In a recent issue of Mother Jones magazine there was an article featured called Hydrogen's Dirty Little Secret.

A caption from the article reads:



John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, says:



I would like to debate this article, in general, and I would like to debate Heywood's statement. Do you think that if the hydrogen for the "freedom car" is derived from fossil fuels that the project is worth embarking on?

Edited to add one additional question for debate: Do you feel that President Bush, during the state of the union address, consciously gave a false impression about the hydrogen program?

Free from pollution is a pie in the sky dream. Just like the dream of fusion power and electric cars, it is so far away that the president shouldn't even be talking about it. He is probably only repeating what others tell him, I doubt seriously that he understands the technology involved.
The process used to obtain hydrogen will cause some pollution whether it comes from fossil fuels or sea water. Likewise the process to build fuel cells, and the materials within that have to be mined, refined, processed, etc.
I read somewhere that some of the materials in fuel cells, once ignited, cannot be put out by methods currently available to fire departments.
The cost of building cars that can survive collision without spewing H2 into the air and causing explosions is also to be considered.
That being said, I think we should continue the research and hopefully we will come up with something.
If a process can be used that minimizes pollution, and is not cost prohibitive, and is better economically than existing fuels, it shouldn't matter that the H2 comes from fossil fuels.
Politicians, once they have decided on war, should let the generals do the fighting, and President Bush should let the scientists and engineers do the talking about this issue.

Yes. Fuel cells, even in their relatively early state of development, are more efficient generators of power than the most advanced 4 cycle internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines are a very mature technology, so there isn't nearly as much room for making them more efficient. Fuel cells are not, however, economically efficient enough YET, especially when the infrastructure costs are considered.

No.

The practical risks to the volatility of hyrdrogen are vastly exaggerated. Hydrogen is SO volatile that it is less dangerous than propane, natural gas, and gasoline, which are all heavier than air so they hug the ground. Hydrogen both dissipates and rises very rapidly, substantially reducing the practical danger, and it would burn off far more rapidly than the current fossil fuels used in cars. In short, the additional costs, if any, would be minimal.

Grace and peace. BD

"There is a monster on the loose, he has our heads in the noose,
and he just sits there, watching". (Stepenwolf, Monster)

The article on hydrogen as a possible fuel source had two problems with Bush's hydrogen fuel source. One is that the hydrogen will have to be produced from fossill fuels. The real problem is on how to develop a renewable energy source and I think I know what it will have to be. The only renewable source of power is that giant fireball we call the sun.

Renewable energy at the source:

Relaying power from ground stations to satellites and back to ground stations at another location is another, perhaps more readily available, application, Mankins said. A complete solar power satellite system to produce enough energy to be economically viable may not emerge until 2025 to 2035, he said.

Sounds good except no one is really that exited about the idea of renewable energy replacing fossil fuels right away?

"Overall funding for renewable research and energy conservation, meanwhile, will be slashed by more than $86 million. "Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing them with fossil and nuclear doesn't make for a sustainable approach," says Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Solar Power R&D

The infrastructure of power:

The article is describing how the oil industry is allready prepareing for the transition,of course a good oil man like Bush wants to develop hydrogen. His Billionare buddies in Texas are planning what they will go into when the oil runs out. Just as the railroads transposed into phone companies because they owned the telegraph wires.

"The oil and chemical industries already produce 9 million tons of hydrogen each year, most of it from natural gas, and transport it through hundreds of miles of pipelines to fuel the space shuttle and to remove sulfur from petroleum refineries. The administration's plan lays the groundwork to expand that infrastructure -- guaranteeing that oil and gas companies will profit from any transition to hydrogen. Lauren Segal, general manager of hydrogen development for BP, puts it succinctly: "We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business."

Bush is concerned with the future of the oil industry not the environment. Just like he was interested in 1/4 of a trillion dollars in oil contracts not WMDs when we went into Iraq. Keep in mind that in the same speech he said Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Niger based on bogus information. He is pursueing his agenda of developing the oil industry, its commercial self interest, nothing more. To get an idea what we can expect over the next 20 years with regard to the transposition of the oil industry you would have to look at how Standard Oil did it. Conspiricy theories are highly under rated mainly because conspiricy theorists cannot predict future trends. Well Im taking conspiricy theory to the next llevel. In order to see the future you have to observe the past.

"On the morning of February 26, 1872, the oil men read in their morning papers that the rise which had been threatening had come; moreover, that all members of the South Improvement Company were exempt from the advance. At the news all Oildom rushed into the streets. Nobody waited to find out his neighbor's opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was "conspiracy."…

For weeks the whole body of oil men abandoned regular business and surged from town to town intent on destroying the "Monster," the "Forty Thieves," the "great Anaconda," as they called the mysterious South Improvement Company. Curiously enough, it was chiefly against the combination which had secured the discrimination from the railroads--not the railroads which had granted it--that their fury was directed. They expected nothing but robbery from the railroads, they said. They were used to that; but they would not endure it from men in their own business."

History of Standard Oil

In answer to my own questions:



Yes, because it is still a great advance with the possibility open for converting much of the hydrogen produced by fossil fuels over to more sustainable methods in the future.

Admittedly, I know very little about hydrogen engines...well, okay...engine's in general. That was my main motivation for starting this thread, because I wanted to get some different perspectives and hopefully learn something in the process.



Somewhat, yes, because during the state of the union address, Bush said that building a hydrogen engine would reduce our dependency on the Middle East. This, at least not at the moment, does not seem to be the plan. The oil boys are heavily involved.

I'll post this source once again:

Hydrogen Primer

I also want to remind people that we have two natural, renewable sources of energy: the sun (as mentioned) and geothermal.

Of the two, geothermal has the greatest potential to generate the amount of electricity needed to generate hydrogen from water. Solar is most effective when concentrated, as in biomass that eventually becomes petroleum and coal. Geothermal is there for the tapping.

When it comes right down to it, all you need to generate electricity is to boil water.

Here's an interesting side point from the linked article for Bikerdad:



How old is the internal combustion engine?

Iceland has made more headway on this than we because they have a lot of natural geothermal springs. We have some, but not a lot, and they're very spread out.



Although the hydrogen- oxygen fuel cell has been known since the early 1800s, there were no available electrodes during that time to carry out an efficient energy conversion, which is why is was never utilized.

Solar energy should be the way of the future as I have seen it calculated that if you covered something like 25'000 square miles ( 67'000 square kiliometres) of land somewhere in a desert where it is almost never cloudy you could power the entire world (except hawaii as it is in the middle of the pacific ocean and would be too expensive to run cables there but except for hawaii).
A Project of this scale however would cost around 250 billion pounds (400 billion dollars) and take about 10 years to complete but if ten years funds for power generation could be given to a project like this I am quite sure that it would amount to a vastly higher sum and be well worth the investment.
The night and day problem of solar generaters was also discussed in article i read and you simply choose 4 desert locations around the world and due to the fact that most of the land mass of our planet exist on just one side of it at least three sites would be in the sun at any one time.

As technology towards energy efficiency there have been plenty of cars that run on all sorts of things like nitrogen, grass and even orange juice however most of these would never be put into production because we would exhaust the earths ability to grow oranges. Although nitrogen as a fuel is a very good idea but it will never come into production because the oil businesses would go to the wall as no-one would pay for fuel when you can suck nitrogen straight out of the air, run it through a filter, compress it and run a vehicle on it. There are limitations to these future technologies (most are not as energy producing as a combustion engine) but the real power lies with those who control the money. What would happen if tommorrow everyone was prompted to but a car that ran on nitrogen? Where would the petrol company's get there money and what would the government tax? You could never tax nitrogen as it is in such plentiful supply (about 80'000 cubic miles of gas) and this must be a major factor in the development of new energy efficient transport.

If you take away there money, you strip them of there power.

I think we're getting a little off topic here. cyan wanted to discuss hydrogen power specifically:

QUOTE

Do you think that if the hydrogen for the "freedom car" is derived from fossil fuels that the project is worth embarking on?

Edited to add one additional question for debate: Do you feel that President Bush, during the state of the union address, consciously gave a false impression about the hydrogen program?

Let's try to stick to debating those questions, please

1)yes, because you can then use the fossil fuel created hydrogen to then fuel power plants(burn it in place of natural gas) though wind is better at least we would be moving towards hydrogen, though slower then if a clean source were used.

2)as much as Iremeber from his SOTU address, yes, because even though cars would not use fossil fuels, the plants to produce the hydrogen would, and we need to move to a hydrogen only system.



wind is also a very viable option. denmark will get 50 pecent of its power from wind by 2030, from offshore windfarms. not only is wind clean, but if the farms are at sea you can make LIQUID HYDROGEN from sea water. liquid h2 represents the most viable option of weening ourselves of oil. not only do you not have to build a whole new infrasctructure for cars, but it can feul IC vehicles with a few small modifications to the engine (h2 burns at a higher temp and faster rate then gas. also, the only emission from burning h2 in IC engines is steam aka water vapor) this would help drasticly in creating the infrastructure for fuel cell cars. we would then need to stop producing internal combustion cars and start producing fuel cell cars. (such GM's hywire)

running IC vehicles not only can be done it HAS been done by roger billings, who converted a model t ford (among others) to run on h2 made from water in a rain barrel using a windmil for power HYDROGEN'S POTENTIAL by R.E. Billings

if we made it a national goal we could be using liquid h2 within a decade, as all the tech needed is already available (electrodes conduct electricity through water which splits the oxygen from the two hydrogens, (thus H2) creating liguid hydrogen) this is the plan proposed by harry braun 3rd, ( FAQs about hydrogen about HARRY BRAUN 3rd)

What Braun, and many others like about hydrogen is its universality. It can replace natural gas, propane, gasoline, coal, even jet fuel. - from http://evworld.com/databases/storybuilder....cfm?storyid=317
the good thing about this is that, as I mentioned earlier, hydrogen can be used in natural gas power plants. using this method we could intially use offshore wind farms(more efficent, do to there being more wind at sea), as well as inland ones, (for reasons mention by braun in the evworld article) to produce the initial hydrogen, which could the be used in NG plants to produce clean energy for electrolosys(explained simply in above paragraph)

Assuming it is done, what of all the steam (water vapor) being exhausted into the air? What do we do with all the O2 that will be released when H2 is taken from the water?
Nothing is as simple as it seems, and I predict that it will not be viable in my lifetime, or another 30 years or so. It is a major shift in technology and the application is as much a shift as is the introduction of this technology.

Research should continue, but don't pin any hopes on near term results.

It seems like "fossil fuels" is some kind of taboo word.

In order to generate the needed hydrogen, it needs to come from somewhere. As AM's link to the Hydrogen Primer says: electrolysis is a very inefficient way to produce hydrogen. The most efficient way is from "reforming" hydrocarbons, with natural gas being the leading candidate.

I have serious doubts about the immediate viability of hydrogen fuel cells. Long term, I can see it happening. Short term :

The oil company connection simply points out the some of the infrastructure necessary to send this idea forward is already in place. That is no conspiracy. Capatalizing on an existing industry (rather than creating an entire new one) is no conspiracy. The evolution of an industry to meet changing technology is no conspiracy (reference the train industry becoming the telephone industry).

Amlord,

You wrote, "The oil company connection simply points out the some of the infrastructure necessary to send this idea forward is already in place. That is no conspiracy. capitalizing on an existing industry (rather than creating an entire new one) is no conspiracy. The evolution of an industry to meet changing technology is no conspiracy (reference the train industry becoming the telephone industry)."

I am not sure what you are saying here but do you want me to demonstrate how the train industry became the telephone industry? Its certainly an interesting historical transition but I was trying to point our some possible alterior motives in the development of hydregen. Now as far as conspiricy, there may be a fine line between conspiricy and consensus.

I am convinced that hydrogen is going to replace oil as the number one commodity in the world and it may even happen in our life time.

The source of hydrogen will eventually be water. The problem is splitting the water without using fossil fuels in the process(ie. energy generated by fossil fuels). It's possible to split water using nuclear power, but unfortunately nuclear power is dirty itself. Another possibility to power the separation of water is fusion; but that seems to be heading down a dead end because of ignition/sustaining post ignition dynamics (plasma).

http://www.pppl.gov/

The energy required to get the H2 from water is more than the energy available from the H2. That process is not viable yet.
Nuclear Power is not dirty, in the sense that other types of power are. Coal and oil generate tons of pollution that gets into the air that then gets carried by the wind. There is actually more airborne radioactive pollution from coal fired plants than nuclear. Coal is not pure, and when it is burned, the radioactive contamination goes up the stack, and into the air.
Fusion has its own set of problems beyond sustaining the reaction in a plasma field. It generates lots of fast neutrons that act like sand blast media that will eventually destroy the structural materials of the building that the plant is housed in. You need a lot of hydrogen based shielding material to slow down these fast neutrons. Ever hear of the neutron bomb? It uses fast neutrons to kill people and leave the infrastructure intact. Even inside a tank, the crew dies.
Concerning Fission Nuclear, the waste/pollution/contamination is contained within the plant. To get harmed by it, you hae to work there AND violate a lot of safety rules. There are no smoke stacks at Nuclear Plants, except the small ones for diesel generators that are used for backup power for safety systems, and those rarely run. Some reporters have called the water vapor from cooling towers smoke, showing their ignorance. A University of Chicago professor once showed 'proof' that there are more incidences of cancer down wind of a nuclear power plant than the other direction. Problem is, he had his prevailing wind direction backwards. There are more erroneous stories by the press about nuclear issues than almost any other issue.
As I said, H2 is still a long ways off, and the whole story is not being told by the politicians and scientists. There are NO magic beans or heroes in this fairy tale.

bill, do you have sources that it is inefficient to turn water into hydrogen? you just keep saying "it isn't viable, it takes more energy to extract it then h2 produces" I would like to see scientific sources that back up your statement. at least jmunro and I tried. as to what happens to the oxygen molecule (it isn't O2 as there is only one molecule) I assume it is given off as a gas during the electrolysis process and becomes a part of the atmosphere. or perhaps you could bottle it in liquid form and sell it to medical companies(also, if it is done at sea you would need to desalinate the water which with a new technology for cheap and sell the salt)

here are some sites refuting your claims:
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/chemistryele...ectrolysis.html (they claim it can produce so much energy so as to be explosive)
http://www.nature.com/nsu/000330/000330-4.html
from the man that modified a model t(or is it a) ford to run on hydrogen using a windmill, a rain barrel, and electrodes, Dr. R.E. billings- http://www.science.edu/tech/h75001.htm
also it is not inefficient if the energy for electrolysis if it is free in the first place, as in WIND! you use turbines at sea to initially make mass amounts of H2, you then use the h2 in place of natural gas in power plants, then you augment the wind energy with that energy for electrolysis. NOT THAT DARN HARD! and please provide sources to BACK UP YOUR STATEMENTS!

oh, and I hate to tell you, nuclear energy is the DIRTIEST energy source. it may not produce green house gasses, but the waste from the plants lasts millions of years(it might be hundreds of thousands, not sure) and it needs to be stored somewhere. the only repository I know of is yucca mountain. the problem is that it will be nearly full once it opens and there is MORE waste to dispose of. radiation is BAD, m'kay.

You had me until that... Nuclear Waste is categorized into three groups: cool, medium and hot. Cool waste can be stored in pools on-site and are radioactive between six months and 70 years. Medium stuff has a half life of up to something like 70,000 years but can usually be converted into a compound called "SynRock" or "SynGlass" which are solid and can be stored safely without fear of seapage or leakage. Hot waste, which can stay radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, is obviously harder to store. The preferred method is to place it in a medium with a known rate of decomposition (iron for example) so that there is no uncertainty as to a containment failure. While this stuff is obviously a problem, the volume produced isn't significant (IMHO) to make it any dirtier than another energy source. In case you're wondering, the single largest pollution source in North America is the Nanticoke Coal Power Plant in Southwestern Ontario. (Which I have personally campaigned to have closed.)

Unabomber, your own sources say that the conversion is at best a break-even process.
And one man with an old car, a rain barrel, and a windmill is a far cry from making the quantities needed for all our cars and our natural gas fired power plants.
Just because his result was "explosive" does not mean that anything was gained. Windmills are also very expensive producers of electricity, as measured in cost per kilowatt hours. The issue is BTU content. Why use a million BTU's of electric energy to make a million BTU's of H2?
I know about Nuclear Power. I am a Navy trained reactor operator, have also worked at test reactors in Idaho, and at the free world's largest commercial
nuclear power plant, which is the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona. Add to that 3 years of college, lots of reading about solar and other alternative means of producing power, and I feel more than qualified to
speak on the subject.
The computer is crashing periodically today, so I will get sources for you later.
BTW, you are completely wrong about nuclear being dirty. If you can come up with anything that relates to someone being hurt on-site, or off-site, at a commercial nuclear power plant as a result of a nuclear incident, I will be
surprised.

By the laws of thermodynamics, energy is always lost in converting from one form to another. I think the idea behind hydrogen is, ultimately, to make energy transportable through the use of fuel cells. It is not to most efficiently use energy.

So, here's the scenario I can see: We generate electricity from solar (which includes wind and wave action, plus biomass), geothermal, or both. With solar, radiation from the sun becomes electricity through photovoltaic cells, wind through heating up the atmosphere, wave action from the wind, and I forgot to mention thunderstorms. Thus hydro is also originating from solar. Lightening, too. Maybe there's a way to collect lightening energy. We sure get a lot of that around here.

Electricity can be stored in batteries and capacitators. That's one way to go, and that has been tried for transportation (electric cars, hybreds). Batteries are pretty expensive and capacitors aren't efficient enough.

Fuel cells have the promise of being the cheap way of storing electricity, but not directly. First the electrical energy has to be transformed to hydrogen energy. That's where electrolysis comes in. Some energy is lost in the transformation, just as with any transformation. But you don't lose *all* the energy. No, much of it is stored in the H2 for use in transportation.

Solar in its biomass (photosynthesis) version results in a net zero energy cycle. In other words, rather than burning up existing oxygen in the atmosphere to create carbon compounds from long-buried fossil fuels (depletes our oxygen and increases CO2 and other compounds), solar results in using only existing oxygen and carbon to create the biomass. Then you can burn the biomass to make steam and produce electricity.

The other solar energy conversions don't involve burning anything, and so are also net zero energy cycles.

Same for geothermal. But do we have to use only naturally occuring steam? Why not drill (we are so good at that now) holes down to near the magma where pumped water from the surface will boil and return as steam to run generators? We have lots of places where the crust is relatively thin.

Shoot, you could set up generation plants in polluted lakes, and the discharged steam would condense into pure water! Two birds with one stone?

Anyway, the simple energy transformation flow is this: solar/geothermal --> electricity --> H2 --> transportation

For our other needs, solar/geothermal --> electrical grid --> heating/cooling/cooking/industry

Here's a good Time article about energy and why so many think the above scenario is a pipe dream:

Problem Is Political, Not Technical

The Time Magazine article is misleading. I have worked where research is funded by government, and when the research isn't getting anywhere, funds get cut. That is the political side of the technical issue. It is to be expected. Also, if it is an alternate energy project and oil prices suddenly fall, the politicians in their short sightedness think that the problem is over and will not occur again.
But it is still a technical issue. Fusion is enormously difficult technology, batteries and photovoltaics are still extremely polluting in the mining, refining, processing, of materials used to make them, plus the waste part of the cycle is a prolem. All those batteries and cells have to be recycled at the end of their useful life. Conversion to H2 is just part of the problem, it has to be stored til it gets used and that is a major infrastructure issue. There never was an issue like this that, once solved, didn't create a whole new set of problems to deal with, problems that were foreseen by the technical people, but were ignored by the policy makers.
I use to read my father's Popular Science when I was a kid in the 50's and 60's. Some of the same wild ideas presented then are still being presented today. The article writers should know better by now that nearly all of these ideas are more difficult to bring to the consumer than they suggest.
We should continue looking for the answers, but not in the minds of the media who will print anything to make a buck, or in the hearts of politicians whose primary goal in life is to get re-elected. If the problems are solved, it will be engineers and scientists who do it, not Congress.

Bill55AZ,

How is the Time article misleading? It seems to support your conclusion.

I do think another energy crisis has to develop before a push to H2 comes about. That it will be H2 isn't really the question. Already an electric car has been pulled off the market even though it was well-liked by its owners. Why?

Well, it could be that Mercedes is working on a unique H2 burner:

Hydrogen from Methanol

So, now what's the problem?

Unibomber, the idea is to use a highly "profitable" method to produce the electricity to form oxygen and hydrogen. Fusion is the closest know to ideal method for producing electricity, via heat exchange and so for and so on.

I suspect you haven't studied much chemistry, as elemental hydrogen and oxygen do not exist naturally to begin with. Electrolysis of water is a common and easy process, resulting in diatomic hydrogen and oxygen, which may be recombined to give off energy.

O(2) + 2H(2) <-> 2H(2)O

I really don't understand your problem with my claims, so please state them a little bit clearer.

I got the impression that the magazine writer thinks that all we have to do is legislate and fund and the scientists can do anything. It just isn't that simple. That is why I think the article is misleading.
When I worked for Arizona Public Service, the company had an electric car that employees could drive for a time, as though it was their own. One of my co-workers had it for a time, and he liked it. But it isn't good for long trips, as the battery charge was only good for short trips at slow speeds. Put it up to freeway speeds, and you get less trips.
And in Arizona, you need Air Conditioning which is a big drain on the batteries. The batteries have to be replaced every few years, at an incredible expense. The hybrid cars, part gas and part electric, seem to be a good compromise, but still, the batteries only last so long and then you get to pay big $$$ to replace them. And as I have said before, batteries are big time polluters when you consider the mining, refining, processing, etc. that goes into making them and then later recycling/disposing of them.
You are right about a crisis being needed. It is the only time that congress even looks at the issues. Once the crisis is over, they cut funding. The last energy crisis gave us the solar water heating industry but how many of the solar water heaters do you see still on houses today? The tax incentives were based on cost of the system, not efficiency, and that by itself inflated the prices. Durability was seldom built in to those systems. Efficiency was good, but the systems just didn't hold up to long term use. New tax incentives that are being considered are for house designs and home utilities systems that must meet standards such that the overall package will cut energy use by certain amounts. And the builder gets the tax credits, not the owner. The builders have always resisted change when it comes to how they do their thing. The new tax incentives are aimed at them, so maybe there is an attitude change in their future. There is a fairly new, emerging industry in concrete homes that interested readers should check into. In fact there is a magazine titled "Concrete Homes" that I have been subscribing to that is very interesting and informative.

Bill55AZ,

Well, I don't see the article as promoting as much as simply showing that government has not been coordinated to get us off oil. One of the opening paragraphs says this:



I'm in agreement that the most likely scenario is that a successful line of alternative vehicles hits the market and people convert over time because it makes more sense to do so. government has the ability to focus on a problem and work to solve it, as has been shown multiple times in our history. Energy policy isn't one of those examples, but NASA and the Interstate Highway System are.

If you poke around for energy alternatives, a lot of advances have been made. Some interesting ones came about because of necessity in areas that have either no energy grids or no coal/oil/gas deposits.

Guess necessity is the mother of invention, eh?

Regarding batteries, the cost is high due to market pressures just like any other commodity. As demand rises, prices will come down. The obvious solution to disposal is recycling. But why use batteries at all? Why not develop fuel cells that deliver enough electricity straight up to the driving motors?

I can envision a bank of fuel cells (we will then brag about how many cells, not cylinders) with a regulator similar to fuel injection systems, computerized of course with a bunch of sensors.

A while back I saw something on an internal combustion engine designed to burn H2 directly, too. Think there might be problems with how much faster H2 burns than petrol. Maybe the exhaust steam has some drawbacks as well, like corrosion.

Gotta agree with you there, primarily because "energy policy" is primarily a political question, whereas your other issues were engineering/technical.

Actually, the cost of the batteries won't come down all that much, since the battery market is already large and very mature. Millions of batteries are already in industrial/transportation use, from the battery that starts your car, to the bank of batteries that power the forklift plucking pallets of Harry Potter in Amazon's warehouses.

Two reasons, both of which are the same reason for using batteries in hybrid vehicles. Regenerative braking and acceleration. By using batteries to store braking energy, the same energy can be dumped into the powetrain to boost acceleration, thereby allowing a smaller power plant. To my knowledge, fuel cell power plants for vehicle drive the electric motor(s) directly.

Grace and peace, BD

From an article about the European power situation..

And hydrogen power, did I hear you say? Well, hydrogen's got a lot going for it in terms of cutting vehicle emissions, but you have to create the hydrogen in the first place, and for that you need electricity. Indeed, completely switching to a hydrogen transport economy would actually require a 50 percent increase in electricity supply.

Hot new European investment: Candles!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/02/...ain547412.shtml



Read this very interesting article and see if you think this is the solution to all our problems. It would help the enviroment AND make us extremely less dependent of Middle Eastern oil.

I wonder how much of that billion dollar investment is into fuel cell research. To me, the current fuel cell technology is the weak point in the design. That and ruggedness. Any vehicle needs to stand up to a virtual pounding from being on the road. It is interesting that GM is investing so heavily in this. It is really a no-lose situation for them. A pure hydrogen car would give them the environmentalist dollar, even if it is only an alternative option.

I have some doubts that all of GMs models can be put onto one chassis, though. It seems to me that different models cater to different tastes and there is no "one size fits all" vehicle.

Not sure if this particular part was answered, but I happen to be a chemistry nut so I thought I'd comment on that statement.

If you were talking about one molecule of H2O and converting it to H2+O, then yes, you would be correct. However, that's not even practical without some very expensive equipment.

If you had an electrolosys lab set up, you'd be using more than one H2O molecule. Oxygen has 6 electrons in it's outermost orbital, which is just two shy of creating a stable molecule. When oxygen comes into contact with other oxygen atoms, the oxygen atom will "share" two of its six electrons with another oxygen atom. Each oxygen atom keeps four electrons but puts two into the "common area." Since each oxygen atom antes up two electrons, there's a total of four in the "common area," which each oxygen atom gets to claim, filling its outer orbital. Since each atom had to borrow two electrons, this is called a double covalent bond. A double bond is stronger than a single bond and it's why most free oxygen is found in the form O2.

I believe Bush was distinctly misleading.

Hydrogen is NOT an energy, it is only a carrier of energy. You need plentiful supplies of energy to create it. Maybe he should have stated here those would be coming from. Maybe he did It also has many other problems, such as storage. It permeates almost anything. There are many gliches to overcome yet.

I noticed this thread had been dead for some months, but with the recent revelations that a natural gas shortage is imminent in the US (see Simmons - Pray for a mild winter etc) and elsewhere around the globe, and the with the strong threat of peak oil also raising its ugly head, hydrogen made from a fossil fuel source looks less feasible.

Biofuels or re-newable electricity sources seem a better way to go, and of course cutting down on the use of energy is paramount. All those townies driving SUV's and Ford trucks should hang up their keys and start conserving. Renewable energy sources will never replace the 20,000,000 barrels of oil used every day in the US, hydrogen or no hydrogen.

The main scientific/engineering focus on hydrogen is as energy storage... but!

There are ways to produce industrial quantities of hydrogen without electrolysis.

Example (and please forgive that it's being a l o n g time since chemistry classes):

Coal + very-hot-steam --> Hydrogen + CO2

Problems: other pollutants in Coal ore and the coal burned to heat the steam!

Coal made into Coke (not the drink though!) + <I forgot the name of that common stone used in concrete with lots of calcium carbonate?> + water -> Ethylene + Hydrogen!

Ethylene is that gas used in solder shops; It would be a nice source of energy if it wasn't so hard to store -- must be stored in acetone!

And so forth...

Hydrogen does present some issues about pollution (it goes up into the stratosphere real fast but it might mess up the ozone layer in great quantities), and handling.

One of main engineering problem currently is storage -- even cryogenic H2 uses a lot of space -- check out the size of the Space Shuttle external tank, it's mostly for hydrogen.

-- my two cents --

Really I don't understand why we simply can't use the various renewable sources of energy for the energy to produce hydrogen. Gallium Indium solar cells in the lab are now approaching 45% efficient, and the theoretical efficiency limit for them is 99%!

As to storage, great progress is being made in the use of so called carbon 'nanotubes' which can trap the individual hydrogen atoms in their unique structure allowing for quite remarkable storage.

Acetylene is the gas, used primarily in welding, that must be stored in acetone.