The Hydrogen Hoax

The New Atlantis.com ^ | February 8, 2007 | by Robert Zubrin

[Shuttle Shucker]

The "H Prize" gets resubmitted in Congress...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1754825/posts

[dgallo51]

I don't believe Hydrogen's best application to be in automotive, but rather as a source of industrial power secure from a centralized power grid.

This U of M experiment is only a small lab experiment, but I would keep eyes wide open for any commercialization attempts at this process.

U of M researchers invent 'flashy' new process to turn soy oil, glucose into hydrogen

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/uom-uom103006.php

[beef]

I think what the government really needs to do is clear the path for nuclear and renewables. That means streamlining the process for brining this stuff online. Licensing a nuclear plant or wind farm should not be a multi decade legal epic. That is the root of the "delays that drive up costs". All new cars should be flex-fuel capable, so that bio fuels can be used to the extent that they become available. And there are some things, like compact fluorescents, that make sense for conservation. The problem is that what the enviros really want is to ban the Industrial Revolution and return to our previous state of Harmony with Gaia.

[Kellis91789]

"Its only real drawback is that it is presently controlled by insane people who want to kill us."

That isn't its only real drawback. Granted Global Warming is a scam, but the internal combustion engine running on any hydrocarbon fuel is still an inefficient, dirty, polluting machine. Ethanol and biodiesel are only better than petroleum fuels in a relative sense. The only reason to use them at all is that tooling and retrofitting costs for existing automobiles/trucks is less expensive than entirely new electric drive platforms.

Burning hydrogen created by electrolysis is even more foolish. You accept the losses of the electrolysis process, the storage difficulties of carrying around highly compressed gaseous fuel, and then you burn it in an engine where you get back less than 30% of electric energy it took to produce it ? That's nuts.

If you've got cheap electricity to create the hydrogen, then a much more efficient use of it would be to charge batteries and drive electric motors. At least the overall efficiency there is about 70%. Battery cost and cycle life are the only major unresolved issues, and there are very promising recent developments in that regard.

[dangerdoc]

Don't confuse the politics with the facts.

Ethanol is a great fuel. It has less specific energy than gasoline but higher octane allowing higher compression. An engine designed to burn ethanol would have nearly the same miliage as a gasoline engine due to increased effiency from higher compression. Ethanol is hard on some synthetics but is less corrosive than the garbage that collects in the oil pan.

You are responding to idiotic legislation around ethanol. I hope that vitriol wasn't directed at me.

We have about a billion tons of ag waste per year in America. We have another 100 million acres of ground in the CRP program that could be growing something. That is what it should be made from. How will they do it? Cellulosic fermentation, syngas, direct conversion, who knows, people smarter than me are working on it.

Two barrels of fuel (ethanol, bio-oil, propane, liquid methane) per ton is not unreasonable. Figure only half the ag waste and half the CRP ground is used, about 2 billion barrels of fuel could be made per year. That replaces almost all of the oil we import for transportation. In ten years, we will have fuel cells than can digest liquid fuels that will fit in an engine compartment. That would double miliage over your IC engine.

Suddenly, we can have a vibrant mobile economy that does not depend on 3rd world tirants selling us their oil.

I personally don't believe that we are causing global warming and I think we plenty of oil for the forseable future. I am for research into alternative energy because I want to see the day when we tell the terrorists they can eat their oil, we don't need it.

Okay, I kind of got off track. Regarding ethanol, it really is a great fuel, don't confuse the screwed up politics with the chemical. If wells produced ethanol instead of oil, our engines would be designed differently but trucks would roll and people would speed down the highway just like they do now.

As a fuel, ethanol is just like gasoline. It pours, it flows in the cold, It evaporates when you need it to but doesn't disapear if you leave the gas cap off while you buy a coke in the store. You can get a tremendous amount of energy in a small inexpensive container in the vehicle. If you run out, you can put enough in a can to get you to the station.

Ethanol is very viable, it is the source that is in question.

[Toddsterpatriot]

The whale oil salesmen talking about how crude oil will never be better than whale oil.

Thermodynamics is hard.

[right-wingin_It]

Separating the two takes energy, more energy than is obtained when the hydrogen and oxygen are recombined in the burning process.

Yeah,....so now add to that the trillion or multi-trillion dollar cost of transforming our liquid fuel economy over to a liquid pressurized gas economy for hydrogen! And never mind the fact that it still can't be safely stored.

THE ONLY way I could ever see that it would be beneficial to take the plunge and loose more energy by extracting hydrogen from water, would be if petroleum became so scarce it couldn't be used to supply critical chemical feed-stocks. In that case, we'd have to preserve the petroleum for the chemical and other critical industries. And so to obtain the hydrogen with the least loss of energy, we would then have to resort to nuclear power (either to create electricity to electrolyze the hydrogen off water, or to use the intense heat to directly crack it off of the water).

[dangerdoc]

The problem is thermodynamics. Gasoline is delivered to the gas station in trucks. You can only cantain a relatively small amount of hydrogen in a Semitruck sized load. So small you burn nearly half the equivalent energy delivering it and requiring something like 10 times more delivery vehicles. And those trucks will be burning diesel.

Even if you could make the hydrogen for nearly free, it is going to be very expensive by the time it is in your tank.

[BuffaloJack]

There is no end to socialist hoaxes.
Global warming.
Global Cooling.
Ozone holes.
CO2 is a Green House Gas.
Methane is a Green House Gas.
Recycling.

[ozzymandus]

So if all these alternative fuels are so great, why aren't some clever private sector investors making a fortune off them??

[megatherium]

All excellent ideas. I think they're already trying to make nuclear easier to license. They've already arranged it so that certain standard plant designs are pre-licensed, unlike in decades past when every plant was essentially custom-designed. They want the site licenses and the operating licenses to be also easy to arrange -- before construction begins. The industry is going to finesse the site licensing problem by putting new nukes next to old ones. I think right now they're about to apply for licenses for 14 plants or some such number.

[thackney]

An engine designed to burn ethanol would have nearly the same miliage as a gasoline engine due to increased effiency from higher compression.

Higher compression is not going to overcome a 34% reduction in energy. If it could, diesel would have a huge improvement in MPG with its 11% increase in energy content and greater compression. You can deliver more horsepower per cubic inch with greater compression, you are not going to get significantly greater MPG.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

There's a 6th one - Geothermal energy from Yellowstone. I read that if we harness that sucker, it can supply all of our stationary energy needs forever.

[theBuckwheat]

>>
Furthermnore, the cost of generation via coal and natural gas isn't fully captured in market prices. Coal has a massive environmental costs that are not priced. Dependence on natural gas carries massive securities costs (since so much of it is produced in the Mid East). If coal and natural gas were taxed so that its price would reflect these unpriced costs ("externalities" as economists call them), nuclear would be cost effective.
<<

This if from the Hopeful School of Economic Speculation. It is an attempt to stretch facts to fit the desired conclusion.

Putting aside that the cost of making ethanol from corn isn't fully captured in market prices, this is a shopworn refuge of people whose position is on the wrong end of simple facts.

First, very little gas is imported from the Middle East in absolute numbers and almost none, compared to how much the US uses.

Second, all these "externalities" are mere speculation. We could say the same about the price of butter or steak, because the consumer doesn't include the cost of treating his future heart attack or nursing home care when he suffers a disabling strokd. There is hardly a single aspect of human life that includes in the market price, the present value of future speculated costs.

In human history that aspect of living has been called "risk" and people gladly accept it. Those who think at least a little about it buy various types of insurance policies such as life, accident or health insurance to help cover losses.

It has often been said the US consumer doesn't pay the full price of oil at the pump because of the costs of our military. But the US maintains a presence in over 100 countries. We don't pay the full price of importing BMWs either when you count the cost of our military that is still in Germany! We don't pay the full price of Sony Playstations when you count all the US service men and women stationed in Japan.

The reason we maintain a large and expensive military is quite a bit disconnected with our importation of oil. We don't contribute to a large peacekeeping force on the border between Egypt and Israel to protect oil. We do it far more for broad political reasons than for oil.

Of the several reasons that the US invaded Iraq, access to oil was the least.

If we didn't import a drop of Saudi crude, we still would protect them in the Gulf Why? Because it is in our economic interest to help the Europeans. We would still keep a number of aircraft carriers stationed off Iran (from whom we don't buy a drop of oil), because their nuclear weaons development program is a grave threat to a lot of peoples and interests.

But if we are to talk about the full cost of every energy source, then where indeed would nuclear power compare? The US government has spent billions and billions on research that supports that industry. And, as an active pilot, I know firsthand the US military's expensive role and ongoing in protecting each of the nation's nuclear power plants. Then there are the civil defense aspects of power plants and the affect that such a plant has on the security and health of people located within quite a large radius of every plant.

If we are intent on fully capturing the costs of nuclear power, we must also include the enormous cost of the implied liability that the US government has assumed as a matter of national policy.

The Price-Anderson Act limits liability in the event of a nuclear accident. Under this law, homeowner insurance policies no longer have to cover such things as destruction or contamination. The federal government has assumed this risk almost in full. In the insurance business this would be called "super-cat" insurance and would carry a hefty premium. The premiums charged under Price-Anderson are, especially for people concerned about paying the full cost, almost a joke.

A single nuclear incident could incur tens of billions of dollars in liability.

When you add all these hidden subsidies up, nuclear power is even far less economic than other forms of power generation.

We may choose nuclear power for other reasons, but please don't try to say it is as inexpensive as burning coal.

[thackney]

Also add to that cost Yucca Mountain and thousands of years its upkeep, along with other waste storage sites.

[BobS]

"Bookmark to see what I can learn from FReeper engineers and scientists."

A long time ago, I fed a Bunsen Burner with H^2. Boom! We decided it needed to have a continuous ignition source. So we used a NG Bunsen Burner to provide it. It sounded like a rocket engine. You can't even see a flame. It was so hot it melted the poor little brass burner. Very high ceiling beyond the 7' flame in that HS chemistry lab. Sneaking in after classes, of course. Be careful with H^2.

You will need either stainless or tinanium steel cylinders and the same with the pistons in an engine to harness this type of explosion for energy. A liquid nitrogen refrigeration system to keep the engine block cool. And big BF Goodrich tires to get that 4WD to the next h2 station.

[Kenny Bunk]

How could I forget?

Actually a commercial energy source in Italy!

[thackney]

And in the US.

http://www.geo-energy.org/information/plants.asp

[tcrlaf]

bump

[Kenny Bunk]

Well, Sherman, I proposed that:
(1) We divide Iraq (fake name, fake country ... actually invented by the British Foreign Office in 1916) back into the natural divisions the Turks used pre-WWI to successfully manage the unruly and largely worthless heathens who infest the place,
(2) de-populate by sending the present recumbents off to settle empty Afghanistan,
(3) re-populate the fly-blown mess with illegal alien Mexicans. We got plenty.
(4) run the place as an oil colony.
(5)I was chased out of Washington.

Kipling had the idea, dude. These are the "Lesser breeds, without the law."

Speaking of laughs, and largely worthless recumbents, when I voted for GW I thought the least I might reasonably expect would be a rational awl policy. After all, GW is a genuine Texas awl man, is he not? How about tax incentives to build more refineries, for starters.