Posted on 08/13/2021 4:13:06 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Hydrogen! It’s the obvious and perfect answer to global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Instead of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) we can leave out the carbon part, burn just the hydrogen, and emit nothing but pure water vapor. H2 + O = H2O! Thus, no more CO2 emissions . Why didn’t anyone think of this before now?
Actually, the geniuses are way ahead of you on this one. President George W. Bush was touting the coming “hydrogen economy” as far back as 2003. (“In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy.”). Barack Obama was not one to get left behind on an issue like this. In the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced, “[F]uel cell technologies [i.e., hydrogen-fueled motors] are paving the way to competitiveness in the global clean energy market and to new jobs and business creation across the country.” Then there’s the biggest hydrogen enthusiast of all, PM Boris Johnson of the UK, who promises that his country is at the dawn of the “hydrogen economy.” (“Towards the end of 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson released details of a 10-point plan for a so-called ‘green industrial revolution.’. . . This year will also see the government publish a Hydrogen Strategy that will “outline plans” to develop a hydrogen economy in the U.K.”)
And let us not forget California. If you look at my post from two days ago about California’s plans for “zero carbon” electricity, you will find a chart showing that by 2045 they plan to have some 40 GW of what they call “Zero Carbon Firm” resources. What does that mean? In the print below the chart, they reveal it: “hydrogen fuel cells.” (Their current amount of hydrogen fuel cells contributing to the grid is 0.)
So basically, hydrogen is the perfect answer to our problems, right? Wrong. Only an idiot could think that hydrogen offers any material useful contribution to the world’s energy supply.
For much of the information that follows, I’ll be relying on a June 6, 2020 Report written for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by John Constable. However, and not to downplay Mr. Constable’s excellent Report in any way, but I made many of the same points in one of the very first posts on this blog in November 2012, titled “The Hydrogen Economy.” That post was based mostly on my layman’s understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Really, that’s all you need to know to realize that hydrogen as a major source of energy for the economy doesn’t make any sense at all.
So what is the fundamental flaw in the idea of a hydrogen-based energy economy? Constable puts it this way: “Being highly reactive, elemental hydrogen, H2, is found in only small quantities in nature on the earth’s surface but is present in a very wide range of compounds.” In other words, the hydrogen is not free for the taking, but rather is already combined with something else; and to separate the hydrogen so that you have free hydrogen to use, you need to add energy. Once you have added the energy and you have the free hydrogen, you can burn it. But that’s where the Second Law of Thermodynamics comes in. Due to inevitable inefficiencies in the processes, when you burn the hydrogen, you get back less energy than you expended to free it up. No matter how you approach the problem, the process of freeing up hydrogen and then burning it costs more energy than it generates.
Do you think somebody in our political leadership or bureaucracies might understand this? Don’t count on it.
Constable then goes into much more detail, and the deeper he gets into it the more ridiculous the hydrogen project looks. Since essentially all of the hydrogen starts out combined with something, where might you look to find a source of large quantities of hydrogen? Constable: “[T]he sources are few in number, being limited to either water, fossil hydrocarbons or biomass.”
The bond of hydrogen and oxygen in water is a high-energy thing that therefore takes a lot of energy to undo. So let’s consider getting the hydrogen from natural gas. Indeed, that is the main source today of substantial quantities of pure hydrogen for industrial purposes. Constable describes a well-established process called “steam methane reformation” (SMR) by which steam is passed through natural gas (methane, or CH4). The bond is broken and the hydrogen breaks free. Voila! Oh, but what happens to the carbon? Why obviously, it is released also, and thereupon combines with oxygen from the air forming CO2.
Wait a minute! The whole idea behind undertaking this expensive process was to avoid the release of the CO2. So clearly, we need another step. In the British proposal to create the “hydrogen economy,” they have had to include the addition of processes for “carbon capture and storage” to capture the CO2 before it gets away and prevent it getting into the atmosphere. Except that they haven’t figured out how to capture it all. They are hoping for capture rates of maybe 85 - 90%. So it turns out that this process, for all its additional costs, is not emissions-free at all.
And then there’s the next obvious question: Why not just burn the natural gas? Instead of having to input energy in the “steam reformation” process, this way you will release a large amount of useable and useful energy when the carbon gets burned. And as to CO2, you get the exact same amount. If you have a fetish that the CO2 must be captured, you can try to capture it from this process instead of from the “steam reformation” process. Again, you will not get 100%, but it’s really no different.
Except for the optics. In the first scenario, you claim you are burning “clean, pure hydrogen.” In the second scenario, you are burning natural gas, just as we have been doing for decades. Can people really be fooled by this? It seems like “smart” people like Bush, Obama and Johnson have all been fooled, so I guess there’s no reason not to expect most of the rest of the people to go along.
These are huge technical problems that have been known about for over 100 years and, while they have solutions, the solutions are VERY expensive, complex, and require special materials.
The problem of gasoline fumes has long been solved and at low cost. Why, you might even have a few products around your house that utilize these gasoline fume management solutions.
“Whatever is the source of the energy that you use to fuel the hydrolysis would be a lot more efficient to use directly for your energy needs”
That brings us back to battery-powered cars. It’s batteries versus hydrogen. I’ll stick with gasoline.
Only water above the troposphere in the stratosphere is a greenhouse gas. Water vapor under the stratosphere and near the surface is part of the water cycle and will ultimately return to it’s base level source the world ocean. Adding water vapor at ground level is like watering your yard and letting it evaporate to the sky in the summer time that no more causes greenhouse effect than letting water vapor out of a fuel cell in a vehicle sitting in the drive way next to that wet grass. Even aircraft using fuel cells would not make a difference as long as they are not above 50,000 FT or so and above the water cycle. Conventional jet engines release millions of kg of water vapor every year into the sky that’s what contrails are made of we see them every day all across the sky. More than half the combustion products of jet fuel is H2O on vapor form. Jet fuel is primarily dodecane C12H26 when burnt in a jet engine you get 12 atoms of CO2 and 13 atoms of H2O per single atom of dodecane. A fuel cell is twice as efficient as a open cycle gas turbine for equal output you will get half the water vapor anyway.
“Gasoline is a dangerous liquid that emits a dangerous fume.”
Not nearly as dangerous as hydrogen.
Regarding fumes, you can smell gasoline fumes. You can’t smell hydrogen fumes so you wouldn’t know to get out if hydrogen were filling the air.
Batteries do not have the energy density to power aircraft for long distances, hydrogen does. Same for long distances with class 8 lorries. Both need the energy density of hydrogen or a hydrocarbon to function over 1000+km distances. With cheap nuclear or geothermal or wind or solar with FT synthesis and H2 electrolysis liquid fuels can be made the Navy is going that route for jet fuel underway.
I had an idea about 20 years ago to install surf generators (devices that generate electricity using the motion of the incoming waves on a beach -they have these already in a few countries) that are used to constantly pull the hydrogen from sea water. The hydrogen is then placed in storage for later use.
Hydrogen is very low permeability in HDPE or aluminum and it embrittles neither of them. Modern carbon fiber tanks are lined with HDPE and aluminum they lose less than 1% per month via seepage the gas lines are also HDPE lined a properly engineered composite H2 tank and feed lines will lose little to permeability or seal leaks. Nasa uses hydrogen on the regular as does every oil refinery in the world in quantities of millions of kg per year. The issues of leakage was solved with composite materials years ago.
IIRC, hydrogen contains less power per unit of volume than the fossil fuels, so to equal the gas/diesel vehicle range would require more fuel storage. Still beats electric, though.
I’ve wondered why geo-thermal hasn’t been pressed more. Right now it’s the playground for the elite like Algore.
Hydrogen has the highest energy per kg of any fuel but low density makes that a moot point.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage
“On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline. On a volume basis, however, the situation is reversed; liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L, as shown in the figure comparing energy densities of fuels based on lower heating values.”
Ahem…the fact remains “Global Warming”, or Climate Change, or whatever they choose to call it is a stupid question.
The demonization of CO2 is idiotic.
Any “answer” other than that will also be idiotic.
Interestingly methanol alcohol contains more hydrogen in a gallon of liquid methanol than a gallon of liquid hydrogen contains. Storing hydrogen in alcohols is a high density way of storing it. Reforming that alcohol into CO2 and H2 is a viable way to fuel a PEM fuel cell w/o having to resort to cryogenic temperatures to get to high density.
One needs to be careful with hydrogen gas. Do a web search on the Hindenburg disaster.
CO2 climate change might be bogus but in the long term timeline humans will run out of fossil fuels at our current consumption rates in less than a century for liquid fuels and if the world went 100% coal powered at American standards of living two hundred more of coal or less. Our species has been modern humans for 250,000 years three centuries is a flash in the pan we need to move to unlimited energy sources. Fast spectrum nuclear reactors, fusion, geothermal, solar, and wind all will last for thousands and thousands of years. Fossil fuels will not that much is fact. I spent the last 20 years exploring, exploiting developing and drilling oil wells all over this planet I have a firm grasp on our petroleum reserves we have much less than a century left even less of the rest of the world comes up to match American levels of per capita consumption
Hydrogen is eminently doable and has the added benefit of restricting driving and auto ownership to the wealthier stratum of society.
There is a process called "planting trees." It's relatively inexpensive and low-tech. Admittedly, it takes a long time to get the results as the trees grow and mature, but there it is.
You mean coating the flammable aluminum airframe with iron oxide and powdered aluminum paint otherwise known as thermite is a bad idea. Watch the video again the hydrogen fire is barely visible rising above the thermite fire of the skin and airframe. This has been known for more than 50 years now myth busters even recreated it in glorious detail on national TV. Again don’t let science ruin a good luddite hysteria. Nasa and the oil industry uses hydrogen every day with little issue.
The reality is always just out of reach, like nuclear fusion.
One more huge issue with hydrogen fuel - hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, with just one proton.
That means that hydrogen gas must be massively compressed in pipelines and storage tanks to equal the same number of BTUs in natural gas, which is moved and stored at much lower compression.
Massive compression equals more energy consumption, and, it dramatically increases the risk for explosions and fire.
This fuel cell car is cheaper than my last two midrange luxury Volvos even before the tax credits.
1st, hydrogen is extraordinarily reactive. It absolutely hates to hang around as H2. It wants to react with almost any other element (not counting the noble gasses). And it is the smallest molecule on the planet. So it presents some significant challenges, when you try to contain, transport or pipe the stuff.
When you burn hydrogen you get water vapor, H2O.
Wait till the Greenies find out that the most potent green house gas, orders of magnitude more potent than CO2, is water vapor.
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