Posted on 03/11/2017 8:32:11 AM PST by ckilmer
We gotta come up every 4 months for food
Gosh I loved Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
WC Fields is a beloved hoot and a skeptic
>>>Takes more energy to split water than you get back be the recombination. OK for some niche applications.<<<
I believe this technology is being considered to be paired with solar power. Imagine the deserts having water piped in from the sea. What is now a barren wasteland can now provide energy that can be used whenever, wherever. As for the loss in efficiency, who cares because the solar energy is free and abundant.
Perhaps one day it will be cost effective as drilling for oil. You can recombine the Hydrogen and Oxygen (from water) with Carbon from the atmosphere and make your own fossil fuels.
If.....and of course that is a big if, it would fundamentally transform the world as it it would open up energy independence far and wide.
You need to buy a sense of humor.
All they need is a trillion dollars in tax subsidies and mandatory exclusive use of their product and they are good to go!
The fact that millions of acres of land will be turned into ugly solar farms that nuke the natural ecology is a small price to pay for your totalitarian wet dream.
The problem with going down this path is that there are energy losses when creating fuel from “water” by hydrolysis even with the most effective catalysts and every other method mentioned. Most people assume that the fuel produced would be used in internal combustion engines... the biggest problem however is that most internal combustion engines have a thermal efficiency of around 20%.
When our power is out and we use our natural gas powered backup generator... taking readings from our kWh meter and our gas meter confirms that less than 20% of the energy in the natural gas is being converted to electricity. The rest is being converted to waste heat.
I believe that the most efficient internal combustion engine in the world is the massive Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged 2 stroke diesel which is used to power container ships and it hovers somewhere around 50%. Fuel cells have a maximum theoretical operating efficiency of slightly more than 80%. But there are still some losses when converting this energy back into useful work.
Where articles like this go wrong is by misleading people into believing that what is being talked about is some sort of free ride. What we are really talking about are energy storage technologies. The energy still has to come from somewhere. When we find hydrocarbons and extract them from the ground, we are merely finding a substance that has energy stored within it. It is the same as when we cut down trees and use the wood to heat our house. The wood is releasing energy the tree extracted from the sun.
As a retired chemist, my current hobby is converting gin into urine......
I noticed the article said nothing about conversion efficiency. That is, how many watts of sunlight hit the panel and how much is converted into fuel?
You can’t get water to split unless you put the energy back into it that was recovered when hydrogen and oxygen was combined. Plus a little more. What’s being offered here, a perpetual machine or some such non-feasible project?
The most interesting part of the article is not actually the results but rather the methodology. Why? Because the way they go about finding new catalysts promises to accelerate the pace at which better catalysts are found —not just for photoanobes—but also for catalysts and membranes of all kinds.
....................
Now, using a new high-throughput method of identifying new materials, a team of researchers led by Caltech’s John Gregoire and Berkeley Lab’s Jeffrey Neaton and Qimin Yan have found 12 promising new photoanodes.
“This integration of theory and experiment is a blueprint for conducting research in an increasingly interdisciplinary world,” says Gregoire, JCAP thrust coordinator for Photoelectrocatalysis and leader of the High Throughput Experimentation group. “It’s exciting to find 12 new potential photoanodes for making solar fuels, but even more so to have a new materials discovery pipeline going forward.”
“What is particularly significant about this study, which combines experiment and theory, is that in addition to identifying several new compounds for solar fuel applications, we were also able to learn something new about the underlying electronic structure of the materials themselves,” says Neaton, the director of the Molecular Foundry.
Previous materials discovery processes relied on cumbersome testing of individual compounds to assess their potential for use in specific applications. In the new process, Gregoire and his colleagues combined computational and experimental approaches by first mining a materials database for potentially useful compounds, screening it based on the properties of the materials, and then rapidly testing the most promising candidates using high-throughput experimentation.
The chemistry and thermodynamics implied for economic value-added do not make sense. Other than being able to burn unicorn droppings as fuel.
This already exists as a proven technology.
It's called photosynthesis and is used by PLANTS, which we then use as fuel!!
Figures lie and liars figure...
Lol.
What we are really talking about are energy storage technologies.
“Burning H is not “clean””
what is the byproduct?
Yup. :)
Cool idea and cool technology.
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