Hydrogen: More polluting than petroleum?

Kinda reminds me of some hand dryers in public bathrooms.

Some of them have little signs on them claiming they pollute less than papper towels because they leave no waste laying around to be stuffed into landfills.

My question has always been "yeah? What about the pollution generated converting the electricity needed to power those suckers up?"

This story is an obvious attack on hydrogen, the headline Hydrogen:More polluting than petroleum is misleading. Yes the article does clarify that the PROCESS of extracting hydrogen is more polluting, not the hydrogen itself.

I suspect that Joseph Romm is a corporate sellout, check out his bio.
BIO of Joseph Romm PHD

As a previous poster mentioned Stan Meyer had already shown how hydrogen can be extracted from water without methane or large factories.

This is about 15 min, well worth a look.

Google Video Link

Alternative and more efficient energy sources are already here. The only waiting is for the corporate control to end.
Not too long ago people were calling Denny Kleinn a crackpot and a fraud with his HHO gas extracted from water through electrolysis, but guess what it's a reality and is being marketed. Although a car can run totally on HHO it's being sold as hybrid technology, so it's threat to the oil industry is minimized.
hytechapps.com...

Although I believe the future of energy is in cold fusion. I'm sure Mr Romm is familiar with it after all he did get his PHD from MIT the same institute that tampered with the test results to debunk cold fusion in 89.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

[edit on 4-4-2007 by squiz]

Originally posted by squiz
This story is an obvious attack on hydrogen, the headline Hydrogen:More polluting than petroleum is misleading. Yes the article does clarify that the PROCESS of extracting hydrogen is more polluting, not the hydrogen itself.

Well if it does clarify what is said then it is not really an attack is it?

You will find critics of any method fo making engery. I just read an article yesterday that indicated wind power was a treat to birds, which it is in some ways, so there are no lies or attacks when what they are saying does happen.

Originally posted by iori_komei
If you use electrolysis, and use clean, renewable energy for the
production of the Hydrogen fuel you get rid of this whole problem
all together.

use it to produce electricity, it's the most versatile form of energy, conversion into hydogen is currently one of the most inefficient ways of storing/distributing energy, look at Sardion's graph above.

Originally posted by Long Lance

Originally posted by iori_komei
If you use electrolysis, and use clean, renewable energy for the
production of the Hydrogen fuel you get rid of this whole problem
all together.

use it to produce electricity, it's the most versatile form of energy, conversion into hydogen is currently one of the most inefficient ways of storing/distributing energy, look at Sardion's graph above.

Exactly. I don't understand why people think using electricity to make hydrogen is effective. You can use normal batteries instead. Surely pure electric vehicle is not mature enough to compete with gasoline engines today, but it is much more mature (and cheaper) than hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Also there are other drawbacks with hydrogen cars - it explodes/battery doesn't; hydrogen takes too much space, even highly compressed - the fuel tanks need to be huge. It also leaks almost through everything that means you'd need better (and heavier!) fuel tank - that means worse fuel economy.

Pure electricity has nono of this drawbacks and the infrastructure is already here. The only one problem is that batteries need hours to recharge, however this could be solved by simply quickly replacing discahrged ones with charged on electric "pump".

And considering electricity generation nuclear energy is the only option. Renewable energy may gain 10-15% of market, even more in some regions, but nuclear energy is the only one reliable and cheap enough form(together with water, but there's not much space lefts for dams).

Does anyone here actually realize that refining oil into any useable product also requires ALOT OF ENERGY. Imean seriously, do some of you just think the refineries work with magic and that no energy is used?

Just a quick fact about solar power.

If you covered an area equal to about 10% the size of Nevada with
solar power generators, you would have produce enough energy to
power the entire U.S.

And that's using todays technology.

[edit on 4/4/2007 by iori_komei]

Originally posted by iori_komei
Just a quick act about solar power.

If you covered an area equal to about 10% the size of Nevada with
solar power generators, you would have produce enough energy to
power the entire U.S.

And that's using todays technology.

Perhaps that is true I do not know, but what happens if there is no sun for one two three four five days or heaven forbid a super volcano explodes blacking the whole earth out for months. What then?

Some so called experts already allege that happened long long ago but that is of course just their estimate/guess.



[edit on 4/4/2007 by shots]

Well I would assume if a Super Volcano exploded out of nowwhere, it would not even matter what way we were producing energy, because the delivery systems (continental pipelines, highways, etc) will probably be destroyed and the nation would be in chaos regardless of what energy is in use.

What if all the ol turned to ash tomorrow? What if al the gas turned to water? What if the world put Naval blockade on the entire continental US?

You worry about such rediculous scenarios like this and you will never progress to anything/

The interesting thing is I posted about using the Southwest Desert Areas of the US to create vast Solar fields that would utilizie pipelines extracting water from the Gulf of Mexico and power refineries in safe zones away from populations centers to produce hydrogen. The environmental impact would be minimal in such harsh unproductive ecosystems, and the technology is already in existence. I figured we could either use solar panels or solar dishes, whichever one does the best. The excess power can be sold off, and the hydrogen can also be sold off at very competetive prices. The entire project would probably pay itself off within ten years, quite comparable to the ROI for oil wells if I may say so myself.

Originally posted by shots
Perhaps that is true I do not know, but what happens if there is no sun for one two three four five days

Well if there was no sun for that long, you'd have a problem that
went far beyond energy production.

If you mean it was cloudy/overcast, well solar cells still work on
those days.

or heaven forbid a super volcano explodes blacking the whole earth out for months. What then?

If that happened, it really would'nt matter where you were getting your energy from.

Though if a large scale eruption that covered a large chunk of North
America did happen, and you had orbiting solar power arrays, you'd
still be getting power.

Originally posted by iori_komei

Perhaps that is true I do not know, but what happens if there is no sun for one two three four five days

If that happened, it really would'nt matter where you were getting your energy from.

Though if a large scale eruption that covered a large chunk of North
America did happen, and you had orbiting solar power arrays, you'd
still be getting power.

I should have been more specific I only put those forward assuming you were using the electricity produced to create hydrogen and I should have made that clear.

Good points on the use of solar arrays but isn't that years or decades away at this time? Lots of safety concerns similar to using lasers I would suspect.

There is actually a new type of solar panel that works extremely efficient in dim light, so efficient in fact that they produce more power per day then conventional solar panels. They are not brittle either and can take a lot of abuse.

www.pbs.org...

Watch Part three.

Good points on the use of solar arrays but isn't that years or decades away at this time?

Decades at the very least. If we are gonna do something like that we should go all the way. By this I mean developing a panel that can withstand very high temperatures and then plaster a large portion of Mercury's surface to collect and convert massive amounts of solar light into a Beam that will then be collected by various means. The best way would be to use a very wide microwave beam, say a mile in diameter to shoot down to earth as at that scale, the energy would be so diffused that it wouldn't pose a danger for any flights, boats, and wildlife inadvertently traveling through it. The amount of scattering and refraction will be reduced due to the nature of Microwave beams, and the amount of electricity it would provide would make electricity essentially free(Minus the cost of infrastructure that is)

[edit on 4-4-2007 by sardion2000]

Originally posted by sardion2000

By this I mean developing a panel that can withstand very high temperatures and then plaster a large portion of Mercury's surface to collect and convert massive amounts of solar light into a Beam that will then be collected by various means.

Some how I do not think that is the kind of array that iori_komei had in mind but I could be wrong and with all do respect while it sounds cool it also sounds impractical and the cost would be astronomical. Mercury to earth one mile wide beam, Nah I do not think so.

Now a narrow beam from several linked arrays in space sure good way to make hydrogen, but then if you could beam power that far why not just mount collectors on cars and run them all by electricity? On 2nd thought just scrap that it would be virtually impossible to beam the light without runing into interferance.

Originally posted by shots

Some how I do not think that is the kind of array that iori_komei had in mind but I could be wrong and with all do respect while it sounds cool it also sounds impractical and the cost would be astronomical. Mercury to earth one mile wide beam, Nah I do not think so.

Not to mention the fact that Mercury and earths orbits are entirely different. We'd need a relay array so that power could be beamed to earth all the time, otherwise we'd only have power when we had LOS to Mercury.

Even then, the orbital speed of mercury would require constant alteration to the beam to send it back to earth.

Some technical considerations anyway

You'd be right Shots, that is not what I had in mind, what I meant
was a fleet of large solar collector satellites forming a complete ring in
equatorial orbit.


As for Sardion's idea, it is possible, and most likely something that will
happen to some extent in the ext century or beyond.

The whole problem with Earth and Mercury not being in orbits where
power could be directly beamed from Mercury to Earth could be solved
by a string of distribution/reflector satellites at various paths in between
Mercury and Earth in different orbits, therefore allowing power to be
transferred from Mercury to Earth, even if Mercury is on the other side
of the sun at the time.

Originally posted by iori_komei


As for Sardion's idea, it is possible, and most likely something that will
happen to some extent in the ext century or beyond.

With the points made by stumason and Sardion I have to disagree. If you stop and think about it in order to project the beam that far you would need boosters along the line then couple that with conflicting orbits I would say it is impossible while you method seems to be the most practical of all.

Another thing that pops into mind with regards to Mercury is that the orbit is so fast, you might well get red/blue shifting of the Microwave frequencies as Mercury goes round the sun.

Not sure if that would be a problem, but worth considering.

Well, you could open up some small wormholes and just run a big
power cable between the Mercuy power station and Earth.

Seriously though, Mercury would probably become a massive solar
power station, but it would probably be used for thigns other than
powering the Earth.

On that Nevada statement, check my math but I'm pretty sure...

Area of Nevada = 110, 567 sqmi = 583,793,760 sqft

10% = 58,379,376 sqft

An optimistic measurement of PV output is 150watts/sqft.

so 10% of Nevada in solar panels in full sun at noon could supply 8,756,906,400 watts of electricity.

According to this review the US energy sales for June 1999 were 281,000,000,000,000 watthours. I'm not sure if that's the sales for the year to date or just the month of June, but I'm leaning towards just June. Either way...

8,756,906,400 < 281,000,000,000,000

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but considering that current solar panel technology is not even 50% efficient, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I'm not.