The Economy Of Hydrogen

There has been a big marketing effort to get government and business to subsidize Hydrogen as a fuel.

I find it amusing and a bit distressing that the basic physics of hydrogen makes it rather a net USER of energy, be it coal or nulear.

It takes more energy to make from water than it can return in any significant manner.

Seems like the nineteenth century equivelent of "snake oil" medicines.

I do have one way of making it pay "eventually". Invest in giant solar farms in LOE.

Transmit the energy to vast areas of desert land, or open ocean, floating nations -- using currently available micro-wave technology. Use that as the source to manufacture hydrogen.

The problem with this is the same as all advancement. Luddites. Oh well. Even though it has been proven that it would be totally harmless to stand in the middle of such an energy farm, it will never be done. There is and always will be too much ignorance in the way of progress.

My second thought on this is to just get off of earth and utilize the Sun for all it's worth. And it is worth plenty, energy wise. We better hurry though. It will die in another ten billion years or so.😲

True enough. Preparing hydrogen for fuel is basically a method of storing energy, like solar energy, in the form of an extremely clean fuel. It's not like gasoline that you dig up already full of chemical potential energy just waiting to be burned.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
True enough. Preparing hydrogen for fuel is basically a method of storing energy, like solar energy, in the form of an extremely clean fuel. It's not like gasoline that you dig up already full of chemical potential energy just waiting to be burned.

what I want to know is why there is no really big push for fusion energy? The ITER people can't get their itshay together to even agree
where to build the next stage reactor, france or japan. It seems to me one big answer to the energy problem. There has been significant advancement in the fusion programs around the world from Z pinch to magnetic bottle confinment to laser zap fusion. Why aren't we pumping a few hundred billion into those things? Instead we think its
imperitive to attack muslim nations with oil, pumping hundreds of billions into that instead with the direct result in higher oil prices. I heat my house with oil and have a 500 gallon tank, I just paid 850 US
just to fill it. There has to be a better way and fusion looks like it to me. With fusion energy you dont need LEO installations, you can make all the hydrogen you want even if its less efficient it would be better on the ecology.

Originally posted by sonhouse
what I want to know is why there is no really big push for fusion energy? The ITER people can't get their itshay together to even agree
where to build the next stage reactor, france or japan. It seems to me one big answer to the energy problem. There has been significant advancement in the fusion programs around the world from Z pinch to magnetic bottle c ...[text shortened]... an make all the hydrogen you want even if its less efficient it would be better on the ecology.

yes fusion uses up hydrogen, but that's not a problem since there's huge amounts available, 2 atoms in every water molecule for instance

The idea of fusion is not to create hydrogen but large amounts of hopefully cheap energy, then use the energy to create hydrogen through other means, chemical, photoreactive, dissassociation, whatever technique is the most efficient at the time. As efficiency progress is made, like finding new catalysts to crack water into O2 and H2, less energy will be needed to have a civilization sized supply of hydrogen. Also new forms of batteries will also inevitably get more efficient at storing energy (more energy stored per pound at room tempuratures, for instance) or alternate storage techniques like the new super capacitors which now are being used in some applications
to replace batteries, although they have a long way to go before they can suppliment say, lithium Ion batteries directly. If those technologies
advance enough, it may preclude the need to have hydrogen in the first place, doing the energy storage and release job now done by gasoline and hopefully hydrogen in the future.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The idea of fusion is not to create hydrogen but large amounts of hopefully cheap energy, then use the energy to create hydrogen through other means, chemical, photoreactive, dissassociation, whatever technique is the most efficient at the time. As efficiency progress is made, like finding new catalysts to crack water into O2 and H2, less energy will be nee ...[text shortened]... ng the energy storage and release job now done by gasoline and hopefully hydrogen in the future.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The idea of fusion is not to create hydrogen but large amounts of hopefully cheap energy, then use the energy to create hydrogen through other means, chemical, photoreactive, dissassociation, whatever technique is the most efficient at the time. As efficiency progress is made, like finding new catalysts to crack water into O2 and H2, less energy will be nee ...[text shortened]... ng the energy storage and release job now done by gasoline and hopefully hydrogen in the future.

Originally posted by thesonofsaul
Actually, I believe there is hydrogen in gasoline. Please corrct me if I'm wrong on that; I never took chemistry.

There have been positive movements in the alternate energy movement, especially in hydrogen powered vehicles.
http://www.csnews.com/csnews/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000781074

Of course, these fuel cells usually ...[text shortened]... from natural gas, but it iis at least a good deal cleaner than burning gasoline.

... --- ...

Hi, for those of you who don't know chemistry: Gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, butter, fat, chicken bones are all what is called under the general term organic molecules and hydrocarbons. A simple hydrocarbon which has been in the news lately is Methane, just found as a liquid on Saturn's moon Titan, there it is so cold that methane is liquified, here on earth it is a gas or a hydrated version existing in what is called a methane ice, methane hooked to a water molecule in such a way as to make it a more or less solid. Now methane is just about the simplest hydrocarbon, like one carbon atom with 4 hydrogen atoms attached, so its called CH4. It is fairly easy to liberate the hydrogen from methane with chemistry and such so you get 4 hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom. Methane is also called natural
gas, deposits of which could supply all our needs for a thousand years but the problem is its buried underground in association with oil, where you find oil you find methane, so you see it burning at oil fields where it is considered a waste product so you see the big fires on top of the tall pipes in texas. I guess they consider there is not enough to be viable to sell as a separate product in texas but in the eastern states, New England, Pennsylvania, etc, there are vast deposits of natural gas
and the natural gas companies were basically caught with thier pants down when the oil prices skyrocketed. They could have stepped in and quadrupled the gas production but lagged behind building the infrastructure which would allow that so they basically duplicated the decline in another industry in the US, the steel industry: briefly, they
refused to modernize in the 1920's and 30's and tried to keep using 19th century technology and so lost out to the Germans and the Japanese who built up their mills with the latest furnaces which were much more productive and used less energy so were able to sell steel a lot cheaper than the Americans so we have a situation like here near
Allentown, Pa where I live, Bethleham Steel rotting, thousands of people laid off and we are left buying German and Japanese steel.
I would have hoped the natural gas dudes could have taken a lesson from that but I guess not. The natural gas people could have taken a significant munch out of the middle eastern dependence on oil because a lot of houses are now heated with oil, like mine. I just paid
1.70 a gallon for heating oil a couple of weeks ago and it looks like the Saudis like that situation just fine so don't look for any price breaks any time soon. I was working overseas a few years ago and the old oil furnace died (I have the ability to keep stuff going far longer than it would normally) and was not around when it died and my son and his wife were living in the house at the time and they asked me if it was ok to replace so I let them put another oil heater in place. I should have had them go to a natural gas system which would basically use the same infrastucture, water pipes, pumps, radiators, etc and probably be about the same cost but I didn't and now am paying the consequences, one of which is the peculiar arrangement
oil delivery companies have: if you are not their customer and you want emergency service on your oil burner you are out of luck, there are not many independant oil burner repair companies out there. I ran into a situation where my oil supplier did not have a repair service and of course when my burner died it was sunday night midnight on the coldest day of the year and pipes froze, etc. was a big mess till I fixed it the next day. With natural gas you don't have that problem because the gas dudes are like the electric companies with established territories due to the fact that you have pipelines carrying the product to your house. Anyway that gets off the subject of getting hydrogen from gasoline. There is a newish device called the fuel cell that does exactly that, with a catalyst and sneaky chemistry these new fuel cells takes various kinds of fuel like alcohol (another kind of hydrocarbon)
and splits it apart and generates electricity directly. This technology can
be used for laptops or cell phones where as now you are tied to a recharging setup, with the new fuel cells you get 4 times the lifetime in the first place and you just fill it with an ounce or so of alcohol and you are on your way. That technology can be an iterim solution for cars:
using gasoline in a fuel cell, converting it directly to electricity and having some form of secondary storage, batteries, spinning gyroscopes which can store and release energy, the idea being you don't have to rely on the fuel cell to produce the peak power needed for acceleration, it just goes steady and has previously built up a supply of more readily usable energy for spurts. This allows us to use the same infrastructure (gas stations, refineries, etc) and get the benefits of less emissions till a real solution such as hydrogen comes along. So anyway you can in fact get hydrogen from gasoline and that is one option, but you are still stuck on a fossil fuel economy.
Natural gas BTW is also found in the ocean as these methane ices I mentioned previously. They are in blocks about the size of a desk on the bottom of the ocean, good news and bad news thing. Good news is they can be mined and it can be a viable alternative to oil but the bad news is its even newer than natural gas and there is literally no infrastucture in place to mine it. The other bad news is methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, like twenty times worse. There are theories this methane ice at the bottom of the ocean was at some point in the earths history responsible for a vast dying of life on earth by somehow getting released from its storage in the methane ice and turning into greenhouse gas that changed the weather, tempurature and such on the earth faster than life could adapt and killed off 80 or 90 percent of life. So there is a down side to methane in that. Any infrastructure built around methane has to from the get go be set up to capture or sequester bare methane and keep it from the atmosphere or else a runaway greenhouse effect could wipe out humans forever. That alone makes a good case for hydrogen, it is not a strong greenhouse gas so is safer in that regard. The bottom line though is we have to get off this stupid fossil fuel economy for many reasons, not the least is to shove the arabs back to the 10th century where they seem to be happiest!🙂

Originally posted by sonhouse
what I want to know is why there is no really big push for fusion energy?

Originally posted by sonhouse
Hi, for those of you who don't know chemistry: Gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, butter, fat, chicken bones are all what is called under the general term organic molecules and hydrocarbons. A simple hydrocarbon which has been in the news lately is Methane, just found as a liquid on Saturn's moon Titan, there it is so cold that methane is liquified, here ...[text shortened]... , not the least is to shove the arabs back to the 10th century where they seem to be happiest!🙂

Originally posted by StarValleyWy
Ok. Any answers to how we do it?

Jeez! You are really long winded. All you had to say was that carbon fuels will run out. Nukes are good but superstition prevents their use. The Sun is good but it goes down every night. The wind seems to work but it kills birds and only works to the irritation of people everywhere within fifty miles because of the ni ...[text shortened]... itch? With all the Luddites wanting to return to the seventh century just on general principles?

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
[b]Jeez! You are really long winded.

I was thinking the same thing.[/b]