Liberals are too stupid to even remotely grasp that hydrogen fuel is not an energy source (like oil, natural gas, solar, nuclear or wind) but a kind of battery, storing the energy from some other source as burnable hydrogen. They are too stupid to grasp this simple fact, so they think in terms of hydrogen as a solution to the problem of CO2 emissions. But since the problem itself is entirely fanciful, I guess it doesn’t matter that the proposed solution is non-existent.
Are you insinuating that they are too stupid to find their butts with both hands and the lights on?
Where do you get the idea hydrogen vehicles don’t work. They are in use today.
Like you said, hydrogen is an energy-storage medium. If hydrogen production facilities could be combined with remote solar/geothermal/wind/etc. power generation facilities, its use could become feasible/economical.
The spread of hydrogen-powered personal transportation will come with the opening of the hydrogen mines and the distribution of hydrogen through the gaslines yet to be built.
No matter how far the technology has come, hydrogen is still notoriously difficult to extract, in terms of freeing it from the molecular bonds that hold it, and its relatively high reactivity with any containment vessel it may be put into. The problem with extracting hydrogen from water, is that it requires about as much energy to break the bonds that join hydrogen and oxygen, as the energy yielded when hydrogen recombines with oxygen.
Energy that comes from - electricity. There has to be a primary generator of electricity, be it the sun, or a nuclear power plant, or hydroelectric power, or even (Heaven forbid!) those giant bird Cuisinarts called wind turbines. Coal- or gas-fired power plants would simply defeat the original purpose.
Hydrogen is also a very difficult element to bottle up and transport, as it reacts with the material of a pipeline, forming a metal hydride, or it simply seeps out through the molecular structure of any synthetic material, say like Teflon, or most plastic materials, as the hydrogen is the smallest and lightest of elements, and easily fills in the interstices that exist in virtually every other molecular structure.
If hydrogen is chilled to low enough temperature, it could be transported as a liquid, but cryogenic transport has its own set of problems, like, for example maintaining the sufficiently low temperature of -252.87 C., some 20 degrees above absolute zero.
Absolutely right. Hydrogen, at least when produced via the “preferred” hydrolysis method, is in essence a battery.
Do you know if anybody has run the numbers for efficiency of electricity “stored” this way vs. in more typical battery types?
Quite a while back I ran some numbers best I could to compare the energy and emissions of burning fuel directly to generate movement via IC, compared to burning fuel to make electricity, transmit it to charging station, charge battery, then use electric motors to generate movement.
If I remember correctly, the electric car came out slightly ahead, but not nearly as much as the hype would have us believe. The problem is that IC is a one-stage process vs. the electric car, which has at least four stages that lose efficiency at each step. Even if each step is quite efficient, the losses add up.
I suspect a diesel hybrid might be more efficient than a pure-electric car, if we used the highly efficient diesel engines used in Europe.
Hydrogen isn’t being burned in this solution. The chemical reaction using a catalyst is generating electricity.