Ubiquitous Hydrogen Power Not Getting Any Closer 267
NewScientist has a story about the "hydrogen economy" that has been resting on the horizon for a decade or more. Despite a great deal of enthusiasm for and research into hydrogen-based power systems, the technology seems just as far away from everyday use as it's always been. A British startup, ITM Power, has recently claimed a breakthrough in lowering production costs by using a nickel catalyst (rather than platinum) with a membrane small enough for home use. But, even if their method is proven and adopted, it still wouldn't address huge energy efficiency problems in the process. "The point was made forcefully by Gary Kendall of the conservation group WWF in a recent report called Plugged In (PDF, pgs. 135-149). Kendall, a chemist who previously spent almost a decade working for ExxonMobil, highlights how the energy losses in the fuel chain - from electrolysis to compression of the hydrogen for use to inefficiencies in the fuel cell itself — mean that only 24 per cent of the energy used to make the fuel does any useful work on the road."
What I still don't get is... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:1, Interesting)
Fossil Fuel is 'ancient sunlight'. It is solar energy stored millions of years ago by animals and vegitation, transformed over time into liquid form.
Seriously, do you read /.? (Score:5, Interesting)
I got all of those by doing a search here on /. Those are just some of the top ones too. These methods are to new to have become a fees-able opportunity so far; however, given a few years and another few gasoline panics (we all know they're coming), and they'll probably come around to being more standardized.
Re:Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (Score:2, Interesting)
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts. While I'm fairly certain that future generations will solve the problem of how to make it safe, that logic has not worked well for us in the past (hence the cause of any number of current social issues) so I will certainly respect if someone disagrees with my position here.
If you're that worried about CO2, use a scrubber to compress it into blocks and then bury it at the bottom of the ocean. Which is where most of the world's CO2 is anyway; Compressed at the bottom of the ocean. There's practical solutions that work on today's infrastructure that are being ignored because today's infrastructure is suddenly seen as eating children and devouring our precious [noun].
And why should the government be spending money replacing infrastructure just to pander to the latest political fashion statement -- ie, "green"? Whenever a slightly faster computer comes out, do all the old ones get swapped out right then and there? No. We hold on to things that are old and out of date because they still serve a useful function and because it costs less to maintain what we have than to use something new. It's great that research dollars are being poured into alternative energy, and I fully encourage it. And when the technology is proven, practical, and economical, I see no reason why we shouldn't then start migrating our infrastructure towards it. Which is indeed what is slowly happening as we speak.
Be patient. You're talking about over $16 trillion in infrastructure in this country alone. We only make a fourth that in GDP a year, and only a small fraction of that can go to upgrades.
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Interesting)
Flamebait? Who moderated this as Flamebait?
CNG is worth thinking about. South Korea has been pushing CNG (and natural gas, in general) for vehicles.
The politics implied by his post are worth thinking about. Paying a premium (even a 75% premium) may be better than sending our money out of the country for oil. Compare hydrogen's inefficiency to paying money to other countries, then using energy to transport the oil we buy.
And yes, some of that money we pay definitely does get spent on bullets on our trading partners' side, and causes us to spend even more on bullets on our side.
Don't like these ideas? Think they're not correct? Reply to the parent, rather than stifle with a "Flamebait" tag.
Some insights from an european perspective (Score:1, Interesting)
ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit
Unless I'm reading into this wrong, you're missing something...
For Obama's plan for the US to be the leader in alternative fuels we're going to need Detroit. He needs an auto industry that he can lay hands on and manipulate. Otherwise he's going to be relying on the goodwill of other auto makers to meet him half way to his goal and that's probably still going to involve subsidies. If these subsidies are going to exist either way I'd much rather have them here than abroad. By using resources in the US he will have some say and legislation will give him a hand to work with these assets.
I'm european (from germany).
I am not saying that it is a smart idea for the US to ditch their native automakers.
However, I do believe that your reasoning that the US needs native automakers to convert to alternative fuels is wrong.
I have two historical cases that support this assumption:
1) Introduction of the catalytic converter
In the mid eighties, there were big discussions about the introduction of unleaded fuel and catalytic converters in Germany. The auto industry, the most important and influential industry in germany, then supplying almost half the worth of cars sold in europe, maintained that doom would be imminent if ;-)
legislation for catalytic converters and unleaded fuel were to be imposed. Technical hurdles would prevent conversion for a long time. Then the swiss government (no native auto industry) went ahead and imposed a ban on leaded fuel and mandated the use of catalytic converters anyway. To the utter astonishment of all the experts, all those fancy high-tech Benzes and Beemers didn't vanish overnight from swiss showrooms - they were available with catalytic converters as soon as the new legislation went in effect.
At the time, this hitherto believed-to-be-impossible conversion was credited to the exhaust pipe fairy
2) Speed limits
With just middle-school math and physics skills, it is easily shown that hitting the back end of a semi-trailer with your car at an 80mph speed differential may impact your health much more adversely than doing so at a 20mph speed differential.
Yet, the only country in europe where no speed limits are imposed on a majority of the highways happens to be the one that makes a living from peddling cars optimised for performance at 125+ mph - germany with its "autobahns".
So not having an incumbent auto-industry with 100+ years of valuable experience in power-lobbying might actually help making both environmentally and economically sound decisions ;-)
Re:Yet Again, the obvious requires stating (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, please. Talk about selective data and card stacking.
1. $ per joule don't make any sense in this discussion. $100 per battery - sure - for retail!
2. right now eestor and others are developing ultracapacitors that have 3x the energy density of the best LIon batteres, and have many orders of magnitude more charging rounds than batteries, AND are cheaper to build AND they charge Really Really Fast. They will be expensive at first, but industrialism knows how to fix that through production.
3. The amount of energy per dollar per kg in gasoline blows all of them away. But gas is going away, so it doesn't matter.
I'm not worried about "cheapest" I'm more concerned about simple FACTS OF PHYSICS that people don't seem to understand too often or selectively forget when they talk about hydrogen.
Hydrogen is a BAD IDEA as a fuel. It is better left in water.
The other problem w/ICE vehicles is What Are You Going to Drive Them On? Peak Oil == Peak Asphalt. You can build your spiffy vehicles running on fucking pixie dust - if the roads are reduced to muck in the Springtime and frozen ruts in the winter, your aerodynamic cruiser car with its 4 cm clearance is going to stay in the garage...forever.
There's a lot more to the energy debate than substituting fuels - our entire way of life has been centred and modelled on a specific energy arrangement and density provided by fossil fuels. Without them, our civilisation itself is going to have to change, radically.
We've done it before. If you were born in 1850 and died in 1940 - think about it...
RS