Re: Hydrogen economy leads to environmental disaster???
Posted by Dale on Feb 18, 2002 at 12:40
153.arc1.il-decatur1.fgi.net (204.212.222.27)Re: Hydrogen economy leads to environmental disaster??? (Mike Kremer)
Why compress and combust it...are you thinking of driving an old fashioned car with pistons?I don’t believe anyone is suggesting that. We are all talking fuel cells.
(Well at least you wouldnt get any pollution -just plain old fashioned water)Which happens to be a greenhouse gas that contributes 10 times more to our current temperature rise than CO2.
One wonders just how much Carbon really does fall to the bottom, commonly called the Carbon sink?Good question. Think it might be valuable to find the answer before we mandate converting to a hydrogen economy?
But i digress. The best source of Hydrogen is the Universe, being the most common element.WOW! And you have a method for collecting and delivering the huge quantities we are going to need as easily as we punch holes in the ground and extract oil?
Although it has but one Proton and One Electron it seems to be quite difficult to work with.Not although – because.
Lets try to think uniquely using lateral thinking. Has Hydrogen been liquified? Yes way back in the 1880 by J Dewar. Has it been solidified? Yes by the same guy.
So i think you will agree that in that state Hydrogen has more power output than liquid gasoline (lets assume for the sake of argument the power input to convert crude oil and the extraction of Hydrogen from the atmosphere are roughly equal.)No, it has far less energy. To start with, temperature is energy. You are going to loose all the combustion (oxidation) energy getting the cold hydrogen up to atmospheric exhaust temperature. Where would you get the idea that cooling something gives it more energy?
Nexst, the assumption that getting hydrogen from the atmosphere is equivalent to pumping oil. First there is no significant free hydrogen in the atmosphere. It’s tied up in water. To extract it from water takes more energy than you get back burning it back to water. I doubt that you are saying that pumping oil and refining it takes more energy than you get back.
It would seem reasonable to suppose that if we can use the most common substance in the Universe as a power source we would have no more problems.It only seems reasonable if you also believe in perpetual motion machines. Just looking at the heat of combustion of carbon and hydrogen and seeing how little energy there is in an atom of hydrogen and how hard it is to extract it should make it obvious that it will never be an economical power source.
Buit there is another thought i have not mentioned. Can Hydrogen exist naturally as a metal?Ok, let’s try this. Granite exists as a solid. Would that make it a super fuel? It contains silicon which, when we combust (oxidize) it yields sand, the most common molecule on earth. Touchy feel-good wishful thinking isn’t going to repeal laws of nature.
Its more than possible that the same could be done with Hydrogen so that the metal retained its crystaline structure after pressure was removed.Fine, you have supposedly solve the storage problem. Now what do you do with this metal? It took a tremendous amount of energy to produce it and you can’t get that energy back. You can’t burn diamonds and get back the energy it took to squeeze graphite into that form.
BUT what about an additive/s that could be added to 'cage' and hold the Hydrogen molecules and atoms together once the pressure is released.And what are you going to use to break the adhesive bonds to get back the hydrogen? Energy?
Thats not an immpossible project or concept.I was reading recently about Hydrogen in the form of Deturium and Tritium pellets that could be used in Fusion confinement.Yes and fusion is 100 times as radioactively dirty as a fission reactor. Do you really think we are going to put up with millions of Chernobyls being operated by untrained individuals?
Nothing is impossible but new ways of thinking need to be found.There are LOTS of things that are impossible. No matter how hard you study the problem, you will never design a pair of shoes that allows you to jump over the moon under your own power. You will also never change the energy that you get from combining two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen. As long as that energy release is less than what it takes to collect the two hydrogen atoms, it ain’t gonna’ work no matter how many research dollars you throw at the problem.
Negative or vacuum quenching just might work....That is something similar to the manufacture of Palladium metallic glass.What runs the vacuum?
I predict that solid metallic Hydrogen could store large amounts of energy which would be released when the solid reverted to the gas phase, it would be totally enviromentaly clean and would undoubtedly replace gasoline and other transportation fluids.The same could have been (and was) said of petroleum oil and gasoline. They are both totally environmentally clean in that they don’t produce all the soot of whale oil. The fact that they produce a greenhouse gas is trivial compared to the greenhouse gas hydrogen produces.
Since in its metallic state it will produce at least 5 times as much energy (per kilogram, (estimated)) as our existing oxy-hydrogen space vehicles.Is this estimating business open to everyone? If so then I estimate that we will develop teleportation before we develop an economically feasible hydrogen energy source to replace oil.
When you realise a large passenger liner will only move six inches on a gallon of diesel fuel! What innefficient watse.Absolutely! We have to pass a law preventing these big ships from displacing all that water. Once that law is on the books those evil corporations that build ships will see the error of their ways and use less fuel.
Yes we would have to build lightweight easy rolling automobiles whether we used metallic hydrogen as the fuel or permeated hydrogen gas thru a fuel cell to produce its electro motive power....Why not just use bicycles. And I’ll try not to run over you in my SUV. But I know, (sigh), you will outlaw SUVs and make everyone ride bicycles and that solves the problem of disparate weight in an accident. Then all you will have to worry about is how someone on a bicycle is going to deliver half a ton of meat to the grocery store.
But thats a small price to pay for the massive clean up of the atmosphere that would be the result.Spending trillions of dollars to create an economy that wastes trillions more every year producing an inefficient fuel that pollutes the atmosphere far more than current fuels is a small price to pay? Why not just spend the trillions on perpetual motion machine research? At least that won’t triple (estimated) the highway death rate and increase global warming by a factor of 10.
(ecuse the spellings etc. no time for correctns)Type your message in Word with auto spell correction and then cut and paste to the forum.