Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water 141
An anonymous reader writes "Traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen are either extremely expensive or release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with drastically more affordable materials. Goodbye platinum; hello nickel and ammonia."
Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink! (Score:4, Funny)
Because they're converting it all into flammable lifting gas!
Whatever will we do?
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Yay! Instant water, just add()&(&7987 NO CARRIER.
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Flammable lifting gas? Are you trying to tell us you don't know how important the Hydrogen extraction process is for our future fuel and energy needs?
Sheesh! I'd mod you down for this, but I can't find the selection for 'utterly lacking a sense of humour'.
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Just repeat after me:
Whoosh!
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JOKECEPTION!
Will it work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, many people don't believe that spending money now is in our best interest - they'd rather wait until gas hits $10/gallon to invest in reducing the average price of energy. There are already many semi-viable alternative fuels, but for some reason, a large majority of people are content to continue "as-is", and let the current energy crisis continue.
Most of those people though, claim "What energy crisis?"
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation. The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe. Renewable energy is a nice thought but it is not going to do it in the short term. Perhaps in the future when it is more advanced but not right now.
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe.
I think you answered your own question there.
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I know it was a rhetorical question, but it's really simple: fear and ignorance. When a nuclear plant fails it's on the front page of every newspaper in the world for months, and a significant percentage of our population doesn't even climate change is happening.
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Another portion of society don't even all the words in their sentences.
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Nuclear is radioactive, it is lethal even through walls and miles of distance. We build massive amounts of redundancy in because of this. Yet you claim it isn't more dangerous than other sources?
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No other power source has the potential for disaster that nuclear does. They were seriously considering evacuating Tokyo until they got Fukushima under some semblance of control. Name anything else that you can't plan for (hydro) that has the potential to force the evacuation of a city 100 miles away.
No problem: Coal. [wikipedia.org]
Previously: Also coal. [wikipedia.org] Oil. [wikipedia.org]
Future: [insert image of SimCity 2000 Microwave Plant mis-fire here]
IIRC, Fukushima is an old design that was already running beyond its originally estimated life span. Modern reactor designs are set up such that an emergency situation would cause reactor shut down -- they need a constant controlled feed to maintain the reaction, rather than a needing a constant controlled feed to limit the reaction. Shut down the entire control system in some catastrophic fash
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Acid rain, again, operational issue that was FIXED not a failure issue. No evacuations of major cities.
Cuyahoga River - yep, sure glad we had to evacuate Akron and Cleveland...oh wait.
None of those things are at the scale of nuclear.
Gulf disaster. Last I checked nobody was starving.
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The future is in solar power satellites.
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JAXA is working on a 1GW orbital power plant that sends energy down to a 1km wide rectenna, birds could fly through it without harm. Of course they say it won't be economical until launch costs drop to 1% of their former amount. And hey, look, here's a Star Tram to do just that! :D
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.
All strong sources of energy are inherently dangerous and expensive (in absolute terms). They differ enough from each other to make you choose your poison, that's it. For the amount of energy nuclear plants produce, they are relatively cheap and safe.
Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area.
Coal plants are failing continuously (as a part of their design), and by doing so they affect much larger area than nuclear plants will ever do.
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It goes beyond filtering... after you filter, what do you do with what you filtered out...
Coal slurry accidents have killed thousands and poluted thousands of acres of land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_slurry [wikipedia.org]
And then you have all the scientific papers about coal ash itself being/not being radioactive then nuclear waste...
And then you have all the mining accidents... both environmental and human.
The only reason coal even has a leg to stand is that people often see the pollution which is not the case wit
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It goes beyond filtering... after you filter, what do you do with what you filtered out...
We already have that problem with nuclear waste. So I'll take a lack of 100 sq miles being evacuated and deal with filter cleaning thank you. Is it an issue? Sure, but it's 'operational' not 'failure'. BIG difference.
Again, everything with coal 'failures' you can walk into the 'disaster' zone the very next day wearing a wind breaker and clean it up. Not great, but it's not the scale or hazard that nuclear presents.
The only reason coal even has a leg to stand is that people often see the pollution which is not the case with nuclear. People are scared of what they don't see/understand.
No, coal has issues of 'design' and 'operation' but not failure issues. Acid rain cau
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They test nuclear warheads all the time, underwater, underground, in the desert
You're comparing 1 time events with something that has to operate successfully for 50 years. Not exactly a apples to apples comparison.
But you do make my point. We test nuclear devices 100s of miles away from populations for the very reason. It's dangerous.
if we spent nearly as much energy and resources as we do for the "green" initiatives
We aren't spending money to resources on gree
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Hell, Cessna's can now come with built in parachutes so that when they 'fail' you have survivable landings. There are no such safety guarantees with nuclear.
My point is simply the scope, range and potential damage of a catastrophic nuclear disaster is orders of magnitude beyond any other power source. We don't build them to be so redundant for fun.
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But, airplanes, when they fail, they can impact a very populated area, instantly killing thousands++... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks [wikipedia.org]
While I do not dissagree with your point "scope, range and potential damage of a catastrophic nuclear disaster is orders of magnitude beyond any other power source" - I counter that in that the total impact of all the little disasters of every other power source per watt being far worse then nuclear - resiting progress in fea
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But if you want to go that route, how about a 9/11 hitting a spent nuclear fuel pond which is NOT hardened against attack? Double whammy.
If the gov't hadn't lied to people about the dangers of ground zero, I have friends who worked there from day 2 for weeks btw, proper safety gear could have been worn and prevented the problems you claim. They were told it was safe when we knew, or at least should have known, t
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The actual point is still that when airplanes do fail, they affect the people in them and a 'few' people on the ground. And 9/11 was not airplane failure.
In a catastrophic nuclear failure, 100 sq miles will be rendered uninhabitable for decades - hence the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone still in existence today 30 years later. Something about not fit for habitation for 20,000 years. Workers responsi
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Chernobyl Exclusion Zone would now technically make a great site for a Nuclear reactor...
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Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Insightful)
You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.
It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.
Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).
The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.
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You can generate hydrogen through electrolysis, so your electrical source is very relevant to the article.
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dunno about that. economically it makes sense, and has a similar amount of environmental concern surrounding it.
a frack is cheaper than a new nuke plant, and governments are more willing to sign off on one.
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wow, downmod? i'm only telling the truth. i certainly don't like it.
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That is because "most people" refers to the 1% who have the money necessary to invest in this sort of thing. And of course they don't believe there is an energy crisis they aren't effected by it.
Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Informative)
Most people could care less about the future.
Couldn't care less.
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I'd like to point out... in the UAE, petrol prices are set by the government. The price is ~$0.45/L or something like that, it costs 120aed to fill my land rover (full service even) from empty so I don't even look at the price. The US, and Canada have about as much oil as the UAE so the only thing I understand is that I don't understand.
Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Funny)
The problem with this particular approach, if it does turn out to work well commercially, is that GW Bush will then have shown to be prescient in his hyping of the Hydrogen economy.
I, for one, have some very serious issues with this concept. Very serious indeed.
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This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy storage that we'll need to rely on.
FTFY
I also hoped that that would be some fancy catalyst to convert sunlight + water into O2 and H2 -- sadly, it's just improvement in electrolysis catalist.
This is total BS (from the article):
The electrolysis of water, or splitting water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2), requires external electricity and an efficient catalyst to break chemical bonds while shifting around protons and electrons.
Hell
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You didn't tell us if your toy trains always ran on time in Soviet Russia?
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;-)
Mine was high-end, actually built in Eastern Germany, so it *was* possible for it to run on time -- but when power supply cranked all the way up it was also relatively easy for it to derail, depending on how track was assembled...
Satisfied your curiosity? ;-)
Paul B.
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Informative)
Your way to do it probably had shitty efficiency. 1-2% of the electrical energy probably ended up used to produce hydrogen. With fancy catalysts and carefully controlled temperature, it's possible to improve that efficiency by a factor of 30 or so, with the best methods now getting efficiencies between 30 and 60%. The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).
What the article seems to speak of is that they've found a catalyst that drastically improves the efficiency of electrolysis, without resorting to expensive materials.
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The issue is that catalysts are typically formed into fine, spherical pellets to maximize the surface area of catalytic material exposed. This is because catalytic reactions are characterized by an intermediate reaction between the reactants and active sites on the catalyst. As a result of their being made into pellets, a variety of things can occur that redu
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Now cars already contain platinum in the catalytic converters so thankfully we aren't talking going from zero use, but when those things fail they are expensive to replace. Cheaper (monetarily) is always better.
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The only semi-viable fuels are Oil-Algae derived biodiesel, possibly TDP derived diesel, and possibly cellulosic butanol.
Pretty much everything else ISN'T viable. Not ethanol. Not really CNG. Without subsidies, Ethanol's just another waste of time. CNG's buring just a different "fossil" fuel.
It's not so much "what energy crisis", as people are already saying enough's enough. As for not wanting spend money now...that's more due to the economy and people seeing the Obama administration (and similar) pour
Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Solyndra did not fail because of any technological fault or even internal corruption.
They failed because China shattered the price on solar panels, with their own subsidized production, which meant Solyndra couldn't effectively compete.
People are seeing the wrong lesson from what happened. It's like the flooding in the upper Mississippi. People got all worked up over the dams and reservoirs not working, but they never noticed that the reservoirs were kept full because of their use in fishing. Which made people money. Or like the California power crisis. Everybody swore up and down that the problem was California hadn't built power plants or some such, but they didn't notice that it was Enron's deliberate shut-downs of functional plants in order to create an artificial crisis. So they could make money.
Perception and reality are often quite different.
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Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider this.
Apple's cash reserves are $110 billion. Microsoft has $60 billion. Google has $40 billion.
U.S. is spending $8 billion per year for TSA (and growing).
Direct spending on Iraq War is over $800 billion. In Afghanistan, over $400 billion.
According to MIT fusion researchers we've had here on Slashdot the other day, we could have had fusion today if we were willing to spend $80 billion on it in the last 20 years. If true, it means that Apple alone could fund it if they wanted!
Let's assume that they are overly optimistic, and increase that figure by an order of magnitude - even then it's what was spent with zero benefit on Iraq alone.
When we fuck up our civilization by over-reliance on a single oh-so-convenient power source, we'll have no-one but ourselves to blame.
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Cash is cash, it's totally unaffected by the stock price.
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Apple's stock price has no bearing on funding fusion if they wanted - they have $100 billion in actual cash assets that they could simply withdraw from the bank in quarters (if they wanted to be douches) or dimes (if they were total douches). Well, assuming the bank could raise that sort of money in cash on hand in one place.
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I understand that, but the original comment was that Apple couldn't simply get their hands on 100 billion dollars because when people *say* that's what a company has, or when it buys another business etc, they really mean a combination of assets, capital, stock price etc. My point was nothing more than Apple actually has 100 billion *in just cash* available if it wants it, without having to use stock price or other assets to reach the figure.
It's unusual, since most companies won't leave that sort of money
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This is the biggest annoyance that scientists have at the moment. So much is said about the "wasteful" spending on things like the LHC or fusion research, or various other "big budget" science projects, and people lap it up because they don't get a sense of scale. Sure hundreds of millions of dollars is a lot of money in real terms, but compared to the 8 billion spent on the useless TSA, or the $20 billion spent air conditioning Afghanistan?
Fusion needs a cash injection that we (as in, humans) could easily
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short sighted energy companies will shit bricks. but smart energy companies will fund fusion etc. and own it all.
H2 is not a form of energy, it is energy storage (Score:1)
The article doesn't say anything at all about future energy. It presents a cheaper way to make a catalyst that performs as well as platinum. It still requires an external source of energy to actually do the H2O splitting. Because the catalyst is efficient the H2 created will store *almost* as much energy as it took to split apart the H2O.
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This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.
So, you're thinking that, if we burn enough hydrogen to produce the equivalent amount of energy we consume daily, now, that it will not have an effect on the natural cycle? How much water vapour do you think Mama Nature is capable of enduring?
I'm not disagreeing with you, burning hydrogen has it's place, but it will be a mix of all sources that gets us through, in the future.
Personally, I'm digging on Thorium fast breeder reactors, and we eject the spent fuel rods into the sun. But that's just me.
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Performance of EVs is no longer a problem - there are batteries, which can take you 300 miles on a single charge. They are just not yet economically viable for lower segments of the market.
The good news is that there is absolutely no reason for the batteries or other EV components to be more expensive than, say, a gas engine. They are a lot easier to manufacture
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Europe for example, you can tell - to the minute - wh
Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a reason engineers choose the materials they do.
Another hint: the price of oil is not based on the amount of it in the ground. We'll burn gas till the last drop. If you think gas is expensive, wait till your plan comes true and see how much you pay then.
If it makes you feel better, the entire planet receives lots more energy from the sun than we use. Sunlight is free, yet we don't use it. Why? - energy density. Converting this almost limitless source of energy into useful energy is not only inconvenient, but also because it's expensive.
Most people like you will still claim "the sky is falling." Relax. We are engineers. We will do it for you. When the time comes.
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Gasoline and coal energy densities have built this world, but they now threaten to radically alter it, perhaps even beyond our ability to 'fix' it.
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How many times have we been offered a magic solution to all our problems if we just stuff all our money in the man's bag... an then trust him to spend it wisely and in our interests... while of course keeping our hands over our eyes and not peaking while it sounds suspiciously like he's running away giggling?
We're all out of trust. If you've got a magic solution that will fix all our problems not theoretically but ACTUALLY then we'll give you trillions. For your promises hopeful assertions though? They're n
NO! (Score:2)
This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy that we'll need to rely on.
Please people. I love clean renewable sources of energy and argue in favour of them at every opportunity. Hydrogen production is not a source of energy. The primary cost of mass producing hydrogen is not platinum. Hydrogen is merely a very inefficient and unsafe way to store energy. Hydrogen is produced by expending twice as much energy as the thermal energy it contains. This means that even if you can burn it in an engine with 100% thermal efficiency you are roughly on par with a finely tuned engine burnin
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So no it is not as efficient, it is much more efficient because the fuel is quite literally 'free'. You don't 'burn' hydrogen in a fuel cell. Burning anything is by definition inefficient. Hydrogen is your battery and it stores the energy imparted when you split water. That energy can come from the sun as I said and so you have no energy c
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Fuel Cell Senario: Pour in a liter of Sea Water. Output is Electrical Energy, and what ever is left. It would not be easy to solve, but I am hopeful.
Affordable (Score:3, Funny)
Cat pee and pocket change. I can handle that.
More seriously though... (Score:1)
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Solar panels perhaps? And use the hydrogen to store the intermittent solar power.
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Solar panels perhaps? And use the hydrogen to store the intermittent solar power.
Maybe, once we're generating enough solar power to have an excess of it.
That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:5, Informative)
The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.
With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.
The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you want or need to live off the grid
If you need to live off the grid you're already such an edge case that we don't need to be optimizing for you. Living off the grid is expensive. And if you just want to live off the grid, then you're obviously not optimizing for 1) low cost or 2) efficient use of resources, so why should I care about your problem?
How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas!
Yes, it's crazy alright, but what good is that? The electricity->H2->electricity round trip efficiency is something like 25%, and that's not counting the massive amounts of energy required to compress the H2. 25% sucks bad enough that you can't change things with handwaving as you scale that efficiency to the transportation sector.
Put the energy directly into the battery (we already have better batteries than H2 fuel cells) and drive several times as far. There's a reason electric cars are here today, but fuel cell cars are not.
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Ummm, yeah, sure. Tell you what, you go get a container made out of the material of your choice (not including unobtanium, that would just be cheating) able to hold a meaningful level of PSI (or the metric of your choice) of hydrogen. Hermetically seal the container (I won't even expect you to have a hole in the container via which you can connect it to whatever you plan to generate work with).
Come back in a day, a week, a month, a year....
Then realize your concept of "stored indefinitely without degradin
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One thing he is right about, though, is that battery cells developed for portable applications aren't particularly well suited to EVs.
Don't get me wrong - it is fantastic we have them, and have them manufactured at a mass scale. This way we can piggy-back on decades of intensive R&D that went into them. Without that there wouldn't be mass manufactured electric cars on the road now. Portable batteries have even proven pretty good in that application, but it doesn't mean we can't improve on that.
In a
Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:4, Funny)
According to Graham's law, it would appear that the solution is to make the molecules bigger. However hydrogen doesn't seem keen to associate into groups larger than pairs.
Some have suggested that attaching the hydrogen atoms to chains of carbon atoms (say, six to ten of them) might do the trick, but I reckon that's crazy talk.
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Damn good thing I have a keyboard cover, I don't own a mechanical keyboard I can just toss in the dishwasher anymore!
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you get all of my imaginary funny mods.
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Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
Don't forget that you have to compress the H2 before you can use it, too, and that takes a huge amount of (usually electrical) energy. Enough energy that you could put it into a battery electric car instead and drive a significant fraction of the distance the fuel cell would take you without the stupid fuel cell.
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wtf man?
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Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:4, Insightful)
The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
You think so? I reckon you're missing the "thermodynamics of capital". If you have to borrow $10k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will have to cover the $1k/year repayment on that loan. But if you only borrow $1k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will only have to cover $0.1k/year repayments.
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While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself.
That kind of attitude will leave the hydrogen industry, that will replace the oil industry in the future, unable to arbitrarily raise price at the pumps when some Platinum manufacturing country starts a civil war... you cut that out. Now.
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You just need the right catalyst. Something like powdered unicorn horn should do it.
Gotta go, some guy called Maxwell on the line...
EI/EO is all that matters (Score:2)
Its probably 5 to 10 years out (Score:3, Insightful)
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You're blaming the wrong people. Scientists do this work and publish it, knowing full well it;s not commercial yet and needs a lot of work, or is 5% efficient etc. However, that's not sexy enough for the media, or likely to generate many ad impressions, so they draw ridiculous conclusions that are a long way away from being reality.
Scientists may say that *in the future* a mature process might provide a viable way to produce hydrogen from water (low energy catalytic splitting of water to make hydrogen/proto
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HOPE (Score:1)
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While I am completely with you on the solar water heating (especially for a community pool to make it useful at least 8 months a year instead of the 3-4 that most of them are good for where I live), and possibly even solar power if the demonstrated efficiency year round proves it to be viable, the fact that you are suggesting people put windmills on the roof to generate electricity suggests to me that you have never stood anywhere close to windmills that actually generate meaningful amounts of power. No ma
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You know, good folks like those people at Al Qaeda are working on that already, but the US government seems to be doing everything they can think of to stop them!
Hydrogen Win-Win factor (Score:2)
Intellects love to proselytize against Hydrogen's long checklist of negatives. The ONE advantage it holds is ' Single Point Capture'.
The manufacture of Hydrogen in vast quantities at a fixed plant location enables economies of scale to be leveraged upon a single point to capture, control, clean and manage pollution at the source. A hydrogen powered economy promises to replace the millions of pollution sources in the Oil powered economy providing a structured ecosystem that enables the replacement and elim
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Silly mortal, only Jebus runs on water.