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Hydrogen Won't Save Our Economy
Journal written by anaesthetica (596507) and posted by
kdawson
on Wed Dec 13, 2006 06:21 AM
from the tell-us-something-we-don't-know dept.
from the tell-us-something-we-don't-know dept.
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."
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umm... (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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Re:FRAUD Alert? (Score:5, Informative)
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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=
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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: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.
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Simply replace income tax with an energy tax (Score:5, Insightful)
No changes to human behaviour required.
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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.
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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.
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Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re-use (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall consumption of energy has to go down... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Battery (Score:4, Informative)
A particularly bad Battery (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:A particularly bad Battery (Score:5, Funny)
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From the article (Score:4, Insightful)
There. nuff said.
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:Hydrogen misunderstood. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason fossil fuels are efficient is that they already exist. Essentially, they are pre-charged batteries.
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water is not scarce. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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...
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: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.)
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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!
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