Posted on 11/20/2004 10:02:46 AM PST by SierraWasp
This is very important. We can stop trading with the ME. The Islamocrazies can have their countries back and can roll the clock back to the seventh century when the camel was the ultimate SUV. We will live in the twenty-first century and ignore them.
That "paragraph summary" is a powerful compilation of some very pursuasive information, indeed!!! Excellent work!!!
Where you hidin, dude? I miss your input! Did you git banned er sumthin???
"You couldn't plant enough biomass if you used all the airable land in the nation"
Do you have a source of data that supports this claim?
It is an alternative to gasoline only in one sense--both are point energy sources you can drive around with.
The difference is that gasoline is itself an energy source. That is, you get a lot more energy out of gasoline than it takes to make it.
Hydrogen is NOT a source of energy. It is best thought of as a battery, and not a very efficient one. Why? It takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you get burning it.
Deceitful greens and gullible conservatives run around proclaiming hydrogen is how we break free of the sheiks. Nope. Unlike oil, there are no pools of hydrogen lying around that we can mine. Instead, we have to extract it from water (H2O) and that takes a lot of energy.
So while greens are driving around in their hydrogen cars feeling self-righteous, they ignore that it took more oil or coal to produce that hydrogen than they would have used were they driving a gasoline powered hummer.
So in it's most important sense, hydrogen is NOT an alternative to gasoline. It is just a way to get energy from fossil fuels to a car, albeit indirectly--a battery.
Arghhhh. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It takes more energy to make the hydrogen from water than you get back when you burn it. It is a battery. To make hydrogen, you will have to burn fossil fuels or have a huge nuclear energy industry.
This is true but misses the point. As I said in my previous post, it takes more energy to extract hydrogen from water than you get back from the hydrogen (the point which you then restated in the above quoted language).
But the opposite is true for extracting oil from the ground or digging uranium--it takes less energy to extract than you get burning it. That's why nuclear can replace oil as a primary energy source and why hydrogen is only an storage medium for energy obtained from primary energy sources--a battery.
Do you really believe that hydrogen is an alternative to oil in the sense that it could act as a primary energy source? If not, I don't understand your initial point--that is, hydrogen should be set up as a competitor to oil. Even if we had an intact hydrogen infrastructure (so I've just saved you billions of dollars) hydrogen can't compete with nuclear and oil because we would still have to get the energy somewhere to store in the form of elemental hydrogen. And that somewhere would almost certainly be nuclear and fossil fuel.
If your point was that oil is a battery too, that is technically correct. Oil contains stored energy from the sun and geologic processes. But that's on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years--not really relevant to this discussion.
Here's the deal: free hydrogen (H2) is reduced relatively by easily by O2 producing energy and water, so if there were any free hydrogen on earth, we could reduce it with oxygen which is readily available in the atmosphere. The problem is, there isn't any free hydrogen, because the earth's gravity is so weak and the mean free path of hydrogen (distance that hydrogen can zip around in the atmosphere without hitting any other molecules) is so long that all free hydrogen in the earth's atmosphere has already been reduced into water or hydrides in the earth's crust or has escaped into space.
That means that, yes, if you want to use hydrogen you have to produce it, which as you correctly surmised means it has to be made available through electrolysis. The energy for electrolysis has to come from existing energy sources. H2 is freed from oxygen, stored, and then recombined in a fuel cell with O2, releasing no more energy than that which was used to separate it in the first place.
That's why I say hydrogen isn't an energy source, but a storage medium. Given how dangerous hydrogen is to transport and store, it's not clear that it's superior to the methods already used. And for those concerned about such things (many people--of whom I am not one) water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Catalysts don't make energy prohibitive chemical reactions happen. What they do is make chemical reactions which have favorable energies but bad reaction kinetics happen more quickly. In English: certain reactions release energy, but they don't happen (or don't happen quickly enough) because they're so complicated. Complicated organic molecules need to be aligned by catalysts so the reacting sites "line-up". Some other chemical reactions require three or more molecules to collide simultaneously; that's unlikely, but a catalyst might capture some of the molecules long enough to reduce the complicated reaction to a two-body collision, which is much more likely. The catalysts don't change the energy part of the equation.
My high school chemistry teacher explained catalysis thus: "two shy people in the presence of alcohol will simply do what comes naturally. " This was 35 years ago. Today she would probably be thrown out of the place, but, uh, she was a nun so she had a lifetime appointment.
We already do have "free" energy. It comes in the form of uranium. We simply don't have the political will to burn it.
So it is OK for a liberal to be skeptical of scientific skeptics because of their "ideological bias" but.....
...... it is heretical for an AGW skeptic to be skeptical of the hysteria (non-science) because of those people's ideological bias (socialism, gaia worship, anti-human/pro animal).....
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