What if we run out of hydrogen?
Remember when paper bags were killing forests and therefore killing the earth - so we had to switch to plastic bags?
Now they’re bringing back paper.
They create crisis after crisis after crisis.
Someone is making money... it aint us.
Question....since hydrogen is highly flammable, how is that concern dealt with using this fuel source?
It is an interesting concept, but it still brings us back to Problem #1.
We need to separate hydrogen from water or natural gas before we can even start.
From memory - it still takes more energy to separate the hydrogen than hydrogen fuel can actually produce.
Curiously, just yesterday I read an article about solid state batteries being developed by automotive companies.
No technical discussion, but this may be of interest to you:
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Burning hydrogen results in water. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas. What now?
Use nuclear power plants to create electricity for refining water into hydrogen fuel via electrolysis.
He says the tech could challenge batteries in both efficiency and environmental friendliness.
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Oh? Where does the hydrogen come from? Currently it comes from hydrocarbon fossil fuel. In other words, you discard the carbon and store the hydrogen.
Hello? Discard carbon? “Environmental friendliness”?
The practical offshoot of this issue is that you have to waste lots of carbon. Burning carbon provides the majority of the energy provided by burning hydrocarbons. Why would you discard overt half of the energy contained in hydrocarbons?
Because you’re an idiot.
I always believed that there would be an alternative medium to Lithium-6 and that the government would NEVER commercialize L6.
And where does the Hydrogen come from?
Electrolysis...you need energy to do it.
Cracking natural gas...you need energy to do it.
Also since H2 molecules are so small, leaks are very common and hard to fix.
All the easy stuff has already been invented.
It is not the motor or the drive train of EVs that is the problem. Both of those are relatively simple and better than the IC. It is the energy source that is the barrier to true success.
IC in the conversion of fuel to power is between 17 and less than 25% efficient. More energy is required to produce, refine and transport petroleum fuel.
EVs are somewhere around 75% efficient. Steam plants to make the electricity from coal are about 40% efficient and power lines take another bite out of the primary fuel to deliver the electricity to where it is used.
Each time you convert fuel to energy or power you destroy some part of it as waste heat.
I have been wondering what the full-cycle efficiency of any fuel is from resource to tractive effort? I bet it would shock us how bad it is even for solar or wind. There is always transmission loss. Energy to make the stuff and the power lines and install them has to come from somewhere. On and on the expense of energy goes with lots of contributory waste elements through each process.
Batteries have been against the wall in progressing the necessary qualifications for success of EVs for quite some time now. What is available is heavy, requires unacceptable charge times, degrades with time, can be unreliable, is expensive, uses what appear to be finite resources, has limited storage capacity generally providing enough 300 mile range under ideal conditions to get to somewhere short of your destination. It is the Achilles heel of the idea. I doubt hydrogen is the key as the net energy production process for it is negative. Breaking the hydorgen-oxygen bond requires a lot of energy as any successful entry level thermochemistry student should know.
If it were not for the batteries EVs would probably be a good idea but the range limitations and charging duration are unacceptable to me for all but local travel within 100 miles. Driving your battery powered car out to a mainline express thoroughfare and latching onto an electrified rail might be one way to cope with the range problem of batteries and charge them while underway. It would be one heck of an electrified rail and the construction and management of such a system would be phenomenally difficult.
I wish him well and fully support the market creating new sources of energy.
Yet I still don’t see how producing, processing, and storing hydrogen will ever produce more energy than it took to get it in a useable state.
The problem with hydrogen is....
https://preview.redd.it/f3nkee5q28z51.jpg?auto=webp&s=cb70d363e74533ecae274c37bef3b7732d102f30
