Posted on 06/05/2024 1:14:19 AM PDT by Jonty30
UIC engineers have introduced a groundbreaking method for producing hydrogen gas using solar power and agricultural waste, drastically reducing energy consumption and enabling net-zero greenhouse emissions.
Engineers from the University of Illinois Chicago have developed a novel method to produce hydrogen gas from water using solely solar power and agricultural byproducts like manure and husks. This technique slashes the energy required to extract hydrogen from water by 600%, paving the way for more sustainable and environmentally friendly chemical manufacturing.
Hydrogen-based fuels are one of the most promising sources of clean energy. But producing pure hydrogen gas is an energy-intensive process that often requires coal or natural gas and large amounts of electricity.
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
We need more gadgets that run like sh*t and smell like sh*t.
It’s not encouraging when a “science” magazine doesn’t understand what a percentage decrease means.
I have no use for hydrogen gas.
That's my way of seeing it as well. If you've got an unreliable source of energy such as solar, don't try to use it directly, just use it when it's available as an energy source for creating fuels that you can reliably use whenever you need them.
“It’s very efficient, with almost 35% conversion of the biochar and solar energy into hydrogen,” said Rohit Chauhan
++++++++++
What chars the bio?
From the article, they use the power wattage of a AA battery to do the job. It doesn’t mean they use an actual AA battery, but the wattage equivalent.
So, it sounds like to me that they roast it over time on a low wattage.
That is magic. How do you reduce something by 600%? Must be that new math I have been hearing about.
All they are doing is replacing coal as a carbon source with biochar. Otherwise they are using someone else’s process.
This is the most accurate statement on solar, and I have solar for my home. It should be a free market thing where it will be implemented by the people who want it, including by conservatives who don't believe in the warmageddon cult but think solar will help in their particular situation (i.e. those of us who live in the south).
Ironically, this article is about solar in Illinois, where it's probably too far north for solar to be of use, even for this particular project.
So, the energy is really solar & the hydrogen is simply a storage system (alternative to battery). Might be good if we can develop the infrastructure to handle & distribute hydrogen.
Yes, that’s basically what it is. A passive transfer of energy to free up hydrogen from water.
Baron Von Hindenburg, is that you?
That immediately caught my eye, too. What an innumerate, idiotic writer.
You can “slash” by 100%, but it’s hard to “slash” behind that.
Things like that generally mean “worthless article — stop right there.”
I suppose we need to give the author credit for not writing “600 times less.”
Well down in the article it is noted that the process generates CO2 which must then be captured if this is going to be emission free. Industrial scale carbon dioxide capture is going nowhere fast. No matter how sexy the means of its production, it’s still just plain old CO2.
Yes, cows just became wonderful again. But the beef meat is still banned and you must eat bugs.
Although, I’m not a believer about CO2 being a pollutant, they may be able to capture it and use it for other purposes.
It’s also about ration. How much CO2 is produced vs how much hydrogen. If enough hydrogen is produced, compared to CO2, it may be worth the exchange.
Thank you, but how does carbon (from whatever source) bring hydrogen?
True that. There's also the possibility of storing hydrogen on site to re-use later, either as an alternative to natural gas or to fuel a fuel cell to make power.
I looked at the possibility of using hydrogen storage as a kind of long-term energy storage to go with my solar in case the Dims push us into a mark-of-the-beast type social credit score system to access energy. The idea would be to run an electrolyzer during the 8 warm months of the year that I pull almost nothing from the grid and have excess solar after charging my batteries to full to get through the night without the grid.
But it's horribly inefficient to generate hydrogen with an electrolyzer, compress it into tanks that I'd want to store in the ground for safety, then utilize that hydrogen gas to run fuel cells when my battery banks get low on charge. Running the fuel cell would probably at best give me only 20% or 30% of the power I spent creating the hydrogen and storing it.
I'd be better off spending that money increasing my battery bank size and solar array, and doing further energy improvements to the home (taking down the sheetrock in the walls to put in more insulation, replacing the old windows with triple paned windows). That would get me to 100% energy independence without curbing our lifestyles to ration our energy use. But for now it's not worth even that. I just keep it in the back of my head and do the math every now and then in case the Dims take their warmageddon cult energy policies to that kind of full control-freak level where I need to implement those changes.
Manure? Don’t they know that livestock are really really really bad and are part of the ‘climate change problem’????
Must be a non-starter.
/s
“or are we simply dealing with another liberal arts major writing the story?”
Well, the article, like most technical articles written for the ordinary audience, begins with a jazzy picture.
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