Futurismic

…are about as likely to solve the two little problems of peak oil and global warming as hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Sorry to flog a dead horse here but it’s always worth repeating something, especially if you’ve found someone who can express the idea more articulately than you can.

Joseph Romm of the Center (sic) for American Progress (centrist American think tank) writes eloquently on the reasons why hydrogen fuel-cell powered automobiles are a dead-end and that there are better alternatives:

More than 95 percent of U.S. hydrogen is made from natural gas, so running a car on hydrogen doesn’t reduce net carbon dioxide emissions compared with a hybrid like the Prius running on gasoline. Okay, you say, can’t hydrogen be made from carbon-free sources of power, like wind energy or nuclear? Sure, but so can electricity for electric cars. And this gets to the heart of why hydrogen cars would be the last car you would ever want to buy: they are wildly inefficient compared with electric cars.

I’ve never been entirely clear why investors, boffins, and the popular press like hydrogen fuel cells so much. And why the insist on using the buzzword the hydrogen economy, implying that this is capable of replacing our current oil-based transport setup. Is it just because the cars themselves don’t emit any carbon dioxide during operation? I don’t know, but I suspect some people, including automakers Honda are in for a nasty shock.

[story via Technology Review][image by mirrorgirl]

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One of my bugbears is the constant implication in the popular press that the twin problems of anthropogenic global warming and peak oil will be solved by the mythical “hydrogen economy.”

Take this article in The Guardian newspaper:

The main fuels used in history form a nearly exact sequence, from ones having less hydrogen to ones having more. Wood and charcoal were the earliest fuels, and have only a little hydrogen. Much of their burning is wasted in pouring out great gusts of carbon, which was needed to build up the tree from which the wood came, but doesn’t do much for the user burning that wood.

Coal has more hydrogen, and its burning can be cleaner. Oil - which dominated next - has yet more hydrogen per unit of carbon; natural gas has even more, and its burning is the cleanest and most efficient of them all. The trend line points pretty strongly to a pure hydrogen economy - but when that will occur is in the hands not of the scientists, but our wise political masters.

Hydrogen fuel cells have some promise as an energy storage medium, but you still need a source of energy in the first place: much of the commercial hydrogen produced today is actually produced from natural gas in a process which still produces carbon dioxide emissions.

Alternative methods using biological extraction have proven successful - but they still don’t tackle the fundamental problem of where the energy to extract the hydrogen comes from. With oil running out and our current industrial infrastructure reliant on dumping stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this is the problem that needs to be solved.

And if the basic problem is getting energy, wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on that and, once this problem is solved, use this source of hydrogen-producing energy to produce petroleum via the Fischer-Tropsch process and save £X trillions by avoiding upgrading our entire transport infrastructure to use hydrogen tanks and fuel cells?

My conclusion: every penny of research currently being poured into the hydrogen economy should be diverted into developing cleaner nuclear fission and synthetic petroleum fuel combined with hybrid electric-petrol vehicles.

Monday rant over.

[main article from The Guardian][other articles from PhysOrg][images from felixmolter and gavindjharper]

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The guardian has a technology article about a UK study on hypersonic aviation that concluded that producing a plane fueled by liquid hydrogen could feasibly transport commercial passengers on long distances in much shorter times than current planes. Provided the hydrogen is created without using hydrocarbons (not easy currently but potentially doable in the future), the flight will be pollution-low, as hydrogen burns to form plain old water, although as the correction to the article mentions, Nitrogen oxide byproducts would still need to be contained.

There are issues though, before we can hop on a sub-orbital or hypersonic flight. Like the Virgin Galactic project, there are concerns about how well us puny humans can cope up there in high-atmosphere at very fast speeds. And, like Paul said earlier today, the future is expensive, including that of flight - will people be willing to pay many times more for such a ticket? Incidentally, isn’t it neat that the design looks and behaves just like the ‘Fireflash’ hypersonic airliner out of Thunderbirds? Supermarionation is the future!

[link and picture via the guardian]

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Researchers at Penn State University have produced hydrogen gas at efficiencies not found before. Tweaking an existing method that previously produced poor rates and yields, the scientists found they could produce nearly 300% the energy used to kickstart the reaction.

Electron-generating microbes produce an electric current that is run through a fuel cell containing biological matter. By adding an additional jolt of electricity at the cathode, the bacteria breaks down the organic matter into hydrogen, without releasing much in the way of greenhouse gases. Whilst this is an early result needing mass study and production, it’s a very promising discovery towards clean fuel.

[via Daily Kos, picture via Wired]

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