The Bussard Collectors are what gives the warp nacelles the red glow in the front, these Collectors gather hydrogen to be used for fuel. If the Federation can do it, so can the USA!!!
Posted on 05/07/2003 11:54:50 AM PDT by Jack of all Trades
Not long ago I wrote a commentary, "The Great Hydrogen Myth," in which I opined that throwing another billion dollars at more research for the purpose of replacing oil, coal, or natural gas was a huge waste. Recently, that commentary was posted on an Internet site for those who work in industries that provide and use various forms of energy. It's a favorite among the many engineers and scientists whose lives are devoted to energy issues.
Here are some of the responses my commentary received. The names of the innocent have been protected because their jobs depend upon it.
"I have often thought that this 'hydrogen economy' seems intuitively flawed; using energy to make hydrogen to then be used as an energy source. Intuitively, it feels like the Escher painting with the water flowing uphill."
Therein lies central issue that undermines the hype about hydrogen as an endless, virtually free, source of energy. First of all, it is not energy. It is what the engineers and scientists call "a carrier." You have to break the hydrogen molecule free from others to use it and that requires energy. Thus, you have to use a lot of energy in order to use hydrogen to make energy. In real life there is no free lunch.
A chemical engineer with 35 years in the chemical and oil industry who knows a lot about catalytic reforming units that make and use hydrogen in the reformation processes, had this to say: "Not only does H2 (hydrogen) require a lot of energy to produce, collect, and store, it presents rather nasty safety problems."
Need it be said he thinks that Ethanol (made from corn!) is another bad idea the environmentalists have foisted on us? Why? "Ethanol costs far more to produce than the fuel value it provides and the Environmental Protection Agency in its wisdom forced industry to oxygenate fuels only to discover that covalent bonds of all oxygenates are very soluble and stable in ground waters when released." In other words, this environmental "solution" has led to the poisoning of ground water supplies throughout the nation. It also forces up the cost of gasoline.
He wasn't through. "While I'm at it - Greens have our environmental experts at EPA on another even wilder goose chase to capture mercury from coal fired utility plants across the USA. If you add up all the Hg (mercury) released from coal combustion and compare it to global sources, the current analytical and statistical techniques and technologies probably will not be able to detect any reduction in the global Hq pool in the environment."
Thank you, thank you, thank you! The Greens live to conjure up endless scare campaigns, always shouting that everyone, especially children, are being "poisoned" by things that pose no real threat. Or they find ways to force government mandates that either end up poisoning us, i.e., ethanol, are represent no real threat, i.e., mercury. The end result is higher costs for energy use of any kind.
Part of the hydrogen hype is its use in fuel cells. A retired General Electric engineer wrote to say, "I previously analyzed and designed fuel cells and it is apparent to me that they will always be too expensive for all but very special uses. They are twenty times the cost of a piston engine and are very likely to remain at least ten times more in spite of all the research done."
Like all realists, engineers and scientists believe we are, in fact, running a risk in our dependence on petroleum. Even with a trillion and maybe even two trillion barrels of oil available, at the present rate of use, the experts estimate we will go through it in about forty years. Others, however, believe there are vast amounts of undiscovered oil reserves.
Part of the problem of energy costs, energy dependency, and the cost of oil can be found in the fact that the US has experienced a drop in its refining capability over the past twenty years. We went from being able to refine 18.5 million barrels to 16.5 million barrels. There has been an even sharper drop in the number of refineries, from 315 to 155! Thus, the US is highly vulnerable if even a small number of refineries stopped producing, even temporarily. A major factor for the dramatic increase in oil prices is this lack of refining capacity.
This may explain why the oil industry and auto manufacturers are willing to spend billions to find a way to make hydrogen the transportation energy of the future. Hybrid vehicles that utilize a fuel cell could get more than 75 miles per gallon of gasoline and that's a good thing. Environmentalists support this and, if the technology can be developed to a point of being affordable, why not? It remains, however, a very big "if".
The real answer, of course, is to build more refineries and, in part, to tap the reserves of oil known to exist in the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve. Environmentalists have fought both these options.
Here's the bottom line. Without energy, this nation shuts down, and so do all the others. The good news is that technologies are being developed whereby, for transportation and other uses, new engines will revolutionize the use of current energy sources. They will be far more efficient and they will be affordable.
Beware of the hype about hydrogen. Many engineers and scientists know it's baloney, and you should too.
I would hope the engine is still in good shape after 100k miles. I had an olds with a v8 diesel for a few months. If it had been a better build engine it sure would have been something. The car was so over powered and had a lock in transmission that it refused to drive below 60. There was no way to push the throttle soft enough to keep it under about 68 on the highway.
The reality is that it's a systems engineering problem: what engine/fuel/infrastructure combination is the optimal solution, considering physical and political (=economical) constraints. The cost of just about any physical device is almost entirely driven by production volume barring the necessity for some wildly difficult material cost (which IS a consideration for some fuel cell devices, but not necessarily the critical one).
As far as access to oil goes, let's see now...$55 billion and 300 American lives for Gulf War I....eventually $200 billion for GWII....did I forget 3000 people dead on 9/11? How much DOES it cost for us to be involved politically and economically in the Muslim world? And what would it be worth to get off oil as the primary fuel?
And one last. Why is it that people who have no problem believing that me and my fellow Aerospace Engineers can build a Space Based Strategic Defense System to knock down incoming nuclear re-entry vehicles (which we most certainly CAN do), but believe that we are incapable of coming up with a transportation system that gets us off of oil?
The reality is it's a physics problem. You get less energy out than you put in.
Does your car burn raw crude? No? Then refining capacity is an issue. All the oil in the world won't help if it can't be turned into something useful. The EPA is forcing the export of our refining capacity overseas, often in parts of the world that don't particularly like us and export terrorists back to thank us for the favor.
The Bussard Collectors are what gives the warp nacelles the red glow in the front, these Collectors gather hydrogen to be used for fuel. If the Federation can do it, so can the USA!!!
Wow. Great argument: the energy balance doesn't work out because...because...we might have to use electricity from nukes to crack water? So? So big deal. Beat's the crap out of what we're doing now.
Space Based Strategic Defense System? I believe it can be done, but bragging about it beforehand is a little out of place.
Neither would I find calling myself an aerospace engineer a point of pride given the lack of any meaningful space transportation infrastructure.
And if you think Hydrogen is the ticket off oil, no wonder our space industry is non-existant. Where do you think the hydrogen will come from?
Maybe the Easter bunny can fart it out.
Oil. That is why it is called "energy production". You get more out than you put in.
Wow. Great argument: the energy balance doesn't work out because...because...we might have to use electricity from nukes to crack water? So? So big deal. Beat's the crap out of what we're doing now.
Fine, when does the reactor construction start? I assume congress is repealing all the laws making nuclear power economically unfeasible as we speak? The great irony: These idiots pining away for hydrogen cars who are violently anti-nuke.
Uhhh....millions of years of solar energy. And your point is???
Wow. Great argument: the energy balance doesn't work out because...because...we might have to use electricity from nukes to crack water? So? So big deal. Beat's the crap out of what we're doing now.
Well, you're the first green to push for more nuclear energy, good for you. Nuclear is the only thing that makes sense to make hydrogen fuel.
Lot's, but that doesn't change the fact that Hydrogen is not a primary fuel.
Space Based Strategic Defense System? I believe it can be done, but bragging about it beforehand is a little out of place
If you don't think that significant portions of it are already in place, or at least being tested (successfully, I might add), then you ain't paying attention.
Neither would I find calling myself an aerospace engineer a point of pride given the lack of any meaningful space transportation infrastructure
Don't blame me for NASA and Congress' problems. My satellites work just fine, as do the Launch Vehicles that loft them! By the way...what part of American Aerospace do you have something to do with, and can you point to another country with a significantly better one?
Where do I think the Hydrogen will come from? Lotsa places. Just gotta pick the right one.
It's easier to extract hydrogen from oil than from gas and coal. That's why these articles tend not to mention them. Typically the anti-hydrogen articles pick on loopy wind-energy strawmen. Almost uniformly they call people foolish, quote "engineers", and talk about "energy inputs" avoiding the "energy inputs" converting oil into gasoline, and transporting the heavy fuel to markets.
We could build an artificial black hole in space and grab the hydrogen it attracts before it reaches the event horizon.
That's true with nearly every energy source. Internal combustion energy efficiency is what? Something less than 50%. A conventional coal-fired boiler is something less than 45%. Even the latest gas turbine co-generation plants a pushing it to get much above 50%.
The measure is what you put in versus the value of what you get out, and H2 as a transport fuel could have great "value" in the future. Gasoline has been a "great value" for transport fuel, but it would be way too expensive for use in generating electricity for the grid. It's the application of the fuel that determines it's value.
Wind and solar energy are not only too expensive for generating electricity for the grid, but they are far to unreliable. Their low availability rates means that they really don't displace any of the conventional means of generating electricity. They are not much more than a nuisance for grid operations. But they could be very valuable used as an energy source for generating H2. Don't attach them to the grid --- when the wind blows or the sun shines, send their power directly to the cracking plant.
Granted, there are a number of other technical challenges in creating an H2 transport system, but this "it takes more energy than what it contains" mantra is not a reason to back off.
And this reduces our dependence on oil how????
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.