Posted on 02/10/2003 2:01:51 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Over the last twenty-five years, the government has spent $1.2 billion on fuel cell research and development. During his recent State of the Union speech, President Bush proposed spending another billion for further research. Automakers have already spent millions to no avail. The simple fact is that it still costs far more money to extract hydrogen, breaking its molecule away from others in order to use it to create energy. This is a bad idea.
Hydrogen is held out as a clean-burning, virtually inexhaustible source of energy, but as a Washington Times editorial pointed out in November, others "suggest it is a gaseous dream rising on the rhetoric of environmental windbags." If enough billions are spent, it seems reasonable to expect hydrogen to become an energy source, but like most environmental pipe dreams, this one has a silent agenda of eliminating petroleum as an energy source, nor can we reasonably expect a dramatic breakthrough. Did I mention this is a very bad idea?
Oil is the Green´s number one enemy after population. The object is not to make the Earth safer, but to continue the pressure to reduce reliance on it, putting everyone at a disadvantage when it comes to utilizing this primary form of energy.
Given the fact that the Earth shows no signs of running out of oil in the near or even far future, the notion of spending billions to replace it seems odd at best, foolish at worst. The Earth´s reserves of oil have been consistently underestimated for decades since it was first discovered. To the contrary, discoveries of new reserves occur every year and the technology to get at it has improved as well.
The mere fact that Greens have fought gaining access to the estimated 16 billion barrels of oil in Alaska´s ANWR area tells you more about their real agenda than anything else you need to know. The Department of Energy estimates there are at least one trillion barrels currently available worldwide.
If the Saudis were not sitting atop huge reserves, they would still be camel drivers and goat herders. If Saddam Hussein did not control the second largest reserve of oil, we might not being going to war to wrest control from this madman?
While it is true that a hydrogen-based economy is deemed inevitable for reasons of efficiency, environmental benefit and inexhaustibility, I remain wary of this. It is true, too, that hydrogen fuel cells have the potential to be almost twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, emitting only air and water vapor, there are huge problems involved.
Three experts, Lawrence D. Burns, Byron McCormick and Christopher E. Borroni-Bird, noted in the October issue of Science that, "Viewed from where we are today, fuel cells and a hydrogen fueling infrastructure are a chicken-and-egg problem. We cannot have large numbers of fuel-cell vehicles without adequate fuel available to support them, but we will not be able to create the required infrastructure unless there are significant numbers of fuel-cell vehicles on the roadways."
Breaking a hydrogen molecule into electrons and protons, and then sending it through an electric drive motor, and recombining the particles with oxygen to produce water poses an enormous challenge. "While hydrogen is universally abundant, it´s not cheap to get at", noted the Washington Times editorial. "At the moment, fuel cells are actually energy losers, since it costs more to free the hydrogen than is earned by running hydrogen through fuel cells." In brief, it costs more energy to turn hydrogen into energy than current technology would permit.
Writing recently on the topic, Llewellyn King, publisher of White House Weekly, Noted that "In an act of political brilliance, President Bush, in his State of the Union Speech, stole the Holy Grail of environmentalism, the hydrogen-powered fuel-cell car. For two decades, environmentalists have held out the ‘hydrogen economy´ as the pollution-free future for transportation. Unfortunately, it also has had about it the whiff of a free lunch." Five Presidents have put the federal government to work trying to achieve this goal. It remains a very bad idea.
The process involved is called hydrolysis, popularly called "cracking water." As King pointed out, "The former defeats the purpose because you still have to have oil, coal or natural gas to manufacture hydrogen." This is what the Greens like to gloss over. Why not, asks King, just run a vehicle on natural gas to begin with? Why burden a vehicle with a duel system of reforming the gas and then making electricity? This seems so obvious that one is also compelled to ask, why not just keep using gasoline? The entire, worldwide structure of extracting oil to transporting it to refining it would have to be changed. Why not just keep finding new sources of oil since there is no evidence we are in imminent danger of running out of it?
Hydrogen has a very low energy density. It would cost more to fuel your car with it than our current system. As King notes, "The energy density of hydrogen is about one-tenth that of natural gas." Hybrid engines, available only in "demonstration" vehicles, would reduce our dependency on imported gas and this well may be the President´s interest in this power source. That does not, however, make it any less of a bad idea.
Hydrogen is the new darling of the Greens as was nuclear energy a few decades ago until they abandoned their support and now actively fight the creation of new nuclear energy plants.
Forget about some spectacular breakthrough on hydrogen as an energy source. Do not be fooled by the Green´s claims because, like everything else they propose, their primary goal is to reduce the population of the Earth and anything that can serve their agenda will be pursued amidst a flood of lies.
We are probably looking at a minimum of a quarter century away from all of this -- possibly much longer. But the good news is that "running out of oil" does NOT equal "the end of the world."
Note that the Greedy Greenies haven't jumped on Bush's proposal. However, I'd just love to stick it to the Saudis, so bring on the hydrogen in quantities that make it affordable. The arabs can keep their oil and eat it.
Where can I get my car modified?
A "hydrogen-based economy" is not only NOT "inevitable", it is an impossibility.
It will ALWAYS take a greater amount of energy from some OTHER SOURCE just to manufacture the hydrogen.
Fision does not need to be as expensive as it has been made to be by the enviro idiots. The fuel cost and actual reactor maintenance cost of fision is actually quite low. It's the fision bureaucracy that costs the megabucks.
And - there is lots of wasted elecricity at night, because even conventional power plants cannot be shut down. That's the reason power companies activly sell street lights, to recover at least a little of the wasted power costs.
Personally, I hate street lights. Our neighborhood deliberatly doesn't have them, and the stars are wonderful at night. So, get rid of the street lights, and run hydrogen separators with the wasted power.
I think it is a pretty overt agenda.
What's your point?
Hydrogen is merely an energy storage medium, like compressed air to run your air drill.
Unless they figure out that oil is still being created by the earth (probably is, but not at the rates we're using it). A hydrogen economy is a certianty in some future century.
With the cost of gasoline what it is today, it is practically at the cost break even point now. So that day may be sooner rather than later.
Huh, yeah.
My point is fission is artificially overpriced today. It is here-and-now, not pie-in-the-sky, like Fusion.
Yes, some other source... but if that source is sunlight, using a version of photosynthesis?
Harnessing the Horsepower of Pond Scum
Researchers Hope to Magnify Yields of Hydrogen Gas from Renewable Green Algae
By Kathleen Scalise, Public Affairs Posted February 16, 2000
A metabolic switch that triggers algae to turn sunlight into large quantities of hydrogen gas, a valuable fuel, is the subject of a new discovery reported by Berkeley scientists and their Colorado colleagues.
"I guess it's the equivalent of striking oil," said plant and microbial biology Professor Tasios Melis. "It was enormously exciting. It was unbelievable."
Melis and postdoctoral associate Liping Zhang of Berkeley made the discovery -- funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Hydrogen Program -- with Michael Seibert, Maria Ghirardi and postdoctoral associate Marc Forestier of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
Currently, hydrogen fuel is extracted from natural gas, a non-renewable energy source. The new discovery makes it possible to harness nature's own tool, photosynthesis, to produce the promising alternative fuel from sunlight and water. A joint patent on this new technique for capturing solar energy has been taken out by the two institutions.
So far, only small-scale cultures of the microscopic green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have been examined in the laboratory for their hydrogen production capabilities, Melis said.
"In the future, both small-scale industrial and commercial operations and larger utility photobioreactor complexes can be envisioned using this process," Melis said.
While current production rates are not high enough to make the process immediately viable commercially, the researchers believe that yields could rise by at least 10 fold with further research, someday making the technique an attractive fuel-producing option.
Preliminary rough estimates, for instance, suggest it is conceivable that a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles, Melis said.
The scientific team is just beginning to test ways to maximize hydrogen production, including varying the particular type of microalga used and its growth conditions.
Many energy experts believe hydrogen gas one day could become the world's best renewable source of energy and an environmentally friendly replacement for fossil fuels.
"Hydrogen is so clean burning that what comes out of the exhaust pipe is pure water," Melis said. "You can drink it."
Engineering advances for hydrogen storage, transportation and utilization are beginning to make the fuel feasible to power automobiles and buses and to generate electricity in this country, Seibert said.
"What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen," he said.
For nearly 60 years, scientists have known that certain types of algae can produce the gas in this way, but only in trace amounts. Despite tinkering with the process, no one has been able to make the yield rise significantly without elaborate and costly procedures until the Berkeley and Colorado teams made this discovery.
The breakthrough, Melis said, was discovering what he calls a "molecular switch." This is a process by which the cell's usual photosynthetic apparatus can be turned off at will and the cell can be directed to use stored energy with hydrogen as the byproduct.
"The switch is actually very simple to activate," Melis said. "It depends on the absence of an essential element, sulfur, from the microalga growth medium."
The absence of sulfur stops photosynthesis and thus halts the cell's internal production of oxygen. Without oxygen from any source, the anaerobic cells are not able to burn stored fuel in the usual way, through metabolic respiration. In order to survive, they are forced to activate the alternative metabolic pathway, which generates the hydrogen and may be universal in many types of algae.
"They're utilizing stored compounds and bleeding hydrogen just to survive," Melis said. "It's probably an ancient strategy that the organism developed to live in sulfur-poor anaerobic conditions."
He said the algal culture cannot live forever when it is switched over to hydrogen production, but that it can manage for a considerable period of time without negative effects.
The researchers first grow the algae "photosynthetically like every other plant on Earth," Melis said. This allows the green-colored microorganisms to collect sunlight and accumulate a generous supply of carbohydrates and other fuels.
When enough energy has been banked in this manner, the researchers tap it and turn it into hydrogen. To do this, they transfer the liquid algal culture, which resembles a lime-green soft drink, to stoppered one-liter glass bottles with no sulfur present. Then the culture is allowed to consume all oxygen.
After about 24 hours, photosynthesis and normal metabolic respiration stop, and hydrogen begins to bubble to the top of the bottles and bleed off into tall, hydrogen-collection glass tubes.
Well, you are correct in your 2nd statement. I don't know about "impossible", however. Just expensive. Coal gasification is a very interesting approach and doesn't seem to be the boondoggle that fusion power represents (always fusion tomorrow, never fusion today.) The coal gasification plants are actually in production in some countries - but they are expensive compared to petroleum and natural gas.
From the link: "Rather than burning coal directly, coal gasification reacts coal with steam and carefully controlled amounts of air or oxygen under high temperatures and pressures. The heat and pressure break apart the chemical bonds in coal's complex molecular structure, setting into motion chemical reactions with the steam and oxygen to form a gaseous mixture, typically hydrogen and carbon monoxide. (Gasification, in fact, may be one of the best ways to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel in the future.)"
and
"Coal gasification offers a much more efficient way to generate electricity than conventional coal-burning power plants. In a conventional plant, heat from the coal furnace is used to boil water, creating steam for a steam-turbine generator. By contrast, a gasification-based power plant uses the hot, high pressure coal gases exiting a gasifier to power a gas turbine (in the same manner as natural gas). Hot exhaust from the gas turbine is then fed into a conventional steam turbine, producing a second source of power. This dual, or "combined cycle," arrangement of turbines - a configuration not possible with conventional coal combustion - offers major improvements in power plant efficiencies. Today's conventional combustion plants are typically 33-35% efficient (fuel-to-electricity). Coal gasification offers the prospects of boosting efficiencies to 45-50% in the short-term and potentially to nearly 60% with technological advancements. Higher efficiencies translate into better economics and inherent reductions in greenhouse gases."
The thing that looks interesting is that this just takes coal (of which we have an abundance), generates electricity from it (with a bit more cost and less pollution) and it generates hydrogen as a side effect.
Since you lose at least 30% in the conversion to H2, I think that the price would be much higher.
He skipped the best and most cost effective way to do so. Nuclear power.
In addition, generating hydrogen would potentially be a way to make non-competitive and unreliable sources such as wind and solar profitable. Instead of burdening the power grid with their overpriced electrons, why not convert those electrons into hydrogen? They can produce when the sun shines or the wind blows.
Why not, asks King, just run a vehicle on natural gas to begin with?
Because natural gas has other far more productive uses than transportation. Home heating, industrial furnaces and metal making, fertilizer and chemical processes etc. Use too much for cars and you drive the price high for other uses where there is no practicable substitute for natural gas.
There is still a lot of development necessary before we get to a hydrogen economy, but to my knowledge, there are no fundamental technical or economic roadblocks.
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