Your Questions About Hydrogen Fuels Source

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In its current state, hydrogen is not a better fuel source than oil to power cars. The primary problems are in production and storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen cannot be drilled for the way that methane and oil can. Much of it is synthesized by what is called the water-gas shift reaction. This reaction is shown below.

CO + H2O –> CO2 + H2

The source of carbon monoxide for this is often steam reforming of hydrocarbons such as oil. The other primary source is electrolysis of water. Electrolysis requires the generation of electricity, which usually is generated from hydrocarbons like oil and coal anyway.

Additionally, storage is a huge issue. Gasoline, diesel, and most of the other component hydrocarbons that make up crude oil are really nifty in that they are liquid at room temperature. This means that they are relatively dense fuels and have a high energy to volume ratio. The result of this is that you can take a 20 gallon tank of gasoline with the tank being made out of relatively cheap materials and use it to drive a car for 300-400 miles. On the other hand, hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, and thus does not have the same energy to volume ratio as liquid hydrocarbons do. It is not even close. While hydrogen does have a larger energy to mass ratio, hydrogen is not very dense at all at atmospheric pressure and room temperature, hence the low energy to volume ratio. Thus, filling up your car with enough hydrogen to move it anywhere is a big problem. One option is to pressurize the hydrogen until you stuff enough of it into a manageable sized tank, but that requires the tank be constructed out of materials that are much more expensive than what they currently use for gasoline tanks, and if something goes wrong with the tank, the result could be a very bad explosion in the car. Since most people would rather take the safer and cheaper alternative of a gasoline tank, and since, as stated earlier, the current sources of hydrogen production all rely on hydrocarbons anyway, hydrogen is currently a terrible fuel source.

But, things can change. Currently there is a rather large push in the academic world for the development of new types of solar cells. The idea would be to use these solar cells to basically perform electrolysis on water to synthesize hydrogen. In a sense, hydrogen would be a way of chemically storing the energy of sunlight. But, many obstacles still remain on that path. A chemistry professor at Caltech, Nate Lewis, made a presentation to the National Science Foundation a couple of years ago about this very topic and has secured funding for a large project involving the collaboration of many professors at multiple universities in an effort to find solutions to these problems. You can find his thoughts on the energy problem here:

http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXX2/powering.pdf

Additionally, many materials scientists are working on ways of producing things that can store large amounts of hydrogen at low pressures and reasonable temperatures. If both of these things can work, then hydrogen will become a great fuel source.

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Water is separated into hydrogen gas by pulling off the oxygen atoms. It can then be burned like any other gas such as propane. It can also power an electric type engine by exposing the hydrogen to oxygen, because the hydrogen wants to reattach to it and make water again. As the electrons shoot around, the electricity is harnessed and it runs like an electric car, and the exhaust pipe lets out a few drops of pure water.

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You could use solar energy to create electricity to crack water into hydrogen and use the hydrogen to run a power plant at night. Not a bad fuel source for that purpose. As a automotive fuel…I dunno…possibly for fork lifts and other industrial applications, but otherwise I don’t see it as practical. Of course using still more solar energy hydrogen could be liquefied and used to power aircraft and ships. Ships seem practical but I don’t know about aircraft….is there an engineer in the house? I can see this technology being used in northern Africa as the Sahara Desert has unlimited areas for solar power, that if transported to the coast and sea water could be used as the ‘water’ part of this equation hydrogen could probably power all of the ships in the Mediterranean. That would beat the hell out of using oil. So…hydrogen has the potential for some serious though limited uses as a fuel source….as far as I know!

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In its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report, ExxonMobil Corp. Said it is “Conducting research and development of an on-vehicle hydrogen production system, which has the potential to imporve vehicle efficiency by up to 80% while improving safety and eliminating the need for a hydrogen distribution infrastructure.”

“Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and 2 universities are working on turning sugars known as polysaccharides into low cost hydrogen with the help of enzymes. Enzymes can break the mix of sugars and water into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The scientists say a tank containing such a mix, with the right enzymes, could power a car for more than 300 miles. Production cost of about $1 per pound, could be cheaper than generating hydrogen from natural gas.

As of March 2004, researchers at the University of Minnesota are working on using ethanol to make hydrogen. The efficiency rates so far show that the process of converting ethanol to hydrogen is much greater than using it for petro.

I am ready for the “Hydrogen Era.”

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Well, the basic concept behind a hydrogen economy would be to use hydrogen as a form of stored energy. The actual energy would come from solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, or nuclear and simply stored chemically. Well, who says that has to be done with hydrogen?

When Sandia Labs investigated a more efficient way of making hydrogen from H2O, they came up with the CR5 reactor where they would heat discs of cobalt oxide till they gave of their oxygen atoms, then when cooled they would readily grab the oxygen atom from H2O leaving H2. They realized that it would also pull oxygen from CO2 leaving CO and they knew that if you had a mixture of H2 and CO in the presence of an iron oxide or cobalt oxide catalyst, they would react in exothermic reactions to form long hydrocarbon chains, the length of which could be selected by varying the pressure and temperature in the reactor, this is known as Fischer Tropsch reactions.

Therefore, it’s just as easy to have gasoline and diesel as the chemically stored energy from solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, or nuclear sources as it is to have hydrogen as the stored energy. The advantages of using synthetic gasoline and diesel is that the infrastructure to distribute them and the vehicles to use them already exist.

Synthetic fuels have another advantage albeit one that hydrogen production could have as well. The syngas (mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases) can be produced by a process called gasification which is burning in a low oxygen environment. Indeed, this is how commercial hydrogen is produced but with the addition of more steam to react with the CO to produce CO2 and more H2. Well gasification works on anything that burns, though currently we do it with natural gas and coal simply because we know how to handle those materials. This means we could gasify biomass, trash and sewage. Well there is another process that occurs with burning in a low oxygen atmosphere and that’s the production of charcoal. The Terra Preta soils of the Amazon were made fertile by the addition of charcoal, the carbon in charcoal is far more stabile than had it been added as compost and hence remains sequestered in the soil but harbours micro-organisms that enrich the soil. This means that producing synthetic fuels or even hydrogen gas from biomass through gasification would also produce charcoal which would sequester carbon hence remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Promoting hydrogen is akin to saying that we should make a new D cell battery that doesn’t fit in any device which would use a D cell and could not be sold in the same stores as D cells even though it would be just as easy to make actual D cell batteries.

So one might ask why promote hydrogen at all. Well, look at who is promoting hydrogen. Automobile manufacturers are promoting hydrogen fuel. Clearly it’s a fashion brand just as flex fuel, hybrid, ev’s, SUV’s, mini-vans, station wagons, tail fins, and model years were either technological or fashionable designed obsolescence in order to promote an artificially high demand for new vehicles. They don’t want people to just keep their old cars which would achieve the same environmental objectives, they want people to junk their cars and buy new ones.