Posted on 11/06/2001 11:56:34 PM PST by sourcery
Canada is producing significant quantities right now. The US kicked off pilot plants after the Iran revolution; Jimmy Carter's energy program. It relies on old and new technology. Hitler ran his army on Synfuels, and Sasol in South Africa has major plants.
Along with Hydrogen, ANWR and Synfuels, the US COULD, if willing, give OPEC something to think about.
It's key to understand that hydrogen in this context is merely an energy storage system (this is primarily for others RLK - you "get" this). It is not an energy source. You can't go out and drill for hydrogen.
Petroleum, on the other hand, is both an energy source and an energy storage system.
Now, who in Hades is going to start producing hydrogen from oil shales or coal or natural gas, when any number of petroleum producers can undercut them immediately? If the economics had a chance to work for something like this, people that don't depend on a far-flung distribution system (gas stations), like urban delivery vehicles, metro buses, etc, would be doing it. But the economics don't work, largely due to the lack of a competitive cost for an energy source.
IIRC, you need the type of hydrogen with the neutron in its nucleus to be a decent fuel source.
This stone-cold fact first appeared awfully far down in the article. It should have been in the first paragraph; then we could have dispensed with many of the idiotic claims in the article, such as:
Hydrogen-as-fuel is a surprisingly old idea. In Jules Verne's novel The Mysterious Island, published in 1874, a shipwrecked engineer suggests that when fossil fuels run out, "water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable." Verne knew his physics: Pound for pound, hydrogen packs more chemical energy than any other known fuel.
How are you going to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in the first place? By burning fossil fuels.
My thermo professor used to paraphrase the Three Laws as:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't even break even.
3. Things are going to get worse and not get better.
Hydrogen as a concept for energy trasnport is pretty good until one looks at the engineering issues. Fuel cells are okay except for the fuel transport and economic issues. Then of course Mother Nature comes along and insist we balance the books. What will be the ultimate energy source? Nuclear is pretty good if you're going the electrolysis route. I have tried many gedunken experiments centered around the idea of a sunlight pumped laser to thermally separate H and O, but developing a laser of sufficient power with a sunlight pump is problematic at best. Those who propose NG and other carbon-based fuels as feedstock for fuel cells somehow seem to be defeating the purpose of the fuel cell in the sense that you are still using a depletable resource in a system that seems kind of lossy for the applications a stationary fuel cell might be matched to, although you avoid the combustion step and thus the production of byproduct gases.
^____^
My thermo professor used to paraphrase the Three Laws as:I've heard that one. My physics teacher in high school said almost the same thing, but added to #3 "and you aren't allowed to quit the game, either."1. You can't win.
2. You can't even break even.
3. Things are going to get worse and not get better.
In general, science and technology "reporting" is abyssmal. For energy and fuels policy, you then combine that reporting with business/economics reporting (another area of reportial non-expertise) and you've got the prescription for some real nonsense in print.
If solar cell cost tracks Moore's Law, we may see an energy revolution in the next ten years that will be as significant as the oil revolution in the late nineteenth century.
Indeed. As noted above, reporter Brad Lemly simply brushes over some major issues, such as the fact that Hydrogen is simply a storage medium, and must be generated.
Even more damning is this little gem from Lovins: Imagine, he says, a high-tech, computer-dependent operation that typically might fork over $1 million annually to keep standby generators humming to ensure constant power. Far better, says Lovins, for that plant to install an on-site methane reformer and a fuel cell.
This has two big problems.
First, he's assuming that these standby diesels are kept running. They're not: an UPS generally consists of a big enough battery/capacitor to maintain power supplies until the diesels can be brought up.
But if we posit that he's correct, it's even worse for his case. Running diesel generators to create hydrogen results in less useable energy than the diesel fuel would have provided in the first place! Rather than leasing hydro-cars to the employees, it'd be more efficient to give them diesel powered cars.
If all of Lovins' reasoning is this sound....
Right up there with stupidity, according to Mark Twain (I think).
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