Is hydrogen a viable successor to oil?

The other disadvantages are that it is pretty explosive than gasoline and that it would require a massive amount of new infrastructure to allow people to tank it.

Depends, if Gasoline ignites it tends to spread out and down, if H2 were to do the same what would happen? Think about it for a second, car companies have done the tests already. H2 when ignited would travel the path of least resistance and burst the gas cap, which would be directed upwards due to safety standards which would then direct the flame up and out safely. It's an amazing video, i'll try to find it for you.

Today danish researchers showed a hydrogen tablet that they believe could be a replacment for gasoline. It will allow a normal 50 litre-tank in a car to hold enogh hydrogen to drive 500 km, which before would have required the room of 9 passenger cars.

A team of researchers from The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has disclosed a tablet, which according to researchers is the first practical method of storing hydrogen energy.

It took place at the recent conference in Chicago in USA after the DTU researchers had kept the invention a secret for about six months while the international patent agencies were treating their application, writes Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten.
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“For the last twenty years researchers almost worldwide have tried to find a practicable way to store hydrogen. Now we found the method,” says Claus Hviid Christensen, professor of chemistry, DTU.

Source and the rest of the news here: Danish breakthrough in using hydrogen as fuel

more info:
Hydrogen storage
Article on DTU, giving lots of info

[edit on 7-9-2005 by cadric]

Remeber Chemistry and Physics (The classes some slept through).

Gasoline the stuff we use now is a form of stored hydrogen. Currently we are using it in a combustion process and splitting it into CO2, NOX, H2O and some other chemicals and using 20% or less of the energy pushing a bunch of pistons and expending energy to toss away the heat. The hydrogen is only a player in the process where we are mostly oxidizing the carbon.

Ever wonder how the refining process gets us these fuels. It takes fractioning, the earlist process developed to make fuel. Latet we started using catalyst to further refine fuels. We actually produce more usable fuel and ditch impurities with less of an effect on the cost of production.

I can see that the direction we are going is that oil companies are going to start producing a form of hydrogen liquid that I'll call Hfuel and explain later. Just by reading adds from Shell, Chevron and others something is in the works. No one can say what because it means that when the technology is available and automakers can take advantage of it, who ever is first to market can reap the benefits and profits. Yes we would still be using fossils to seed and feed the process and produce the product but use less oil. But lets say this process doubles production of usable fuel from the proverbial barrel-o-oil. We would then have the start to alternative sources. If from that point on we could reduce the oil consumption in that sector at 1% per year Peak Oil would become a thing of the pass. We still have to convert millions of homes and businesses that depend on heating oil to another fuel/energy. We also have to consider natural gas though we may start producing more bio-gas and be able to keep it for a while.

The Xfuel I speak of could be any form of hydride or chemical bonded molecule to stablize H into a storable fuel. Several projects have been successfully proven worthy. Some produce a soapy substance and water but production costs from what I read it was too expensive to be viable yet. In this case the H was stored in a powder form bound to Calcium if I remeber right. A catalyst in the presence of heat split of the hydrogen as needed to feed the fuel cell and the soapy substance was collected for later use or reuse expelling only the water.
Catalyst will play a major role in the production of this HFuel as it uses less energy to produce results. In most cases high temperatures are involved just in the gas refining process. This is where nuclear as some of you have said can come into play but we may have to back off some Environmental Controls and NRC rules to make it happen. If we do move towards nuclear than it should be a mandate that fuel rods, core and pellets are recycled to reduce the burden on RA-waste buildup.
If we can reduce a building full of vacume tubes down to a PDA, why can't we kick the fossil fuel habbit?

Is hydrogen a viable successor to oil?

NO, hydrogen is only an energy storage medium.

You still need energy to crack water, so back to the drawing board. That or start building nuke powered electrolysis plants. I can here Greenpeace getting ready to scream too.

There are several processes which can yield hydrogen via water splitting using various energy sources at different efficiencies and costs. 48% of current hydrogen production is from natural gas, 30% is from oil, 18% is from coal, and electrolysis accounts for about 4%.
en.wikipedia.org...

[edit on 11-9-2005 by Regenmacher]

H2 can be viable if we got most of our energy from Hydro, Nuclear, Solar, Wind etc.

This may not be a pipe dream as alternatives are booming(as are investment prospects)




We could be at the start of an exponential trend.

[edit on 14-9-2005 by sardion2000]