THE Hydrogen Thread (merged) Part 2

Tanada

Something nobody seems to want to talk about in the MSM is the risk the Hydrogen economy has for the environment. I am talking about the direct risk, not the lack of ene3rgy density, low EROEI or any of the other problems already explored either.

When hydrogen gas escapes into the atmosphere one of two things happen to it if it doesn't burn immediately. About 80% of the time it is absorbed into the soil where it is taken up by soil bacteria, which may or may not affect their life cycle. We don't know because nobody has published any detailed studies on this phenomenom yet. Because Hydrogen molecules only have 7% the density of atmoshperic gasses in general the other 20% of the time the hydrogen rises into the stratosphere before being absorbed. In these cases the hydrogen molecules react with OH radicals and O3 Ozone molecules to form water vapor. This lowers the abundance of OH radicals and Ozone in the stratosphere and as a side effect reduces their effectiveness at oxidizing Methane (CH4). This causes Methane to be more persistant in the atmosphere and as a GHG it is 20 to 23 times as effective at reflecting heat as CO2.

Before we go off the deep end with billions of dollars invested in this mythical hydrogen economy the Polliticians love to talk about shouldn't we study how spilled hydrogen is going to effect soil chemistry/biology and GHG persistance? Why do we always go haring off after the next great technobabble solution before we know if it will bite us in the behind through the law of unintended consequences?

Graeme

Hydrogen cars can solve foreign oil problem

KevO · Expert Joined: May 24, 2005 Posts: 2333

you're gonna need a helluva lot of new nuclear power stations to be able to get the hydrogen. I think the estimate was for 64 new ones in the US alone just to run cars and trucks.
But they need to be up and running within, what a year or two?

Rolling Eyes

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MrMambo · Heavy Crude Joined: Jul 22, 2005 Posts: 163

Why go through the hydrogen step when you can just use a highly efficien electric battery instead without all that insane loss of energy through electorlyzis, compression, leakage, cell-inefficiency.

The cycle where you first have electricity and then hydrogen and then convert it back to electricity will at least take away 50% of the energy .. currently I havent heard of any hydrogen-cycle wich has gotten to 50% efficiency yet. Granted combustion engines will have only about 20% efficiency in normal auto usage, so it could perhaps be more efficient than todays gasoline/diesel cars, but you should also compare it with todays electric cars wich are steadily improving the driving range and are of course far more efficient.

A battery easilly returns 95% of the electricity put in. Meaning that you would probably have to have twize as many nuclear power plants or solar power plants to power the same fleet of cars.

Sys1 · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 25, 2005 Posts: 606

purcatty : i see some anger in your two posts. I don't have the science to argue about your claims, but i've the feeling you are right :
Before knowing about peak oil back in 2004, i thought (just like everyone in the street) that we have 40 years of oil, and anyway that oil is not so necessary to our industrial civilization, as we have biofuels, nuclear, soon thermonuclear power, spacecrafts and artificial intelligence...
I thought that progress (or the thing called progress should i say)was some kind of invincible direction for mankind.
Now that i know about the ugly lie about oil and our dependance to it, i see newspapers, magazines, television and even people as the propaganda's tools of an agonizing system based on perpetual growth.
What makes me angry is not only that, it is most of all that even when things will get really bad (let's say in 2015), the liers will still have the power, and the poor people won't get the true reason for the lack of jobs/food/water/cars/planes/internet/medics/education
/electricity/ freedom.

Nota Bene : Fusion has nothing to do with plutonium, as it consists in fusionning 2 hydrogen atoms in 1 helium atom. Anyway, we are 50 years from thermonuclear energy. (Back in 1950, we were also 50 years from it (!)).
Let's generalize : We'll always 50 years from thermonuclear energy.

Newsseeker · Light Sweet Crude Joined: May 12, 2005 Posts: 1226

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 4970

lawnchair · Intermediate Crude Joined: Oct 20, 2004 Posts: 722

Let's do these numbers another way:
Currently, there are 7.5 to 8 billion miles driven per day in the US alone.
Let us assume every car (including buses, semis, and SUVs) on the road today was a Tesla Roadster tomorrow. Chosen for it's mind-numbing efficiency. Theoretically around 220 W*h (at the plug) per mile. That's incredible. That's 18 miles per one load in an electric clothes dryer! Let's even take another conceit that fuel cells are 100% efficient users of hydrogen and there is no energy required to transport hydrogen, and no energy used in building the whole new infrastructure.

By that assumption, we need 1.7 TWh per day to drive the national traffic jam. That's not impossible. That's only about 18% of current electric use.
If the grid use were perfectly utilized and we were talking about 100% efficient battery electric cars, we would only need 71 GW of base installation, or 70 of the newest, largest nuclear reactor designs.
You'd have to double that number of GW installed to go to hydrogen iff the plants were high-temperature plants (pebble bed for instance) designed to reform hydrogen directly.

You'd have to easily triple the number if you were dealing with water-cooled steam-driven electric-reformer plants.
And keep building them, so growth can continue.
So, possible? Maybe, if that was the absolute priority of the nation, yes. Realistically, off by at least an order of magnitude. Every efficiency listed is best-case.

Mesuge

Lawnchair> Why Tesla Roadster, the lowlywood bimbo with 220Wh/mi from plug?
Btw. isn't it a BIT more in reality (heavy, bad aerodynamics)?
Try Loremo instead, 40Wh/km at wheels ~ 56Wh/km at plug =>91Wh/mi and for 1/6 of the cost..
I think the best fun now is to buy som solar arrays, electric car and off the grid home system. After PO you will be a TV personality for a week, and then dead meat as the new local warlord took interest in the latest hightech.. Twisted Evil

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DOOMerotron: at all-time high [8.1] out of 10..

Cyrus · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 25, 2005 Posts: 608

Couldn't have said it better my self purcatty.

Twilight · Expert Joined: Mar 02, 2007 Posts: 2971 Location: UK

Let's not forget, where are you going to get the people to crash-build all those nuke plants?
They don't exist.

See, the laws of supply and demand in a free market apply equally to the training of professional cadres. For the last 20-30 years the market has only been demanding enough for operation and maintenance of existing build, so that's what we have been getting. If you suddenly have the market demand enough to build and connect a new nuke plant every few months, you are going to have to wait another generation for them to go through school, university and training. You are not going to retrain existing personnel from other economic sectors. We have a high specialisation of labour these days, boasting a modern flexible workforce says nothing about your ability to fill those stubborn critical niches.

So even if you have the money, the willpower and the resources, you are not crash-building anything. There is no-one to do it! And there won't be for a period of time at least equal to the duration of the necessary education.
Forget the pipe dreams of what would happen if governments woke up tomorrow. Those opportunities always had a lead time.
Simmons' vague idea for a big project isn't going to work either, for the same reason, unless he thinks we have until after 2020 to start in earnest.

Everyone has a tendency to focus too much on the hardware and forget the people. If you plotted an age distribution of the energy industry as a whole, how would the bell curve be skewed? In the West I would guess heavily, with a median age of around 50, and signs of low recruitment during the 1980s and 90s (partly because of cutbacks/recession, partly because during this time business became far more sexy for the student applicant). Simmons has hinted at this forgotten aspect, but should really devote much more attention to it. The question of what a country is doing to train essential workers is every bit as important to its future as things.

With what people?
Unemployed machinists from the soon-to-be bankrupt automotive industry? They will be building power conversion equipment somewhere?

Show me the progress.
If a technology-based solution does not address how it will source, manage and retain the specialists required for implementation, I am not interested. Pushing the subject off the balance sheet into some future government experiment with technocracy is not going to cut it. The expected downslope of oil and gas depletion and ageing infrastructure and workforce dictate the timescale, we know it will be very quick on a human timescale, so your available human resource will not be much greater or much different than what it is today.
So again - hundreds of nuke plants, electrolysis plants, new power transmission and distribution system, hydrogen transportation and distribution system - who?

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 4970

lawnchair · Intermediate Crude Joined: Oct 20, 2004 Posts: 722

Indeed, had I been paying attention a decade ago, I would have gone into something energy-related (electric grid or nukee). The boom, bling, and reasonably easy world of the computer industry, especially in the last decade, has absolutely eaten away at the wetware pool that keeps the modern world operational, just as poor maintenance and hypertrophy has eaten away at the physical plant of modern society.

The number of years for a MSc is probably overrated. We don't need high-end engineering designers as badly as we need field engineers to replicate good standardized designs. An intense 1-2 year program (US Navy Nuke for a model) is probably appropriate, and a whole lot more salable to people who still paying student loans on their first careers' degrees. At least the very cream of the tech industry has the aptitude, and many would be retrained for the right incentives. This doesn't make things cheap at all, but really, it's that or collapse.

The other question is whether the West can brain-drain our way out of the engineering gap. It's what we've done with doctors (not that we actually need as many as we have) and IT (ditto). Power engineers are still largely native (50 year old plus "rednecks" seem the norm). Is life in the West enough better than elsewhere to suck talent out of the rest of the world?

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 4970

Tanada

I posted my big objection to the Hydrogen economy Sunday last but aparently nobody noticed it. Here dear colleges it is again, Hydrogen has untested but likely detrimental ecological impacts which are being ignored for pollitical reasons.
Something nobody seems to want to talk about in the MSM is the risk the Hydrogen economy has for the environment. I am talking about the direct risk, not the lack of ene3rgy density, low EROEI or any of the other problems already explored either.

When hydrogen gas escapes into the atmosphere one of two things happen to it if it doesn't burn immediately. About 80% of the time it is absorbed into the soil where it is taken up by soil bacteria, which may or may not affect their life cycle. We don't know because nobody has published any detailed studies on this phenomenom yet. Because Hydrogen molecules only have 7% the density of atmoshperic gasses in general the other 20% of the time the hydrogen rises into the stratosphere before being absorbed. In these cases the hydrogen molecules react with OH radicals and O3 Ozone molecules to form water vapor. This lowers the abundance of OH radicals and Ozone in the stratosphere and as a side effect reduces their effectiveness at oxidizing Methane (CH4). This causes Methane to be more persistant in the atmosphere and as a GHG it is 20 to 23 times as effective at reflecting heat as CO2.

Before we go off the deep end with billions of dollars invested in this mythical hydrogen economy the Polliticians love to talk about shouldn't we study how spilled hydrogen is going to effect soil chemistry/biology and GHG persistance? Why do we always go haring off after the next great technobabble solution before we know if it will bite us in the behind through the law of unintended consequences?