Pah!
The flux capacitor in my DeLorean has been doing this for twenty years.
Posted on 01/31/2005 11:44:25 AM PST by anymouse
I think this will be OBE, specifically thermal depolymerization.
later read bump
Pah!
The flux capacitor in my DeLorean has been doing this for twenty years.
I still think hydrogen is a non-starter. No matter how efficient you get at producing it, the low energy density and near-impossibily of storing it for any significant length of time (it seeps through damn near everything) makes it no match for other fuels.
How many grams to the mile does that Delorian get? :)
Those wonderful "zero emission" electric cars and fuel cell vehicles really aren't "zero emission" at all. They just move their emissoions from where they're operated to to electric power plants producing the electricity required to charge their batteries or manufacture the hydrogen by electrolysis.
Actually it makes lots of sense. It is much easier to put scrubbers on one plant than to maintain emissions on millions of cars.
Of course, it still suffers from the same problem that all solar sources do, namely, the low power density of sunlight. At 1 kW per square meter, it would take 1 square kilometer of a 100% conversion efficiency process, at the equator (when the sun is directly overhead) to generate 1 GW - at noon. Away from the equator, away from noon, and if your process isn't 100% efficient, it would take more land area than that to make 1 GW. That's a lot of land for only a modestly powerful power plant.
One point of the conversion is to move our oil dependency over to natural gas dependency.
TDP OH YEAH!!!!!!!
What kind of emissions is produced by hydrogen fuel?
You are forgetting about the efficiency loss at each step. After all the conversions you are probably at a whopping 3% efficiency
I'd bet that your average 1000 MW coal or nuclear station has a bigger footprint than 1 square km. But those darned "sun angle", "nighttime", and "cloudy day" issues...those are tough indeed to overcome.
Actually, keeping it at the equator still wouldn't maintain maximum capture. You'd have to continuously migrate it between the two tropics. /nitpick
In less-biased engineering terms, we would say that this process for converting sunlight to an alternate form of energy is 5% efficient. But why let realistic calculations get in the way of a good story.
Even when compressed a thousand times atmospheric pressure, hydrogen occupies 5 times the volume of gasoline. Where do you propose storing it in a vehicle?
Depending on how big, how cheap and how resistant to contamination these gadgets are in practice, burning the hydrogen to make water might be a useful method of desalinization.
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