HYDROGEN HERE!

PaulS said:
You need to make it, then you need to compress it. That requires a lot of energy.
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FREE energy. It costs a lot of money to build this facility to make and compress hydrogen, but then it runs and runs on free energy. Amortize the costs over the years.

So your 5 kwh $100,000 hydrogen plant will produce enough energy to run your expensive hydrogen car for an hour each week..... nice...
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Oh, well, those look to be good solid numbers. I had no idea it was so dire! Crude oil it is then, for as long as we can find it. After that, we will throw down our machines and return to the caves. It is all we can do. :rolleyes:

I'm not saying that hydrogen is the most practical energy storage system we can come up with, or the cheapest. The thread is to talk about hydrogen, so I have. Those that say hydrogen is useless and could never be used as an energy storage medium are flat wrong.

  • It can be produced without fossil fuel sources.
  • It can be contained in vessels.
  • It can be safely dispensed.
  • Fuel cells do work well in vehicles.
All of it is possible, but at a cost. True, there is no infrastructure, but once there was no crude oil infrastructure either. It could be built. Should we build it? That is another question altogether.

Hydrogen does have attractive qualities, but it has significant down sides as well. Primarily among them, the cost of the build out and as Henning is fond of pointing out these days, we value money above all else.

I personally believe that fuel cells are the future, but just not with hydrogen in them in the short term, but rather a petroleum based medium. Good thing is, they are working on that too.:)
 
Dav8or said:
Since when??! Batteries are terribly inefficient at storing energy. Huge losses going in and coming out. Capacitors are much, much better, only they can't hold that charge very long. No, the best way to store electrical energy is by mechanical means such as pumped hydro, or flywheels, but they aren't very portable.

Maybe some day batteries will get better and that will be a great day, but for now they are pretty terrible. The good news is, there is a tremendous amount of brain power working this problem all over the world right now. The bad news is, it seems to be a very tough nut to crack.
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From the article Kyle Boatright referenced on the first page:
.

"The obvious question that Ulf Bossel and people such as myself ask is why go to all that trouble? Why not just transmit and use the electricity directly? High-voltage direct current electricity transmission is just as efficient as pipelining hydrogen. If we allow for 90 % efficiency for rectifying and 90 % for transmission we end up with 3.3 times more energy for the electricity economy than the hydrogen economy. If you want to include batteries the math doesn’t change much because the round-trip efficiency of batteries is really very high – 90 % for lithium-ion batteries. As Bossel states, hydrogen cannot compete with its own fuel source − in this case, electrons. This poor efficiency of the hydrogen economy that I’ve talked about is not something that has a solution through improved technology. The laws of thermodynamics maintain the limiting factor here. All the extra steps in the hydrogen case produce entropy, and there’s no way to get past certain theoretical limits to the efficiency of each stage."

Electric transmission and storage in batteries is quite efficient. I drive a Ford Fusion PHEV, and can make my 28 mile round trip daily commute on less than 8 kWh of electricity, measured at the socket. Considering that a gallon of gasoline contains the equivalent of 34 kWh in energy, I'd say the battery and electric motor are quite efficient
 
Dav8or said:
FREE energy. It costs a lot of money to build this facility to make and compress hydrogen, but then it runs and runs on free energy. Amortize the costs over the years.



Oh, well, those look to be good solid numbers. I had no idea it was so dire! Crude oil it is then, for as long as we can find it. After that, we will throw down our machines and return to the caves. It is all we can do. :rolleyes:

I'm not saying that hydrogen is the most practical energy storage system we can come up with, or the cheapest. The thread is to talk about hydrogen, so I have. Those that say hydrogen is useless and could never be used as an energy storage medium are flat wrong.

  • It can be produced without fossil fuel sources.
  • It can be contained in vessels.
  • It can be safely dispensed.
  • Fuel cells do work well in vehicles.
All of it is possible, but at a cost. True, there is no infrastructure, but once there was no crude oil infrastructure either. It could be built. Should we build it? That is another question altogether.

Hydrogen does have attractive qualities, but it has significant down sides as well. Primarily among them, the cost of the build out and as Henning is fond of pointing out these days, we value money above all else.

I personally believe that fuel cells are the future, but just not with hydrogen in them in the short term, but rather a petroleum based medium. Good thing is, they are working on that too.:)
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Dave, the point is that this idea is not free and it looks very impractical to me. But if you have the money, go for it. The problem I have is that people come up with these impractical ideas to solve things that may or may not be a problem, then they want me and other taxpayers to pay for their ideas, even though they don't make sense. Go to the bank, mortgage your future and let it rip.
 
PaulS said:
Dave, the point is that this idea is not free and it looks very impractical to me. But if you have the money, go for it. The problem I have is that people come up with these impractical ideas to solve things that may or may not be a problem, then they want me and other taxpayers to pay for their ideas, even though they don't make sense. Go to the bank, mortgage your future and let it rip.
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While solar and wind energy are free, the equipment needed to collect them are anything but free.
 
FormerHangie said:
While solar and wind energy are free, the equipment needed to collect them are anything but free.
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And it makes very little sense to waste a bunch of it the free energy just to say we're using H2. It is 3x more efficient to just use the electricity directly.
 
kyleb said:
And it makes very little sense to waste a bunch of it the free energy just to say we're using H2. It is 3x more efficient to just use the electricity directly.
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You can't speechify about an "electric economy" since electricity has been in wide spread use for a long time. On the other hand, many people don't really understand how H2 needs to be extracted so you can make a lot of noise about it while glossing over the inconvenient details.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
You can't speechify about an "electric economy" since electricity has been in wide spread use for a long time. On the other hand, many people don't really understand how H2 needs to be extracted so you can make a lot of noise about it while glossing over the inconvenient details.
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The information and knowledge gap creates a great niche for unscrupulous people to do private IPO's and the like.

I need to forget my moral code for a few months and concentrate on selling a H2 economy to dupes...
 
Sorry all. My post above I meant fusion, not fission. I always get those two mixed up.

:rolleyes:
 
It takes more energy to collect hydrogen then energy from hydrogen

Abort
:mad2:
 
kyleb said:
The big plants produce 24/7. Those are the nuke plants followed by the coal plants. The natural gas turbine plants are easy to throttle, so they are used for surge capacity.

The grid IS efficient and does not store electricity.

What is the purpose of Hydrogen in the energy economy? It is similar to, but worse than Ethanol in that it requires much more energy to produce than it can return.
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The main purpose is to provide a constantly scalable commodity to back a currency with so we can get back to the constitutional mandate of no fiat currency and provide a true free market in finance. The other purpose is that one can transport 12kg of product mass in water and petroleum fuel equivalent energy with 1kg of H2.

A natural gas plant running throttled back is not efficient, it is not providing the capacity it can. It is most efficient running wide open and storing all the energy that isn't immediately consumed. The grid is very inefficient as is most of our society.
 
Henning said:
The main purpose is to provide a constantly scalable commodity to back a currency with so we can get back to the constitutional mandate of no fiat currency and provide a true free market in finance. The other purpose is that one can transport 12kg of product mass in water and petroleum fuel equivalent energy with 1kg of H2.
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What is the volume of that 1 kg of hydrogen? I'll let you assume it to be liquid hydrogen. How does that compare to water or petroleum fuels?
 
Henning said:
The main purpose is to provide a constantly scalable commodity to back a currency with so we can get back to the constitutional mandate of no fiat currency and provide a true free market in finance. The other purpose is that one can transport 12kg of product mass in water and petroleum fuel equivalent energy with 1kg of H2.

A natural gas plant running throttled back is not efficient, it is not providing the capacity it can. It is most efficient running wide open and storing all the energy that isn't immediately consumed. The grid is very inefficient as is most of our society.
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Henning, if you want to talk energy efficiency, Hydrogen production and consumption is about the least efficient process imaginable. It takes far more energy to break the hydrogen free from water (or other sources) than you can possibly get from the hydrogen.

You're right, Natural Gas fired plants are relatively inefficient. That is why they are generally used to throttle the power on the grid with the base loaded plants taking care of most of the power needs. The beauty of natural gas turbines is that if you have 10 turbines, you can run anywhere between 0 and 10 of them at a time, which is how you throttle the overall power production.

Fiat currency? <snort>
 
Henning said:
No, Hydrogen will back a resource based currency.
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Isn't gold a natural resource? Cold fusion will probably be developed before transmutation of metals, hence gold will serve better for reserve currency rather than Hydrogen which will become inexpensive to produce?
 
Jim Logajan said:
Agreed. Of the carbon neutral means of energy transport, NH3 is one better alternative. Combustion of ammonia yields products already in the atmosphere that should not affect the climate:

4 NH3 + 3 O2 -> 2 N2 + 6 H2O

Down side is about half the energy density of carbon fuels, but really a lot better than most of the other alternatives, especially molecular hydrogen.
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Yeah but then some politicos would be calling for nitrogen credits because some scientists have predicted that the percentage of N2 in the atmosphere will rise .02% in the next century unless we do something to stop it.
 
kyleb said:
Henning, if you want to talk energy efficiency, Hydrogen production and consumption is about the least efficient process imaginable. It takes far more energy to break the hydrogen free from water (or other sources) than you can possibly get from the hydrogen.

You're right, Natural Gas fired plants are relatively inefficient. That is why they are generally used to throttle the power on the grid with the base loaded plants taking care of most of the power needs. The beauty of natural gas turbines is that if you have 10 turbines, you can run anywhere between 0 and 10 of them at a time, which is how you throttle the overall power production.

Fiat currency? <snort>
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Those natural gas powerplants that are used as demand following are less efficient than are coal plants that are used for the baseline load, but that's true of any fuel. When used as steam generation rather than as a gas turbine, the difference drops to where it is insignificant. When used as a combined cycle plant, natural gas is much more efficient than is coal: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html
 
FastEddieB said:
That bolded part is great.

Problem is the energy input to create it, which usually has byproducts beyond "pure water".
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Free solutions for anyone who cares to develop and implement:

Hook up a bunch of pedal bikes and your energy input is human powered. Offer financial incentive for people to participate in powering the grid. It will become a social revolution and the new "do-gooder" craze. You eliminate joblessness and have a means of productivity for criminals, as everyone is now a contributor to society. A real energy economy.

Plan B: you can ask Michelle Obama to recruit some fat people to do all the pedaling.

Either plan is a win-win
 
Cap'n Jack said:
What is the volume of that 1 kg of hydrogen? I'll let you assume it to be liquid hydrogen. How does that compare to water or petroleum fuels?
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No, the way the industry is coming about is compressed gas, there's just been a tanker design approved. You could use water, but it's a single product commodity where as H2 gives you 3 product where if you count the heat vs what petroleum takes to create, you ship 15kg product for each kg of h2. Also there is greater 'value added' going to H2 due to the new industry that will come about building all the accouterments to the industry. At 6000 psi hydrogen ships quite well, and we have cylinders of all sizes that can handle it from scuba tank size to 1000' tankers.
 
What I find humorous is that y'all bring up engineering issues as a problem. Can someone point out some engineering problems that we have no been able to conquer?

BTW, anyone able to tell me how much energy is wasted refining petroleum? Y'all thing that gasoline comes out of the ground and is piped to the pump?
 
http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/Advantages_Disadvantages_HydrogenEnergy.php said:
4. Highly Flammable : Hydrogen in itself is a very powerful source of fuel. We all know the effects of hydrogen bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. It’s highly inflammable and always in news for the potential risks associated with it.
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Wow. That's wrong in so many ways that I don't know where to start.
 
Henning said:
What I find humorous is that y'all bring up engineering issues as a problem. Can someone point out some engineering problems that we have no been able to conquer?

BTW, anyone able to tell me how much energy is wasted refining petroleum? Y'all thing that gasoline comes out of the ground and is piped to the pump?
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It's simple physics....... right now 5 barrels of oil is produced for every 1 consumed to produce them. Hydrogen as it stands now will always consume more energy to produce than it will yield.
 
I think about this every time I see 20-30 elliptical machines/stationary bicycles being used at the gym. People PAY to provide energy. Give them a discount to pedal a machine connected to a generator. Seeing how much you can generate might even be a motivational factor.

Jaybird180 said:
Free solutions for anyone who cares to develop and implement:

Hook up a bunch of pedal bikes and your energy input is human powered. Offer financial incentive for people to participate in powering the grid. It will become a social revolution and the new "do-gooder" craze. You eliminate joblessness and have a means of productivity for criminals, as everyone is now a contributor to society. A real energy economy.

Plan B: you can ask Michelle Obama to recruit some fat people to do all the pedaling.

Either plan is a win-win
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JOhnH said:
I think about this every time I see 20-30 elliptical machines/stationary bicycles being used at the gym. People PAY to provide energy. Give them a discount to pedal a machine connected to a generator. Seeing how much you can generate might even be a motivational factor.
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The average person on a bike produces maybe 100 to 150 watts and most people I see at the gym can last about 15 minutes. Tour de France riders average watts???? Somewhere between 175 and 225,( on the climbs they average between 400 and 500 watts). Not much in the grand scheme of things.
 
PaulS said:
The average person on a bike produces maybe 100 to 150 watts and most people I see at the gym can last about 15 minutes. Tour de France riders average watts???? Somewhere between 175 and 225,( on the climbs they average between 400 and 500 watts). Not much in the grand scheme of things.
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Not unless you multiply it by a couple hundred thousand.
Still not much, but better than a carbon tax. And it might also help overall fitness and reduce obesity.
 
PaulS said:
It's simple physics....... right now 5 barrels of oil is produced for every 1 consumed to produce them. Hydrogen as it stands now will always consume more energy to produce than it will yield.
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Yep, if you just go for energy, now add in the water value, 9 kg per kg H2. Then there is also the food production increase available from the water as well as heat that can be used as is or converted to refrigeration. The problem with radical Islam is our fiat currency which we can provide an option to.

The entire universe is made of two things, hydrogen and information. Take a clue from nature as to how to do things efficiently.
 
Henning said:
BTW, anyone able to tell me how much energy is wasted refining petroleum? Y'all thing that gasoline comes out of the ground and is piped to the pump?
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That's something I have always chuckled about. People seem to think that getting gasoline to the pump takes almost no energy, it's really easy and that the oil to pump system we have evolved is some model of efficiency, or something. The truth is, crude oil is so dense with energy, we have the luxury of wasting nearly all of it. The whole infrastructure is amazingly complex, huge in scale and was fraught with major engineering challenges.

Yet, any alternative energy proposal is always met with, "impractical", "not ready for prime time" and flat out "it'll never work". Everyone has to agree that crude oil is a fantastic resource, but at some point, it needs to be used more wisely than it is now. It always comes down to money.

Crude oil is great because it can be used for a great multitude of uses besides just fuel and all the energy required to extract, ship and refine this product is basically free because of the ridiculously high energy content. However, it is a finite resource no matter how much we frack the land up. There are replacement opportunities for much of the oil we use for fuel, but because it will cost a lot of money to get it up and running, nobody wants to pay because of the lousy ROI in the near term.

Solution- Extract ourselves from the Middle East. Stop playing world police and trying to "fix" the Middle East. Reduce our military to a size actually required to defend our borders, not everybody else's. Instead of laying down the keel of yet another aircraft carrier and ordering up more and more aircraft and submarines, we take that money to fund private companies to build out new infrastructures and developments. The contracts for these new projects would be awarded by performance and competition, not political favors. The government would not be in the business of picking winners and losers.

Imagine that. People overseas hate us a little less, and we get to become the world's biggest exporter of crude oil. All the Saudi Arab riches will come to us instead of them. As we stop burning our oil, we can sell it. Just because we start making alternative energy, doesn't mean we have to stop drilling and pumping crude, just use it to better advantage. In addition, new technologies and processes for creating alternative energies would be invented that we can also export.

I know, I know, this is all a bunch of liberal, commie, socialist boondoggle talk. A stupid idea I know. So, drill baby drill and lay down that keel. There is a whole new generation of soldiers waiting now to fight for freedom and justice in foreign hell holes to keep the oil flowing and at a good price. Worry not, the "free market" will save us.:rolleyes:
 
Henning said:
The problem with radical Islam is our fiat currency which we can provide an option to.
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See, there you go again with the fiat currency. Radical Islam doesn't give a crap about our fiat currency. They trade in it all the time. You don't see masked protestors in the Arab street burning effigies of the US Dollar, or chanting "Death to the Federal Reserve!" and holding signs reading "Bring us gold for oil!". Fiat currency is an esoteric debate for economists living in ivory towers. The average human being doesn't even know what it is, or cares. You need to go back to thinking of fiat as just a car and give it rest.

The entire universe is made of two things, hydrogen and information.
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No, the most abundant element in the universe is stupidity. :D:yes:
 
FastEddieB said:
Yes, but regardless we're lucky that gasoline isn't flammable as well! :rolleyes:
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You happened to latch onto the only part of that paragraph that was true. Okay, so I guess I'll have to try:

1. The flammability of hydrogen has zero to do with fusion (e.g. the hydrogen bomb).

2. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were NOT hydrogen bombs.

3. Hydrogen is not "always in news" because of the risks associated with it because it's flammable. More often, it's in the news for the reasons it's being discussed here.

Okay, so I guess it was only wrong in three ways. Still a pretty bad way to make a valid point.
 
FastEddieB said:
Since that sounds absurd on its face, I think you need to explain.
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Every bit of matter in our universe is forged in stars from hydrogen. What it becomes and does is controlled by information. DNA is the information source for all life.
 
Dav8or said:
See, there you go again with the fiat currency. Radical Islam doesn't give a crap about our fiat currency. They trade in it all the time. You don't see masked protestors in the Arab street burning effigies of the US Dollar, or chanting "Death to the Federal Reserve!" and holding signs reading "Bring us gold for oil!". Fiat currency is an esoteric debate for economists living in ivory towers. The average human being doesn't even know what it is, or cares. You need to go back to thinking of fiat as just a car and give it rest.



No, the most abundant element in the universe is stupidity. :D:yes:
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If you don't understand that our economy is what makes us infidels, those who have lost fidelity with the God of Abraham, by creating a First Commandment violation, then you don't understand why we have been at war for a long time.
 
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