Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars? 313
thecarchik writes with this interesting excerpt: "It takes a lot of energy to split hydrogen out from the other atoms to which it binds, either in natural gas or water. Which means energy analysts are skeptical about the overall energy balance of cars fueled by hydrogen. Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidize (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine. Because urea's four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart."
Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if they relax the drunk-driving laws. I don't see any other way the economics can work.
urinine (Score:5, Funny)
the fuel will be called urinine, because after a lot of beer, I'm way way past urin8
Re:urinine (Score:5, Funny)
My urine goes to 11.
Re:urinine (Score:5, Funny)
You guys should get together and form your own country. You can call it the Uri-nation.
Re:urinine (Score:4, Funny)
Re:urinine (Score:4, Funny)
Why not just fly out and build a colony on Uranus?
It doesn't take a whiz to see why that's a piss-poor idea. Who leaked this idea to the press anyway? They're just trying to make a splash.
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The more the Merrier (Score:2)
Only if they relax the drunk-driving laws. I don't see any other way the economics can work.
Simple. Have one designated driver and three people on "fuel detail." This would make long distance road-trips more economical for college students. It's going to put a dent in Mickey's Big Mouth sales, though.
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Re:Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars? (Score:4, Funny)
Urea? (Score:4, Funny)
first piss!
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Errrm...stupid question, maybe, but....
How exactly is the GP offtopic?
Immature, maybe. But offtopic?
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Ah...I get it.
When I first read it, though, the original post was also modded offtopic.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Sperm and now urine? I'll take a guess and say the next article will be about crap.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll take a guess and say the next article will be about crap.
I suppose that will be a shitty article.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll take a guess and say the next article will be about crap.
I suppose that will be a shitty article.
Now, now -- there's no need to get pissy about it.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of what's on the Internet qualifies, so I'd say that's a safe bet.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
New waste recycle plants? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Of course there's an easy way. You have one line explicitly for liquid waste and another for solid waste. Problem solved!
I didn't say it would be cheap. I only gave an easy solution to the problem.
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It would probably be easier to ignore the human waste stream and just force farmers who are being taxed for their cow farts to build lagoons to catch the animal wastes and pump that to the processor plant.
Re:New waste recycle plants? (Score:5, Funny)
Urea is a common component in a lot of industrial applications, notably cosmetics, soap and animal feed. No need to really source it from the sewer, industrial vats make this stuff every day.
Telling women what exactly "Urea" is in the ingredients of their makeup case is great fun...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea [wikipedia.org]
Re:New waste recycle plants? (Score:5, Insightful)
And therein lies the rub. It's way too expensive and inefficient to recover from natural sources (it makes up ~2% of urine, mixed in with ~3% "other"), so we make it synthetically from ammonia. Which is made via the Haber process. Which in turn use coal or natural gas as feedstocks. Gee, that's really going to solve the efficiency problem right there...
Which puts it in direct competition with ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fertiliser production. Also using the Haber-Bosch process with obvious implications for the cost of food vs fuel.
There are 4 big things we can do to save the world, and dependency on oil.
1: Stop throwing away 60% of our energy through "waste" heat. Which is pretty much what every electricity generating plant does.
2: Stop using 50% of our 40% efficient electricity to move heat around... See air conditioning.
3: Stop using 17% efficient vehicles to move us around.
4: Stop generating artificial fertilisers.
The solutions?
1: District Heating and District cooling.
2: Insulation, thermal mass. District cooling and/or evaporative cooling.
3: Walk. Battery electric vehicles for relatively short journeys, personal rapid transit for intermediate and rail for longer journeys.
4: Stop discharging human waste into the ocean. Compost it to destroy pathogens and start using it as fertiliser. The current methods simply move NPK from the land to the ocean.
p.s. I don't expect any of this to actually happen. Humans are stupid animals and it's easier to kill others who threaten resource consumption than it is to change.
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What about #1 [vefur.is]?
Heck, here in the midwest, I'm in a university building that has central-source-heated steam pipes that not only run across the entire campus, but even cross under a river.
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The idea is that we have already made significant headway in the development of environmentally friendly power plants (i.e. carbon sequestering, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, etc.).
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First, electric vehicles are more efficient, and need less energy for the same result.
Second, that electricity can come from any source. Some sources are cleaner than others.
Third, this centralizes production of power for cars. Instead of millions of small inefficient engines engines, you have thousands of huge and quite efficient power plants, which are also easier to regulate and to make cleaner.
Re:New waste recycle plants? (Score:4, Informative)
Why? It's from Hamlet (from the "To be or not to be" soliloquy -- the same place where we get the phrase "shuffled off this mortal coil" and a couple other phrases). Actually, the original is "there's the rub"; "therein lies" is just a less abrupt way of putting it. "Rub" in this context means "obstacle" [reference.com] (definition #14).
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Nah, just drive down any major highway with a lot of long-haul trucking. You can be sure that before you run out, you'll find another 2-Liter bottle of the stuff by the side of the road.
Bathrooms (Score:2)
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Take that you punk kids! (Score:4, Funny)
Try pissing in my gas tank now!
Humm, if Bio Diesel Cars smell like French Fries (Score:5, Funny)
The cars powered by this will smell like Bourbon Street.
Way Cool (Score:5, Funny)
Cool. We burn our pee in the car, collect pure water from the tailpipe, drink the water and pee again.
Perpetual urination FTW.
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Due to human perspiration and respiration, not all of the water ingested by the driver/passengers/donors/etc would be returned as urea.
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So will we now refer to this loss of efficiency as "piss off"?
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My penis is a fucking/boring tool.
Just 0.037 Volts... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently, a lot less. From TFA: "Just 0.037 Volts need to be applied across the cell, against the 1.23 Volts needed to break down water."
Re:Just 0.037 Volts... (Score:5, Insightful)
When did they make volts a unit of energy?
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What they didn't tell you is that it takes about 33 times longer. They're not sure why, though.
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"Just 5mph of velocity was needed for the bullet to break through the paper, versus the 600 mph needed to get through the steel."
Although velocity is not a unit of energy, you know that more energy wa
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They made the Electron Volt [wikipedia.org] a unit of energy when they needed a way to describe how much energy difference there is between two particle states, for example the amount of energy needed to electrolyse a single molecule.
Re:Just 0.037 Volts... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care how much less it is... There is simply not enough urea made in the entire country on a daily bases to produce enough H2 for fuel for even a small city.
Really, how many gallons a day do you piss? Considder then that urea is only a fractional percentage of that pee. (about 95% of typical urine is water, the rest is a combination of mostly urea as well as other contaminants removed by the kidneys).
I'd have to piss somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 gallons a day to have enough fuel just to handle my daily commute. Then there's the energy loss seperating the urea at the water treatment plant, hooking houses on septic up to sewers to collect the additional urine (about 35% of the country doens't have a sewer), then transport of the seperated urea to an H2 processing plant, and THEN, what do you plan to DO with the H2? We can't afford to run it in our cars... (current fuel cells cost about $750,000 once you take away the government subsidies. They THINK they can make em for about $100,000 in 15-20 years....
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I'd have to piss somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 gallons a day to have enough fuel just to handle my daily commute.
So that just gives you an(other) excuse to get very drunk at work. :)
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This is the Bender principal. Not only do you consume alcohol for fuel, but you get to go on a "bender" every day!
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Apparently, you've never been to Boston on St. Patrick's Day. :-)
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I don't care how much less it is... There is simply not enough urea made in the entire country on a daily bases to produce enough H2 for fuel for even a small city.
I disagree. There is easily 40 gallons of urine produced daily for each person on the continent. You're only taking into account human produced urea... but any urea would do. There's a lot of horses and cows in this country, they make it too... and if we could tap into the urea produced by rats... but this is assuming cows, horses and rats don't need it for their own cars.
This must be a... (Score:2)
The only problem I see is that... (Score:2, Funny)
Energy balance of using urea? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see two possible problems with this. Urea is a product of amino acid metabolization, in other words, protein breakdown. Somehow I think it'd take quite a lot of energy to provide the protein to provide the urea.
Second problem, what're the reaction by-products? That wasn't clear in the article. If nitrogen gas is a by-product, that basically reverses the very energy intensive process of fixing nitrogen. We'd be better off using the urea as fertilizer to grow food rather than as fuel.
--PM
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Urea is a product of amino acid metabolization, in other words, protein breakdown. Somehow I think it'd take quite a lot of energy to provide the protein to provide the urea.
Egads, you're right!
Now that we know this, every mammal on the planet will stop producing urea because it's inefficient!
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We produce Urea because it's a much safer thing to transport through the bloodstream than the ammonia which is produced by the body's metabolization of proteins.
A case of made up again. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right about the energy balance for the wrong reasons, and also the article submitter has screwed up. No one is suggesting urine, which the journalist made up on the spot, and which fails the capacity requirement to boot. The pure industrial chemical urea is mostly produced synthetically from ammonia and carbon dioxide, and ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. Hydrogen is currently produced mostly from natural gas and similar sources, which means it won't solve anything, and the carbon dioxide should be non-fossil also for the carbon cycle to be closed. In summary, what we have here is another way to produce synthetic fuel from natural gas or carbonaceous masses like coal or organic matter. The good thing is that the fuel precursor is noncombustible; the bad is that it's completely unproven and even hypothetical, and its energy density is not known.
Running low on fuel (Score:2)
just pee into the gas tank. Bring your dog or cat with you, and have them pee into the gas tank as well.
Urine powered automobiles for teh win!
So, let me get this straight. (Score:2)
We first just need to build urine collectors for livestock to separate the urine from the other waste. We then need to run this through a urine-tolerant reverse osmosis system and concentrate the solution from the ~5% solution it starts at. We then need to extract the urea from the salts and proteins (which make up more of urine per mass than urea does). We then need to use energy to separate the urea (just not as much with water). And this is supposed to solve an efficiency problem?
Yawn.
Think about it
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Think about it this way: if urea was actually a reasonable energy source, we'd already be concentrating it and burning it for power.
Not really...it took us til the 1930s to really grasp the power of the atom. By the logic above, we already should have had nuclear plants otherwise it wouldn't be efficient.
(I make no assumptions on how efficient piss power will be...I'm just saying as technology advances, more reasonable energy sources can be made that weren't even pipe dreams decades earlier.)
Another stupid analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
Urea will never be a significant energy source. Think about it, cars use far more energy than the total caloric intake of an animal (human or otherwise) per day. Yet WASTE product is supposed to supply all the energy needs of our vehicles?
Secondly, this would directly compete with our food sources even more so than biodiesel already does. Urea is a nitrogen fertilizer source that is in short supply. We already manufacture most of the world's urea supply from atmospheric nitrogen using up energy (mostly natural gas) in the process.
So in short, while this research may be of practical and academic interest, it is not going to usher in a new era of piss-powered cars.
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I don't think it's a case of "Every engine in the world must be converted to run on hydrogen obtained from urea, NOW!"
I think it's more like "This could be an environmentally friendly way to run a generator at say, a hospital or sports stadium." The first would be fairly easy to retrofit for collection, and the second....well, let's just say there's a LOT of pissing going on there.
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I'm not saying that *this* idea will be valuable, but people having ideas like this could all be small steps towards the greater goal.
Speaking of waste, what about the manure to methane conversion? Admittedly, some of google's top results say that doing that can be expensive to start, but just like solar, it can pay for itself eventually.
No officer, I'm just refuelling the car (Score:2)
I love this idea (Score:2, Interesting)
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Unless you have a long tube connected to the gas tank, you'll still have to stop.
Attendants (Score:2)
"Lovely Mayback sir, mind if I piss in the tank?"
"Go ahead son, fill her up!"
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If only Monty Python was still going.....
What if ? (Score:3, Interesting)
... we run out of water, because we drink it all and instead of peeing it back on Mother Nature we break it into other particles?
While this sounds rather strange, you should realize that it's only a matter of "when?" instead of "will it?" Just for the heck of it, does anyone have any idea how this period can be computed?
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When you burn hydrogen in a fuel cell or internal combustion engine, you get - shock of shocks - water.
As long as we keep using the fuel we generate like this, there will never be a lack of water.
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It still comes back as water. If you you split water into hydrogen and oxygen by inserting electricity, when you burn the hydrogen the ehxhaust is good old dihydrogen oxide (AKA "water")
But what's left? (Score:2)
Looking at it, after your strip the 4 O atoms, it looks like you'd get 2CO + N2 (carbon monoxide and Nitrogen gas). Anyone know what the real reaction would be? NO2 + C? (could you then feed the NO2 into your engine, or yourself?)
It burns when I pee (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but... (Score:2)
...who control barter town?
It worked in Rome (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It worked in Rome (Score:4, Funny)
I like the idea. Anything that involves aiming a stream of urine towards our national leaders is fine by me.
Horse Piss? (Score:2)
We used to joke about no-name gas stations selling "Horse Piss". Guess
it won't be a joke much longer!
drinking and driving takes on a whole new meaning (Score:3, Funny)
If it works, it would be a very green... er... yellow solution.
Surely... (Score:3, Funny)
Unless I miss my guess.. (Score:3, Interesting)
won't this produce large amounts of NO(x) pollutants?
Wait a second (Score:3, Interesting)
Crack the urea on the fly to hydrogen and combust it down to water. What are the waste products of the electrolysis?
Re:The problem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't just getting the hydrogen, its storing and using it safely. This might make hydrogen dirt cheap, but it still doesn't really solve the problems that make hydrogen cars unworkable.
Are you the sort who gets up in the morning, observes that you are out of clean shirts, and trots off to do a quick load of laundry. But then say... "Hey, the problem here isn't just getting dressed, the car needs a boost and I can't remember where my wallet is." And then you lie back down in bed in defeat. The whole getting to work problem is just unworkable. ;)
When you have two problems and you solve one of them I'd call that progress.
The most common element in the universe is hydrogen. It will pay off in the long run to master using it for energy.
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Garrison Keillor once wrote
It is more worthy in the eyes of God if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.
I'm not entirely certain you've succeeded in changing my opinion of hydrogen, but you've definitely made a change in my thinking.
Now if I could only find my car keys ...
Re:The problem.... (Score:4, Funny)
Now if I could only find my car keys ...
Have you tried Google [flickr.com]? They're doing some really amazing stuff with their engine lately.
Re:The problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
Every time I see people complaining about hydrogen storage, I find myself wondering what's so hard about it. You can store hydrogen fairly densely and easily by just attaching it to carbon atoms in a roughly 2:1 ratio. What's more, we already have the infrastructure in place to transport and use hydrogen that's been stored in this manner. And, even better, no high pressures, low temperatures, or special materials are required!
Re:The problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but that relys too much on using dangerously toxic carbon ....
.
I've heard that a few grams of carbon injected into a polar bear at 100m/s can kill it instantly.
.
Way to dangerous to use in cars and vehicles.
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Oil is two or more separable problems. Gasoline has environmental effects - we will never get it to burn cleanly enough in an application such as individual autos if they are at all widespread. The same goes for natural gas, ethanol, and all the alternates that involve any hydrocarbon compound - a few people with badly tuned engines can produce pollutants equal to what thousands of well tuned engines will produce, and even well tuned engines aren't really good enough when you expand use to hundreds of milli
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Your AP science experiment was very, very flawed. Hydrogen has the ability to combust over a very, very wide range - something like 90% (I don't remember exactly, and am too lazy to google it). This is especially true when compared to gasoline (vapor), which is more like 7-11% (again...to lazy). The only saving grace for H2 is that it's so light it doesn't collect near the ground awaiting a spark, which reduces the danger in an accident.
The problems with H2 storage is that it has a very low density. Whet
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electric is good and mass transit is better
Not in my town it isn't. We have three coal fired generators and a brand new natural gas generator; an electric car wouldn't decrease greenhouse gasses or other pollutants. Bus service works fine in milder climates, but it gets damned hot and damned cold here and nobody's going to want to wait half an hour in 20 degree f weather or 95 degree f weather, or in the rain; the busses stink; and they usually don't have meany passengers. I alone in my car put far less car
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Not in my town it isn't. We have three coal fired generators and a brand new natural gas generator;
Your town is not an island. Nationwide, on our current grid, according to the DOE, EVs decrease CO2 emissions by 27%, slightly increase PM, keep SOx the same, slightly decrease NOx, nearly eliminate CO and VOCs, and move all emissions away from surface level, right next to where people are breathing it in. Sounds like a win to me.
I agree with you about busses, mind you.
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Bus service works fine in milder climates, but it gets damned hot and damned cold here and nobody's going to want to wait half an hour ...
If you have to wait a half an hour then it's not "fine" bus service. I lived in Toronto for about 10 years and it gets pretty bad in the winter but between stops or stations on every corner and the bus and subway systems being so regular mass transit was actually a joy compared to struggling in traffic. I'd say the only exception was being out on a late night bender after the subway closed and the buses* slowed down. But then again I never got a DUI waiting for a late night bus and if I had the money to bur
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why is hydrogen still seen as some sort of viable alternative?
It's not. But when you give out literally billions of dollars to businesses for hydrogen research and investment, you shouldn't be shocked when they fight against the death of that tech. See buggy whips.
Hydrogen articles are going to keep popping up for years.
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Officer: next time try COFFEE. Now put your hands behind your back...
You can't buy beer, you can only rent it.
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You haven't been on the internet long enough, apparently.
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You really need to see more of the internet. (or, maybe not...)
The physics (Score:2)
I suppose this means that part of the energy needed to separate the hydrogen atom from the other atoms it was clinging to was supplied by the organism that created the urea.
Re:Uh, the chemistry (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I know someone who will save our Earth (Score:4, Informative)
My wife is going to be the Energy SuperHeroine. She has to pee about 20 times a day.
Either your wife has a small or irritable bladder, or she drinks a lot of water. In either case it's not going to help. If she has a small bladder she will be peeing all the time, but her total daily volume of urine will be within normal limits. If she drinks a lot of water, her urine volume will be above average, but the actual concentration of urea in her urine will be less.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
On the other hand, we doctors know that red meat and other protein rich foods - dairy products, eggs, etc - will substantially increase your production of urea (this is after all how the body gets rid of excess nitrogen produced when amino acids from proteins are turned into other stuff like sugars, fats, etc). So perhaps finally we'll be able to imprison all the snobbish vegans. Everyone will be forced to eat red meat and cheese all the time, and promptly die of heart attacks at 40, solving both the energy and the social security crises in one fell swoop.