I want...
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Hydrogen is a false promise. The most efficient commercial process for producing hydrogen uses 40% more energy than you get back from burning the hydrogen. And uses petroleum products as a source. Forget using water as a source, it takes even more energy to separate hydrogen from water. Hydrogen will never be a large scale solution unless we find a way to produce electricity for free. In which case electric cars might be a good idea after all.
I'll lay money on the future for more efficient hydrogen production than on practical electric car electricity storage. No one's really had a reason to provide hydrogen on the scale of petrochemicals (really not much required but a ramp up, perhaps some more experimentation with gene splicing to create bacteria that can crack hydrogen out of something else would be ideal) but there has been a huge need for more efficient batteries for decades and despite the best efforts of industry we're still no where near there.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
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I'll lay money on the future for more efficient hydrogen production than on practical electric car electricity storage. No one's really had a reason to provide hydrogen on the scale of petrochemicals (really not much required but a ramp up, perhaps some more experimentation with gene splicing to create bacteria that can crack hydrogen out of something else would be ideal) but there has been a huge need for more efficient batteries for decades and despite the best efforts of industry we're still no where near there.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
John C wrote:
create bacteria that can crack hydrogen out of something else
Yes! I believe that there are already bacteria that produce methane, which I think some of the lap-top fuel cell prototypes use. Surely the Methane could replace the petroleum based feed-stocks mentioned earlier?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?"
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Nice but electric cars powered by batteries are a dead end technology. The future is most definitely hydrogen powered electric cars unless there is a radical new invention in the area of electricity storage.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
Hydrogen power is also a dead end in the foreseeable future, mainly because of the costs involved in creating the hydrogen. It's just a to inefficient process. I believe that the Fischer Tropsch[^] process, to create oil from any hydrocarbons (such as wood or farming byproducts) is the way to go. The efficiency here is also less than 50% but the residual heat can be used in electric powerplants. And it's tested. It's been used in South Africa for many years.
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I'll lay money on the future for more efficient hydrogen production than on practical electric car electricity storage. No one's really had a reason to provide hydrogen on the scale of petrochemicals (really not much required but a ramp up, perhaps some more experimentation with gene splicing to create bacteria that can crack hydrogen out of something else would be ideal) but there has been a huge need for more efficient batteries for decades and despite the best efforts of industry we're still no where near there.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
John, Cracking Hydrogen is simple physics. You have to overcome the binding force between the hydrogen and what it is mixed with, i.e. oxygen, etc. The bond between H and O is one of the strongest, which is why there is so much water around. A calculation of the energy required to crack hydrogen vs the energy returned says hydrogen can never be a positive return. There is no microbe or secret catalyst that changes the energy balance that mother nature gave us. Which is not to say hydrogen can't be useful. If we have a massive amount of cheap electricity to waste, we could use it to make hydrogen as an automotive fuel. But if we have that much electricity, we may as well use electric cars.
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John, Cracking Hydrogen is simple physics. You have to overcome the binding force between the hydrogen and what it is mixed with, i.e. oxygen, etc. The bond between H and O is one of the strongest, which is why there is so much water around. A calculation of the energy required to crack hydrogen vs the energy returned says hydrogen can never be a positive return. There is no microbe or secret catalyst that changes the energy balance that mother nature gave us. Which is not to say hydrogen can't be useful. If we have a massive amount of cheap electricity to waste, we could use it to make hydrogen as an automotive fuel. But if we have that much electricity, we may as well use electric cars.
http://live.psu.edu/story/11709[^] http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=8590.php[^] There are dozens of other examples. I think it's clear that hydrogen powered electric vehicles solve all the problems of battery powered electric vehicles and it's clear that there just hasn't been enough investment in the research because there are all kinds of promising approaches. Battery powered electric vehicles are just not a substitute for what we have now they are too limited in too many ways and the battery itself despite untold amounts of money and time has not improved substantially in decades.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson