Cheaper, Cleaner Hydrogen Without Platinum 295
keithww writes "Looks like the hydrogen economy may have gotten a whole lot cheaper. Wisconsin team engineers gas from biomass
using common metals of tin, nickel, and aluminum instead of platinum. This looks like a good way to get rid of biowaste also." Of course, there's still a long way to go before the automotive industry is using it, but it is good news nonetheless.
Re:Never underestimate the power of a lobbyist (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Never underestimate the power of a lobbyist (Score:4, Insightful)
Biomass (Score:4, Insightful)
The US is not the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Never underestimate the power of a lobbyist (Score:3, Insightful)
Ciao
Re:The day this goes through... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's capitalism for you.
Re:Hydrogen from biowaste is stupid. (Score:1, Insightful)
Mr. Fusion, meet Mr. Anti-Matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever happened on research on anti-matter reactors? The entire concept is feasable, and it is very effeicient. In most nuclear fission reactions, the efficency is about 8%, and combustion reactions usually have substantially less, at less than a tenth of a percent. In an anti-matter reaction, nothing is wasted, and the efficency is 100%.
Re:Hydrogen from biowaste is stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hindenberg (Score:1, Insightful)
They'll encourage it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah (Score:4, Insightful)
Cars... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it, perhaps, the whole idea of an automobile, which is inherently inefficient, which needs re-thinking? It seems that support for rail over long distances, and metro-like systems for shorter distances might be more beneficial to all. Trains do not require huge streets, they do not require huge areas for parking, they do not lead to massive congestion, they do not cause deaths on a huge scale. (More Americans are killed every year from road fatalities than were killed in the war in Vietnam).
It may be that the car is too ingrained in the American psyche to dispense with it... but that's no reason to keep it either
Forget the "hydrogen economy" for transportation.. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not to stop the U of W's process from fueling a large number of fixed polluters. For example, the giant cooling plant (part of a co-gen facility) for the building I work in could benefit from some H2. Bring it on, just don't waste time trying to get it into cars & trucks.
I'll go back under my rock now...
10 gallon gas per person per week mandate (Score:4, Insightful)
Right! Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are going to mandate every American buy 10 gallons of gas every week to keep the oil industry afloat as the price of oil goes to $30, $40, $50, $60, $70 a barrel and the US has to increase its share of world oil production from 25% to 40% to 50% to 75%.
The reality is that world oil production will peak this decade if it hasn't already.
That doesn't mean that oil will run out, only that there will be no increase in daily supply no matter what the demand. There have been no major oil fields discovered in the past decade, and the important oil fields were discovered more than 40 years ago.
Technology won't magically cause oil to require less energy to extract. The people extracting oil aren't complete morons, they have always extracted the oil that is easiest and cheapest to extract before moving on to the harder and more expensive to extract oil. Millions of people have been extracting oil over the past century and if there was a way to extract hard to extract oil cheaper than today, they would have found it by now because cheaper would mean more profit.
So the only way the oil industry can prevent higher prices motivating consumers to switch to some other, any other, form of energy is to get a mandate passed that requires Americans to buy 10 gallons of gas every week no matter what the price.
Failing that, there is nothing that the oil industry can do to prevent the decline of oil as an energy source.
What we as consumers have to hope for is a million small steps to cheaper hydrogen production. The likelihood of someone coming up with real cold fusion are real slim. Hydrogen as a fuel in 20 years is going to be more expensive than oil as a fuel is today, but the price of oil in 20 years will make hydrogen look cheap.
Re:Cars... (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe it or not, there are still places in the US where you can drive for many, many miles without seeing another person, house / car / farm animal, etc... It wouldn't be economically feasible to run rails or buses out to these areas for the 1 passenger that you might get on a busy night. Besides that, even if you did have mass transit service to these areas, you couldn't run the things often enough to accomodate the schedules of the people that would utilize the service. The automobile shines in this area. It runs on my schedule, and it's always there.
Re:still many problems with hydrogen (Score:2, Insightful)
the impact of the water vapor is less clear. as far as i can tell, the jury is still out on this issue [sirs.com]
yes,funding should be spent on battery technology and fuel cells certainly, but there's no reason not to include hydrogen ino this mix.
Re:Never underestimate the power of a lobbyist (Score:3, Insightful)
If they can efficiently reform the gasoline into hydrogen IN THE CAR, we may not need to immediately rebuild our entire energy infrastructure. Then over time as we get better at producing ethanol, for example, from urban or agricultural waste, we can migrate to a more eco-friendly infrastructure. That's where the oil industry will fight, they will push for methane-based systems so fossil fuels can still play a large role, even though "carbon-neutral" ethanol production methods would probably have less impact on the environment, and are undoubtably more sustainable.