Posted on 11/27/2004 10:23:36 PM PST by neverdem
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods, raising the possibility of using nuclear power to indirectly wean the transportation system from its dependence on oil.
The development would move the country closer to the Energy Department's goal of a "hydrogen economy," in which hydrogen would be created through a variety of means, and would be consumed by devices called fuel cells, to make electricity to run cars and for other purposes. Experts cite three big roadblocks to a hydrogen economy: manufacturing hydrogen cleanly and at low cost, finding a way to ship it and store it on the vehicles that use it, and reducing the astronomical price of fuel cells.
"This is a breakthrough in the first part," said J. Stephen Herring, a consulting engineer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, which plans to announce the development on Monday with Cerametec Inc. of Salt Lake City.
The developers also said the hydrogen could be used by oil companies to stretch oil supplies even without solving the fuel cell and transportation problems.
Mr. Herring said the experimental work showed the "highest-known production rate of hydrogen by high-temperature electrolysis."
But the plan requires the building of a new kind of nuclear reactor, at a time when the United States is not even building conventional reactors. And the cost estimates are uncertain.
The heart of the plan is an improvement on the most convenient way to make hydrogen, which is to run electric current through water, splitting the H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. This process, called electrolysis, now has a drawback: if the electricity comes from coal, which is the biggest source of power in this country, then the energy value of the ingredients - the amount of energy given off when the fuel is burned - is three and a half to four times larger than the energy value of the product. Also, carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions increase when the additional coal is burned.
Hydrogen can also be made by mixing steam with natural gas and breaking apart both molecules, but the price of natural gas is rising rapidly.
The new method involves running electricity through water that has a very high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen. The resulting hydrogen has about half the energy value of the energy put into the process, the developers say. Such losses may be acceptable, or even desirable, because hydrogen for a nuclear reactor can be substituted for oil, which is imported and expensive, and because the basic fuel, uranium, is plentiful.
The idea is to build a reactor that would heat the cooling medium in the nuclear core, in this case helium gas, to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The existing generation of reactors, used exclusively for electric generation, use water for cooling and heat it to only about 300 degrees Celsius.
The hot gas would be used two ways. It would spin a turbine to make electricity, which could be run through the water being separated. And it would heat that water, to 800 degrees Celsius. But if electricity demand on the power grid ran extremely high, the hydrogen production could easily be shut down for a few hours, and all of the energy could be converted to electricity, designers say.
The goal is to create a reactor that could produce about 300 megawatts of electricity for the grid, enough to run about 300,000 window air-conditioners, or produce about 2.5 kilos of hydrogen per second. When burned, a kilo of hydrogen has about the same energy value as a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline. But fuel cells, which work without burning, get about twice as much work out of each unit of fuel. So if used in automotive fuel cells, the reactor might replace more than 400,000 gallons of gasoline per day.
The part of the plan that the laboratory and the ceramics company have tested is high-temperature electrolysis. There is only limited experience building high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, though, and no one in this country has ordered any kind of big reactor, even those of more conventional design, in 30 years, except for those whose construction was canceled before completion.
Another problem is that the United States has no infrastructure for shipping large volumes of hydrogen. Currently, most hydrogen is produced at the point where it is used, mostly in oil refineries. Hydrogen is used to draw the sulfur out of crude oil, and to break up hydrocarbon molecules that are too big for use in liquid fuel, and change the carbon-hydrogen ratio to one more favorable for vehicle fuel.
Mr. Herring suggested another use, however: recovering usable fuel from the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada. The reserves there may hold the largest oil deposits in the world, but extracting them and converting them into a gasoline substitute requires copious amounts of steam and hydrogen, both products of the reactor.
The Slimes have plenty of hot air, can we use that?
Are you a speed reader? I just posted it.
Oh baby when they break through on this it will slingshot the USA ahead.
Understand this: unbound hydrogen is energy expensive to produce. People pushing it either don't understand, or understand but don't want the public to understand that hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It's simply a storage medium for energy produced somewhere else.
Like battery technology, if you drop your objection to burning uranium, most of your environmental problems go away, and that has nothing to do with hydrogen. But as soon as you say nuclear power you might as well say black magic voodoo. Because when you say nuclear power, that's what the scientifically illiterate masses (and altogether too many mis-educated scientists) hear.
Harness the "paper of record" as an institutional effort for a patriotic endeavor? Did you start drinking after the previous article?
I'll ping the list in the morning. We'll see if it's still in breaking news.
Doesn't mis-educated scientist qualify as an oxymoron, just like the left likes to use that word to mock military intelligence?
It's out of breaking news already.
I think the article was very clear that hydrogen is not being used as an energy source in the processes described.
What makes hydrogen interesting is that, though it is energy expensive to produce, it compares reasonably well in energy density to other portable fuels. It is more energy dense than electricity from conventional batteries, for example. It is, though, not quite as good as gasoline, but it is not so much worse that performance of hydrogen-fueled vehicles could not be comparable to ICE engines.
Furthermore, even if the hydrogen produced by electrolysis provides only 1/2 of the energy employed to produce it, if electricity is cheap enough to generate then an important step toward economic use of hydrogen can be taken.
Look, I'm as cranky as anyone about hyperbolic liberal worries about "peak oil" and other thinly disguised misanthropy. Still, the possibility of an economical alternative to gasoline for vehicle fuels, an alternative that can be produced in abundance entirely domestically, is so important that it is worth investigating. It's interesting to see the progress being made on the hydrogen front.
Here's a link to Shell's hydrogen page with some interesting information:
http://www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=hydrogen-en
Hydrogen is explosive...right??!
This could work. The utility companies have to build enough capacity to handle the peak demand. If they can use that capacity during non-peak time to produce a fuel for vehicles, it just might be feasible.
ping
So is gasoline and natural gas.
The Hindinberg
The article is clear. Hydrogen is not an energy source from any process that exists on earth (except in thermonuclear weapons). I'm going somewhat beyond the article, because my point is that the buzz about hydrogen is a distraction--probably a deliberate one.
Still, the possibility of an economical alternative to gasoline for vehicle fuels
Perhaps, you aren't clear, however, since you call hydrogen "an economical alternative to gasoline for vehicle fuels." Hydrogen, as the article makes clear, I make clearer, and you acknowledge IS NOT A FUEL. It cannot be an alternative to any fuel. You want to make hydrogen right now, the only way you will be able to do that in quantity is by burning coal. That's it. Now, imagine burning 3.5 to 4 times as much coal as would be required to power a coal powered vehicle, and that's the amount of coal a hydrogen powered car will burn. In addition to burning all that coal, you also have transport and manufacturing problems with a highly explosive gas that you don't have with gasoline, but that's another story for another thread.
The point of the post is: forget about hydrogen, per se. If you're willing to burn uranium, then lots and lots of alternatives open up. Maybe hydrogen included, maybe not. But the point is, we suffer from a lack of common sense, not a lack of unbound hydrogen, or coal, or even energy at all.
Is anyone monitoring the *reduction* in oil requirements due to the country's increasing use of the net to conduct business?
I wish. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scientists who do just fine in their own fields who're tremendously backwards when it comes to understanding nuclear power. For that matter, there are quite a few physicists--some of them nuclear physicists, who oppose nuclear power as well.
ping
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