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.
Why not a democRAT law requiring perpetual motion machines?
We're already doing that. Much of what you toss into the trash (food waste, paper, cardboard, etc) is carbon which has been captured out of the atmosphere by plants. Then it gets buried in landfills, to turn into new coal in a million years or so.
Water vapor is a much more potent warming agent then CO2.
And it takes more energy to generate H2 then you get back when you “ burn “ it.
Looks like the only way hydrogen as a fuel makes sense is to produce it using electricity from a clean source like solar or nuclear.
In my mind, though, hydrogen is a dangerous gas.
No matter how you approach the problem, the process of freeing up hydrogen and then burning it costs more energy than it generates.
I’ve been saying it since the 80s
If you have large amounts of solar or nuke power you can capture CO2 from the air or seawater add in the hydrogen from electrolysis run the reverse water gas shift to turn H2 + CO2 into CO based syngas and make liquid fuels depending on the catalysts you can make any of the simple alcohols like methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol. Propanol and Butanol are close enough to petrol in Mj/Kg that no adjustments are needed for modern OBDII controlled engines the fuel maps are wide enough to accommodate the fuel air mix needed for either. Using cobalt catalysts the higher alkanes are in reach all the way up to C25+ Pennzoil uses this process to make synthetic motor oils, Iron catalysts yield the light alkane series with methane, ethane, propane, butane ,hexane being the dominate products. The South Africans use stores synthesis to make liquid fuels by the millions of gallons per year they source the syngas from coal but the process doesn’t care where the CO and H2 comes from as long as the CO to H2 ratio is at least one to three. The US Navy has tested and produced jet fuel from seawater using just electricity as the energy source as seawater has 180 times the CO2 content relative to air extracting CO2 from it during the electrolysis process is a free byproduct. The US Navy plans to make jet fuel on board the carriers with excess nuke power rather than shipping jet fuel around the world in tanker ships. They already flew a drone on the synthetic jet fuel from the process a F18 is next.
Yep, the carbonless future is going to be filled with wonders. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?
Gasoline is a dangerous liquid that emits a dangerous fume.
Or you could just put the gas in carbon fiber tanks and run fuel cells on it. Hydrogen in carbon fiber tanks is less of a fire risk than jet fuel in metal wing tanks. Hydrogen vents up and away during a breach and the flames rise above the source of the gas unlike jet fuel with pools under and on the structural breach and burns on that surface. Hydrogen hysteria is a mental problem not an engineering one.
Or turn it to liquid like the space shuttle used and fly conventional looking aircraft like Airbus plans to do.
https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zeroe.html
Good! Let us make the atmosphere say, 99and 9/10% hydrogen 1/10% oxygen. That should be good. Why can’t we do it tomorrow?
https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is-hydrogen-fuel/
Check out what the Army did they used an RPG and C4 on a vehicle with a composite wrapped can even then they couldn’t get one to detonate it simply vented and burned vertically. Also look at the car test at 60 and 90 seconds after tanks breach and ignition the hydrogen car is intact the gasoline car is melted rubble. But by all means let’s not let science get in the way of good old fashioned luddite hysteria
That’s the thing about hydrogen. The cliffnotes version is that hydrogen is locked up, and it takes energy to free it.
If you use electricity to free it, the one that comes to my mind is hydrolysis. Applying electricity to two electrodes in water (of different materials if I recall) to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. It’s sorta like a battery in reverse, which uses seperated charged materials to close a circuit to release the potential. Except a water batter would be terribly inefficient. So is the reverse. you have to apply wayy too much energy to seperate the hydrogen compared to what you get back. And where does that energy come from? You don’t pull it out of no where. 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
Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism. When you charge a battery, you get less energy out of the battery than what you put in because of heat loss. But a hydrogen tank can be filled in 5 minutes versus the hours it takes to recharge a battery.
Correct anyone with a freshmen level of thermodynamics who actually paid attention in physics 1301 understands that. Hydrogen is energy storage via chemical means. Using nuclear power to make hydrogen allows you to cut the powerlines and take energy with you. Using solar or wind to make hydrogen allows you to store excess of either for use at a later time or in a location not connected to the energy source. That is the value of hydrogen it is storage on a massive scale if you make the tanks big enough or use the natural gas grid as storage like Germany plans to do. Their gas grid can store 10s of gigawatt hours worth of hydrogen mixed in with the natural gas at up to 20% before it alters the BTU/scf ratio outside pipeline specs.
Hydrogen requires fuel to crack it from the water it’s trapped in. Nice dirty coal can be used to separate hydrogen from oxygen.
Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas. This creates greenhouse gases. Stop talking about clean fuel.
Fuel cells. NASA was very successful with these to provide power for the space capsules and LEM. just add water.
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