Hydrogen Won't Save Our Economy 723
anaesthetica writes "Physorg.com is featuring a story asserting that hydrogen is economically infeasible as a replacement for our current energy sources. The premise is that isolating and converting hydrogen into a usable energy source takes up a great deal of energy to begin with, and that subsequently converting that hydrogen fuel into usable energy results in an overall efficiency of only about 25%. Apparently, the increasing scarcity of water is going to make hydrogen too costly and just as politicized as oil." From the article: "[Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel's] overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense. The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."
umm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydrogen requires a complete redesign of the sales channel. Alcohol doesn't.
Hydrogen requires a large amount of electricity to generate. Alcohol doesn't.
Hydrogen requires a large amount of electricity for cooling during transport. Alcohol doesn't.
Just look at the real technical values of the BMW showcase. You'll see that hydrogen makes little sense as a means of energy transport and storage.
FRAUD Alert? (Score:5, Insightful)
FRAUD??? It's true that making hydrogen is not an efficient way to store energy for use later. However, this quote is partly nonsense: "... the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare..." Water is not rare, and is could never be a problem with the production of hydrogen. I doubt that a reputable publication would print nonsense like that.
Not only is something very wrong with the article, but something is not right with the article's source, Physorg.org. Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom - See who's pumping cash by making oil for $13.21. And selling for $59. And another: Free Top Energy Profits - 5 Triple-Digit Investment Gains in Today's Alternative Energy Boom." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.
This article on the same web site seems like the beginning of fraud to me: A Printer that Delivers 1,000 Pages a Minute? [physorg.com]. There is NO printer. There is only a poorly edited article in the online (not peer-reviewed, apparently) edition of Applied Physics Letters. The idea is called JeTrix (Jet Tricks) by the supposed developers. The idea is that a printhead that covers the whole sheet of paper can print faster than one that is small.
Recently, Slashdot has been carrying discussions of "scientific breakthroughs" that are in actuality attempts to get money from investors. The Slashdot articles are, in reality, press releases for extremely poor investment "opportunities". Is a Slashdot editor taking money to run these?
Re:FRAUD Alert? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FRAUD Alert? (Score:4, Interesting)
So by your logic its too hard to distribute clean water and too hard to extract "industrtial levels" of hydrogen from probes in the middle of the ocean, so what, just die when the oil runs out? Gee thanks, brilliant. Got any other ideas?
Re:FRAUD Alert? (Score:4, Informative)
If you're concerned about putting a little metal into the oceans, perhaps floating oil rigs, submarines, torpedoes, and deep mineral mine runoff should be targets before anodes and cathodes on electrolysis equipment. The oil and agricultural chemicals we're putting in the water now are pretty bad, too. If your alternative fuel is alcohol, then count on more agricultural chemicals allegedly causing infertility, learning disorders, and other health problems downstream.
If we make hydrogen from seawater, then burn the hydrogen, then we're making clean, desalinated water. That can be used for drinking water, irrigation, or whatever. If it's released into the atmosphere, it'll become clouds and rain -- at a faster rate than through natural evaporation. As for how we use the hydrogen once we have it in sufficient quantities, sustainable hydrogen fusion in traditional local and regional centralized power plants may be a future option.
Nuclear fusion has already been used for thousands of years to desalinate seawater for irrigation -- it's called the water cycle.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh... So we can't use petroleum because it raises the temperature of the earth. We can't use water because some people don't have water. It's posts like this that really seem to confirm to me that "environm
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And the whole point of a hydrogen carrier for energy is that there is no lack whatsoever of energy; there's a lack of energy where it's useful and an overabundance of energy where it isnt.
Coincidentally, water has the exact same problem; there's a whole bunch of it where you dont particularly need it and not enough where you do.
So put water pipeline from the atlantic to the middle of sahara, drive hydrogen
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not just use sea water? Electrolysis of sea water should produce reasonable clean hydrogen, if I recall correctly, and fresh, truly clean water is not very suited without additives.
Not sure about the biological means of producing hydrogen.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bu oil vapor is. Why do you think oil companies go to such great lengths to ensure that no ignition sources are around? Or as to why air is flushed from commercial tanks and replaced with nitrogen?
And I really want to see you execute your "drop a match and the pool of gasoline will extinguish it theory". Perhaps with you standing in the pool, since you're so sure of your point? But you do mention the vapors, and it's those that will ignite before the falling match even
Re:Why do you need potable water? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but if you have enough nuclear power to run the desalination plants to make fresh water and then also produce hydrogen.
The key to hydrogen is nuclear power. And
If the ads are "by Google" ... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they are using Google to sell ads they don't control the ads. Their site relates to energy issues, so ads for energy-related scams will match in the placement algorithms.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount of Fresh water needed is a lot less for energy than for drinking.
So even if it is inefficient, I seriously doubt that we don't have enough Volume -- this is pretty silly on its face. Can't you even use Salt Water?
I'll admit that I already think that a Hyrdogen fuel system is NOT where we should be going right now -- it's many years away and sort of a Red Herring.
And I don't think that Electrolysis is
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Hydrogen requires a large amount of nearly-free electricity to generate.
3) Hydrogen requires no transport, and no cooling during storage.
A hydrogen fuel station could be built with various electric generation systems on-site to generate hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for medical purposes, and even feed unneeded electricity back into the grid. Most gas stations in the USA (I don't know about other parts of the world, but I assume they're similar
Re:House of Cards (Score:5, Informative)
Alcohols also need to be made, although there is at least a slight energy gain in the process (stored solar energy in the plants you ferment). Converting a perfectly viable fuel like Alcohol into hydrogen is pointless: You lose energy in the conversion and you still release the carbon into the atmosphere.
You are correct in saying that hydrogen is rarely produced by electrolysis due to energy consumption. Do you know how it's really made? Reforming natural gas - a fossil fuel! Congratulations, you've managed to shift our dependence on fossil fuels from crude oil to natural gas (which is even more scarce) while reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
Metal hydride storage uses some pretty expensive, toxic and dangerous materials and still does not achieve the hydrogen storage density of more common and safer-to-handle fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel.
It's a trifecta of failure.
=Smidge=
Re:House of Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
Alcohol is one answer, but it's not exactly perfect either.
Re:Solar Panels Foating on the Ocean (Score:3, Funny)
So basically, you're suggesting taking the energy that the sun currently transfers into the oceans? Because.... the ocean doesn't really need that heat energy anyway, and it couldn't possibly be environmentally catastrophic if done on a massive scale? No thanks. Let's stick to nuclear.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The earth has a surface area of around 510 million square km.
We'd preferentially want to use equatorial waters, which limit you to about 200 million square km, but that's still only using about 1% of the tota
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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That's what I keep telling my friend Mr. Jack Daniels.
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The carbon you are releasing is carbon that has already been removed from the atmosphere. It's called 'Carbon-nuetral' for a reason.
reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE c
Re:House of Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course this is correct. I'm a huge supporter of biofuels as a renewable energy source (obviously) and I think carbon neutrality is a major selling point. However it's still wrong to say that Hydrogen is a carbon-free energy system when it's refined from a hydrocarbon source - especially a fossil fuel.
Reducing energy yield, yes. Reducing efficiency, no. Hydrogen/electric cars are significantly more efficient than gas ICE cars. So while you have less energy to use when you put the fuel in the vehicle, you use less energy to get the same output from the vehicle using hydrogen.
While burning hydrogen may be slightly more efficient, the energy density is significantly lower resulting in more fuel being burned for the same output. In the end, pound-for-pound, Hydrogen seems to offer no significant advantage.
When you consider the requirements to manufacture and store the Hydrogen, I challenge that the efficiency from energy source to point of use is actually very poor.
People love to shoot down alternative fuels because they aren't able to replace ALL of the vehicles on the road.
Hydrogen is not an alternative fuel. That's the problem. So far, whatever source of energy you're using to make the hydrogen - electricity, natural gas, etc. - can be better used directly instead of pissing away half of it using hydrogen as an intermediate.
I completely agree that there is no single solution, but I do not agree that pure Hydrogen as a primary link in the energy flow is ever going to work. Biofuels are a much safer bet, being renewable, carbon-neutral, 100% compatible with existing infrastructure and closer to the energy source.
=Smidge=
Re:House of Cards (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be missing the two fundamental points of a hydrogen economy.
1) A hydrogen economy is not bound to a specific liquid fuel. Ultimately, a hydrogen economy is an electric one. Not many are predicting "peak electricity" any time soon.
2) A hydrogen economy is very efficient. That is, to say, electric vehicles (which is what hydrogen-fuelled vehicles are) can easily recover energy, electric engines are very efficient, fuel cells are up to ~70% efficient, electrolysis of water is ~90% efficient, etc.
Of course, in the mean time, until thermolysis of water (say, from nuclear power) or farmed hydrogen (say, from genetically engineered bacteria) is available, producing the hydrogen is a somewhat wasteful stage that's reliant on natural gas. Only "somewhat", however. Natural gas reforming produces H2 and CO. CO can be burned for heat. As a result, apart from incomplete combustion, all of the energy of the natural gas either goes to H2 or heat. Heat can be used to do work. Indirectly (subject to carnot cycle losses), it can generate power. More usefully, however, is it can heat processes that need heat inputs -- industry or even home water/house heating. In such a case, you only "lose" a tiny amount of the natural gas's energy.
Of course, even if you consider all of non-H2 energy wasted, as this article does, you're left with the following possibilities:
1) 30% efficiency on your typical ICE gasoline engine.
OR
2) 25% efficiency on your typical natural-gas derrived hydrogen engine, which is automatically a "hybrid" and can thus save power by regenerative braking. And, since it uses natural gas for the hydrogen, which is currently more available than oil, it reduces stress on the oil market. If natural gas prices rise too much, pressure on natural gas markets can be allieviated by switching from natural gas power plants to coal/nuclear (as happened with the oil-driven power plants in the 70s).
Is the second option really that bad -- present day? Especially with some of the new high-density hydrogen storage systems hitting the market? I think not.
As an aside, I ran into an interesting proposal for hydrogen storage that costs 1/3 as much as conventional storage tanks: commercial-scale wind turbines. They're huge hollow shafts. The extra cost to make the turbine able to hold hydrogen is something like 85k$, and an equivalent-sized tank costs something like 250k$.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Centralized energy generation is usually cleaner and more efficient
2) The price of silicone limits the adaptation of building integrated solar arrays (solar shingles for instance)
3) Distributed electricity generation will not likely replace the need for centralized energy generation, but it can reduce the need for MORE centralized energy generation as demand grows.
There have since
sun and wind (Score:5, Insightful)
but even this will be useless if we don't put serious brain power into improving the eficiency of our gadgets/cars/homes/etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
sun and wind power are, IMHO, the alternative to oil and coal
Wind won't work outside of a very few areas that have the kinds of sustained winds to make it workable. In general, it just takes up too much physical space for the energy it generates.
Solar is potential workable, but not with single-crystal silicon wafers. Those actually require quite a bit of energy to create, and take (I believe) over a year to "pay back" that energy. Recent research into nanocrystalline materials has more potential there
Re:sun and wind (Score:4, Insightful)
Why impose additional constraints on new solutions to old problems? Hydroelectric power also won't work outside a very few areas where there is enough water and elevation difference, coal thermoelectric plants are impractical outside areas where you can strip mine coal, nuclear fission power plant is not feasible where you don't have uranium available (or water for cooling for that matter, or where it is IMBY). All this "downsides" didn't stop us from building and using each one of them. Why should we now suddenly make such an exception for wind power plants only?
Ever heard of Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant and Nikola Tesla? Back then, the guy demonstrated that energy can be harvested in remote locations, then conducted to areas of deployment.
Unrelated to that, but similar in paradigmatic sense, note that petroleum is used throughout the world, even though it is obtained only from handful of regions of the planet.
So, the only thing that actually matters for whichever energy production is: is it doable anywhere?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why impose additional constraints on new solutions to old problems? Hydroelectric power also won't work outside a very few areas where there is enough water and elevation difference, coal thermoelectric plants are impractical outside areas where you can strip mine coal, nuclear fission power plant is not feasible where you don't have uranium available (or water for cooling for that matter, or where it is IMBY). All this "downsides" didn't stop us from building and using each one of them. Why should we now suddenly make such an exception for wind power plants only?
It's not simply pessimism, it's basic freakin' physics. 12 million cubic feet of water falling from 170 feet is a concentrated energy source. Coal, at 24 megajoules per kilogram, is a concentrated energy source. Uranium, at 560 gigajoules per kilogram, is a very concentrated energy source. Wind isn't even in the same class. It's not transportable, and it's highly dilute. There is no super-efficient windmill design waiting in the wings for some visionary designer that will revolutionize wind power generatio
Solar, wind, nuclear and energy efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually both are space hogs, especially if you are talking about actual wind or solar 'powerplants'. However each has the potential to produce say... very rough guess here... up to 10% of the energy needs. In Europe wind is extensively used, farmers often set up wind generators on their fields and sell the electricity they don't need to the energy companies for extra income. If you drive through Denmark, Holland, or N-Germany you will see wind generators by the dozen in the wheat fields you drive through. I don't think either wind nor solar will replace coal and oil for all sorts of reasons of which the physical space they take up is only one reason, they will remain important supplementary energy sources. Large solar power plants are not all that common here in Europe but people have begun to combine improved insulation of their houses/apartments with measures like mounting solar cells on the roof to reduce the amount of energy they have to draw off the electric network for heating/cooling or lighting in their houses. Basically I think we can get far by encouraging the use of wind and solar and combining those with measures aimed at increasing the efficient use of energy but even all those measures together will never enable us to replace oil and coal. Unless somebody finds miraculous new energy source and invents room temperature super-conductors in the near future, conventional Nuclear power may prove the only viable way to phase out fossil fuel use in power plants. Nuclear leaves nasty waste products that will be hard to deal with but at least it doesn't cause a rise in sea levels and climate change. The choice we have at the moment is:
It's a choice between bad and worse.
In Ohio... (Score:3, Informative)
There are new windmills going up in the flat countryside. They're barely making the payments on the initial costs, but they're relatively affordable. It doesn't take huge amounts of wind to make decent amounts of electricity, it's just not as affordable for the companies trying to make a profit. Here's a helpful website, I am not affiliated with http://www.greenenergyohio.org/page.cfm?pageID=10 8 [greenenergyohio.org]
Use farmland (Score:4, Informative)
They pointed out that although wind does take up space, it's not as if the space it "takes up" can't be used for other things. They had some interesting shots of farmland out in the midwest where there were wind generators standing in the middle of the fields. The actual footprint of the generator on the ground is pretty small. Though I suppose its shadow might reduce crop yields in the surrounding acres slightly, one assumes the electricity generated must be enough to make up for this cost to the farmer. Probably the biggest drawback of having them all over your field is that it becomes harder to spray your crops using aircraft, but that doesn't seem like a total deal-breaker.
There's a whole lot of farmland out in the middle part of the country which also has pretty steady winds, and is already being used for what basically amounts to an "industrial" purpose (large scale high-yield farming). If you can show the owners of that land that they can increase their financial yield per acre by adding wind turbines to their fields -- basically giving them another cash crop besides food -- you probably wouldn't have as much of the NIMBYism that plagues wind projects in more residential or coastal areas. (Although I think eventually, those people are just going to have to suck it up and learn to enjoy looking at turbines; 100 years ago, people probably bitched about having a lighthouse mucking up their view, but now they're considered a beautiful addition to the landscape. Surely generators could be the same way in time.)
Although I think in the short term, nuclear (fission, obviously) plants are probably our best bet towards cutting carbon emissions and reducing our dependency on foreign energy sources, wind turbines seem close to being practical. Most of the objections to them seem to be aesthetic, and when it comes down to having your lights go out, or having some sort of power plant in your backyard, wind turbines seem a whole lot nicer than a coal-burner or nuclear facility (or being flooded out for a hydro project).
Re:sun and wind (Score:5, Insightful)
How about putting some serious brainpower to changing cultural values? How much fucking space, heat, energy, electricity is wasted every year because each family/individual has a house/apartments much bigger then they need yet no people populate the extra empty rooms during the year, etc? Society in their desire for privacy / personal space creates a huge tonne of fucking waste simply through their animal prejudices and "preferences" (read programmed evolutionary emotional responses), we could save a TONNE of money and resources of we did something to develop superior cultural values. How much money would be saved on social programs if governments gave tax breaks to people that took the disabled, homeless, etc into the free space in their homes rent free, etc? How much good could come if people simply weren't dogs infected with the backward behavioural baggage of evolution.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You cannot fight against evolution and win. If your solution includes telling people to go against their most basic desires and needs, it is certain failure.
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Of couse that's only a half-truth, if you had courses on training in self-mastery you could do it. You're totally copping out, trying to sound scientific and all. "Evolution" is to the modern person as "God's will" was to the christian in ages past everything is viewed in terms of some narrow concept and that concept is somehow the arbiter and absol
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Slavery is an artefact of agriculture. It was created by agriculture and it was destroyed by industrialization. It is alien to human society and human nature--we are evolved by nature to be more-or-less sympathetic to our fellow-beings, and while we have a lot of flexibility in this regard, societies that do not get enormous economic gain out of violating our ten
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And it wasn't just in the Middle east either. Hunter-gatherer societies all around the globe have adapted to agriculture as a natural part of thier progress. (Somehow I doubt the Incas ever had anyone from Tehran teach them about farming) Indeed, I would posit that a move to an agrarian society is a necessity for any group of people to progress to a "civilization" level.
However, that does not mean that I don't agree w
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the theory of the original affluent society. [wikipedia.org]
Modern hunter-gatherer societies generally only spend about 3-5 hours per day in search of food.
Of course, this assumes a rather small, stable, mobile population. If every person on earth today decided to drop what they're doing and go forage the countryside for food, we'd pick the earth clean
Simply replace income tax with an energy tax (Score:5, Insightful)
No changes to human behaviour required.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My car does 60 mpg, and it's an average french car. When I was in the US I had a very inefficient car and the funny thing was that despite gas prices being much lover in the US I was spending as much on gas a month than I'm doing now in France for approximately the same comm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I like the idea, but... who pays for the increased cost of businesses? That is, right now, my company pays for the lights, computers, heating etc in their building.
Your customers pay, as they do now. As it's an energy tax, everyone who consumes energy would pay the tax in proportion to their consumption, it wouldn't fall any more heavily on businesses than it would on anyone else, and the tax change would have to be split, employees would have proportionally higher domestic costs. Companies which are more energy efficient will obviously have substantially lower costs.
Re:sun and wind (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe we should all live in a hive, possibly with a monarch as a king?
How about we sleep only in standing closets, or pull out rolling beds?
Maybe we could all live life in a gigantic bunk house with public showers?
Why not get rid of cars and bus's and airplanes and boats entirely? Heck, weve got internet now, everyone can telecommute right?
in fact, why not just jack everyone into a grid
And maybe we could tweak that virtual world to remain always near perfect, but not quite perfect.
Humanity like most life is designed to consume resources as much as it can, the gambit is wether or not we can find a way to maintain our growth through such consumption. Compression and self-lessness are only positive if they are natural or necesary. Compelling our current society to live in pods would be foolish, detremental, and likely a catastrophe. While condensed living is a requirment in most major population centers, youd be surprised at just how comfy people who live in rural or semi-rural europe/asia/America/Africa are in terms of space.
This planet is BIG... REALLY BIG... on a magnitude thats hard to describe. You could suggest we all go underground too, with equally disasterous results. But te key to our "evolution" is to be the first bit of life to succesfully get off this rock in a self sustainable manner.
Which is exactly why population density not being a preffered condition is a good thing, it forces us to open up new frontiers and search for more space... you know... doing that "life" thing.
We keep growing like this and we might die.... We stop growing, and we will die for sure.
Re:sun and wind (Score:5, Insightful)
It all depends on who you regard as "rogue nations running around doing anything they want". From where I'm sat, that description looks more like Bush's USA than Iran.
Re:sun and wind (Score:5, Informative)
This is the only thing hydrogen can do. We store energy by producing hydrogen, and then release it when we want to use it. It's never been proposed that hydrogen will magically solve the energy problem, just that it might be a good way to store/transport what energy we do produce.
The study's claim is that this is not a good idea, since the two step chemical process is simply too inefficient.
Re:sun and wind (Score:4, Insightful)
And the author of this study makes a trivially false claim in this regard: "We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
No, we have an energy carrier problem. We have all kinds of sources of energy. Wind, wave and most of all solar are more than abundant enough to supply the world's energy needs if we could just package and transport that energy with reasonably high volumetric and gravimetric density. If those sources are not enough then nuclear, for all its problems, is perfectly capable of filling the gap. But all of these sources most easily produce electricity, which has limited utility as a carrier of energy, particularly for transportation. The energy density of batteries, to say nothing of the conversion efficiency at anything like full discharge, is far worse than hydrogen.
Beyond that, the author makes a strong claim about the economic feasibility of the hydrogen economy. We all know what an exact science economics is, and how economists routinely make accurate and empirically validated predictions of the future of technological trends. So the author is arguing about the wrong problem and reaching an implausibly strong conclusion.
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case in point, using diesel cycle engines instead of otto cycle engines, revert the trend of power hungry CPUs in computers, use mini-fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent ones, and things like that.
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Ummm, any excess oxygen released from cracking water gets used up when you use the hydrogen fuel to produce the original water you started with.
Where I think hydrogen will work, and will work well, will be with a process that directly cracks water using solar energy.
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re-use (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not really, since we have no use for deuterium in the context of fuel cells, only in the context of future fusion power plants. And I find a lot of scientists are involved in research related to fuel cells, and they can't possibly mean deuterium when they say hydrogen.
Overall consumption of energy has to go down... (Score:5, Insightful)
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What we actually need to do, at present, is reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, because it's the burning of carbon-based fuels that is the source of all the drawbacks of energy usage.
If you had a battery that never depleted and produced no pollution whatsoever, what would be the benefit of not using it?
Re:Overall consumption of energy has to go down... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Oil looks cheap because we are using in a few centuries the production of millions of years.
-Wind or solar energy comes free, but to use them, you need devides that need to be built, maintained and trashed, and due to their power source, they can have significant downtimes. Solar pannels also contains a lot of dangerous materials (As, Ge, Ga...) and their production causes some nasty pollution.
-Nuclear power is probably the best we can have today for fixed power generation: we have largely enough uranium to wait for the fusion reactors and the generated pollution doesn't go into the atmosphere and therefore can be processed, but there will always be a risk with that.
And of course, for the portable energy
-Batteries are neither cheap or clean: they contain lots of toxic chemicals, have a limited life time, and due to Ohm law, can only give back only half of the energy that was put into them.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Overall consumption of energy has to go down... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been charging batteries with efficiency of around 85%. High-efficient switched mode chargers can reach even higher numbers.
And if the target load is much smaller than the internal battery impedance, you get near 100% efficiency using the stored energy, at least at battery's terminals.
Battery is not a waveguide. You don't match its impedance to the load (and lose half of the energy if doing that)!
Re:Overall consumption of energy has to go down... (Score:4, Informative)
You're confusing two issues: Maximum POWER versus maximum ENERGY when pulling power from a voltage source through a fixed resistance.
If you want the maximum amount of POWER (rate of energy delivery) and the resistance is fixed, you get it when half the power is delivered to your load and half wasted in the series resistance. Efficiency is 50%. (This assumes ideal fixed voltage source and resistance - a bad assumption when loading a battery with a near-short.)
If you want the maximum ENERGY from your battery you pull much more slowly. Efficiency would approach 100% as discharge time approaches "forever" (though a real battery has leakage and a real load usually requires more than a trickle, so you waste a few percent to do things at practical rates and power levels).
Same is true for the power grid. The system of generators, transmission lines, transformers, and miscelaney has overall efficiency far above 50%. You don't put so little copper in your wires that you're loading it at the peak of the power curve and half is wasted heating (and melting!) the system. You put in a BUNCH MORE and never draw power anywhere near the maximum you could draw.
Example: My neighborhood has something like 50 houses served by a "bank" of three paralleled "pole pig" transformers on one edge of a primary delta - call it 12 KV. Rule of thumb for homes is they draw about a KW each, so call it 50 KW and a tad over 4 amps in the primary wiring. It's fed with bare #10 copper, which would easily carry 30A embedded in insulation in a wall without noticable warming.
A couple years ago a goose flew into the primary wiring. The current melted the #20 in two places in less than a second and draped the primary wires all over the street. That means the goose was getting FAR over 30A. Let's be conservative and say it was 300A and dragged the voltage across the goose (and the arc to it) down to zero, which would put the half-power point at 150A and 4 KV - 600 KW. Normal load current would be about 2.7% of that, and resistive losses in the grid (as a percentage of power delivered) would be about 1.3%.
Battery (Score:4, Informative)
A particularly bad Battery (Score:5, Informative)
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What difference does energy efficiency make? ... (Score:3, Informative)
If we use solar, wind and tidal energy to charge the hydrogen batteries, what difference does energy efficiency make, so long as current and future energy needs can be met?
Well, you take your energy as hydrogen, I'll take it as electricity at 1/4 of the price...
And it gets worse. Assume we're not going to use 100% *cough* renewable electricity. Assume your energy comes from a local coal power station. They're about 35% efficient, so your 25% efficient battery actually gives you an overall efficiency of 8.8%. You're taking your scarce energy resource, burning it and making use of less than 10% of the energy in that resource.
Until we are using 100% renewable or magical *cough*
Re:What difference does energy efficiency make? .. (Score:3, Funny)
What difference does energy efficiency make? ... (Score:3, Informative)
If we use solar, wind and tidal energy to charge the hydrogen batteries, what difference does energy efficiency make, so long as current and future energy needs can be met?
Well, you take your energy as hydrogen, I'll take it as electricity at 1/4 of the price...
And it gets worse. Assume we're not going to use 100% *cough* renewable electricity. Assume your energy comes from a local coal power station. They're about 35% efficient, so your 25% efficient battery actually gives you an overall efficiency of 8.8%. You're taking your scarce energy resource, burning it and making use of less than 10% of the energy in that resource. Exactly how clean do you think that strategy is?
Unt
Re:A particularly bad Battery (Score:5, Funny)
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From the article (Score:4, Insightful)
There. nuff said.
Why do they have hydrogen cars in Finland then? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydrogen misunderstood. (Score:5, Insightful)
Before that, hydrogen is a cumbersome, impractical, lossy way to transport energy. We might as well look into synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O instead of just splitting water into H2 and O2. Any hydrocarbon is less troublesome to handle than hydrogen. If we make the chains long enough, we might even end up with stuff that's pretty much identical to oil-based gasoline.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why waste our time with producing something like "oil-based gasoline" when a diesel engine will run fine and dandy on the oil that we can just squeeze out of the end product of about half a billion years worth of plant evolution?
Biologists and architects will get us over the hump, not physicists.
Re:Hydrogen misunderstood. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason fossil fuels are efficient is that they already exist. Essentially, they are pre-charged batteries.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Which I wasn't going to contest. My point was that handling anything that has carbon in it is much, much easier than hydrogen, which has some fairly nasty properties like diffusing through almost anything.
A practical energy carrier should be at least as convenient as natural gas. Bonus points are aw
Well, yeah, wasn't that obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
water is not scarce. (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't salt water better? (Score:3, Informative)
I seem to recall needing to add salt to the mix whenever we did electrolysis experiments in junior high science classes...
Still interesting in many places (Score:2)
So you need to put your hydrogen plants where you have both water nearby (ocean, desalinate?) and energy (sun?). California maybe? Sounds like a big enough market.
No surprise here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about the early 19th century, for instance: oil was just one energy possibility among many others. Most people used wind power to process cereals into flour, or mechanical water power. They used coal or wood to warm themselves and candles or whale oil to light themselves. They also used solar power, for instance in salt flats. Then came steam engines -- again wood or coal -- and so on and so forth.
Of course, the 21st century is a much more advanced society, but the energy possibilities are also much more numerous: from bio-fuels to nuclear, with solar (photovoltaic and thermal), wind power, bio-mass, natural gas, tide power, etc... etc... Our technology level has progressed by leaps and bounds and may well end up covering most our needs, IF we also improve efficiency and energy savings (= no more gas guzzler for you, sorry). But the key idea here is this: the 20th century, from and energy point of view, was an historical abberation: a time when we solved most of our energy needs on one solution. The 21st century may well see us come back to a more diversified picture, and something more in line with the previous centuries.
Water shortage? (Score:4, Informative)
Considering that 3/4 of the planet is covered with oceans, at some points kilometers deep, I fail to see a "water shortage". There may be a shortage on fresh water, yes, but salt water elctrolyzes just as well (even better, since it contains ions). To boot, you end up with sodium, chloride and some other chemical elements that can be sold as by-product.
The real problem with hydrogen is that it's an inefficient way to store energy. Plus, storage is difficult since it's a very tiny atom (one proton only...) so it tends to seep out of every container; it's highly flammable, and to store it effectively you need either very high pressure, or very cold temperatures (20K). Gasoline really isn't that bad for a fuel...
No, the real boon would be to either store electricity very efficiently, or somehow convert the CO2 in the atmosphere directly into fuel again, using some form of renewable energy like the sun.
Re: (Score:2)
But Methane (CH4) is a fantastic way to store and transport energy. We already have pipelines and ships to transport it and busses which run on the stuff. All you need to do is burn the hydrogen down to Methane, taking carbon out of the atmosphere in the process.
"You never get what you pay for" (Score:2)
To get energy out of hydrogen you have to get the hydrogen out of water, which itself takes energy, lots of energy. This indirectly makes the process similar creating a hydrogen based battery. You put the energy in in the seawater processing plant, and get it back out to drive your automobile, if the voltameters at the plant are solar powered you
ram scoop (Score:2)
nasa has got nothing better to do at the moment.
Not Hydrogen Alone (Score:4, Insightful)
In the future (if there is one once we get our act together soon enough), the "solution" has to be a combination of solutions. Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Nuclear (yes, Nuclear - although it's gotten a bad rap, it's actually a pretty good source), and perhaps Fusion, in addition to Hydrogen. The Earth's Oceans are a huge source of Deuterium, which can be used for Fusion (if we have it figured out), and possibly we could even use it as fuel (burning it). But I'm not sure of the effects of having slightly radioactive water vapor. Maybe it's not a good thing.
I know there's a lot of IFs, but the sooner we start...
Discovery had a good show today, outlining doomsday scenarios because of our overdependence on fossil fuels. It seems the Pentagon is actually seriously considering the implications to National Security from Global Warming and the rising cost of Oil, especially when it can involve droughts, and lots of war.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Burning deuterium? That would really be a waste of money. Why not use ordinary hydrogen is you want to burn it chemically?
Radioactive? Deuterium is not radioactive.
WATER??? (Score:2)
Hydrogen is out... (Score:5, Insightful)
C2H5OH with [H2SO4] as a catalyst -----> C2H4 + H2O
and with that cute little double bond, I can make any hydrocarbon you want. Where do we get the ethanol? There's plenty of arable land left for now - so much so that certain governments pay their farmers NOT to plant crops. Instead of making energy to create H2, perhaps we should use the sun's energy to work for us, as we have been doing anyway for the past few billion years...
Eejits at physorg. - Bacteria, sunlight (Score:2)
Pour some of these into the sea in some sort of screened-off area and the only technical issue is to separate the hydrogen gas from the oxygen and transport them. A plant like this would require next to n
An unfair comparison (Score:3, Informative)
It seems that the title of this article should be "hydrogen infererior to magic batteries".
Whoopdie doo...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No it isn't. [wikipedia.org] I would call 250 miles on a single charge more than acceptable.
Basic flaw in article (Score:3, Informative)
"In the market place, hydrogen would have to compete with its own source of energy, i.e. with ("green") electricity from the grid," he says. "For this reason, creating a new energy carrier is a no-win solution. We have to solve an energy problem not an energy carrier problem."
Why do we have to use electricity from the grid to generate hydrogen? Why can't we use floating arrays of photovoltaic cells to crack the water on the ocean? Or we could use large banks of mirrors to power an array of Stirling engines to generate the power to crack the water? It's not as if you need a large voltage to do the job, I think there are many ways of getting the power other than off the grid.
I have to admit I'm rather partial ton the idea of using arrays of mirrors to power a series of stirling engines - apart from possible loss of heat transfer fluid, and wear and tear (which is minimised by the typically low RPM of stirling engines) it should be very cheap power once you amortise the cost of setting up the thing. There are several places in the world (in the USA, South America, Africa and Australia at least) where you have ubiquitous sunshine at beaches where desert (or otherwise low-productivity land) comes down to the beach. The real problems to be solved for Hydrogen as a stored energy source are purely matters of storage and shipping. There are several technologies for renewable energy that could power the cracking with relatively low research costs to get them to a point where they would be usable.
Hydrogen a white elephant (Score:5, Informative)
As the movie points out, electric cars are the real answer: they're simple, cheap, fast, efficient, convenient and low maintenance, so there's absolutely no need for hydrogen to enter the equation. Hydrogen just makes these cars more complicated and less efficient. The only thing holding back the electric car is the will of the industry. For instance, Chevron holds the patents for one of the most promising battery technologies, but they specifically forbid the current manufacturer to sell them for use in private vehicles (only public transport).
I suppose you could argue that the auto manufacturers the oil companies are only acting in the best interests of their stock holders, and that's probably true, but at this rate they might as well be evil.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Electric car tech works. The problem not discussed in the movie is the amount of lithium reserves in the world. It's mostly produced from an oddball mineral called spodumene, and other pegmatite related minerals. There's enough lithium available to us to make about 500 million Toyota Priuses. These use much smaller battery packs than a true electric like the EV-1.
We need to come up with battery tech that uses raw materials we actually have available. Li-ION is nice for laptops, but doesn't scale.
Temkin
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Electric cars have 2 major problems.
First, recharging takes hours. Electric cars are only useful for commuters. No long-distance driving. This can possibly be overcome by making recharging stations that swap battery packs instead of recharging in place. This requires a degree of standardization that I wouldn't expect to see in the American automotive industry, however.
Second, the
Finally an article that makes some sense... (Score:4, Informative)
As far as the hydrogen goes - it's a good point, it's not a fuel source, it's a transport mechanism, since we don't have a lot of easily collectable hydrogen around - we have to obtain it by expending energy. Hydrogen should be thought more in the lines of electricity than of gas, just that it has different uses.
As for "water running out"? WTF? Clean water may be diminishing, but the amount of water on the earth probably hasn't fluctuated by even 1% over the past billion years. Seing as how we aren't
And anyway, take the hydrogen out of unclean water... Well, when that hydrogen mixes with oxygen, I gurantee you the water will be clean.
Misguided analysis (Score:4, Informative)
But, funnily enough, nobody wants to buy an electric car, despite the fact that they'd probably be cheaper to run. Why? Because the range and performance is unacceptable to most people. And it's the same with a fuel cell vehicle compared with a battery-powered electric car. Sure, the hydrogen might be more expensive than the equivalent power straight from the grid. But the car's range and performance will be much better than the battery car.
Furthermore, he makes the strange assumption that the hydrogen will be coming from room-temperature electrolysis. That's highly unlikely. It's much more likely that hydrogen will be produced using chemical processes on fossil fuels (using geosequestration to dispose of the resulting CO2), by using a nonchemical source of heat (such as a nuclear reactor or solar furnace) in high temperature electrolysis [wikipedia.org], or through all manner of nifty renewable hydrogen sources that don't involve producing electricity and then doing electrolysis.
Hydrogen makes sense as a power source.. (Score:3, Insightful)
for generating both electrical power and drinking water. On earth, hydrogen fuel
cells might make sense in places where batteries don't fit. For example, there is
a company that is working on small hydrogen fuel cells to power lap top computers.
The power density of these promises to be better than Li-Ion batteries (and maybe
even safer given Li-Ion batteries often catch fire).
We just need to keep in mind that hydrogen is NOT a power source. It is a fuel that
needs to be manufactured, better yet, it is a battery that needs to be charged.
how about these guys perpetual motion machine .. (Score:3, Funny)
"We have developed a technology that produces free [steorn.net], clean and constant energy."
Nuclear Power is the only power _source_... (Score:3, Insightful)
All other forms of 'power' are just storage mechanisms or transformations for nuclear power:
Solar: Converting radiation from Nuclear @ Sol
Wind: Nuclear @ Sol -> differential heating -> wind
Hydro: Nuclear @ Sol -> evaporation -> water runs down hill
Geothermal: Nuclear fission within the earth -> hot core -> heats water for geothermal
Biomass: Nuclear @ Sol -> photosynthesis -> energy storage
Fossil Fuels: As Biomass -> burried over long periods -> concentration of stored energy
It's _all_ Nuclear at some point. Once we accept that and work toward building safe reactor designs we'll be able to get on with "progress" without destroying the environment.
Isn't water recycled (Score:3, Informative)
Re:my car is eating sugar! (Score:5, Informative)
Sugar, like most other forms of easily accessible energy, is dangerous stuff. It only seems harmless since complex mechanisms have evolved to deal with it. Sugar is hydrophilic and will kill microbes that come in contact with it by dehydrating them. It will also destroy cells that contain too much of by osmosis. Your body needs to keep the level of sugar in the bloodstream within very tight limits, or bad things will happen.
(Yeah, I know. Completely offtopic.)
Re:hydrogen may be inefficient BUT (Score:5, Interesting)
Transport batteries ( I think we all agree that is what we are discussing here) require a few things to be practical: low cost of materials and ease of fabrication, high energy density, ease of movement of the material from one vessel to another and finally ease of synthesis and also conversion efficiency. Non-toxicity is important as is the effect on the atmosphere. There are very few materials that can match or better liquid hydrocarbons.
There is one candidate that should at least be considered. Nitrous Oxide. N2O is a saturated fluid under about 750psia at room temperature and it has a density the same as hydrocarbons. This means that vessels to store it are efficient. It is non-toxic although it is an anesthetic gas. It is very safe to handle and compatible with nearly all materials. This means that the devices to handle it are cheap to make. It is a liquid so heat of compression losses for movement are minimized. If it leaks it has a distinct odor and will generally not pose an explosion hazard- at least compared to H2.
N2O is a monopropellant- in other words it will decompose to N2 and O2 when passed over a heated catalyst. It reacts very completely and almost no NOx species are produced- good for pollution. Better still it has a high flame temperature which makes for high thermodynamic efficiency. So a turbogenerator running N2O does not have to have a compressor- it can work at least part of the time off of the storage tank source pressure. Heat from the environment or directed waste heat from the exhaust can help keep the remaining N2O warm and vapor pressure high. N2O has a decent energy density but more importantly you can add any fuel and increase the power release enormously. So you power with N2O when you can and add fuel when you need to accelerate. The power increase is rapid and significant.
It does have problems though- synthesis is complex and not presently at large scale. What would be great is to develop a catalytic system that could take atmospheric N2 and O2 and under proper conditions directly synthesize N2O which could then be stored. Sounds hard to me but you never know. In any case there is no shortage of the precursors. It is however a nasty greenhouse gas. This could be its worst issue- lareg releases of unreacted N2O could be worse than CO2. But at least these are accidental and incidental- not part of everyday operation.
Anyway it is something to ponder. I always thought that a N2O vehicle with ethanol fuel assist sounded pretty good- and what a party car!