking, there is alot of room for improvement!

As far as the political process goes, the main thing the government needs to do is to:

1) Stop subsidizing waste.

2) Correct the legal structures that currently allow industries to externalze costs. Just to give a timely example, a gallon of gas would cost alot more than $1.50 if the oil companies had to foot, say, 25% of the nation's defense budget every year to preserve access to the oil (the ethical considerations notwithstanding, of course.) As it is, the taxpayers pick up the tab instead. A whole lot of "fringe" and "green" technologies would be much more in demand if the users of current technology had to pay the true costs of that technology.

Re:Short term/long term

[Malcontent]

"Soory Greenies, that's the way it works. You want to save the enviroment, prove to someone with dollars that there is more dollars to be had and quickly"

And that's why we are all on a collision course with calamity.

There is no profit in preserving life. A bluefin tuna swimming in the ocean is worthless to anybody. The same tuna when killed is worth a thousand dollars. Same with clean waters and clean air. They are both worthless but if you can make a lot of money polluting them.

The problem is one of ethics. Most people are willing to deprive your great grandchildren to make money today. The so called greenies are trying to preseve the remaining planet for future generations. Unfortunately there is no profit in that. As a result they are not as rich are the business owners and shareholders. As a result the natural resources of the world keep spiraling down. Nothing can be done about it except maybe violence.

Re:Short term/long term

[david.johns]

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, since I blame our foreign policy decisions in the middle east on big oil. Foreign policy decisions that lead to general hatred by a lot of people. Who build bombs.

In other words, I don't think that we're going to have peace until we get away from a Petrol hungry economy.

Since I'm a freaky peacenik, this means a lot to me. So my thought is - introduce the technology in those "developing countries" that we didn't ratify the Kyoto Treaty over. (I know, I know, we never intended to actually sign the damn thing, that's not the point. ;)

Point is, if somebody started manufacturing a hydrogen engine cheaply and building and selling it in someplace third world or maybe even a poor first-world country (Mexico, India) then we'd have a chance.

My thoughts are initially: trains and trucks. If I make my millions in the near future, I'll be learning everything I can about MechE, hiring some people, and moving to Mexico for a while. Build a prototype hybrid hydrogen/hydraulic engine (so that a little hydrogen produces a lot of torque) and then sell it to trucking as a way to meet and beat the US emissions requirements.

My scheme actually also involves closing the system (cooling and re-cracking the exhaust) and introducing electricity into the system partially by means of solar. Other possibilities (for the nighttime trucker) include flywheels that can be charged at stations and during the journey, and for trains, just bearing the burden on the same thing that drives electric engines now.

The hydrogen/hydraulic engine is supposedly a very efficient way of producing a lot of torque for a little energy, which makes it ideal for hauling heavy loads. However, I'm going to have to check my facts. Still, if so, this would be a great way to start the little industry that could.

Oh, and btw, Iceland is making the move to Hydrogen. Don't remember where I read it but the story checked out. Take a look on google.

Re:Short term/long term

[spiro_killglance]

Point is, if somebody started manufacturing a hydrogen engine cheaply and building and selling it in someplace third world or maybe even a poor first-world country (Mexico, India) then we'd have a chance.

This is pie in Sky at the minute, there don't
even seem to be many expessive but affordible
to buisiness/risk peoples hydrogen bases engines or Fuel cells, at the present.

There isn't a shortage of companies trying to
bring this technology to market, it just seams
their isn't much of market at present.
People and Business are very conservate about
there power sources it seems. You'd imagine
a few rich people would want to own performance
electric vehicles or fuel cell cars, just for
the cool value of the silent acceleration, of
for PR about how green they are. But it just
doesn't seem to happen.

Re:Short term/long term

[Malcontent]

You know the events of the last month or so have me realizing how fragile our economic system is. If we do end up sucking the people of the third world dry (and I see no reason why we wouldn't) they could crush us so easily. Let me lay out a couple of scenarios for you.

1) A small atomic device gets exloded in redmond wa taking out the entire microsoft campus, all the equipment and virtually the entire workforce. Ms instantly ceases to be force in the world. MS stock becomes worthless and billions invested in that stock magically disappear. The economy collapses almost instantly.

1a) A significant minority of MS employees get infected with a disease (say smallpox) and there is a mass exodus of employees which all of a sudden fear for their lives. Unable to staff itself MS is unable to create new products or keep the current products going and dies a slow and painful death.

2) A handful of cows in a handful of western states get hoof and mouth disease (injected into them by a terrorist of course). Once this happens millions of cows will have to be slaughtered and the people will stop eating meat from the US. Ranchers all over the west go out of business the economy of the west collapses. S
3) Same as above but with dairy.
4) Same as above but with tainted corn or wheat.

As I see it it takes very little effort, money or organization to take us down a notch or two. Four airplanes crashing into three buildings took this country from being in surplus to being in debt. Wen all is tallied including the several years of war that are sure to follow those terrorists did more damage to this country then they ever imagined.

Re:Short term/long term

[elfkicker]

Point 1) I just want to address that stock value does not "magically disappear". Stocks are bought and sold according to bid ans ask rates. Someone always walks away with the cash. Money sort of follows physics in that it is not created or destroyed. One of those kinetic vs potential kind of things.

Point 2) I can't say that Mad Cow destroyed the economy of the UK, although they've had their problems they're still better off than the EU in general. I still buy Angus steaks and pay quite a bit for it too. It's not as easy as it sounds and I think we load our beef with enough antibiotics to piss off a raging minority of Greens in this country anyway. Besides, they insure those cows y'know. What does the insurance co do to come up with some quick capital? yeah... it doesn't just effect the US.

Re:Short term/long term

[SectoidRandom]

Cost is the issue here, along with time i might add (as you said). The problem we have is all the artificial pressure keeping fuel prices 'stable', okay excluding OPEC's efforts to the contrary. If fuel costs kept rising at at greater rate than they have been, we would be far more inclined to find and USE new (and perhaps) re-newable energy sources.

I believe its a very short-sighted policy to think that we must keep our oil costs down at any cost. A perfect example being the end of 2000 and begining of this year when oil prices went up, people across Europe and America i think (and later here in Australia) protested to the government to cut tax's on fuels. Eventually many governments complied, such as the Australian govt early this year cutting the re-indexing of fuel tax. The fact is although tax makes up a huge percentage (over 50% was it here??) fuel costs will contiune to rise how much more can we cut the taxes?

In my opinion the tax's should remain, and despite the short-medium term hardship it may cause prices should not be controlled so vigerously! The fact is, oil is non-renewable, and unless we start PAYING more now the general short-sigtedness we seem to suffer from will cause us HUGE problems in the future! Imagine in 30-50 years when we have used up the last reserves (excluding the disgusting (IMO) ideas of oil drilling in Antartica and Alaska) if we havnt used these years to prepare for that eventuality.

That's the main problem with 'artificial' price controls on oil, its naturally going to get much MUCH more expensive, and there is NOTHING we can do about it. Besides of course alternative fuels.

Other Infos

[robbyjo]

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Institute [h2fuelcells.org], California Hydrogen Business Council [ch2bc.org].

Read "Hydrogen Futures: Toward A Sustainable Energy System", from WorldWatch Institute [worldwatch.org]. Check out its Q & A section [worldwatch.org].

NEWS FLASH!

[Golias]

NEWS FLASH! People Who Sell Hydrogen Think Fuel Cells Are A Good Idea!

Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[herrlich_98]

The main thing that gets glossed over in his argument is that unlike oil or solar you never get more energy from hydrogen than you put in. Sure there's a lot of hydrogen around, but to break H20 apart is always going to take slightly more energy than you get when you burn it or use a fuel cell to put it back together.

Hydrogen is better compared with gyroscopes or batteries than oil, solar or nuclear.

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[dbrutus]

Hydrogen is probably not going to come from H20 but rather from methane, natural gas, or other hydrogen rich sources that don't take as much energy to break apart as H20. The multi-fuel issue is going to set apart hydrogen because you don't need to build an infrastructure, you can use the one we already have and shift the fuel as new ones become available. Indirect competition rules the roost and OPEC pricing power is broken because all of a sudden, switching becomes possible without killing the economy.

DB

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[mj6798]

I hope not. The best source for hydrogen is solar energy. If you are planning on producing hydrogen from methane, you might as well just use the methane directly.

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[gorilla]

If you've got solar energy, you're better putting it into batteries rather than the losses involved in hydrogen.

Just use a battery

[Eccles]

Exactly, I just don't see much of a situation where using hydrogen as a quasi-battery is better than just using a battery. The Toyota Prius uses an engine to charge batteries which then drive an electric motor, for example. Why mess with the hydrogen intermediate stage? The only reason I can see is that in general, storing electrical power is difficult. Using it to produce hydrogen which can then be burned to generate peak power for the grid (such as half-time during English soccer games, when half the country puts a kettle on for tea at the same time) which can't be done with most green power systems.

(I'd really like to see some way to plug the Prius in, so you don't have to burn fuel when you're just doing short commutes every day; maybe the next generation will have that.)

Re:Just use a battery

[Mandelbrute]

I just don't see much of a situation where using hydrogen as a quasi-battery is better than just using a battery

A battery is not particularly efficent. Getting 20% of the power that you put in back out of a battery to drive a wheel is a major acheivement. With combustion or a fuel cell you get greater efficency. Storing the hydrogen is still a bit of a problem.

I personally like the idea of a big solar powered ammonia plant for peak loads. You break the ammonia up during the heat of the day (and use spare solar heat to generate power) and recombine the hydrogen and nitrogen during the night (and peak demand) to produce more heat to generate power. The recombining step could be skipped if you have a lot of ammonia and want to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, but I suspect that the energy cost to produce the ammonia in the first place would be higher than by getting hydrogen from another source.

Re:Just use a battery

[Dyolf Knip]

And on top of that, most batteries only last a few years before having to be thrown away. And they're not exactly the most eco-friendly item in the landfill.

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[gnovos]

Well, that's not exactly true. Fusion power would produce far more energy than oil or gas and be very safe and clean.

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[Hooptie]

This is true. However, I think you are a lot closer to having a hydrogen powered fuel cell in your automobile, than having a tokamak therein.

Hooptie

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[Malcontent]

" The main thing that gets glossed over in his argument is that unlike oil or solar you never get more energy from hydrogen than you put in."

Actually the main thing that gets glossed over is that we use too much energy in the first place. If everybody carpooled one day out of the week we would cut gasoline usage by 25%. Hey we could be free of mideast oil if we just stopped driving one day a week. The solution is so easy too bad it takes actual sacrifice and no american would ever take the bus or carpool, it would be too inconvenient.

Where to get free hydrogen

[BillyGoatThree]

Electrolysis. But wait, you still need to provide electric power. Ok, how about PV? Check out the "Water Battery". [dyndns.org]

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[mj6798]

Hydrogen isn't just better, it's essentially the only choice when it comes to storing and transporting solar energy on a large scale. The idea is to generate hydrogen in desert regions and ship it to where it is used. Furthermore, hydrogen can be generated using solar energy in a variety of ways, and the energy expended on that wouldn't be useful for much else.

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[bonzoesc]

BigDaddy said:

So far H2 has not proved to be a useful fuel source in other industries.

Quick! Somebody tell NASA! Let them know that H2 isn't useful, even though it has propelled over 100 different launches into orbit!

Re:Kinda like saying gyroscopes are the future...

[Dyolf Knip]

If a vehicle uses water to store the needed H2, it will also need an electrical source to electrolyze the water. Where does this come from? Why not just use an electrical motor?

You got it backwards, silly. If H2 is a battery, water is a dead battery. You put H2 into the car, not water. Yes, you could do that and 'charge' it using lead-acid batteries or a normal gas engine, but that's defeating the purpose of using H2 in the first place.

I just don't think H2 is a viable source of power. Unlike a hydrocarbon, combustion breaks very few bonds and therefore releases very little energy

Hmmm, well, actually, no. By unit mass, combusting Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of gasoline. It just can't be stored as compactly, even as a cold liquid.

Re:Not all of that is true . . .

[dragons_flight]

Some energy is lost as heat when you break the bonds, and inefficiencies in the electrical systems also dissipate some energy. The amount of energy in breaking and forming the bonds is constant, yes, but any paractical system to do that will lose some energy in the process so that you end up a net loss.

Of course H2 can still be worthwhile if the amount lost is small and the value as an energy storage medium can be made high enough.

Hydrogren as fuel

[Dolly_Llama]

There's still the problem of generating the hydrogen. Electrolysis is the simplest way, but it requires electricity so you're spending some amount of energy to get it. Some law of thermodynamics or something. Maybe we should get rid of it. [theonion.com]

Best thing, imho about hydrogren fuel is the ability to use it as a means of transmitting energy from potentially remote renewable generating facilities. Think of that game of SimCity where you put all the windmills in the hilly corner you'd never use. Same idea could work with wind or solar in the real world. Put wind facilities in prime (for wind generating) locations, generate hydrogen with the electricity, and truck the h2 to cities. No need for big ugly lines.

Re:Hydrogren as fuel

[bonzoesc]

They only produce one. The big orange thing (External Fuel Tank) holds H2(l) and O2(l), while the two Solid Rocket Boosters are just that: solid propellant, much like big reusable Estes engines.

My thoughts about alternatives

[Kiro]

I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.
Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).
I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.
Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.
Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.
They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.
Some say time is the fire in which we burn. My time is running out

.

He's fission and I bit

[Mandelbrute]

I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power.

Chenobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and that power station in France where all of those people died (from liquid sodium) during the decommisioning.

Three Mile Island particularly showed that the people who were in charge of the plant should probably not be trusted with anything as dangerous as a motor vehicle - the contractors x-rayed the same weld joint dozens of times (and changed the id numbers) instead of inspecting the whole plant because they knew that no-one would check up on them.

Fission is clean power to public relations people and a government that wants a good source of radioactive material for weapons, but to engineers it is very dirty power that needs to be very carefully contained in case it gets out and kills everything near the powerplant.

The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous - that price may come down after a few more have been decommisioned, but for now it is an expensive form of power over the life cycle of the plant. All of those rare earths and hi-tech materials are not cheap - and everything used in the steam cycle is going to be radioactive enough to cause storage problems for more than a lifetime. The environmental costs have been enormous in the Ukrane, and may be high in other places in the future.

Re:He's fission and I bit

[Grond]

3 points.

First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone. I live in a small city in Arkansas (Russellville, population ~25,000) that is the site of a large nuclear power plant. I know many engineers who work at the plant and a few people involved with the construction and design of the plant (such as my father, who did the environmental impact work on the 'steam cycle,' more on that later). Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power. The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small compared to that of coal/oil/natural gas and their related activities (such as coal mining).

Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply. The cost of construction is only about a third of the cost of building a plant (a large plant would, if built today, cost in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars, depending on location (i.e., availability of natural cooling sources like lakes and rivers) and output). Whenever a nuclear power plant is built, the design documents, environmental impact studies, evacuation plans, etc, must all be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as though no nuclear plants had ever been built before. Read that again. The majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in the United States is red tape. Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plants can be cheap. In France, most of the power plants follow the same, well-tested design.

Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean. During construction of the plant, the chemists (such as my father) had a valve system in place such that they could take samples of the water at every stage in the cycle. After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess. The water was just plain, distilled water. The only thing that happens to it is being heated and cooled over and over again. The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure. In the Russellville case, the only thing in the water vapor other than H20 is a small amount of (non-radioactive) Xenon, which, for those of you who slept through chemistry, is inert. Perhaps you meant the coolant itself? Well, the coolant is heavily laced with Boron (in the form of Borax soap, actually), which is a neutron absorber. It's only a 'coolant' in the sense that it absorbs neutrons. Even if the Boron did become radioactive (and I'm fairly certain it doesn't), that water isn't part of the steam cycle and the Boron can be removed from the water anyway.

The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.

PS He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line. Who is worse, the troll, the troll who followed him, or the idiot who responded to both? ;)

Re:He's fission and I bit

[Mandelbrute]

Grond had some interesting points, and I replied:

First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone.

Perhaps I should remove the word "dirty" from that line to make it more accurate. Containment is, of course, vital in the context of nuclear fuel.

Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power

The ex-patriate Russian turbine engineer I've talked to a couple of times had very different views on the subject. In the ex-USSR there was occasionally dodgy state-run engineering, in the US you sometimes have an unsupervised lowest bidder during a recession - either way the lowest common denominator is not good in a very dangerous system. The Indonesian nuclear power station engineer that I talked to had some stories about some odd attitudes to radiation safety (doing a lot of radiography with neutron sources and things like that).

The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small

Interesting that you qualified that statement by nationality, but yes, the total number of deaths is lower than that in the very large coal, oil and natural gas industries. Chenobyl, however, did affect a large number of people.

Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply.

In comparison to what other forms of power? The exotic materials required push up the constuction cost, which is offset by the lower fuel costs, but the extremely high cost of decommissioning a plant adds in a major cost as well to produce something that is not very cost effective in terms of producing power. The decommisioning cost will most likely go down and perhaps someone will be funded again to solve the waste storage problem, but currently those problems push nuclear power generation into the catagory of a good idea that doesn't quite work. Nuclear power stations are only built by nations that want to be self-sufficent and don't have other resources, or nations that want to build atomic weapons. Britain cancelled the construction of a nuclear power plant a few years ago on economic grounds, you'll find something article about it in a 1996 "New Scientist" magazine (I wish they had put stuff on the web back then).

Nuclear power plants can be cheap

Example please. The only cost breakdown I've seen was for the unbuilt British plant listed in a "New Scientist" article - and that one was very expensive in comparison to a coal fired plant. They didn't really need it since they left the cold war early.

Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean.

True, it has to be or it destroys your pipework. I'm talking about the pipework that is exposed to the water that is heated by the rods (the radioactive steam cycle, for plants that are built that way) - eventually neutron sources (like that water that is converted to heavy water by radiation) irradiate the pipework, making it radioactive and a furthur waste problem. Similar things happen in plants with other liquids in the loop that is exposed to the fuel. Obviously the steam that goes through the turbines has never touched the fuel, and the cooling water that runs through the cooling towers doesn't touch the turbine.

After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess

Probably safe, but very bad practice. In a lot of cases it is a good idea to add some things (hydrazine? can't remember) to reduce the corrosion rate of the pipework, and that may make the water toxic. The water may be "distilled" by definition (since it has condensed out of steam, but it is rarely pure, and you don't really want it to be.

The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure

Yes, it's far removed from radioactive material, except for incidents like Sellafield where an accident happened.

Perhaps you meant the coolant itself?

Yes - that's the material that has become highly radioactive in the past (also creating other radioactive materials) and created problems with decommisioning. From what you said it looks like some advances have been made in that area.

The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.

There's a lot of hysteria, but I strongly dispute the discription of nuclear power as "clean".

An accident in a coal fired power station or oil refinery can kill a few people, but an accident in a nuclear power plant makes the entire continent worry - just ask a few europeans how "clean" they think nuclear power is.

Why do I feel justified in my opinion? I've read about the subject (a long time ago now) and talked to a couple of engineers from nuclear power stations - one that I was working with and another that I was teaching (about ceramics - so not much to with the subject). I'm not in opposition to nuclear reactors, since we need a source of radioactive materials for a variety of reasons (medical etc), and I've used an Iridium isotope to examine weld joints at an oil refinery, and thick welded test plates. I've talked to one of the people that worked on the "synrock" project for containing nuclear waste (it probably works, but we'll never know). I've also worked in coal fired power stations, alongside people that work in the research facility attached to my nations small reactor. What I do think is that using very large quantities of radioactive material is a dangerous and expensive exercise. Ask the Swedes and Fins how much they are spending to prop up the reactors in the old USSR - it's bound to be on public record somewhere. I've got no idea how much in US Federal government funds goes into propping up the US nuclear power industry - have you ever wondered why they pay so much for weapons grade materials if nothing else? It looks like a subsity to me to keep a weapons production system and some jobs.

He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line

Yes, it is a bad pun, but I don't consider any of this thread to be a troll - just offtopic.

Fission is not an alternative energy, and I am not convinced that a lump of plutonium is any more "clean" than coal or oil or the HF acid used in oil refining. If the HF gets loose people die. If the plutonium gets loose a lot of poeple die, and keep dying unless they stay away or until it's cleaned up. There's more to environmental issues in power generation than carbon dioxide, NOx and SOx.

Each generation uses more hydrogen

[volkris]

A long time ago I read something about how every generation of fuel uses a higher hydrogen to carbon ratio. For instance, coal to oil and then oil to natural gas.

Every generation was less poluting and more efficient because of this larger ratio, and so it seems almost natural that eventually we'd get to pure hydrogen as a fuel source.

Please correct me if someone else has more info.

Fuel Cell Technology is coming along

[spiro_killglance]

Interesting timing for this article as i've
just been looking into weather Fuel Cell Stacks,
such as Zetek Powers [zetek.com] 2.5Kw Fuel Cell stacks, would make
a useful backup power source for our server shop,
fortunately it looks like Zetek's gone tits up.

I can thing of many places were a compate, safe
energy source would be ideal, but somehow this
Technology just doesn't ever seem to get
commericalized.

Hydrogen as energy storage/transfer medium?

[Goonie]

That article was singularly uninformative, but it strikes me as possible that in the future instead of electricity transmission wires, electricity generation plants will simply electrolyse water, and we'll turn the hydrogen back to energy in domestic fuel cells.

The benefits are considerable:

• no transmission losses (except for leakage and pumping costs)
• the ability to deliver it in trucks to remote areas, or even ship it between continents, just like oil.
• No need for peak load generators, because you can just store a surplus of hydrogen during low-demand times and release it during peak periods.
• Very efficient at fuel-cell end - most of the waste heat runs the household hot-water system.

Is such a system ever going to be feasible?

Re:Hydrogen as energy storage/transfer medium?

[j-beda]

Not such a bad idea, but electrical transmission energy losses have got to be less than frictional losses in pumping or trucking the gas to every end user.

But the idea of using hydrogen as a energy storage medium for peak power demand is viable, and using a fuel cell to power your home or business and using the excess heat for space heating is quite possibly ecconomical. Now if we could combine that with rooftop solar cells...

On an only tangentially related topic, the last couple of Home Power Magazine [homepower.com] issues (most recent one available for download) have had some articles on solar hot water heating. They very convincingly claim that the return on investment is substantially better than you could possibly expect in the stock market long term:

An investment in a solar water heating system will beat the stock market any day, any decade, risk free. Initial return on investment is on the order of 15 percent, taxfree, and goes up as gas and electricity prices climb. Many states have tax credits and other incentives to sweeten those numbers even more. What are we waiting for? Forget the stock market. If you have invested in a house, your next investment should be in solar hot water.

SPEAK UP SONNY!

[_aa_]

Being a crotchity old man, I fear change and progress. This.. this so-called Hy-dro-gen you speak of has been nothing but a pain in my rump ever since my days as a gold prospector. This margerine business.. try as I might, I still don't beleive it's not butter. I was a hearty 45 when I witnessed the Hindenburg disaster. What guarentees can you give me that such an incident won't befall my hearing aid? I have had a fear of water since I was knee-high to a crawdad. The most respected talk-show host in the world, Phil Donahue, said that this methane gas is responsible for a hole in the O-Zone layer. I beleive that space travel is best left to the Russians. I am not allowed to operate a motor vehicle in my state because I'm legally blind, deaf, and my reflexes ain't what they used to be. These yuppies in their office buildings need to get out and get real jobs gold prospectin'. Why in a single day I panned up 6 bits! All while fendin' off coyotes. I ain't ever needed no power in the house that the Ol' wind mill can't provide. I dunno what cell phones are, but they sound like the work of the devil to me. Anyway.. The Price Is Right is about to start so I have to go.

Liquid fuels are far more practical

[cryptochrome]

For all it's good points, people often gloss over the one big dealbreaker - hydrogen is a gas. And a very, very small gas as well, which has a tendency to work it's way even through metal containers, making them brittle in the process. In a nutshell, it's difficult to store. Even if you overcome that with tanks on cars or buildings, what are you going to do for smaller devices like lawnmowers or whatnot? If you run out of gas on the road, you won't be able to just walk to the nearest station to fill up a tank.

The fact is, for practical purposes, gases are difficult fuels, even relatively easy ones like LPNG. We need a liquid alternative that we can make in a renewable fashion, even if it doesn't trigger as many buzzwords. Methanol would be ideal for most purposes. Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide. That produces water and nitrogen as a byproduct.

Re:Liquid fuels are far more practical

[FastT]

Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide

Um, we may have to rethink this idea. Making copious amounts of nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) easily and cheaply accessible to reckless teenage drivers doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Re:Liquid fuels are far more practical

[cryptochrome]

As one who has driven through New Jersey, let me say that I find it an INCREDIBLE pain to have to wait in my car for some slow-ass pump jockey to fill my tank and process my bill, and then have to wonder whether I'm supposed to tip or not. I'm perfectly capable of filling my tank myself, and faster too, thank you very much.

Energy density

[Michael Woodhams]

"Pound for pound, hydrogen packs more chemical energy than any other known fuel."

But litre for litre, it is lousy. I've seen pictures of designs for (liquid) hydrogen fueled jetliners - they are very significantly larger to contain the fuel.

This is one of the reasons people are so interested in 'reforming' methane or methanol to form the hydrogen on the spot - they are so much easier to store compactly. (This does, however, mean you now need much more *weight* for your energy.)

Re:Energy density

[NonSequor]

The answer is simple. Compress the hydrogen into its metallic form.

Re:Energy density

[Dyolf Knip]

Wouldn't help much. When it crystallizes at 14 K its density is 0.088 g/cm^3. Compare that to the liquid density of 0.07 g/cm^3 and you see its not much of an improvement. Gasoline, by comparison, is around 700 g/cm^3.

This is about the single most limiting factor in hydrogen powered vehicles. There are people working on tricks to store hydrogen at greater densities, but I don't know if any of them are close or whatever. Storing it as a liquid isn't a good anwer anyway, it takes wayyyy to much power to do it. Several times what you'd get by burning it, in fact.

Re:Energy density

[WolfWithoutAClause]

As I understand it, you can stuff it into a metal cylinder, but then the cylinders weighs lots. There's no point in compressing the gas down further if it adds hundreds of kilograms to the vehicle- performance suffers.

Or you can stuff it, cold fusion style, into a palladium catalyst. However, then the catalyst weighs a lot too.

Basically hydrogen turns out to be really bulky and/or heavy.

If you want to know how big- look at the space shuttle. If it wasn't for the fact they use hydrogen- that entire external tank would be gone and the space shuttle would be only slightly bigger.

Re:Energy density

[gorilla]

If you stuff it into a metal cylinder then you're going to have a much lower density than either the liquid or the solid.

Re:Energy density

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It's very unlikely indeed to ever be practical to carry liquid hydrogen around in a car; it boils way to easily for one thing. The practical issues with liquid hydrogen are immense. It's a deeply cryogenic fuel, it has large thermal expansion characteristics, it tends to freeze water (sticking valves!) and condense oxygen from the air (boom!). Hydrogen makes a very small molecule- it escapes from tanks without there being anything resembling a hole.

Solid hydrogen? Yeah right ;-)

Hydrogen is not an energy source

[uncadonna]

Hydrogen is a clean fuel, in that it can be burned without harmful emissions. Because water is plentiful, hydrogen is also a sort of a battery. Electrical current can be used to separate it from water molecules, and some of this energy can be recovered in fuel cells.

Hydrogen extracted from fossil fuels necessarily produces less energy than the raw fuels themselves. Hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis is an energy sink.

Hydrogen may be extracted from water by using solar energy. That is solar energy, not hydrogen energy.

Whether hydrogen is a suitable fuel for vehicles depends on whether the energy costs are worth the emissions benefits. If so, this will make energy more scarce, because of the inefficiencies of converting energy in some other form into the energy of electrolysis.

Whether electrolysis of water is the right method for storage of solar energy depends on the comparative costs, risks and benefits of alternative storage technologies.

In neither case is hydrogen competing with fossil fuels as an energy source. It is competing with fossil fuels and batteries and flywheels and passive heating media as an energu storage system in both cases.

There are no significant pools of free hydrogen on the planet that can be used as an energy source.

Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It may have its uses as the former. Proposing it as a replacement for fossil or nuclear energy is complete nonsense.

All the above should be fully understood by anyone trying to venture an opinion on this subject.

Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who misses this point is one of the following: 1) not seriously interested in the subject 2) incompetent or 3) dishonest.

Re:Hydrogen is not an energy source

[markmoss]

Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It's also an energy _shipment_ strategy. You can put H2 in a pipeline and ship it far further than is practical for electricity. This is important because rooftop solar panels in the southwest could probably supply the USA's non-mobile energy needs, but more than half of the energy consumption is over 1,000 miles away.

Re:Hydrogen is not an energy source

[gorilla]

You can put H2 in a pipeline and ship it far further than is practical for electricity.

We can ship electricity all the way from Quebec to California if we want. The only reason we don't is that there isn't any need to ship power that far, when there are places with excess power inbetween. However if it proved neccessary, it would happen, and with less losses than pumping gases around.

Hydrogen is like bad software

[NewtonsLaw]

I love the way people talk about the "pure, clean" nature of hydrogen as a fuel.

Unfortunately the reality is that it has a long list of problems associated with it -- and a number of them are environmental.

As others have pointed out -- it's a fuel with a very low energy density (by volume), it's very difficult/expensive to store, and most of it is produced by "dirty" methods such as the cracking of hydrocarbons which come from -- you guessed it -- oil!

In short, hydrogen is a fuel for the academics amongst us -- those who find the easiest way to deal with reality is to ignore it.

You know -- these are the kind of people who write computer software that does no error-checking on its input data. When such a program crashes, the response tends to be "well don't enter bad data then."

Unfortunately, if we want to write software for the general public -- or in this case if we want to create a practical, clean fuel, then reality can't be dismissed.

We've got a long way to go before hydrogen becomes everything it's cracked up to be.

By the way, what ever happened to those breakthroughs in solar-cell technology that were going to bring us ultra-low cost energy from the sun?

Bah... humbug... I think I'll just go and burn a few more gallons of dinosaur-extract in my pulsejet :-)

Hydrogen for free

[CaptainCarrot]

I work for Lockheed Martin [lockheedmartin.com]. Many years before the merger that created this company, when I worked for what was then called Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., there was a series of articles in the company rag talking about a technology we were developing that generated electricity from the temperature differential between shallow and deep seawater. This was back in the early 1980's. The process is called OTEC for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and there's a a bit of information about it [nelha.org] available online.

Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It would be a whole hell of a lot cleaner than oil rigs on offshore platforms, and could in fact be set up on oil platforms in tropical regions (like the Gulf of Mexico) that no longer produce enough crude oil to be profitable, or that must be shut down over environmental concerns. OTEC plants are very clean, very safe, and fairly inexpensive to run. They could be a viable method for producing hydrogen almost for free.

Re:Hydrogen for free

[btellier]

This is an excellent idea, just as solar [slashdot.org] power was or wind power, but can someone please tell us why this didn't work?

When a company comes out with a new plan to solve the world's energy problems the rational person always asks "So why hasn't it been done?". Barring OPEC conspriracy theorists I refuse to believe that if this was valid it wouldn't have been done already. In fact, if it were possible the first people to jump on the bandwagon would be the people who already have the oil rigs in place.. i.e. the oil companies themselves.

Re:Hydrogen for free

[CaptainCarrot]

OTEC is fairly limited as an electrical generation plant, which is what it was originally conceived as, because it really needs to be situated in tropical waters to work well. There's an experimental plant off the coast of Hawaii, which admittedly doesn't produce any net power largely because it's made from parts designed for other purposes and so operates suboptimally. (Its primary purpose right now is to validate a particular design of heat exchanger.) But the location requirements imposes insuperable tramsmission obstacles. It's just not practical to transmit the electricity from tropical oceans to the industrialized countries that need the power.

Hydrogen doesn't have that limitation, but it's also not now a mainstream power source. If proton exchange membrane fuel cells come into common use, that will undoubtedly change. But as things are, it's just not profitable enough to make it worth the capital investment.

Power & Current Alternatives

[Neutron_F1uX]

Why is everyone so affraid of Nuclear power? Pound for pound, Nuclear Energy is far cleaner and environmentally friendly then coal power plants, that's been proven already. The chances of a catastrophic reactor melt down are not very likely, as long as they are properly maintained and staffed. While I'm all for new forms of energy, we are currently not even using what is within our grasps. How can we expect power companies, who have a lot of money sunk into their current operations, to change their way of thinking? I doubt they see it as a viable thought to try these things out when they may flop. I have little faith that anything such as this article describes will be used, when we are not even using Nuclear Energy to what it could be. Look at the Navy, they have tons of nuclear reactors on their ships. Have there been any indicents with them? Not that we know of, and it'd be hard to hide something like that. Of course, those are smaller reactors, but none the less, it just proves the government knows what is going on. They are using the technology we already have, while the power companies are still stuck back a 100 years ago.

Re:Hard to Hide? Re:Power & Current Alternativ

[leucadiadude]

I think you are ignoring the fact that we have a very aggressive free press here, especially concerning words like, "nuclear accident", "coverup", or "radiation release". You can be sure if something happened, our leftist anti-nuclear media would be all over it.

Utopia is not economical

[TACD]

I'm not knowledgeable about all of the technical stuff being said here (e.g. "you can never get more energy out of hydrogen than you put in"). However, I do know that this is unlikely to become a reality until it is also a necessity; simply because it isn't profitable.

It would be nice to think that people would wise up and convert before all of the fossil fuels are gone, but we know it won't happen until someone either takes out OPEC or manages to invent a hydrogen engine more efficient (and crucially, more profitable) than a petrol engine.

Money makes the world go round. Not common sense. :-(

Never understood

[MisterPo]

When I was studying engineering, I never understood why people folk tried to experiment with alternative forms of fuel such as wind, solar and my personal favourite biomass :)

Take out the benefit of them being limitless, and you are not left with a lot, possibly their only other strength is that a lot of these systems can be installed in remote places.

Their problem is that the technology behind them is so underveloped and so implementing any systems is not only initially very expensive, but also costly to maintain. For what you put in, you normally get *very* little out.

What always got me was that the amount of heat billowing out of the chimney tops of convential electrical power stations is tremendous. I have yet to see any country implement a widescale plan to harnass some of that power. It would be no trouble to redirect that steam and heat up more steam for the turbines, or to heat up water for local community. And of coure the wasted heat energy begs the question of just how much they power stations are in the first place.

Regards,

Po

Storage Systems

[SpeedBump0619]

The primary problem with Hydrogen as a fuel source is not generation (which can be accomplished in large facilities dedicated to the task), but rather in safe, efficient delivery.

One of the most interesting systems I have seen recently is the Powerballs [powerball.net] system. It does appear to be a well considered, functional, and (most importantly) *available* system. I don't think this is anything (scientifically) extraordinary, but it is available now.

Hopefully the site will take a slashdotting, they deserve a little publicity, and I'd like to see what others think of the basic idea...I'm not enough of a chemist to understand the efficiency or practicality of their method.

Patent pending

[Maskirovka]

Hydrogen has been around an awfully long time. Doesn't at least one mega-corp have it patented?

For those who hate FRAMES:

[aka-ed]

Use this story link. [discover.com] less ads, less /.effect...

Will cheaper fuel eliminate our need for Oil?

[T. Will S. Idea]

A quote from the article:

Imagine a world where ...
"OPEC is out of business because the price of oil has fallen to five dollars a barrel,"

Currently the vast majority of commodity chemicals are made from crude oil. That means most everything you own, the synthetic fibers in that cotton blend shirt, the plastic in your keyboard, the tires on your car, down to the aspirin that you take after staring at the computer screen all night; all of it is made from oil.

If oil prices dropped to $5 a barrel, the chemical companies would still crack the oil to get at the compounds that they are interested in, and we would be left with a lot of gasoline. What would we do with that? Burn it? Give it away?

This is why oil is such an integral part of our world. Finding a cheap alternative fuel source is only part of the solution.

Real solutions

[jdstahl]

Until energy consumers start demanding clean energy (both in the marketplace, and through the political process), we'll never make the transition to a sustainable energy system. One organization that is working to build both real markets and realistic policies for clean energy here in the Pacific Northwest is Climate Solutions [climatesolutions.org]. Worth checking out... these folks are trying to take the pie-in-the-sky that Lovins et al. discuss and make it real on the ground.

Very hazy about where the hydrogen comes from

[Animats]

Most currently produced hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels, like natural gas. And extracting hydrogen from natural gas, then burning the hydrogen, is far less efficient than just burning the natural gas. So that doesn't help.

A pilot plant for extracting hydrogen by electrolysis, driven by solar cells [ucr.edu] was built in Riverside, California in the early 1990s. Overall efficiency was 4.7%, which isn't too good.

There are occasional lab reports of better schemes for separating hydrogen [sciencenews.org], but so far none of them work in production. The U.S. Department of Energy funds work in this area, but no breakthroughs yet.

This isn't a new idea. It's an old one with lousy performance.

Re:Very hazy about where the hydrogen comes from

[Alpha State]

A pilot plant for extracting hydrogen by electrolysis, driven by solar cells [ucr.edu] was built in Riverside, California in the early 1990s. Overall efficiency was 4.7%, which isn't too good.

Doesn't sound too good until you realise that the input energy is free. As typical solar cells have an efficiency of around 15% (from memory), that make the rest of this plant about 30% efficient, not good but not terrible compared to other energy conversions.

The real question is how much money, resources and most importantly energy is needed to built and maintain the plant. This scheme couldn't fuel our current road system without consuming huge resources, but it isn't useless as a starting point. Quoting meaningless numbers which make it look like crap doesn't help anyone, I don't see why they use this as the main result in their report.

Natural Capitalism

[Chris Hanson]

Amory Lovins, along with Paul Hawken and Hunter Lovins, wrote a book a couple years ago called Natural Capitalism [natcap.org]. Read it. It'll change the way you think about renewable energy and efficiency.

The central thesis of the book is that while getting incremental improvements in resource/energy efficiency may be expensive, radical improvement that comes from leveraging synergies within a system can often be more cost-effective than the status quo. Companies and individuals who realize this will profit significantly in the 21st century.

Read the book. Even if you disagree with it, you'll learn a lot about systems thinking and optimization. And maybe even wind up saving a few bucks (and a few barrels) down the line.

-- Chris

Popcorn airbags

[Ukab the Great]

On saturday night live many years ago, they had a "commercial" for airbags that inflated with popcorn. These would actually be quite useful if your hydrogen powered car slams into an oil truck.

Industrial Hemp

[lazytiger]

...is an answer to virtually all energy problems. I'm potentially starting a completely off-topic and/or flame-inducing thread here, but man, this is something that should be discussed.

It would probably make most people downright mad to know the potential uses of industrial hemp and why it's illegal. Obviously the main reason (and the one you'll hear from any government source) is that it's marijuana, and we all know how "bad" pot is for our health. I'm going to try really hard though to stay away from the legalization of marijuana, because it is a separate issue from industrial hemp.

For starters, most people are unaware of that last statement, so I'll repeat it: INDUSTRIAL HEMP IS NOT MARIJUANA. It contains very low levels of THC, so low that you may as well smoke paper (except plain white paper is potentially toxic... we'll get to that later). Now, they are from the same family of plants, cannabis, but they are indeed different plants. Therefore, it is entirely possible to grow industrial hemp without producing marijuana. Most people (and senators/representatives) don't seem to realize that, or are concerned that THC-producing hemp could be grown in or around industrial hemp. The validity of that argument is up for grabs.

But let's get to the point here, which is energy. What can hemp do? Here's a quick synopsis:

ANYTHING MADE FROM WOOD OR OIL CAN BE MADE FROM HEMP

Hemp biomass can be converted into gasoline more efficiently than fossil fuels (coal, oil) and without sulfur or acid rain as byproducts. Hemp fiberboard is stronger than wood, hemp houses are as strong as cement houses and better insulated. Plastic, rayon, and cellophane made from hemp are biodegradeable. Paper uses nearly half the world's timber. Hemp produces FOUR TIMES the amount of paper per acre as trees, and grows in all climates of the US. Hemp paper lasts about 1500 years. Cotton requires more pesticides than any other agricultural product. Hemp grows without pesticides and herbicides, and is much stronger than cotton cloth.

We're only touching the tip of the iceberg here. The point is that people simply don't realize what hemp can do, because the government's blackballing job has been so effective. I'm hoping to at least enlighten a few /. readers, and hopefully spurring them to check out some websites that I'll list below and spread the word.

Here's the short version of why hemp is illegal:

-Major corporations such as DuPont, Monsanto, Dow, ExxonMobil, Lilly, etc. stand to lose MILLIONS, if not billions, of dollars if hemp were allowed to be used to its potential.

-It is simply TOO EASY TO GROW. Sounds absurd, right? It is. Hemp grows in virtually any environment with virtually no need for chemicals. In short, any Tom, Dick or Harry could become a hemp farmer. The government does not like not having absolute control over what is grown. Tobacco seeds, for instance, are carefully controlled AND TAXED by the US government. They would have a very, very tough time trying to control and tax hemp growers.

I'm really tempted to dive into the THC-friendly portion of this debate. :) But I don't want to drone on or piss anyone off.

Whether or not you support legal use of marijuana should have no effect on your support of legal hemp cultivation. Please keep that in mind. They are completely separate issues.

Please continue your learning at this most excellent website:

http://www.jackherer.com/

It has a definite slant towards pro-marijuna and hemp. But even if you think the website is biased, you can't deny the pure volume of bullshit that we're fed about the marijuana/hemp issue.

Hemp SHOULD BE one of the main alternative energies of the future.

Re:Industrial Hemp

[IronChef]

That site is nutty. Can you provide a link to a site with hemp facts that doesn't go on about the wacky tobaccy? I just want the facts on the one part, not the other.

I think that the crossover between the industrial hemp and pothead crowd is killing your crusade as well as any gov't conspiracy. :)

Not really a fuel.

[squaretorus]

Hydrogen is not really a fuel as such, in the way that Oil, Gas or Wood are fuels - because you have to use some other fuel to produce it.

Hydrogen is best thought of as a way to transport energy to places where you can't make it on the spot efficiently, or in sufficient quantities.

For example, the average suburban house has enough sunlight and wind to cater for all its energy needs. If we make solar and wind capture more efficient, every garage could have a small 'charger' cracking Hydrogen and storing it for the car.

A similar idea is being researched for Mars projects (using CO and O2, but the same principle). This allows an ongoing process (powered by the sun for the martian experiment) to generate useful amounts of transportable 'fuel'.

By turning the energy model on its head, away from the current 'few big power stations' model to 'millions of tiny power stations' model we not only get better efficiency but less polluting powerstations because they are in EVERYONES back yard.

Hydrogen has a role to play, so might CO. But this is no fuel of the future - the fuel of the future is the sun and the wind.

Re:Not really a fuel.

[trongey]

>Hydrogen is not really a fuel as such, in the way that Oil, Gas or Wood are fuels - because you have to use some other fuel to produce it.

So are you suggesting that oil, gas, and wood just jump out of the ground and walk themselves to the nearest point of consumption?

Hydroelectricity - The not so green option

[RuntimeError]

There are loads of places outthere in the world where hydroelectricty is the prime source of energy. For a long time, it has been touted as the most green method of producing electricity.

This is, indeed, a vile lie. Hydroelectricity, which involves building huge dams to collect water in reservoirs, has a huge detrimental impact on the environment. Thousands of river based eco-systems have been devastated because of hydroelectricity plants.

Everytime time a huge dam is built, millions of local people are displaced. Unfortunately, many of the so-called developing nations have embraced hydroelectricity, and often in these countries, these displaced people are left destitute. While the rich folk in rural areas get all the energy they need, the poorer displaced people lose their lively hoods.

I totally agree that it is high time that we moved away from burning fossil fuels to harness energy, but there is no point in finding alternatives that are equally, or as in this case even more, environmentally hazardous.

Windmills to make hydrogen

[bubblegoose]

USNEWS has a good article here:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/011112/biztec h/ 12energy.htm on this subject.

One of the things the article says is that Wind power is becoming more efficient, the only problem is storing the power created at night when power demand is low. It goes on to say that at night the windmills could go into hydrogen creating mode.
They think fuel cells are about a decade away from being cheap enough to replace internal combustion and Shell is already looking into establishing an infrastructure for hydrogen.

Comparing energy sources

[Bikku]

So when we boil down this analysis of H vs other energy sources, what do we get?

Some axioms:

- There are no energy sources, just temporary energy storage forms. The only true energy source on earth is sunlight.

- Every use of energy creates some form of "pollution" (1st law of thermodynamics). What differs is how much, how unpleasant it is for humans, at where it is created. (eg, electric cars still create air pollution, but it is moved back to the generating station, instead of the car tailpipe)

- Every conversion of energy from one form to another is lossy (3rd law of thermo). And constitutes a "use" of energy, which creates "pollution".

So, the real questions about comparing energy sources amount to these criteria:

- What does it cost us to find and access the stored energy?

- How easy/cheap is it to convert the stored energy into a useful form (eg, rotational kinetic energy of a car driveshaft)?

- How efficient is that conversion? How much of the sourced energy is lost as general thermal radiation (ie, friciton losses, i^2r transmission line losses, etc)

- Doing so creates what form of pollution, in what amounts, and at what locations?

- How politically acceptable is that particular pollution arrangement? Who benefits, who suffers?

Watch those examples.

[Syberghost]

The stuff that turns oil into a butter-like substance that is far, far worse for your arteries than butter.

The stuff that made the Hindenburg burst into flames.

The stuff that combines with carbon to make greenhouse gases that will supposedly plunge us all into Venus-like hell.

The stuff that sent the space shuttle Challenger to a watery grave.

People are scared of Hydrogen. We need better examples, the ones you used are linked in people's minds with bad events.

Last month's Diane Rehm show on this topic....

[ClarkEvans]

On Wed, Oct 17 the Diane Rehm [wamu.org] show had a wonderful talk [wamu.org] on this very subject. If you listen to the show, make sure to pledge [yahoo.com] as hosting real audio archives cost a good deal of cash. Details about the show...

Wednesday, October 17, 2001 10:00 - War on Terrorism and U.S. Energy Policy
A panel talks about how the war against terrorism could affect U.S. imports of oil from OPEC nations - which account for almost half of our imported oil - and how domestic energy policy and the economy might be affected.
Phil Verleger, California-based energy economist
Peter VanDoren, editor of Regulation magazine for the CATO Institute
Charli Coon, Heritage Foundation

For more information about ANWR, check out the U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-0040-98: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum Assessment, 1998 [usgs.gov]

Re:Something like this in Aus

[cryptochrome]

Lots of folks have made cars that run off vegetable oil. It's not too different from diesel fuel (hence the term "biodiesel"). It's not a very efficient method of energy production at all, though.

Re:Something like this in Aus

[j-beda]

GeDid you have to change your car at all, or should it work with normal engines without modification ?

There are various schemes using plant oils to power engines, moslty diesel engines. Some of them are as simple as mixing it in with the regular diesel gas, which requires basically no modification, but I think the engine doesn't like to start with this mixture, so you might want to be able to switch to a pure source for starting.

The best method does some chemical magic on the oil to make it into biodiesel which can be run in a basically unmodified engine. As with most fuel conversions however, there is some concern about various plastic hoses which might react chemically with the new feul - but this seems to be a minor concern.

For all the details, and a fun read, get thee hence to veggievan.org [veggievan.org]. And almost no discussion of alternative energy would be complete without a link to Home Power Magazine [homepower.com] - download the most recent issue.

Re:fuel cell

[Mandelbrute]

isnt this just about fuel cells?

Yes, you can have a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell and use it to generate electricity.

Re:Cows and Corn

[T. Will S. Idea]

Or better yet, start out converting animal waste to Methane and once you've perfected that technology move on to converting human waste. Human waste is tougher to do because it is a lot less uniform (think toilet paper, discarded condoms and all that other stuff tat makes it's way into human waste).

When I was doing my undergrad work, this was my dream. I brought it up with some microbiology professors who pointed out many problems in the real world which prevented this from becoming a reality.

Arguments I've heard against this.

1. The methane produced is so contaminated with sulfur containing compounds that you can't legally burn the stuff even after scrubbing the exhaust.
2. Small scale power generation is not really a viable business. I think that this has changed somewhat with the introduction of mechanisms for selling power back to the grid.
3. The equipment costs so much that the return on capitol would be too low to attract investors.
4. Fluctuating energy markets make it tough for small time producers to stay in business over the long haul

Re:Energy Density.

[j-beda]

Energy Density. Look it up. The whole point of using gasoline is that it stores so much energy per unit weight/volume. Hydrogen fuel cells could work, but just to store energy, there are many better alternatives as far as energy density is concerned.

I thought that Hydrogen had the highest energy density, many times that of gasoline... why did I think that?

Pound for pound, hydrogen packs more chemical energy than any other known fuel. Hydrogen also fits the arc of history: From firewood to coal to oil to gasoline to methane, the world's fuels of choice have become increasingly decarbonized. Carbon adds bulk and smoke without adding energy. Hydrogen, the only carbon-free combustible fuel, seems the logical omega point.

Oh yeah, I remember - because it said so in the article!

Sure there are difficulties with transportation and storage of hydrogen, but there are similar issues with gasoline and natural gas and we seem to cope with them relatively easily.

Re:Energy Density.

[Dyolf Knip]

Energy Density. Look it up. The whole point of using gasoline is that it stores so much energy per unit weight/volume. Hydrogen fuel cells could work, but just to store energy, there are many better alternatives as far as energy density is concerned.

I thought that Hydrogen had the highest energy density, many times that of gasoline... why did I think that?

Because you're right? I dunno if it's the highest, but it's certainly higher than gasoline. MJ/kg: H2 = 141.90, Gasoline = 47.27. The catch is that even as a liquid, H2 can't be as dense as gas. At best, it's 1/10. So by weight, it's much better, but by volume it's only a third as good.

Sure there are difficulties with transportation and storage of hydrogen, but there are similar issues with gasoline and natural gas and we seem to cope with them relatively easily.

Well sure. Oil is available in only a few places and must be refined and then shipped out to the world. H2 can be made from water, which is slightly more ubiquitous. Currently, H2 is more expensive but that would change with millions of new customers.

Re:Energy Density.

[j-beda]

Energy density is usually stated in energy per mass, but even using energy per volume, hydrogen is better than gasoline when measured at typical storage pressures.

Re:Public Views on Safety

[Waffle Iron]

You have to remember that this is the same public that prefers coal fired power plants to nuclear plants...

Ummm... with recent events leading to talk of outfitting nuclear plants with antiaircraft defense systems, I think the public may have been right on this one.

Re:Liquid or compressed hydrogen?

[IronChef]

I found a reference to a liquid gas tank explosion in Cleveland 1944, killing 130. 1903 sounds too early for that anyway... but post if you have a link. Sounds interesting.

Re:There's another problem with Hydrogen...

[Junks Jerzey]

...but wouldn't it.. explode?

Oh, _that's_ why we haven't been using gasoline and natural gas for energy!