Posted on 01/23/2005 6:45:16 AM PST by Blood of Tyrants
LOS ANGELES — Hydrogen-fueled cars have been hailed as the future of transportation — clean, safe and propelled by a power source whose only by-products are air and water.
[snip]
The problem, critics say, is that the technology that makes the fuel of the future generates just as much pollution as the gasoline-powered vehicles we drive right now.
[snip]
Extracting useful quantities of hydrogen from water requires a massive amount of energy — energy that typically comes from burning oil or coal.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Kinda' like me with my broadband connection to FR.
Like I said, the power cannot be "free" because to draw it out, it has to be put in somewhere else. Think of the earth as an electrical storage tank . Right now the tank is empty because there are no Tesla towers running. If someone builds a Tesla tower and starts pumping energy into the storage tank, then someone else can only draw out as much as is pumped in. Now, those Tesla towers must have a source of enegy also and each one would have a limit on how much can put in and therefore how much can be drawn out. This costs money. Freeloading countries would put in little if any energy and since it is "free" would draw out all they could. When something is "free" people have little incentive to conserve.
Believe me, this is a zero sum game.
Not quite, the corn has stored energy in the form of sugar. Yeast cheaply transforms the sugar into alcohol. The expensive part is seperating the mash and water from the alcohol. It works because the sugar is made with free energy from the sun. But you are correct, there are fewer BTU's per gallon of ethanol than gasoline. However, it is still not as cheap to make ethanol than gasoline.
Plug it into the sky outlet right next to the sky hook?
"....the average house used about 40 amps"
Actually, in the end Tesla was right, sort of.
Thomas Edison advocated electrical distribution as Direct Current, Tesla, using essentially low-frequency radio waves which are, of course, Alternating Current.
Edison's approach would have required local electrical generating stations because the transmission losses at usable and safe voltages would have been way too great.
In the end, the transformer and alternating current solved the problem - allowing power to be efficiently transmitted from large power plants.
Edison may be partially vindicated.....DC is used on some transmission lines now that relatively recent developments in DC/AC power conversion have made it a compelling alternative in some cases.....
lol
"That isn't true, it would require an upgrade to the pipe."
""Wrong. The only upgrade necessary would be to increase the size of the pumps.""
So, hydrogen embrittlement to low grade steel pipes is not a problem? The ability of hydrogen to seap through smaller pinholes not a problem? The need to pump at higher pressures not a problem?
Gee, I'm glad all the problems have been solved. Curious no one has gotten rich from following your advice if it is so easy. It's your big opportunity.
I always wondered what the cost of enormous cost was. :-)
Ah, yes--the old "hydrogen embrittlement" argument. Here's a clue---hydrogen embrittlement of mild steel is a significant problem AT ELEVATED TEMPERATURES. At ambient temperatures (as in pipelines buried in the ground) the rate of the embrittlement reaction is so slow that it would take hundreds of years for a problem to develop. There is a mild steel pipeline in the Ruhr Valley that has been in use continuously to transfer hydrogen gas from one process plant to another FOR SEVENTY YEARS.
Sure, hydrogen can leak from pinholes---so what?? We know how to avoid the problem, and have for years--see that Ruhr Valley pipeline as an example.
And my earlier response answered the "need to pump at higher pressures" point. Actually, what is needed is not higher pressures, but either more powerful pumps or pumps at more closely-space intervals along the pipeline. Again--a problem that is easily solved.
I would suggest that if hydrogen is such a great fuel and the transmission problems are so small, AND there are so many of us dummies out here that can't see the potential - then this is your chance to become fabulously wealthy.
In the meantime while I'm waiting, I'm go to put my money in oil stocks.
tesla bump
The only REAL problem hydrogen has is producing it cheaply enough. If anyone fixes THAT one, they WILL become fabulously wealthy.
"In the meantime while I'm waiting, I'm go to put my money in oil stocks."
You'd probably do better to buy stock in foreign companies who produce nuclear reactors.
Te same 20,000 BTU can be produced from a small heat pump using less than half the power but requiring the use of compressors , refrigerant gases, and the industry to make the items. The heat pump/air conditioner unit will cost about $700 to $1000 and servicing must be done by licensed contractors.
That is what I refer to as enormous cost. Perhaps a factor of ten isn't really enormous in scientific terms but it would be on your household budget.
Do not forget that there is more than ethanol produced from the corn. The high protein corn mash makes excellent livestock feed. The protein benefits consumers in many ways.
I think that all of the problems mentioned ARE significant. The H2 molecule is very small and VERY LIGHT, which means that the average velocity of the free molecule is higher than that of any other gas at any temperature. It will escape where no other gas will. The natural gas distribution system actually does have a considerable amount of leakage. I discovered one such leak a block from my house a couple of years ago, when I saw bubbles in a puddle after a rain. The actual leak was in a distribution pipe about 15 feet away from the puddle. Actual distribution losses in the US amount to billions of MCF annually. If it were hydrogen, expect that number would multiply several times IF it were used the same way - a BAD idea.
You note the greater explosive range, but omit that it is not trivially greater but is several times the next gas on the list. Also, the flame is invisible and unquenchable as long as hydrogen and oxygen are both available, over that very wide mixture range.
Distributing a gaseous fuel is very different from a liquid. First of all, how do you measure it? Liquid is easy - just measure the volume, or measure the weight. Residential gas meters operate at a fixed pressure, over a relatively small temperature range.
But H2 fuel would have to be very highly pressurized if sold as a gas. Maybe you can measure the volume, temperature, and pressure, but they could change during a fill - it could get complicated. Weight? The container will be MUCH heavier than the contents, and measuring the change in weight with enough precision would be difficult. Will it be distributed at low pressure (60PSI, like residential service) and compressed at the delivery station? That's pretty energy intensive in itself. Delivery by truck means either transfer or container exchange - and again, transfer would take a lot of energy. Vehicle tank exchange and refill might be the most economical way to distribute H2.
Free hydrogen will ALWAYS be a derivative product on this planet, and will always require more energy to produce - by several times - that its fuel energy content. That makes its production and distribution an energy sink, not a source like petroleum and natural gas. And it means that it has value as an energy vector only as a transportation fuel and a few other special circumstances. Homes can be heated at lower cost and higher efficiency with the electricity that would be used to generate the hydrogen, particularly if it runs a heat pump.
Transportation is a different story, since low weight and high energy density are the most important characteristics of the vehicle fuel, whether ground or air.
We SHOULD be moving to hybrids for all of out ground transportation, but for more reasons than immediately apparent. Already, a major sector of our commercial transport is hybrid powered, in the form of the diesel-electric locomotive. If the railroads had an electric trolley or underground slot pickup for electricity, we would need only a small increase in electric generation capacity to eliminate all of that fuel use.
And if we could find a way to power our personal vehicles from the grid - at least in city center and major intercity routes - we could really tell the Arabs to start making windows out of their sand, because we would not need the only other thing they produce.
It is possible that such an electrical distribution system for vehicles could be an easier problem to solve than distributing gaseous hydrogen.
Actually, we already have a high-volume distribution system for one of the most hydrogen-dense liquids that exists - gasoline! The light hydrocarbons contain almost half again as much hydrogen as water, and the hydrogen can be released in an exothermic reaction, unlike any other source. Maybe "regular or high-test" will refer to Octane or Propane in the future.
What?!
I think the earth IS used as part of the circuit. Isn't that why electricians use the term "ground"?
You have a hot wire, and a ground wire....and don't give me that crap about the ground being the third prong either. That's not the ground I'm talking about.
My point exactly, it is not cheap period to make ethanol, and if you take away the subsidy cheap isn't even part of the equation. It is a market for corn, and IMHO that is the best that can be said about the subject.
And you would STILL be wrong. Look, we have been utilizing hydrogen successfully ALREADY on an industrial scale for over a century, and the number of "bad incidents" is miniscule, in spite of all these so-called problems. The worst one mentioned is always the Hindenburg, but if you actually check into what happened, most of the damage was done by the burning diesel fuel and dope-and-aluminum impregated cloth skin of the Zeppelin, not the burning hydrogen.
I don't have time to go through a point-by-point rebuttal, but basically you are wrong on every point. We ALREADY do all the things you are saying can't be done. Measuring compressed gases is something that is done every day by hundreds of companies at thousands of locations. How do you think Air Products sells its compressed nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, and compressed gas mixtures??? These are sold both by tankage lots AND via pipeline. Hydrogen is in no way different from these already-handled products (and in fact "is" one of those products).
The ONLY thing we don't currently (no pun intended) know how to do is separate the hydrogen from its water carrier sufficiently economically. And in fact, if the recent announcement of 30% efficient nano-structured polymeric solar cells turns out to be real and practical, even THAT one may have already been solved.
not use geothermal energy for the electrolisys process required to crack the H2 from the O... Then it's just a matter of storage and transportation.
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