Watched a fun presentation on the kinds of technology we might find in a future city, from folding cars to desalination plant. Part of the infrastructure was algae producing hydrogen which was sent down pipelines to supply transport vehicles, cooling cables on the way. I have the feeling, and I may well be wrong, that we assuming hydrogen will be part of the future mix and are looking for solutions.
Supposing the best use of algae was to create hydrogen, would it not be more energy efficient to convert directly to electricity and put the electricity on the grid than creating an additional infrastructure for hydrogen, not to mention more complex engines? I would be very interested to see the capital costs and running costs of hydrogen vs. electric cars. Given that hydrogen cars are electric cars with the addition of a fuel cell and hydrogen storage, it must be considerably more?
3 comments:
I see some negative assumptions about hydrogen here. I believe hydrogen is the right way to go. I would like to provide some cut-and-paste of some well-known postings of others, on the internet, which counter some of the points against H2:
“Hydrogen beats batteries, biofuel and all other vehicle power solutions:
A. Hydrogen can be made at home and requires NO NEW INFRASTRUCTURE. Anybody who says it can’t be made at home or work is either a shill or completely out of touch with reality and technology. You can make it for free, at home, all day long and all night long. The production can be powered by solar, wind, microbes and other free sources. The volume of H2 produced “IS” enough to charge solid state H2 containers. The metrics quoted by the anti-hydrogen crowd are just lies to protect their competing business interests.
B. It now costs less to make hydrogen from water than any known way to make gasoline and it continues to get cheaper every month: The GE Noryl system, The R4 processor and over a hundred different systems can do this NOW; with many more expected next year. The “battery shill” spin has worn thin and has been supplanted by facts. Hydrogen is made from WATER via solar energy, wind energy, microbes, radio waves, sunlight and salt, and other FREE sources of energy. Hydrogen can also be made from any organic garbage, waste, plants or ANYTHING organic via lasers, plasma beams or dozens of other powered exotics which can be run off of EITHER the grid or the free hydrogen made from solar energy, wind energy, microbes, radio waves, sunlight and salt, and other FREE sources of energy OR the grid. There is no oil that needs to be involved anywhere in the production of hydrogen. These systems trickle charge hydrogen into storage containers, either tanks or solid state cassettes, 24/7. GE, ITM Power, QSI, U of Korea and 30 others have this year announced technologies that make H2 hundreds of times more efficiently than any other energy solution.
C. Tens of millions of dollars are being spent by battery companies like A123, Cobasys, AltairNano, etc. in order to discredit hydrogen because hydrogen works better than batteries. A large number of “pundits” who act as “writers”, “bloggers”, “authors” and “non-profit evangelist group founders” are actually supported by financial gain from battery companies who are terrified of hydrogen displacing their revenue streams. They include:
Ulf Bossel of the European Fuel Cell Forum,
Alec Brooks
James Woolsey
EV World
Sam Thurber
Cal Cars
Felix Kramer
Lets go over the battery and bio-fuel shills lies:
Lie # 1:
“But critics say the process of producing hydrogen requires three to four times more energy than the hydrogen later generates in the fuel cell.”
RESPONSE: This is data from the 60’s. It is now more efficient to make hydrogen than it is to make gasoline, build or use batteries or process bio-fuel. The technology has beat everything else.
Lie # 2:
“the cars are too expensive.”
RESPONSE: The production of hydrogen cars is at an early stage while battery cars have been around for almost a hundred years and the battery cars are still expensive for what you get. The Moore’s law on hydrogen cars shows a clear price decline to low cost in market volume. A Fuel Cell car that goes 500 miles without a charge costs half as much TODAY as a battery car that goes 500 miles without a charge.
Lie #3:
“ hydrogen molecules can't be contained easily without energy-consuming compressors or maintaining them in liquid form at extremely low temperatures , and it's extremely difficult to store,"
RESPONSE: This data is also from the 60’s. Hydrogen is stored in chemical powders and muds that easily contain vast amounts of hydrogen. Pressure and liquid tanks to store hydrogen are old school archaic technologies. Hydrogen can be easily stored in over 2800 different solid state compounds.
Lie #4:
"The infrastructure isn't there”
RESPONSE: Solid state hydrogen can be shipped by UPS, Common Carrier and uses all existing infrastructure. DOPT has already licensed and approved such solid state delivery via common EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE. This method can reavch every person on earth TODAY! This requires almost NO NEW INFRASTRUCTURE. NO INFRASTRUCTURE IS NEEDED!!! This is the biggest lie of all. A large number of start-ups have solid state hydrogen solutions that entirely use existing infrastructure.
Lie #5:
“the hydrogen is too expensive”
RESPONSE: Hydrogen can be made at home or office in numerous ways powered by solar or wind or microbes or any number of free power sources. It is always being made by such devices and constantly trickle charged into solid state storage systems all day and night FOR FREE without grid power. Hydrogen processors now make hydrogen with 91% efficiency.
Lie #6:
“Hydrogen is too dangerous”
RESPONSE: If the gasoline in your car blows up it will do a VAST AMOUNT more death and damage than H2 ever will. You are driving a MOLOTOV COCKTAIL. H2 on fire rapidly dissipates up an into the air. Gasoline flows all over people, cars and streets and covers all of the above with flaming death you can’t easily extinguish. In 2030 oil is GONE and there is NO OTHER OPTION that can be delivered world-wide in time but H2! Biofuel only solves 2% of the problem. Batteries have failed. Nuclear is too dangerous.
Lie #7:
“We have enough gasoline to last forever”
RESPONSE: Gasoline/petroleum/petrochemicals have now been shown to be the number one cause of cancer, and maybe the primary cause of cancer, in the world. Besides causing global warming, lung disease and all of the other bad things that it does; the oil industry itself knows that affordable oil is gone around the year 2030. Even if it wasn’t, do you really want the ROOT CAUSE OF CANCER around one day longer than it needs to be? (See the EPA report “EPA/600/S-6-87/001 Sept. 1987” as one of over 16,000 studies validating this.) Gasoline, Petroleum and the plastics made from it are the single largest cause of cancer in the world. This is a known fact, verified by thousands of studies which the oil industry counters by paying pundits to say: "Well, we just are not sure yet"
This chemical array has killed more Americans than every terrorist since the beginning of time.
The petrochemical bisphenol-a, or BPA, causes precancerous tumors and urinary tract problems and made babies reach puberty early.
Every gas pump has a label on it that oil and gas causes cancer and a host of lethal medical problems.
When there is an oil spill, you are not allowed on the beach because most agencies classify oil as toxic.
A study of childhook leukemia in England mapped every child with the diserase and found they all occurred in a circle, in the center of which was a gas station.
Alberta’s oil sands are one of the world’s biggest deposits of oil, but the cost of extracting that oil may be the health of the people living around them. High levels of toxic chemicals and carcinogens have been found in the water, soil, and fish downstream of the oil sands. The local health authority of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta comissioned the study in response to locals’ claims that the oil extraction projects upstream were damaging the health of citizens. Petrochemicals and their byproducts, such as dioxin, are known to cause an array of serious health problems, including cancers and endocrine disruption.Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) is a term used to describe a large family of several hundred chemical compounds that originally come from crude oil. Crude oil is used to make petroleum products, which can contaminate the environment. Because there are so many different chemicals in crude oil and in other petroleum products, it is not practical to measure each one separately. However, it is useful to measure the total amount of TPH at a site.TPH is a mixture of chemicals, but they are all made mainly from hydrogen and carbon, called hydrocarbons. Scientists divide TPH into groups of petroleum hydrocarbons that act alike in soil or water. These groups are called petroleum hydrocarbon fractions. Each fraction contains many individual chemicals.
Some chemicals that may be found in TPH are hexane, jet fuels, mineral oils, benzene, toluene, xylenes, naphthalene, and fluorene, as well as other petroleum products and gasoline components. However, it is likely that samples of TPH will contain only some, or a mixture, of these chemicals. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has determined that one TPH compound (benzene) is carcinogenic to humans. IARC has determined that other TPH compounds (benzo[a]pyrene and gasoline) are carcinogenic to humans.
Benzene causes leukemia. Benzene as a cause of leukemia had documented since 1928 (1 p. 7-9). In 1948, the American Petroleum Institute officially reported a link between this solvent used in many of their industries used and cases of leukemia in their workers. Their findings concluded that the only safe level of benzene exposure is no exposure at all (2).
The largest breast cancer incidents are in Marin County, California which is tied to the air, water and ecosphere of the Chevron Oil refinery right next door.
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Gasoline, Petroleum and the plastics made from it are the single largest cause of cancer in the world. This is a known fact, verified by thousands of studies which the oil industry counters by paying pundits to say: "Well, we just are not sure yet"
This chemical array has killed more Americans than every terrorist since the beginning of time.
The petrochemical bisphenol-a, or BPA, causes precancerous tumors and urinary tract problems and made babies reach puberty early.
Every gas pump has a label on it that oil and gas causes cancer and a host of lethal medical problems.
When there is an oil spill, you are not allowed on the beach because most agencies classify oil as toxic.
A study of childhook leukemia in England mapped every child with the diserase and found they all occurred in a circle, in the center of which was a gas station.
Alberta’s oil sands are one of the world’s biggest deposits of oil, but the cost of extracting that oil may be the health of the people living around them. High levels of toxic chemicals and carcinogens have been found in the water, soil, and fish downstream of the oil sands. The local health authority of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta comissioned the study in response to locals’ claims that the oil extraction projects upstream were damaging the health of citizens. Petrochemicals and their byproducts, such as dioxin, are known to cause an array of serious health problems, including cancers and endocrine disruption.Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) is a term used to describe a large family of several hundred chemical compounds that originally come from crude oil. Crude oil is used to make petroleum products, which can contaminate the environment. Because there are so many different chemicals in crude oil and in other petroleum products, it is not practical to measure each one separately. However, it is useful to measure the total amount of TPH at a site.TPH is a mixture of chemicals, but they are all made mainly from hydrogen and carbon, called hydrocarbons. Scientists divide TPH into groups of petroleum hydrocarbons that act alike in soil or water. These groups are called petroleum hydrocarbon fractions. Each fraction contains many individual chemicals.
Some chemicals that may be found in TPH are hexane, jet fuels, mineral oils, benzene, toluene, xylenes, naphthalene, and fluorene, as well as other petroleum products and gasoline components. However, it is likely that samples of TPH will contain only some, or a mixture, of these chemicals. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has determined that one TPH compound (benzene) is carcinogenic to humans. IARC has determined that other TPH compounds (benzo[a]pyrene and gasoline) are carcinogenic to humans.
Benzene causes leukemia. Benzene as a cause of leukemia had documented since 1928 (1 p. 7-9). In 1948, the American Petroleum Institute officially reported a link between this solvent used in many of their industries used and cases of leukemia in their workers. Their findings concluded that the only safe level of benzene exposure is no exposure at all (2).
The largest breast cancer incidents are in Marin County, California which is tied to the air, water and ecosphere of the Chevron Oil refinery right next door.
Oil “IS” CANCER!! It is worth any H2 considerations to eliminate cancer.
Thank you for your comments.
Do you have different numbers to those quoted by Ulf Bossel re efficiency of hydrogen as a energy store?
Do you have links to DIY hydrogen production kits that make hydrogen suitable for putting in cars fuel tank? (I presume it has to be compressed in some form).
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