Your Questions About Hydrogen Fuels Station

admin answers:

Voice of reason is sadly pretty spot on on this one.

You can quite easily split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, but you need electricity to make that work.

A typical car uses about 30 Kilowatts of energy to run, so assuming even 100% efficiency in converting your water, you will need 30Kw energy to be creating enough fuel to keep one car moving. That is the same as it takes to run 30 hairdryers!

If you used solar cells to collect that energy you would need around 150 square metres of them, and we are talking about 000′s per square metre here and that is just for one “always on” car.

So…as a small business start up, right now, probably not the best idea.

admin answers:

We don’t really know because no one has built any stations open to public use. All the hydrogen stations are experimental so they naturally cost tons more than they would for consumer use (so that million $ estimate is actually a reasonable answer at this point). Because it would require that the fuel be stored at high pressure and low temperature, the cost would be significantly higher than a petroleum or bio fuels station. Many scientists want the hydrogen pumps to be fully automated because pumping hydrogen is not very user-friendly and potentially very dangerous, so that will add to the cost too.

admin answers:

This isn’t an EPA issue.. The EPA’s job is to regulate pollution, and force (as much as possible) polluters to clean up the messes they make. They also do reports on the environmental impact of various human endeavors, for use by other entities in their decision making process.

The EPA, as a branch of government, is hardly funded independently .. When you say “they”, you’re saying “we”… Any money they have is taxpayer money, same as the Department of Defense, Department of Education, etc. And while, like most governmental agencies, they’re big, they’re certainly dwarfed by many other agencies.

And they’re not “getting in the way”, they’re looking out for our interests — yours and mine, versus the exceptionally well funded interests of Big Business. It’s much cheaper to build a thing if you can simply dump your toxic leftovers into the ground and move on, but that’s not acceptable to the people moving onto that land next, or drinking the polluted water, or discovering 10 years later they have a dramatically higher chance of getting cancer, etc.

As for oil drilling, today’s oil companies already hold existing government leases on some 40 million acres of offshore land they can use for drilling (usually requiring state approval, but NOT EPA approval). They’re not building those dereks, they’re not drilling… It’s not currently seen to be in their economic interest. The whole flack about increased offshore drilling is a grab… The oil companies figure the time is right, with the oil-friendly Bush administration in power still, to grab leases on more of the available offshore land. It’s not really in their interest to drill today… After all, oil’s at record high prices, but oil companies are at record high profits… ExxonMobile made $40.1 billion dollars profit last year. That’s not just good for a company, that’s more than the GNPs of 2/3 of the world’s countries.

And they could open up some drill sites tomorrow, and it’s still going to be something like 10 years before the first barrel of oil is pumped out. The oil companies all know this, and as long as they have cheaper sources to continue their supply, they’re not going to do more offshore drilling. But they want the option to do so, whever they like, whenever they like. So this is been made an issue, since most “regular folks” will assume that this could actually have some effect on oil prices over the next 5-10 years… Which it cannot. Unless they decide to stick the consumer with the bill for the new dereks, of course…

As for the EPA, basically, it’s beyond their charter to do as you suggest. If the government (eg, We the People) decides to get into the alternative energy business directly, this would more like be done under the auspices of the Department of Energy, which is already in the business of funding energy-related research. Of hey, even as government incentives to private industry.

Or why not the Department of Defense… After all, the simple fact that a few poorly run Middle Eastern monarchies can, at their whim, throw our economy into chaos, should be a really serious security concern for us all. Becoming energy independent, in a sustainable way, is the single best thing we can do to actually defend our way of life. Not only would that eliminate any concern over the dramas of the Middle East, but it would launch a new era of prosperity here, based on all the new technology, just as WWII and the Space Program did here in previous generations.

Getting off petroleum isn’t a simple thing, either. It’s not just that there are few if any H2 pumps at fueling stations, it’s the fact that the tried and true fuel cell stacks use very expensive materials like platinum… Consumers would reject $50,000-$100,000 economy cars. There has been work to deliver other FCEV technologies, but it’s not a problem you can solve overnight. And IF they did, well, you still have to get the H2 somewhere… H2 isn’t really a fuel, it’s more like a chemical battery — you have to put energy IN somewhere to get H2 out, whether that’s cracking H2O with electricity, cracking natural gas or methanol (all of which are options). If you wanted to move to cracking sea water from electricity, this would require a doubling of the USA’s electric output… Just to cover consumer vehicles. Same goes with electric cars, even if they do solve the battery problem (current batteries take at least 15 minutes to “fill up”, and would probably have to be replaced every 2-3 years, at a cost of $20,000-$40,000 per car).

This is a big problem, and it’s not one that either private industry or government can solve overnight. Escalating this to a “Manhattan Project” scale, however, with government and private industry working together, could very much solve it.

But first we need a President who’s not in Big Oil’s back pocket.

admin answers:

The Honda FCX Clarity is only leased in the LA area, so that is where the hydrogen Fuel stations would be.
Many of the major oil distributors have already started adding hydrogen pumps to their stations.
You can find the closest one to you at this link.

Http://www.hydrogenassociation.org/general/fuelingSearch.asp

admin answers:

It could be used to boost the stations orbit assuming a suitable rocket motor is attached.

They can be used for emergency breathing oxygen, or emergency water supply if the need arose.

They could be used to dump heat into, though this is unlikely.

They could be used to generate power in a fuel cell if the solar panels were damaged, or there was a need for more power than could be supplied by solar cells and batteries combined.

Currently, water is carried up to the International Space Station where it is electrolysed into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is used for breathing air, and the hydrogen is vented overboard. Similarly, the CO2 that is breathed out is also vented overboard.

In the future, there is interest in reacting the hydrogen with the CO2 via the Sabatier reaction to recover water for recycling and venting methane overboard. This would greatly reduce the mass of supplies needed to be lifted to the space station, though it would still require hydrogen to be delivered since there is a net loss of hydrogen with this process (though hydrogen is at least much less massive than water).

admin answers:

[This answer is revised] – It seems there are plans in the works to produce ammonia engines. I am interested in learning the environmental effects of ammonia combustion. Also, the ammonia gas molecule is larger than hydrogen and is not likely to experience the seepage problems found with H-gas.

There are Hydrogen fueling stations opened by Shell in various US cities as part of President Bush’s work to convert this nation to a carbon-free fuel economy. Hydrogen produces only water when used as an energy source.

Still, your question inspired me to learn more about ammonia as a fuel. It seems the ammonia engine has lost a lot of commercial interest due to focus on corn ethanol as well as hydrogen.

admin answers:

AT this time it will be very expensive. Like Rolex watches, the more they make the cheaper it will become. If most of the cars run on hydrogen I think it will be less than gasoline is now.