Crunching the Numbers on a Hydrogen Economy 396
mattnyc99 writes "In its new cover story, 'The Truth About Hydrogen,' Popular Mechanics magazine takes a close look at how close the United States is to powering its homes, cars and economy with hydrogen — including a calculation of where all the hydrogen would come from to meet President Bush's demands. Interesting that they break down the future of hydropower not by its advantages but by its challenges: production, storage, distribution and use."
You keep using that word. (Score:5, Informative)
I do not think it means [reference.com] what you think it means.
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could do what most people do when they want hydrogen, heat a hydrocarbon with steam [wikipedia.org]. It is a hell of a lot cheaper than electrolysis! In fact, most fuel cells use some sort of hydrocarbon reforming to get their hydrogen. Unless you store hydrogen as a liquid, its energy density is just too low for any reasonable fuel tank.
Crisis is in Transportation sector. (Score:5, Informative)
The fixed or stationary energy use, at homes, offices, and factories is not in as much of a crisis as the transportation sector. For electricity generation, there are alternatives like coal (yeah, it is dirty), or nuclear (yeah, most people fear it) or tar sands (yeah, it is expensive to recover) or wind (yeah, it has some problems), solar (yes, it needs high investment). There are problems, but USA is self suffiicient in them, and we wont be held hostage by foreign powers. There is breathing space to develop really good alternatives.
On the other hand, in the transportation sector is in crisis already. So much of personal transportation depends on gasoline and freight depends on diesel and air transportation depends on kerosene. No serious alternatives are emerging and the time is running out on those sectors. Most predictions of peak oil is around now or 2010. Even the most optimistic estimates about the Hydrogen powered cars or biodiesel driven trucks talk about widespread adaptation around 2020.
America is particularly vulnerable to this energy crisis. It is not as densely populated like Europe or Urban India and China. It is not easy to switch USA to use electricity driven public transportation. So much of the economy depends on the high home values of the sprawled cities and the humongous fleets of trucks delivering goods. So much of the infrastructure is built around the idea it is very cheap to transport goods over 100s of miles. And America is not self sufficient in this energy sector. This is a grave crisis.
Re:Coal to oil (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/47/ [peakoil.ie]
Other organizations and institutes a re backing those figures and they agree with this. Meaning that if the figures are correct we will run out in 2050, but as supplies start running out the price of oil will skyrocket.
If they skyrocket this high the price will be to high to, for example, power combines for the harvest of food supplies. This is not a scenario for third world countries, this is a scenario we can expect to have in the US and Europe for example in 20 till 30 years. This is to say if we do not take quick action.
There are solutions to extract fuel from coal, this is done by Germany in world war II when they had almost zero access to oil supplies but where in need of powering a war machine. The solution is today used in South Africa where they have a 28% fuel supply from coal liquefaction.
Even do we are aware of the problem and even do we have a solution in place there is not very much initiative at this moment. We might run out of time. At least that is what I am worried about.
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:3, Informative)
Instead, they take some other compound, like ammonia or hydrides, from which they extract the hydrogen to power the fuel cell. The advantage is that at no point do you have a large enough quantity of hydrogen to cause an explosion.
So my point is, generating the appropriate "fuel" for a fuel cell isn't as easy as electrolysing water to get it's hydrogen. You'll then want to combine that hydrogen with a carrier, which is what will be injected into your fuel cell. That's the complicated part.
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hydrogen Not A Fuel? (Score:4, Informative)
The more things change. . .
Gasoline and diesel have to be refined -- it's not like we find them naturally in the ground.
But the energy is already in the crude (stored solar) and it can be used to power its own refinement. There is a loss of available energy in the process, but a net gain nonetheless.
There is nothing but net loss in hydrogen since any energy that can be extracted from it must be put in it the first place - and the Second Law wins. The current cheapest and quickest way to put energy into hydrogen is to . .
In other words, when hydrogen becomes really, really expensive itself.
KFG
Re:Crisis is in Transportation sector. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Storage as a "compound" (Score:4, Informative)
The temperature needed to release the hydrogen is about 300 deg C.
Re:Innovation (Score:2, Informative)
How about telling the truth, just to be different?
KFG
Re:What about Iceland? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.hydro.com/en/press_room/news/archive/2
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,3604,94313
They don't just use hydrogen.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/energy-
They are lucky they live where they do. It's a hot bed of free energy.
Re:The myth of peak oil (Score:5, Informative)
Amazing how you don't graps what "Peak Oil" really is.
At a certain point, production stops increasing, and in fact starts to decline, because not enough new fields can be found to replace the spent ones. (When's the last time you saw a field of Oil pumps in PA?) The price of oil goes up, as the supply goes down -- making currently non-profitable oil reserves and energy sources, theoretically, more profitable.
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:5, Informative)
That's because there are no fuel cells aimed at the mass market yet, except alcohol testers, which are anyway not a power source. Hydrogen is not more dangerous than gasoline; it does not concentrate on the ground but escapes high to the sky. You can neither be soaked in hydrogen. It does however have a lower threshold for ignition, but putting things together it is not especially dangerous. Thinking Hindenburg, less than half of crew and passengers actually died [wikipedia.org]. Try find that number in any plane crash with an equivalent amount of flames.
Wish it were like that, but if they contain the energy, hydrides, ammonia or whatever else can also burn. The idea is mostly to increase volumetric energy density, as hydrogen is very light and going around with a 70-MPa cylinder is somewhat unpractical (though not impossible).
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Informative)
Immediately before that quote: Skeptics say that hydrogen promises to be a needlessly expensive solution for applications for which simpler, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already exist. (Emphasis mine)
In other words, for many applications Hydrogen is the Rube Goldberg machine of energy management.
=Smidge=
Hindenburg explosion not H2 but FeO3&Al (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, the skin panels were not electrically bonded to the superstructure of the ship and formed a series of capacitors which were highly charged - when the ship was grounded by the mooring lines, the panels discharged, some through the wet cords binding them to the ship, some by arcing (and thus setting themselves on fire).
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:3, Informative)
The real problem here is the space required by sugar-cane plantations. To be able to supply enougth methanol the plantations would have to grow over lands ocuppied today by other cultures (we still need food!), or the few preserved wild forrests that we have. Yes, I know we can harvest methanol from beats and other vegetables, but AFAIK sugar-cane is the most efficient.
Re:A wise man once said.. (Score:1, Informative)
Now, the median is defined such that it's actually in the middle, so half are below and half are above it. So half of the world has lower than median intelligence.
If you really wanted to defend that, you might instead point out that IQ tests are made to fit a normal distribution.
Re:A wise man once said.. (Score:3, Informative)
He's not wrong, merely imprecise. You might be considered either wrong, or ill informed. Your choice. I can't just pick overly critical, as that doesn't fit. (Well, it's true, but it's not the point I'm addressing.)
It would have been more correct to point out that dumb means unable to speak rather than unintelligent. This is at least formally true.
Re:Electricity + Water (Score:3, Informative)
The main problem with Nuclear today is the absence of recycling the material after it has been in the reacotr. Once we get breeder reactors and a recycling program going, nuclear gets a lot cleaner.
Re:Hindenburg explosion not H2 but FeO3&Al (Score:2, Informative)
Ah, but the whole basis of Bain's theory (especially as it is used to counter the Hindenburg objection when discussing hydrogen's potential as a fuel) is that the hydrogen was incidental to the fire, and that it was the cover and not the hydrogen which was the fire's primary accelerant.
Bain tried to claim that the Hindenburg would have burnt just the same had it been filled with helium, and therefore hydrogen was not to blame for the Hindenburg disaster. Of course, Bain's claims seem to have changed as more and more of his theory was debunked (last I heard he was apparently claiming that it was engine exhaust which somehow wafted up to the top of the ship and caused the fire, so consider the source here) but when his theory was still new and unchallenged, he was trying to say that the outer cover was SO flammable that an airship filled with non-flammable helium would have burned exactly the way the Hindenburg burned. Hence, the inevitable conclusion would go, hydrogen is safe to use as a fuel.
Now, I believe hydrogen IS safe to use as a fuel, at least given the fact that we regularly use a combustible fuel like gasoline and consider it safe. Don't misunderstand me... I am a big proponent of the development of alternative fuel sources. I'm not arguing against Bain's theory for the sake of attacking alternative fuels.
However... Dessler, Overs, and Appleby have proven (by an easily replicated burn test) that the Hindenburg's outer cover, on its own, would have taken 40 hours to burn. A helium airship with this same covering under the same conditions would NOT have burned in 32-34 seconds as the Hindenburg did.
Could the outer cover have been the initial source of a small, slow-burning fire that ignited the ship's hydrogen and led to the disaster? Possibly. However, I have yet to see Bain actually replicate the ignition of the cover using the same static discharge that would have been present atop the Hindenburg. In various documentaries on the matter, I've seen him light fabric samples using an open flame, and using a high-voltage charge from a Jacob's Ladder, neither of which are remotely the same thing as the type of static discharge that would have ignited the Hindenburg.
A far more likely possibility as far as the fabric helping to generate a static discharge that would have ignited the hydrogen is this: The outer cover was isolated from the ship's framework by wooden shims up to a centimeter thick which had been glued along the longitudinal frames in a number of places (especially in the stern of the ship) to help tighten the outer cover (which was noted to be unusually loose during the ship's early flights.) Now you've got a gap between cover and framework across which static can arc, and in which loose hydrogen could easily be present if we're talking about the very top longitudinal girders atop the ship.
And this really comes back to the theory that Dr. Eckener had in 1937, and which he held for the rest of his life... free hydrogen was ignited by a spark between the outer cover and the ship's framework.
But again, either way, it was the hydrogen which was the real problem there. Had the Hindenburg been filled with helium, it simply would not have burned the way it did, even if the cover HAD somehow started on fire atop the ship. They'd have had plenty of time to get the ship landed and the passengers disembarked, and then you'd have probably seen riggers and mechanics climbing up inside the hull with fire extinguishers to douse the fire. The ship wouldn't have sailed back to Germany that night as intended, of course, but they'd have almost certainly saved it and repaired it.
And, of course, if the Hindenburg fire wasn't anything to do with any cover fire, if the whole thing was just as Eckener theorized, free hydrogen being ignited d