Date: Fri Jan 20, 2006 6:59 pm. By: Sparky @zig-zag.net
Don Lancaster wrote:
I've been accused of ridiculing the hydrogen economy, but the simple fact is that the hydrogen economy is inherently self-ridiculing.
Here is why the emperor has no clothes...
~ No large net energy source of hydrogen is known. that is conveniently reachable.
The Sun is 90% hydrogen and it reaches all the way to Mars to keep the Rover Robot explorers going and going and going. The Oceans covering 70% of Earths surface are made of Hydrogen and Oxygen -- one-ninth Hydrogen by weight
The way to connect the sun to electrolysis of water has been figured out by the bright guys at the US Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Labs. They published a map showing how little of the lands are needed to be covered with photovoltaics to provide all the Hydrogen needed to replace Coa for electric generation and replace oil for motor fuel.
View this MAP here: http://h2-pv.us/H2/H2_Basics.html
~ Hydrogen on earth is only an energy carrier or transfer system. You first have to fill it with energy before you can empty it.
The same is true for every fuel known, except Natural Gas. Oil is useless in its natural form. It has to go through extensive transformations to be made useful. It has to be drilled, pumped, containerized, shipped, and then refined with monsterous industrial complex plants made of bewildering mazes of pipes before one single useful drop of gasoline is produced. Oil pipelines and refineries cost millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars before you get the very first drop of useful gasoline.
Gasoline is an energy carrier for oil. And modern gasoline requires being filled with HYDROGEN before the octane is high enough to be useful. Oil refinries make Hydrogen every single day to fill gasoline with Hydrogen. 35% of the national Hydrogen Economy infrastructure already exists at oil refineries. They have decades of experience making it and using it safely. Oil refineries pioneered the safety codes that ill be used nationwide in safe use of Hydrogen.
~ Hydrogen is inherently a pollution amplifier that INCREASES the pollution of its underlying net energy sources. It is utterly ludicrous to claim that hydrogen is in any manner "non polluting".
This is a bogus statement made by a chronic liar.
Photovoltaics (PV) produce energy from the sun. All the big pollution is at the sun, 93,000,000 miles away, and there's nothing anybody can do about that pollution -- use it or refuse it, the level of pollution at the sun does not go up or down.
PV makes power to make more PV. There are dirty way to make PV and clean ways. Liars like to hide the clean ways and point only to the dirty ways. All of the PV needed in the world can be made through the clean ways, and environmental laws someday will ban the dirty ways. People like Lancaster actually thwart to movement to the clean PV by lying about the differences.
~ The energy density by volume of hydrogen is absurdly low, typically being 1/3000th that of gasoline. Known methods of increasing the density such as liquification or pressurization raise major and unresolved safety, efficiency, and cost amortization problems while still falling far short of gasoline energy density.
Nobody cares about the energy density. They want to know three things: (1) Can I afford to fill my tank, (2) How far will I go on a full tank, (3) How often do I have to fill the tank.
Most people would enjoy going back to the old days of Full-serve filling stations, like Oregon requires every filling station in the state. That won't happen. People have to learn to fuel with Hydrogen the same way they once had to learn how to fuel with gasoline for themselves.
Gasoline has safety problems. Gasoline vapors catch fire at lower temperatures and the vapors are explosive at lower limits in the air than Hydrogen. People blow themselves up at gasoline filling stations using cell phones while filling their gasoline tank. People have blown themselves up from static electricity sparks filling gas cans that were nt grounded but were in pickup truck beds.
All fuels are powerful -- that's why we buy them. All fuels have dangers. Hydrogen is a bit different, but no more dangerous than any other fuel.
~ The energy density by weight of hydrogen is a useless measure of no terrestral consequency whatsoever. The CONTAINED energy density by weight is much worse than gasoline. While improving gasoline to the theoretical hydrogen density would only have negligible advantages.
Nobody cares about the energy weight. They want to know three things: (1) Can I afford to fill my tank, (2) How far will I go on a full tank, (3) How often do I have to fill the tank.
~ Virtually ALL commercial hydrogen is produced by the reformation of methane. Hydrogen is thus inherently a product and service of "big oil". One that is certain to increase foreign oil dependency.
Methane is not OIL, it is the main fuel in Natural Gas. Even oil refineries sometimes use natural gas to reform methane for adding hydrogen to gasoline to give it more octane.
The argument is Bogus anyway, because the H2-PV solution bypasses methane, oil and natural gas and turns 2.5 gallons of plain water into one gallon-equivilent of hydrogen fuel using nothing but clean olar power. Solar power as wind may be used, or solar power as photovoltaics may be used, or concentrated solar power as heat may be used.
The US has sufficient oil for lubricants and other chemicals made out of oil, and biomass oil can replace those stocks eventually. OIL is too valuable to burn.
~ The explosive range of hydrogen is among the widest known and its spark trigger energy is exceptionally low. Hydrogen burns with a nearly invisible flame. No colorant or odorant solutions are presently known.
Lies. The lower flamability limit on Hydrogen virtually insure that Hydrogen will burn before an explosive quantity can be formed. Pure hydrogen will extinguish a flame, because pure hydrogen does not burn in the absense of oxygen.
Hydrogen rises very fast, and that prevents explosive quantities from congregating in outdoors conditions. The few explosions from Hydrogen have occurred indoors, at some fertilizer plants inside process containers, and inside run-amuck nuclear reactors. Outdoors explosions have not often happened in the 80 years people have been making large amounts of hydrogen for fertilizer use through the Haber-Bosch process.
Fertilizers are the biggest users of Hydrogen and millions of tons of hydrogen have been produced every year since World War I. Every country makes hydrogen as the first step towards economic development -- you can tell how far industrially advanced any country is by the amounts of hydrogen they make.
~ Electrolysis is wildly and totally unsuitable for the production of bulk energy hydrogen because a kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.
Kilowatthours are not transportation fuel except in low-range electric cars. A tank of kilowatt hours gets you 60 miles. A modern tank of Hydrogen can get you hundreds of miles. Which do you prefer -- being stranded out of power 60 miles from home with lots of kilowatt hours at home, or would you rather have the power to drive home on hydrogen?
Thermodynamic fundamentals involving exergy absolutely and positively guarantee that electrolysis will forever remain the equivalent of 1:1 exchanging US dollars for Mexican pesos.
LANCASTER HAS A FIXATION ON PESOS.
That doesn't make him true.
Thermodynamics makes hydrogen plentiful and cheap if you know more than he knows. Lots of people know more than he knows. The US govt is moving to Hydrogen, and California is building the Hydrogen Highway, because they know more than Lancaster knows about Hydrogen.