Hydrogen Hype

I've been saying it for quite some time now, the idea of hydrogen either as a compressed gas fuel or in fuel cells, as an alternative to fossil fuels is bullpuckey. But thanks to the dsinformation war being waged by the environuts and the lack of critical thinking skill worldwide people still seem to think it is.
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Very good point. I think a lot of oil peak scoffers believe that hydrogen is the answer. It is true that hydrogen is a fuel. Hydrogen, however, is just a method of transferring energy to be used in something else. Oil is not like this in that it has more energy than it costs in energy to produce it into a final product. Oil is a gift and we will run out of it. Hydrogen cannot be produced to replace current energy requirements unless we radically change our energy policy towards non carbon producing alternatives. Start listening ATSers!

It takes more energy to creat it, then it durives.

I like the Idea of Alcohol, Theres enough landmass to support at least 30% of our need, without hurting are food production.

Burns clean to

Perhaps we will need Hydrogen in the future. However, in the interim, why do we have cars that get 10mpg highway, 8mpg city? These are 2004 cars, sold as regular transportation.

If oil is a limited resource, should we not have some limitations on how fast we as a society are going to suck it up?

Also I remember as a kid national speed limit was 55mph. That's not really a bad speed limit. Less deaths on highway, more gas saved overall.

While I do not know much about how much energy alcohol needs in order to be produced, you need to understand that growing enough crop to make alchohol involves conventional techniques using farm machinery and fertilizers all using oil based products and derivitives. To replace them would mean using animal and human power. I know alcohol burns clean, but I would love to hear from you or someone else on how much energy is needed to produce enough crop to make 30% of our energy with alcohol. You know alcohol can be made from about anything that is organic. Oil energy has been stored for a long time over an geological process, but plants produce alcohol yearly, which is short term. Can you research this and tell us the yields of alcohol energy versus the energy used to produce it? Thanks.

taibunsuu, this is a good question; why do we have no realistic limits on energy consumption if we know that our oil will run out. I guess there could be a conspiracy on energy tech that we don't know about, but how would we know?
If you can tell us that then you would be a hero. Since all energy is derived from the sun, I think we should devote all our tech to that and nothing else. It is our main source of power........everything else is just its subsidiary.

Even if such news was leaked no one would believe it, thats why why can't discount any conspiracy!

But I guess GM has made engines for years that run on a blend, and pure alcohal. The engine are not being sold here. But have been mass perduced in south america. I think Argintina. But I was reading somewhere that the 30% had been worked out. Now I think they were talking about a blend here. I also read that the Diesel being used in Europe is much cleaner, and the engines run much smoother then the deasil we run here. And you get a much higher yeild per barrel with Diesel than gasaline

true! no one would believe it. I believe that atrophy is real, but I think that we don't understand everything about energy that we would like to. I think we have the technology for better stuff and it is hidden away for some good time in the future benficial to both corporations and US dominance. Sad indeed that they keep it from us who need it most.

Well, the US currently produces 38% of the world's corn and something like 55% of world corn exports. We're the world's corniest country, you could say, as we blow away all other national output of corn.

We could produce a heck of a lot more if people wanted to use ethanol for vehicles. That good 'ol invisible hand will demand more be grown if there's profit to be made.

I don't think anyone who has any engineering background at all considers hydrogen as anything but a "battery" in that it stores energy analogous to the way a lead-acid battery does.

You "charge" it by using electricity (and lots of it) to crack the hydrogen from the water, purify it, compress it, and transport it; then you "discharge" it by letting the hydrogen power a fuel cell.

Unfortunately, most people don't realize this; they think that we can wave a wand over the ocean and cubic kilometers of compressed hydrogen will magically appear.

My guess (and I have not pencil-whipped this) is that large scale production of alcohol (like they do in Brazil) is not cost-effective, given the fuel and soil amendments needed to turn your corn (or sugar beets or whatever) into ethanol. I'm sure that we, given anough research assets, could genetically engineer a plant which will grow rapidly with little fertilizing and will produce tons of sugars which can be made into ethanol, but the Luddites would probably scream at that, too.

Hydrogen as a fuel is feasible, as long as we don't waste hydrocarbons to create the electricity to crack it. Let's face it, the only proven way we can get lots of cheap electricity without burning hydrocarbons is to burn uranium. You pays your money and you makes your choice.

AS far as cars go, though, I think that we can probably squeeze as much energy out of a hybrid engine, like a common-rail diesel, along with regen braking, pumping up NiMH batteries like the hybrids running around today.

But sooner or later, we're going to have to stop burning hydrocarbons for a lot of reasons, all of which I have previously delineated ad nauseam.

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I believe there is a way of producing hydrogen using green algae and red algae/bacteria.

Alcohol relies on crops. crops rely on fertilizer, fertilizer is produced using fossil fuels. Circular logic going on there unless you have a complete stand alone system.

A small wager, someone is going to go hungry so they can run their automobile? Not likely I think.
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Slank says:

"I believe there is a way of producing hydrogen using green algae and red algae/bacteria."

Maybe so, but probably only as a byproduct of metabolic action. You're talking about a lot oh algae to produce hydrogen to support a hydrogen economy.

"Alcohol relies on crops. crops rely on fertilizer, fertilizer is produced using fossil fuels. Circular logic going on there unless you have a complete stand alone system."

Not necessarily. You can have crops which require much less hydrocarbon-based fertilizers than you'd spend to burn it in the hydrocarbon economy today.

Here is a really good article by Michael C. Ruppert and Dale Allen Pfeifferon why Hydrogen won't work.

August 18, 2003, 1930 PDT, (FTW) -- For months FTW has been besieged by misguided activists arguing that hydrogen is a real solution to the world's energy crisis. Sadly, these critics have been sold a bill of goods as deceptive and dangerous as Enron's cooked books, the intelligence "justifying" the Iraqi invasion, and oil reserve figures quoted by oil companies and government agencies. Hydrogen's problems are not difficult to understand and require little more than common sense applied to well-documented and easily understandable scientific fact.

There are no easy "magic bullet" solutions to the realities of Peak Oil and serious and irreversible natural gas shortages. Perhaps one of the most dangerous courses is to accept widely-hyped solutions without critical judgment and then waste the days and hours needed to look for real answers. Just because someone shows you a car that runs on hydrogen today, whether by burning the gas or by using a fuel cell to produce electricity, does not mean that they have shown you a solution. Spending more money or energy on a demonstration model than is produced from the resulting engine's output is a deception - nothing more. Snake oil salesmen have been around as long as mankind and there will be no shortage of unprincipled hucksters making a buck as the world begins to starve and freeze. Unfortunately, there will also be a bumper crop of gullible victims, easily led to the slaughter, who could have made other, more mature choices. Arguing that hydrogen burned in a car engine produces no greenhouse gases ignores the fact that those same gases were produced at the plant that made the hydrogen to begin with.

The truth is that Peak Oil and its implications will kill the human race a long time before global warming does. Just ask the innocent civilians who died on 9/11, the tens of thousands of civilians massacred in Afghanistan and Iraq and all those who will continue to die in the Empire's sequential war for oil - the war which Dick Cheney told us will not end in our lifetimes.

Hydrogen proponents need to answer FTW's 9 Questions for Evaluating Alternative Energy Sources at:

www.fromthewilderness.com... Beyond that, they need only read the following two excerpts from FTW stories to understand that any rescue by a "hydrogen economy" is about as likely as George W. Bush withdrawing US troops from Iraq and saying it was all a mistake.

FULL STORY: www.fromthewilderness.com...

I'm just the guy to debunk mr mulder's posts. I mean, I'm an engineer, I worked for a photovoltaics company, I understand hydrogen generation, and I realize that we have to replace the hydrocarbon burning with something else.

Now here comes this bozo trying to tell us that hydrogen won't work! Well, the only reason I'm not going to debunk his silly arguments right now is because...

He's one hundred percent correct. The "Hydrogen Economy" simply won't work.

Here's what's going on now:

We drill holes in the ground and, if we're lucky, pump a lot of oil out. We spill some, but that's okay.

Then we ship the oil to the refineries. We spill some, but that's okay.

Then the refineries refine it into #2 heating oil, kerosene, and gasoline and we pump it to the various hydrocarbon stores. We spill some, but that's okay.

Then we burn it and the exhaust poisons the air and us, and probably causes major climatic changes which shold be showing up pretty soon now if they're not here already.

And of course, the stuff that we don't get from our own country, we buy from a bunch of people who don't like us very much and they use our money against us in various and sundry unpleasant ways, like blowing up our skyscrapers and all.

Finally, we're running out of the damn stuff which is a mixed blessing, because although we'll cut down on pollution and climatic change and subsidizing terrorists and other Bad Guys and all, we'll probably end up with a billion or more people dead as a result of the loss of power which will lead to wars and a general collapse of what a lot of people call "civilization".

So there's not much argument that the hydrocarbon addiction is bad and we need to get rid of it.

But what does the hydrogen economy offer us?

Well, we're still going to need a lot of elecricity or heat to crack the water (or methane) into hydrogen, and guess how you generate a lot of heat and electricity? Right! Burn hydrocarbons!

Photovoltaics can't provide the electricity the world needs, nor can wind turbines, nor can hydroelectricity, nor can geothermal, nor can any combination of them. I would be glad to explain that once again, although it shouldn't be necessary by now. It does not require much math and research to understand why -- just a little common sense and the ability to look at things that you might not want to.

And people who quack about suppressed energy sources like Tesla rubbish or usable zero-point energy (as thought they actually exist!) may enjoy some good BS over a couple of beers, but as far as actually helping -- all they're doing is distracting us from a search for some real solutions to real problems.

There's only one energy source available today that can save us and it's the elephant in the living room that no one wants to talk about.

If we do not make the switch -- world-wide -- to nuclear power real soon now, it'll quite possibly be too late.

Why are so many of you people in denial about it?

Nuclear is not the answer. Yeah, we don't have to pay for it now, but where does all the spent uranium go? We can't go anywhere near the "uranium burial site" for 10,000 years or else we get cancer, our kids get cancer, their kids, etc. etc. Not to mention that they have deformities, too.

It's extremely inefficient, too. If the reactor core is not covered with water at all times, it will cause a meltdown. Does that say anything about how much energy is wasted to heat? And uranium is a limited resource, too, just like oil.

Fuel cells are more efficient than lead-acid batteries. You're just not explaining the whole story. Hydrogen is pure when it is created from electrolysis, so it doesn't have to be purified, and the fuel cell is only inefficient when you use oxygen from the air, which has to be purified because it contains carbon-dioxide, nitrogen, and other gases.

Why not use the oxygen that is created during electrolysis? It's already pure, and if you don't use it, you're just wasting energy. That's where the loss occures.

For more info, read you up on "Science and Technology", under the topic "The Ultimate Power Source".

A fuel cell system (including the electrolysis chamber, the fuel cell itself, tubing, etc.) is basically an energy storage system, but a fuel cell alone is not. This is presently the best energy storage system we have, and nothing can top it.

Besides, who would want a nuclear reactor in their car?

Hydroelectric dams are the way to go! No heat, waste product, dangerous or explosive materials; just right. The only downside to hydroelectric dams are that they are somewhat ugly looking. But speaking of ugly, nuclear has those gigantic towers...

All nuclear energy is missing is a final resting place for the waste.

Here's a thought...

Begin utilizing nuclear energy to advance technology to the point that nuclear waste can be ejected from the planet or injected into the planet safely and efficiently (radioactive materials actually come FROM Earth, by the way, so the system can handle them if they're properly diluted).

Store the waste until your ejection/injection method is perfected...toss the waste.

Imagine the rail-based space vehicle systems that have been discussed. Mag-lev tracks designed to impart an initial velocity onto an object to minimize the amount of energy required to break into orbit could work. We'd just need huge ones with lots of power (hence the reactors to power them) to launch objects fully out of Earth's gravitational pull and toward, let's say, the Sun. Once that's set, the threat of having a launch vehicle explode during it's boost phase and rain nuclear waste down on the planet is monumentally reduced and all you end up doing is minutely re-fueling the Sun.

Whilst I agree that in order to create hydrogen you need to put energy in,it doesn't have to come from hydrocarbons, as stated above,.. the REALLY expensive bit is compressing or liquefying it...but some British scientists may have the answer......

Brits invent Hydrogen storage thingy

Here's one for the petro engineers.
We already have the Hydrogen Economy, the trouble is it is bound to carbon!
Pumping it into a cylinder mixed with oxy and hitting it with a spark is cracking the H from the C and making heat, H2O, CO2 and a bunch of other chemicals.
Bind H with something that you can slide the chemical accross a catalyst to crackit when you need it eliminating the cryo tanks or high pressure bombs.

Think about who used the term Hydrogen Economy in 2000!

The Governator Like it!
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[edit on 24-10-2004 by AlabamaCajun]