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Science

Sunlight + Algae = Hydrogen fuel 312

Posted by Hemos from the clean-limitless-energy dept.
frivolous writes, "The University of California, Berkeley has issued a press release here that describes how they've managed to fool algae into producing pure hydrogen gas. This hydrogen can then be used to power nearly everything that's oil-powered today - cars, homes, industry, and so on. If they can get the production rate up as high as they suggest, this could revolutionize the energy industry. I've already submitted the info to Bruce Sterling (see the Viridian Web site for more on his involvement). " To qualify the release: The scientists have filed for a patent, and the process will be appearing in a peer journal next month. That means that it hasn't been throughly analyzed by the scientific community yet. Let's hope it holds up under scrutiny.
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Sunlight + Algae = Hydrogen fuel More

Sunlight + Algae = Hydrogen fuel

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  • Current combustion engines using petrochemicals also cause large amounts of NO_{x}. It comes from the nitrogen in the air and the heat of the combustion process (iirc). Anyway, from what I remember H2 combustion engines (rotary engines seemed to work the best for H2 combustion) had less NO_{x} and much less SO_{x} product.

    And the bad emmissions are drastically reduced even from there if a fuel cell is used (and they make H2/O2 fuel cells that are really efficient... like 98%).

    H2 is really good, there have been lots of strides in different ways to store it... especially metal hydride storage.

    And the ability to drink what comes out of your tailpipe is just cool cool cool. :-)

  • stored in the form of sugars. H2O and CO2 are utilized to create the sugars - oxygen is released as a byproduct of this process. The plant still needs oxygen to metabolize the sugar, much as we do, so, under adverse conditions, it evidently splits water to get at the oxygen so it may utilize it's sugar and then release the excess hydrogen. This is my understanding of the process.

    Wouldn't it be interesting if animals had more of the capabilities of plants at food production?
  • The Oil Industry might go along with it, as other posters have stated.

    But what about the OPEC nations? What happens to the Middle Eastern nations? What happens to Mexico, Congo, Indonesia and Scotland/Norway?

    Replacing oil with H would be a crushing blow to Texas, Alaska, Louisana and Oklahoma.

    I'm all for replacing Oil with H as fuel.
  • Who cares if they patent it. 17 years later it's public domain. (Unlike, say, the formula for Coca-Cola, which is just a secret.) It'll take 17 years to implement this develop and implement this tech.

    Besides, judging from the text that whizzes past when I load a kernel, The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley are pretty cool about licensing their IP. [Rimshot.]

    Don Negro
  • Storage problems are being addressed, and it's been shown that hydrogen does not easily explode.

  • The OPEC and oil companies have very VERY different interests. For instance, it's the interest of the OPEC that the production be limited, so as to drive their oil stock to a higher value. Oil companies, OTOH, benefit from a large amount of oil being consumed.

    Then, the energy is extremely competitive. There are dozens of HUGE companies competing. If one of them can find a cheap alternative, it will give them a competitive advantage.

  • "The Oil Industry" does'nt mean much. If you're thinking about the likes of Exxon, Total, or Royal Dutch Shell, they're on a heavily competitive market, and they don't own the raw material. They make money off extracting it, transforming it and distributing it, but they BUY the raw material, which belongs to the country where it's extracted. If you want to find a conspirator against it, you'd rather look at OPEP.
  • If this ever works out, just like every patented technology, ... is that a commercially viable system to exploit this will be extremely complex, and will probably involved dozens of other patented techniques. The involved companies will enter into licensing agreements, etc ... plus it's never going to be the end-all be-all energy source; it will have to compete with fossil fuel and nuclear energy, so they won't be able to force an astronomical price on it.
  • to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive"

    Have you tried to buy a gallon of Diesel in the Northeast US lately? It's going for over US$2/gallon!

    What price can they generate biodiesel for now?

    Your Working Boy,
  • Press release. Wild claims of enormous energy. Patents. I'm having flashbacks to Pons & Fleishman (or however you spell it...)

    Anyone got a salt shaker?

  • Yeah, it's bad to put up people's taxes to pay for research, but it could be even worse to patent the research and make people pay exorbitant licensing fees. At least if the research is funded by taxation, everybody has equal access to it and there can be competition in implementing it, giving lower prices.

    Paying an extra $10 in tax to save $100 on your electricity bill isn't such a bad deal. Of course, this technology may not be like that.

  • Not if they are smart. This might just be a god send for them. From entirely thier point of view that is. If I was a oil company CEO I would be making these dudes and offer before the ink is dry on the patent. Not to scarf up the patent and have it vanish to but put bucks in it and make it commercial process.

    This would be a win-win for them in the long run. They can dump the basiclly hunt and gather approach that has marked the oil industry for the last 100 years. They are living on borrowed time anyway. The oil in the ground is only going to last so long, then what? The process would basiclly do away with the oil industry as a environmental problem. Good press there.

    As a county we can drop out dependance on OPEC and take the teeth from that tiger. The US could reduce it's military budget because we wouldn't have to spend so much defending what is basiclly a big sand pile. International terrorizem would drop because, well without the big oil cash cow, they can't fund it.

    This is a good thing.

  • Not gonna happen. Don't get your hopes up. We'd have solar power too if the electric company could figure out how to run a sunbeam through a meter. The oil monopolies are no different. You've got mega-corporations with big bucks willing to go to congress to get anything like this delayed for "environmental" reasons (bacteria? is it dangerous?), or because it could be explosive (OMG - hydrogen and oxygen! But leave gas alone - it's harmless..), or for a dozen other regulatory reasons. Believe me, they'll be going through hoops.

    In the meanwhile, oil companies around the world will mobilize to capture the patent for themselves. They'll also put strong pressure on the US saying "market this and we'll make prices go higher!" Considering it's already approaching $2.50/gal in our area that threat will be taken seriously.

    In short, good luck guys - great tech but you're up against goliath.

  • In fact, the engineers at Zeppelin company kind of didn't realize the doping material on the surface of the Hindenberg WAS essentially a major explosive. If that reflective material was non-explosive, the Hindenberg would have settled back onto the ground, and there would have been a lot less casualties because remember which way hydrogen burns: straight up.

    In fact, because hydrogen burns straight up, it doesn't have the extreme danger of things like methane, ethane or propane, which has a very bad habit of burning sideways in addition of burning straight up if an explosion occurs. That's why ships and trucks carrying liquid petroleum gas or liquified natural gas has to be given very careful treatment to prevent ignition.
  • "Typically, microalgae are grown in ponds, harvested and the oils extracted. The extracted oils are chemically reacted with alcohols to produce diesel fuels..."

    Wait a sec... I'm guessing these oils are probably going to be some sort of fatty acid, which would react with alcohol to form an ester. Now, if we've got enough low molecular weight fractions in the result, it could mean we end up with diesel trucks that give off a nice fruity fragrance.
  • Well thats the thing, I'm assuming their method is more efficient than using solar power. With solar power, you lose most of the energy hitting the panels striaght off the bat.

    What I'd like to see is cold fusion. If we can produce stable cold fusion, then our energy concerns will be set. Imagine this:
    - Using electrolosis, we produce an endless supply of hydrogen and oxygen
    - We irigate the Sahara desert using ocean water with minimal costs

    At this point, we'd have very little reason to resort to fossil fuels. I've heard testiment of 5-10yrs before ignition, but I don't know how realistic it is.
  • Nitrogen oxides? You may have a lot of these computer science geeks believing you that an internal combustion of hydrogen gives you nitrogen oxides. I don't see in the equation where nitrogen comes in.

    Well you need oxygen for the combustion to occur. Since the engine won't store oxygen and will presumably use air from the atmosphere to obtain the oxygen, you get nitrogen also. Couple this with the heat the combustion produces and you'll get N combining with O to produce NO_x.

  • Replacing oil with H would be a crushing blow to Texas, Alaska, Louisana and Oklahoma.

    Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way. With a production rate of a whopping 3 * 10^-3 litres of H2 per hour per litre of algea culture. Which can only be in production half of the time. It will be long long time (decades) before we see production plants producing mass quantities of H2. And it will even be longer before a significant number of cars use H2 instead of oil derived fuels. There are several major problems with introducing H2 as fuel:

    • The chicken and egg problem. Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere. (This can be solved by goverment intervention though)
    • H2 is much harder to store. H2 is a gas, except for extremely low temperatures. You can bind H2 to metals, and use poreus metal tanks, but that makes cars heavier and bulkier. It also means that when you are out of gas, you can't just walk to the gas station with your plastic jerry can for some fuel.
    • Oil and oil based fuels burn easily, but compared to H2, they are childs play. To ignite oil and oil based fuels, you need some heat source (to evaporate the liquid), while H2 is already a gas. Remember the Hindenburg?
    Furthermore, even if H2 will be used as a significant power source, it won't be the end of oil. Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.

    -- Abigail

  • Though the obvious next steps would be to first alter it genetically to stay constantly in "auxillary power" mode

    Eh, no, it's far from obvious that the first step should be solving a non-problem in such a way that you have very low production rates.

    Keeping the algea in "auxillary power mode" is trivial. No genetic engineering needed - just keep them deprived from sulpher. The problem is that if you keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long - they die.

    So, you do not want to keep them in "auxillary power mode" for too long.

    -- Abigail

  • It is lighter than air and rises above most common ignition points

    Well, yes, but if you want to use H2 as a fuel, you're not letting it freely rise...

    The TAX PAYERS OWN the rights to that knowledge. The two researchers were paid for their work and will probably be awarded degrees in addition to their stipends. If they want to patent their discoveries they should have funded their own work. Ditto for the universities.

    Eh, you don't want to go there. While this research might have been done on a grant paid for by taxpayers, it might also have been funded by external money. I've worked in the academia myself, and for two years I participated in a committe that gave recommendations on who to assign grants to. There's a lot of external money going on, and the reasoning "research foo was done on a grant by US taxpayers so US taxpayers own the right to that knowledge" also means "important discovery was made by a scientist on a Microsoft grant - Microsoft now holds the keys to the cure of cancer".

    The scientist will publish papers about their work. At that moment, the information will be available. Don't forget, scientific results don't mean anything unless they can be reproduced independently.

    -- Abigail

  • more calculation:

    a car driving on hydrogen with the same range as a normal car has a tank of 100 litres (very rough number based on a vague memory of something I read on this once). Of course the gas is stored under pressure (5 bar??) so lets assume we are talking about 500 litres H2 for a full tank.

    given 0.333 litre of H2/litre alge/10 days, that gives you aproximately 1600 litres of alge to produce that amount of H2 in 10 days or 16000 to do it in one day. But given the 10 fold increase those people think is feasible in the yields we'll assume 1600 litre for 500 litre of H2 per 10 days.

    The real question of course is how much litre of alge you can get to produce H2 per square metre of sunlight (i.e. how deep can the tanks be).
  • Based on Berkeley's work, I've done the following:

    Step 1: Get a largish, air-tight tank
    Step 2: Put a bunch of algae in the tank with a lot of algae food (check your local pet store).
    Step 3: Seal the tank.

    As the algae produce H2, the pressure rises. All of this has been proven in the lab. If my linear extrapolations are correct, however, a further *mumble* increase in pressure will start the spontaneous fusion of H into He. This could revolutionize the energy industry!

    Send checks to:
    FascDot Killed My Previous User
    Near the Bottom of the Page
    Slashdot
    --
    Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
  • It was triggered by an electriccal spark - the thing was charged from flying through a lightning storm but not properly insulated. So. some panels discharge when the tow rope hits the ground, others don't, you get a spark between panels. That starts the fire. Whether the hydrogen burned or not is difficult to tell, but it isn't going to have started first automatically. Greg
  • When I clicked on this article, it was my intention to write a mocking parody of an anti-patent nutcase who thinks people should release their patents into the public domain after they poured millions of dollar into the research.

    mjuarez, I guess you beat me to it!

  • Yes, if a version can be found, or bred, which constantly operates in both photosynthesis and anaerobic modes then it can be recharging itself at the same time it produces Hydrogen.

    I wouldn't be surprised if such a version already exists in the wild in swamps. It's an obvious advantage in a hostile environment. Whether it exists may depend upon whether the two activation paths are mutually exclusive at a low level.

  • Wankel rotary engines aren't that bad. They're 1/4 the size of the equivalent power reciprocal engine, much cheaper to make, a magnitude fewer parts...

    You can get 40% efficiency out of a well-built reciprocal engine (40% of the gasoline's explosive energy turned into torque), the other 60% disappears as heat either through the cooling system or through the exhaust. The reason these figures are so good (in comparison! :) is that the heat in a reciprocal engine is concentrated at the top of each cylinder. Less metal to heat up means less fuel wasted heating metal.

    Wankel rotary engines top out at around 30%, mostly because the entire crankcase is the cylinder head. They heat much more evenly.

    It took the automotive industry 50 years to push 30% to 40% for reciprocal engines - they might be able to do the same for rotary engines given another 50 years.

  • I still don't understand why large cities can't combine their problems. Why is it not possible to create a large clay bowl a 100 yds across and several miles long and cover it with a transparent material. Feed waste water, pulverized trash and all sorts of bio-agents like this into one end. Along the way, air pumps keep the water supplied with oxygen and force exhaust gas full of fuel out of the system. On the other end you extract a ground enriching slurry to sell to farmers, and all along the middle you collect flamable gas to pipe to a power generator located next to the enclosure.

    So it doesn't produce a lot of electricity? You at least got some, you reduce the landfill load, you take care of your waste water treatment and you return some nutrients to the land.

  • I love to be pedantic, so here I am.
    It's great to meet somebody one has something in common with!

    If, as you say, everything is solar (which isn't true, really. It's only solar if it's first-stage solar) then we should be able to reach some form of long term equilibrium with anything.

    Well, accepting your definition, that's strictly true, but to do so you would have to accept more severe restrictions. For example to use fossil fuels at a equilibrium rate, you would have to limit your energy use to the formation rate of coal, petroleum and natural gas.

    Anyway, saying that direct solar (whether photovoltaic or turbine-based) is the only thing that we can work with indefinitely is a farce. Just because we don't know what else there is for us to work with yet doesn't mean solar is it. For all we know we'll come up with a way to use minor gravitic fluctuations to generate power.

    Again, if you want to be pedantic, of course I can't prove the non-existence of some future, now-unforseen non-solar renewable energy source. It is logically impossible. Maybe some day we discover an infinitely renewable energy source from unobtainions flowing from dimension X. It can't be ruled out by I'm not holding my breath.

    Oh, you left out "Coal/Oil power is just animals and plants (IE, solar-powered biomass) that was compressed and heated via geothermal processes, so it's half solar." And while we're on the subject, let's not forget geothermal, though that does admittedly have a whole ton of problems.

    Well, yes, they are "fossil fuels"; it hardly needs saying that we probably are extracting them faster than they are being formed.

  • What isn't solar power?

    Animal power comes from plants which convert sunlight into sugars and other nutrients.

    Biomass power (burning wood) just burns the same plant captured solar energy.

    Hydropower captures the work against gravity done by solar driven evaporation and convection.

    In the end, almost all of our energy sources other than nuclear and geothermal are derived indirectly from solar photons. This is why environmentalists who are interested in long term sustainability are so ideologically committed to solar power. In the end it's the only energy source other than geothermal that human beings can reach some form of long term equilibrium with.
  • I wonder how long before they get an "offer" from the oil industry in exchange for them moving their research in a "slightly different direction" (read: give up).

    Sorry for the slightly cynical view of things, but I'm sure its what will go through an oil baron's head when he reads about this :)
  • Wouldn't it make a good hybrid engine? I would think that a hydrogen/electric engine would work quite nicely. What's more the electric utility could ALSO use hydrogen....
  • Think about this: Solar energy is the most efficient source of energy on the planet. However large portions of the planet do not allow 365 days a year solar stations due to cliamte considerations(Seattle). This method of extracting hydrogen would be good for those portions of the world with poor sunlight coverage. Storing the gas has become safer than it was in 1936.
  • While I realize the need for a better source of energy is not an Ameri-centric problem, and that the world needs to look at and use alternate fuels, one problem I can see, at least for America, to the slow adaption of alternate fuels, is a large, if crazy one:

    The American male "macho" attitude.

    You see, most alternate fuel concept cars I have seen, that worked, had little "get up and go", so to speak. Many would start out slowly, build up speed, then be running normally. Electric cars are the slowest in acceleration (although I do know of the Wired article on electric drag racing, so maybe there is hope), but most alternate fuel vehicles are dismal in the acceleration figures. Maybe this can be improved on in time (I am sure it can).

    However, if these vehicles are released (on the American market), they have to have accelleration figures and horsepower to match a gasoline car (and you better bet the FUD will fly by marketing on this), if it is to be adopted in America.

    Personally, I wouldn't give a damn, as long as I can still accelerate fast enough to get out of harm's way. But, as we see in America with the SUV's and sports cars on the road, faster and bigger are what the public wants, and it doesn't seem like alternate fuels are delivering on that.
  • The basketball team helps support the school, the football team helps support the school...
    While apologists for college athletics often make this claim, it's just not true. Almost every college has to charge students to fund athletic programs, because sports programs don't make money. Nor should they; it's long past time to stop using our colleges as minor leagues for football and basketball, damn it.
  • I remember hearing that the planet was running out of fossil fuels faster than it was producing them. I also remember hear the inverse of that later on.
    Putting aside some fringe theories about how the Earth is just naturally full of hydrocarbons, the planet's not producing a significant amount of fossil fuels now. You need to have lot of biomass trapped in sedimentary rock for a few million years to get coal, natural gas, or oil.

    What is happening is that extraction techniques are becoming more extreme, both in the depth of drilling and in where we're willing to drill, so that we're extracting fossil fuels from previously inaccessable reserves.

    Of course, even if fossil fuels were unlimited, they're not practical as fuels in the long term because of the greenhouse effect. Only fusion - directly from a reactor on Earth, or indirectly through sunlight into photovoltatics, weather phenomenea (wind, hydro, OTECs), or biomass - is a practical long-term energy source.

  • erm - correct me if I am wrong of course, but doesn't it use the hydrogen to make simple sugars and starches, and release the oxygen?
    --
  • I guess it's patent based around process and discovery of process. Much in the same way you can have the madness of naturally occuring genetic material being patented by companies... Justified through process of use and extraction...
    I don't dispute that (well, I do, but that is another matter <grin>) what I *do* dispute is that their discovery required enough effort to justify a patent - this is stuff a high-school project could have done.....
    --
  • I have a feeling this should have a "patent gone mad" icon rather than a genius one - that they have noticed that standard alge, deprived of sulphur, produce Hydrogen is of course a useful product of research, but seems to rank below discovering that rubber dropped on a hot stove vulcanises - and they rejected that one fast enough.....
    --
  • It was aluminum powder. All the structural stuff was coated with various super-flammable laquers. And at least some people knew how very dangerous the aluminum powder was and how flammable the craft as a whole was. One of the engineers sent a note (basically a "memo") to the higher-ups, who didn't bother to act on the fact that they were building a hydrogen bag with tinder.
  • Though the obvious next steps would be to first alter it genetically to stay constantly in "auxillary power" mode, and then try to improve hydrogen yield with further genetic engineering. Though in all likelihood they'd end up with something to fragile to survive for long in the real world.
  • What an odd comparison. The Hindenberg was using Hydrogen gas as a source of buoyancy, not fuel. Although you're right about the explosive doping compound (look here [about.com] for more info), the whole point of using hydrogen as a fuel is that it is *combustible*. Its explosiveness is what makes it a good fuel.

    smallstar

  • This whole story is really depressing. Not the news, but the quality of ideas and presentation. First the article itself, with a slew of real bone-headed nonsense. What does "a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles" mean? Didn't anyone notice that the two quantities being compared are in different units and dimensions? (How long does it take to produce enough hydrogen of several cars for a week?). Then there's that incredible peice of non-sense: "What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen". Duh... This is either incredibly self-serving or unbelievably ignorant (ever heard of Solar Cells and Electrolysis?). These aren't the only flaws in a very depressingly badly written paper - as others have pointed out.

    Then the /.'ers strike - two standard issue idiot-paranoid "oil companies will suppress" postings. Gee folks, who would manufacture the hydrogen, distribute it and retail it at the gas stations (yes, where else do you think it would go?)? Maybe the oil companies? Ever think that perhaps their profits would go UP if we switched to a hydrogen economy? (They wouldn't have to pay Arabs, Hispanics and Russians for the nationalized oil reserves).

    Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.

    Come on, folks, you can do better than this! (or am I just having a really bad day)?

  • Responses:

    1 & 2: Water comes out of the tailpipe with gasoline, diesel and whatever else gets burnt that has hydrogen in it and uses oxygen as the oxidizer. Just with H2 as the fuel, the _only_ significant reaction product is water. Water will not likely drip out of the tailpipe after the exhaust system is warm. So LA does not have _this_ to worry about for flooding. =-]

    3. Yes, fueling stations need to be careful, but they already have to be careful. The likelyhood of storing H2 in liquid form is so remote as to be incomputable. It just wouldn't be done.

    In response to the other posts, I abbreviated. I left out the metal hydride storage, water injection and fuel cells on purpose. Really =-]

    I'd like them to use turbines instead of fuel cells because turbines have better instantaneous power. Unless the fuel cell is hooked up to the flywheel power storage system I saw in Discover a few years back (4.2KWh/wheel with 50HP apiece instantaneous power output), then we'd have good acceleration. I drive a big, powerful car because I think it's safer to get out of the way of an accident than to be stuck in some little piece of crap econo-box deathtrap =-]
  • MSNBC.com has an article about this. Unfortunately the site is being stupid and won't give me the exact URL. Look for the News article "Scientists say they've struck oil with algae."
  • Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way.
    It's still a huge breakthrough because the collector, far from being highly-refined semiconductors, is as cheap as water (it is water, and a little green scum). Further, it has enormous possibilities for improvement. If I recall correctly, algae such as Chlorella have a photosynthetic efficiency up to 50%. If even 1/4 of this productivity can be harvested as hydrogen, you'd get something like 170 watts per square meter peak (maybe 1/4 of that average) already in the form of storable, transmissible chemical fuel. In case you hadn't noticed, storage and transmission have been the bugaboos of the alternate-energy scene. All of a sudden they look a lot less difficult.
    Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere.
    Who says you'll buy H2? You might buy methanol catalytically produced from CO2 and H2. Methanol (M85) has been on sale for years as motor fuel in California. Methanol goes into jerry-cans just fine.
    Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.
    All you need is carbon and hydrogen. From CO2 and H2, you can proceed directly to methane or ethylene using the proper catalysts. Ethylene takes you straight to polyethylene. I'm not a chemist and can't tell you what it would take to make other polymer building blocks like butadiene, styrene and acrylonitrile, but I doubt it's all that difficult. The oil industry may die due to cheap H2, but the plastics industry will hardly hiccup.
    --
  • But what about the OPEC nations? What happens to the Middle Eastern nations? What happens to Mexico, Congo, Indonesia and Scotland/Norway?
    OPEC goes back to irrelevance, as their black goo is seen as the nasty, water-polluting, smog-forming, climate-changing stuff it is. Imagine how many wars would NOT have happened in the Middle East in the last 50 years if there weren't any money to be had in oil. (I suppose they could farm algae, but it's not like they have a monopoly on sunlight.) Mexico, Congo and Indonesia have other natural resources and might even benefit from cheaper energy by using their production at home to make products for export. Scotland and Norway are industrialized countries with educated populations; they'll find something to do, they aren't stupid.
    --
  • Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it.
    Or just combine it with carbon to make a denser fuel, burn the fuel in a fuel cell, and save the reaction products as highly carbonated soda water. Off-load the fizzy-water at the same time you load more fuel. More discussion of this concept is here [egroups.com].
    --
  • If this is really as big as you think it is (and I'm not convinced yet), these people and institutions should get both fame AND compensation for this invention.
    The scientists who did this work are employed by the University of California at Berkeley and NREL, the NATIONAL Renewable Energy Laboratory. We, the people of the United States, paid for its development. It is a work-for-hire, and We the People own it. On the other hand, plenty of fame and merit raises are definitely in order.
    --
  • I'll bet that the biomass generators aren't used because they can't compete with fossil methane (natural gas).
    --
  • The advantage of H2 is that even if you took the most inefficient way of using it as a fuel - burning it - the byproduct is totally harmless and recyclable.
    The other advantage is that you don't have to collect and fix carbon (and incur evaporative losses of water) to create hydrogen. Carbon is about 100 ppm of the atmosphere, or maybe 120 milligrams per cubic meter of air. Hydrogen is available at 110 grams per liter of water. No comparison.
    I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane.
    Oh, are you laboring under the delusion that there is no natural gas industry because of greenhouse-warming issues? Think again.
    --
  • I don't know what pressure propane is stored at in a car's fuel tank.
    If I recall correctly, propane boils around 150 PSI (gauge) at high ambient temperatures (90 F). At 20 below 0 (F) or so, its vapor pressure falls to atmospheric and you can't get any fuel flow. Therefore, propane-fuelled vehicles using natural flow (as opposed to in-tank fuel pumps and ported fuel injection) would be unable to operate under winter conditions typical in Canada, the plains and mountains. (As far as I know, nobody builds fuel-injection systems for propane, they all vaporize the liquid and carburete it into the intake air.)
    --
  • True, but hydrogen cannot explode spontaneously by exothermic decomposition.
    --
  • Fuel value of gasoline is about 19,000 BTU/lb.
    Fuel value of hydrogen is about 52,000 BTU/lb.

    You were saying?
    --

  • Water will be coming out of the tailpipe and will be extensively present in the engine. Won't this cause a LOT of problems in places where it is very cold?
    It's very obvious that you don't live in the Midwest or Northeast, because you'd see this happening all the time with gasoline cars. Gasoline produces roughly 1 molecule of water for every molecule of CO2. When the exhaust system of the car is warm, this just comes out as water vapor. When the exhaust system is cold, water condenses on the cold metal. The exhaust warms up fairly quickly, and the water briefly plays a game of hopscotch as it flows as liquid or is blown as vapor down to the muffler, vacating the forward sections of the plumbing first. During the warmup process it is not at all uncommon to see a stream of liquid water dripping or even flowing out of the tailpipe. Once the entire exhaust system is heated to 90-odd Celsius, all the water can remain as vapor without condensing and you do not see any further liquid drips. This is why your Los Angeles scenario is impossible (though not undesirable, LA could use the water).
    --
  • There are numerous examples of oil producers buying patents for more efficent engines and alternative power only to bury them to protect there market share.
    Okay, suppose that's so. They'd still be patents. They're published, by definition; the information is available to anyone as of the time the patent is granted. We've been hearing about these conspiracies to suppress the "100 MPG carburetor" for at least as long as I've been alive, which is longer than the term of any patent I've ever heard of. These inventions are now in the public domain. They can be legally built and sold by anyone. So why, if there's the slightest shred of truth to the rumors about how great these inventions were, aren't we swimming in 100-MPG cars and the like from the patents filed in the 40's through the 70's?

    Simple answer: we don't see them because these inventions never existed. Yet the rumors continue because a large number of people are ignorant jerks who think the world owes them an effortless living, and since the laws of Nature could never make it difficult to accomplish something worthwhile, it must be some person causing their failure.

    It's only one small step from there to the thinking which produced the Salem witch trials.
    --

  • In the most energetically efficient biosystems
    You mean, like a cornfield or a forest? We're not talking about big organisms with lots of overhead. We're talking about one-celled algae. I seem to recall (read years ago, no reference handy) that Chlorella can hit a photosynthetic efficiency of 50%. Even if that's off by a factor of ten it is still quite impressive, because it is converting water directly to a storable, transmissible fuel. To store electricity, you have to convert it to something else.
    While capital costs of solar cells are high, they (unlike biological systems) require virtually no maintenance or cycling.
    The biological system is self-maintaining; the biological elements reproduce themselves at no cost to the user. This is the huge advantage of the scum-pond over the solar panel; the pond is really, really cheap per unit area.
    --
  • It's fun to go nuts over these reports, and dream of a care-free life, but please, let's think about the overall thermodynamics of the situation.
    If you had done that first, and looked at the amount of availability (the thermodynamic term for energy which can actually be converted to work) going to waste all around you, you'd have a very different take on the situation. Guaranteed. I'm even willing to put money on it.
    What's really going on here?
    I'm glad you asked me that.

    What's going on here is that someone has found a way to use a natural (harmless to the environment, because already part of it) self-reproducing (cheap) organism to provide large amounts of chemical energy in a very useful form using what appears to be inexpensive methods. This is a huge advance because the expense of collection is radically lowered.

    Is it realistic to expect this source of solar energy to compete with solar panels, which provide direct electric current, and which do not suffer from the inate energetic inefficiencies (I'm talking metabolic pathways here, not current efficiency levels) of biological processes?
    In a word, yes. Photovoltaic panels and batteries supply power at a cost of about US$.90 per kilowatt-hour. Sunlight, by comparison, is extremely cheap. Pond surface is relatively cheap. If you need something like fuel to run a vehicle (or hydrogen for the fuel cell running your 2002-model laptop), tapping some H2 from the green stuff growing in the pond is likely to be cheaper than converting to electricity via PV, then to H2 via electrolysis. Storing hydrogen isn't a big problem, it can be stashed in metallic hydrides relatively cheaply or chemically converted to other fuels. CO2 and H2 can be catalytically converted to H2O and CH4 (methane, natural gas), ethylene, and I presume methanol as well. Methane is a terrific fuel, ethylene is a great synthetic chemical (think polyethylene plastic just for starters) and methanol is the fuel of choice for some newly-invented fuel cells.

    For further reading see:
    Burning Backwards (New Scientist) [newscientist.com], an article about converting CO2 back to methanol enzymatically (powered by hydrogen to convert NAD back to NADH), and
    Viridian Note 129 [bespoke.org], regarding methanol fuel cells.
    --

  • Probably. There is some excess hydrogen in the fuel mix (it cools the flame and recovers energy that is otherwise just dissociating water molecules, and it improves the exhaust velocity and thus the performance), but I don't believe this causes pollution as such. The only pollutant I would expect would be some nitrogen oxides produced as the engine exhaust mixes with the air, and this should be small due to the pressure being low and the reducing environment (from the excess hydrogen). NOx production is favored in high-pressure oxydizing environments, and by the time the SSME exhaust hits air it has expanded and cooled quite a bit.
    --
  • Have to see if they need water or not, though.
    Of course they need water. Where do you think the hydrogen comes from? Plants create oxygen by cracking water molecules and discarding the oxygen. (I haven't studied biology since HS nor chemistry since my first year, and even I knew that.)
    --
  • You say that the problem with electricity is the storage. Have you ever tried to store a scum pond?
    They freeze over in winter here in the North, but come spring they're soon covered with scum again. What's to store?
    And how would you capture the gasses from this wondrous self-maintaining scum pond?
    The gasses don't come from the pond, they come from the scum. You pump the scum into sulfur-free tanks and wait. The scum runs out of sulfur and starts the hydrolytic metabolism. After a while, you dump the energy-depleted scum back in the pond and pump in a new batch. The hydrogen is available for immediate consumption, storage or chemical synthesis. It's very easy to synthesize methane and methanol out of hydrogen and CO2.
    I think I'll stick to using unleaded gasoline for my car, at least for a few more decades.
    Technology advances and legality might catch you unawares. Does your car radio use tubes? Do you spot-clean your clothes with carbon tetrachloride? You might soon find yourself buying a fuel-cell hybrid car because bio-methanol is cheaper than gasoline after all the carbon taxes. If you could buy one that carried 4 people and gave you 100 MPG, who wouldn't?
    --
  • I'm disappointed that the press release does nothing to speculate on the efficiency of the entire system.
    Me too. The meaningless choice of units (typical of scientifically-illiterate "journalists") makes it impossible to infer anything.
    Is photosynthesis-hydrogen-combustion a more efficient way to extract solar energy than photovoltaic-battery/flywheel-electric or steam-turbine-electric? Is it any cheaper?
    I'll bet dollars to donuts that it is less efficient, but the cheap (and perhaps multi-purpose) pond/collector makes it likely to be more cost-effective. Solar cells are still around 3 dollars per peak watt, and that's before you even think of storing or converting the juice for some other purpose.
    Would a pond get hot enought to kill the algae?
    I doubt it; brewer's yeast also operates on anaerobic metabolism, and I have not noticed that fermentation vessels warm up much even when they are blowing off CO2 at the rate of liters a minute. I haven't measured the temperature, but if it was a great deal warmer I'd have noticed.
    --
  • The "photosynthetic efficiency" you describe as being 50% probably refers to the percentage of light absorbed over a small range of wavelengths or something similar; it thus has little to do with the overall percentage of energy extracted from the sun. Otherwise I can't rationalize the figure of 50%.
    Contradicting your previous fractional-percent figure is this BBC article [bbc.co.uk] where they finally quote an efficiency figure for conversion of sunlight to hydrogen: 10%. That is ONE TENTH. (This is the projected efficiency rather than the current figure, true, but even 1% now is pretty impressive considering the size of the collectors we could marshall.)

    This is starting to look like the future.
    --

  • When I said "I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane" I meant just that. I didn't know particularly why it wasnt used so much.
    I don't know the situation in Wales, but the USA is criss-crossed by large pipelines carrying methane. The USA burns it to the tune of almost 20 trillion (that is 2 times ten to the thirteenth power) cubic feet every year (see this USDOE page [doe.gov] for my source). Europe imports a great deal of it from Russia. Exactly what did you mean by "wasn't used so much"?
    --
  • I wonder how long before we run out of oili to a degree severe enough that the oil industries are forced to invest in more research like this just to stay afloat.
  • Well, I don't really understand why this is any different from other biological systems that are known to produce hydrogen. The first three attached references are for microorganisms that produce hydrogen gas as a normal part of their life cycle. In the second reference you can see that the rate of this process has even been measured at about 12 mL per liter of fermentation per hour. This is thee times as fast as what was just announced at Berkeley. The last two references show how some organism can use hydrogen as an energy source. They absorb and "eat" hydrogen. That means that an enzyme in their metabolism can oxidize hydrogen. Enzymatic reactions are all, in principle, reversible. Thus, it is not surprising that a bacteria could catalyze the reverse reaction., the electrochemical reduction of some substrate resulting in hydrogen.

    Smooches --- > O'Biquody

    References:

    1) Electrochemical study of reversible hydrogenase reaction of Desulfovibrio vulgaris cells with methyl viologen as an electron carrier.
    Anal Chem 1999 May 1;71(9):1753-9

    2) Studies on kinetics of substrate utilization of hydrogen production from wastewater with immobilized cells of photosynthetic bacteria.
    Chin J Biotechnol. 1995;11(1):69-77.

    3) Methanogens outcompete sulphate reducing bacteria for H2 in the human colon.
    Gut. 1994 Aug;35(8):1098-101.

    4)Fe(III) as an electron acceptor for H2 oxidation in thermophilic anaerobic enrichment cultures from geothermal areas.
    Extremophiles 1997 May;1(2):106-9

    5) Purification and molecular characterization of the H2 uptake membrane-bound NiFe-hydrogenase from the carboxidotrophic bacterium Oligotropha carboxidovorans.
    J Bacteriol. 1997 Oct;179(19):6053-60.

  • Finally, a use for all those 2 liter Coke bottles:

    Connect them up with PVC pipe, some valves and, bingo, your roof is a threat to OPEC!

  • Not every college sees this benefit. Also, I'm not arguing for turning the NCAA sports into money machines...

    It's just that a number of schools with good teams (UConn, St. John's, etc.) indeed *do* make a lot of money from their programs. These are schools with huge, well-known teams that win consistently. I don't see why a school with a very good, well-known science program shouldn't reap the same benefit.
  • Yes, educational facilities that are spending how many bazillions on research should be entirely funded with taxes?

    Wouldn't you rather see the experiments fund themselves as much as possible?

    The basketball team helps support the school, the football team helps support the school, why shouldn't the science department help fund the school?
  • This is a fascinating discovery, but it is nowhere near anything that "could revolutionise the energy industry". When we read the small print it turns out they are getting 3 milli-litres (cc) of hydrogen *gas* per hour per litre of culture.

    This is an absurdly small amount. Orders of magnitude less than you could produce using photovoltaics and an electrolysis cell.

    The real problem with most bio-mass energy projects is getting decent energy density. The most practical (so far) involve using high-yield crop plants to produce oil and/or feedstock for methane fermentation.

    You can buy rape-seed diesel oil in Germany that is produced sort-of economically (tax-breaks) in this way. Makes your snazzy new turbo-diesel car smell like an old-fashioned UK fish-and-chip shop (Greasy Spoon kitchen for our US cousins) ;-)
  • Pardon my general science ignorance but couldn't the production of hydrogen also be done with a DC current produced by solar power and then fed through water? (Sorry old data records on general chemistry class have bit-migrated. *grin*)

    Or is the amount of current needed per amount of hydrogen produced not workable?



    The Tick - "Spoon!"
  • There are two ways of storing hydrogen for use as a fuel. One is to compress and pressurize it, just like propane -- with all the same problems and risks. Propane or natural gas bottles can go boom, and so can hydrogen.

    The other means is to store the gas in a (heavy) metal hydride. This is far safer but has a problem of its own -- those metals ARE heavy, thus limiting range per amount of energy much as batteries do for electric vehicles.

    NOVA several years back had a very interesting demo of this. A can of gasoline, a bottle of propane, and a tank of metal hydride were each set out on a range and shot at. The gasoline made a fireball and lingering fire. The propane bottle detonated. The metal hydride just hissed.

    Hydrogen isn't perfect, but if a cheap means of production works out, it could mean trading current fuel's imperfections for a better set of problems.

  • Hmm? (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    The first viable hydrogen producing method? How about using solar power to electrolize water? As I recall, all you need is a little water and some electricity...

  • My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come.

    Maybe you will come, but history has shown that most people won't. See many electric cars on the road? They are heavily subsidized, and the public still runs away in droves. Basically, the reason is because they suck. The range stinks, and they are built like golf carts with delusions of grandeur.

    For a new vehicle to succeed, it's going to have to be superior to the gasoline engine in some significant way (cost, performance, etc), or it's doomed to failure. Pollution superiority is not enough, simply because modern cars are already almost non-polluting.


    --

  • Have you ever owned a diesel car? I have. You may or may not remember they got pretty popular in the late 70s when gas got expensive (I didn't own one then). The minor superiority that they had was gas mileage. When gas got cheaper, people ran away once again.

    Why? Because they have other problems. They are very noisy. The performance is not that great (good torque, though). They are much more polluting (ever seen a mis-tuned diesel smoking down the highway?). They last a long time, but that just means that you have to live with the noise longer. :)

    Problem is, because it takes more to make a diesel -- the engines tend to cost more, so the auto manufacturers have very little incentive to use them. [Imagine a company CEO saying to the company stock holders "sure, now our cars last three times as long -- but that's okay, we made a one time $500 extra profit..."]

    Oh, please. Auto manufacturers make whatever the people are willing to buy (and did when there was a demand for diesels). Now imagine that same CEO saying to the shareholders, "Uh, we know the people are clamoring for diesels, but we didn't want to make them, and our marketshare is now down to 5%." Hasn't happened yet.


    --

  • RTFA (Score:2)

    by Jerom ( 96338 )
    They have to put the algae in very specific
    conditions in order to make them produce
    H2. (no sulfur etc)

    There is no danger of these algae escaping
    (in fact they're very common and can be found
    in water al over the planet)

    J.

  • I wonder how long before they get an "offer" from the oil industry in exchange for them moving their research in a "slightly different direction" (read: give up).

    I think you're assuming the oil companies are inherently evil. When in fact they're just ruthless moneygrubbing companies. They're in the business of supplying energy. This sounds like it will be right up their alley. It will require automated production facilites on a vast scale, with highly trained staff, skilled in handling highly flammable material. Hmmmm... Sounds like a refinery to me.

    But the thing that will attract them is the release from liability. Hydrogen doesn't pollute, so they'd have a golden opportunity to go from "most hated industry" to something kinder. It would be a major PR coup. No more drilling for oil. No more uncertain, expensive exploration. And to top it off, they'd get to lock in their profits.

    There's a downside of course... I'd expect them to move to maintain their profits during conversion. This would probably look like foot dragging, but let's face it, we're talking about billions of dollars playing musical chairs, and this pulls a couple seats out and stops the music. It will take time for them to figure out how to make this work financially without upsetting too many apple carts.

    Other potential problems:

    1. Assuming they end up genetically engineering some algae to improve yield, or eliminate the "rest" phase, what impact will this have on the environment if/when it gets released? You can pretty much be assured that anything done on this scale will end up getting released to the environment. (imagine the atmoshere slowly getting reduced to nitrogen and water vapor via "feral" sea algae!)

    2. What's the conversion effeciency? You get something like 1200 watts (from memory, don't roast me) of energy per hour per square foot of land via sunlight. How many square feet of land do we need to cover with algae ponds? Let's see... My truck has 143 hp, 745 watts per hp, that's 106Kw... divide by 1200... allow for 50% loss... we're talking 178 square feet. Assuming my numbers are close. So a 10 foot by 18 foot pond would produce enough hydrogen to run my truck for say 8 hours a day. Not bad. Somehow I suspect the losses will be higher. Solar panels are at 22%, so that's the lowest acceptable return. Assuming 200 million similar cars in America, that's 35.6 billion square feet, or 817,264 acres. As amazing at that sounds, it's only something like 1/30th of the farmland in California alone.

    3. What environmental impact will the creation of 900,000+ acres of ponds have? (In the U.S. alone, just for cars...)

    But back to "what goes through an oil baron's head"... That's easy... "Can I make more money off this than oil, what's the cost of conversion, and can I convert profitably?" Sadly, that's pretty much it.

    Temkin

  • The Hindenburg would have exploded even if it was filled with air.

    The crazy Germans used iron oxide and aluminum in the doping process to seal the fabric. This makes thermite. Thermite burns rather quickly, very hot, and ignites very easily all on its own.

    Add a static discharge, and POOF.

    Had the Hindenburge actually developed a puncture the size of a house, then caught fire at that puncture (without the skin burning), it would have LANDED and everyone would have more than likely walked away.

  • hmmm, NH3 as fuel? wouldn't you be producing huge amounts of NOx compounds in this reaction?(no thanx) also what about the efficency of the haber-bosch(endothermic) process to produce the NH3 in the first place. im guessing its not fantastic. but i do agree that fusion is the way to go. too bad congress killed funding for ITER, eh?
  • Does anyone realize what this new source of hydrogen REALLY means???

    I can finally build that fleet of death-zepplins to conquer the world. And if they try to shoot back, we crash onto our enemies in a raging inferno!

    The Kaiser will be pleased...

  • Better than Methane? (Score:3)

    by coreman ( 8656 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:27AM (#1254068) Homepage
    Remember the whole bit of Methane production from cow digestion? methane is also a cheap source of hydrogen and yet the conversion of biological waste into Methane as a fuel hasn't gone too far. Certainly the byproducts of straight hydrogen use are better but using macroscopic biomass fermentation might be easier than something that has specific microenvironment needs.

  • Patenting it?!?! (Score:3)

    by mjuarez ( 12463 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:24AM (#1254069)
    I lived for the day this announcement would come... it was just a speculation a few years ago... and now they're going to patent it? Come on guys... it's supposedly for the well-being of humanity.

    I suppose you put a lot of work and money into it... however, I can't (don't want to) imagine a single company holding a grasp of the entire industrialized world, which at some time could come to depend entirely on hydrogen, instead of oil.

    How about giving away the patent into the public domain? That way, your name will be remembered for all eternity, as the inventor of the first viable hydrogen-producing method, while at the same time saying that you weren't some kind of greedy businessman.

    Just my thoughts on it.

  • Hydrogen fuel cells (Score:3)

    by Industrial Disease ( 16177 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:20AM (#1254070) Homepage
    This is especially interesting in light of recent advances in fuel cell [msnbc.com] technology. (Sorry about the source.) I'd love it if my next car ran on a hydrogen fuel cell.

  • Re:Minor issues (Score:3)

    by Industrial Disease ( 16177 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @05:24AM (#1254071) Homepage
    For one, if you burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine...
    Which is why you use fuel cells [msnbc.com], which generate electrical current directly, instead of IC.
  • That is, dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).

    Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

    For more information, go to http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/ [circus.com].

    Ban DHMO!
    --
  • Newsflash! People can drink "pure water"!

    "Hydrogen is so clean burning that what comes out of the exhaust pipe is pure water," Melis said. "You can drink it."


    --

  • patent (Score:3)

    by Basje ( 26968 ) <bas@bloemsaat.org> on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:28AM (#1254074) Homepage
    As stated, it hasn't held up against 'peer review' yet. That is a direct result from pursuing the patent. Anything published, cannot be patented. They have to postpone publishing until the patent is officially pending.

    The fact that they filed a patent, may indicate that the scientists themselves believe it's important. However may not mean that we're even close to hydrogen fueled machines. That's what was also said of nuclear fusion some years ago. It always takes much longer than expected.

    ----------------------------------------------

  • Storage... (Score:3)

    by schon ( 31600 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:30AM (#1254075)
    This is great news, if it works, but the biggest problem with it is storing the hydrogen.
    I'm not talking about it's volatility (although that's an issue).. It's my understanding that hydrogen is a difficult thing to store efficiently - it's a gas, so you will get significantly less mileage out if it than you would from an equivalent volume of gasoline. It would annoy me if I had to stop to refuel every hour on the Highway (if there even were pitstops that frequent.) (I'm not knocking the technology - it's a good start.. but this only gets us halfway...)

  • Re:Storage... (Score:3)

    by Kintanon ( 65528 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:50AM (#1254076) Homepage Journal
    There is actually a fourth way to store it as well, though it's similar to your second option. You can store hydrogen in a steel container that is filled with honeycombed carbon. And it will hold a LOT more than a regular non honeycombed container. I think the difficult part in that instance is how to release the hydrogen when it's needed since it's not under much pressure.

    Kintanon

  • Re:Patenting it?!?! (Score:3)

    by smallstar ( 68747 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @05:04AM (#1254077)
    The way I understand it, patenting scientific discoveries is not about fame or about establishing "a grasp of the entire industrialized world" - it's about money. Research is very very expensive, and patenting allows people and institutions to benefit financially from their discoveries and fund further research.

    If you want all scientific discoveries to be put in the public domain, how do you propose to fund the research that makes those discoveries in the first place?

  • Two Words (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @05:32AM (#1254078) Homepage Journal
    500 litres of H2? I got two words for you, buddy:

    Ford Pinto

  • The Holy Grail? (Score:3)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:17AM (#1254079)

    I remember reading about the 'Holy Grail' of Hydrogen Farms back when I was eight or nine in one of my 'Science Fiction or Science Fact' books. If these scientists really have cracked this problem, then this could be as fundamental a shift in energy generation as the nuclear reactor.

    Of course, Hydrogen is not necessarily the most well behaved fuel (witness the Hindenberg disaster, although in that case there is concern that doping the skin of the Hindenberg with a mixture resembling gunpowder was also a problem...) but the possibilities of having a reasonably clean environmentally friendly fuel ready to take over from Crude oil derivatives is something we should be thankful for.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Not Significant (Score:3)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:42AM (#1254080) Journal
    The consumer cost of electricity and natural gas are 2/3 distribution costs. It will be many many years before hydrogen (even if it could be made for free) will ever make it to our homes or autos. The USA has enourmous amounts of natural gas, and we haven't even started looking into the methane hydrate reserves found offshore.
    Environmentally, we could make some immediate gains by getting rid of the suv's and buying one of those new hybrid hondas! The usa uses an amazingly disproportionate amount of fuel vs. popluation.

  • Press Releases and slopy procedure: (Score:3)

    by Seb Rabit ( 153249 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @07:36AM (#1254081)
    Goddamit! The correct prcedure is observation, hypothesis, experimental falsification, paper, peer review, publishment, repeat experimentation, aceptance and Scientific proof. If this thing does turn out to be good (and bear in mind if it gets it's energy from the sun ALL it is a rather efficient solar cell, after all, I dont think they have found a way to make Algae break the law of conservation of Energy, and if it does turn out to be feasable... (work out the energy density of the sun and it is NOT feasable for large scale gneration of power. The Earth recieves 1.3 KW per square meter of sunlight, so you would have to have an area of 462 thousand square meters to have an equivalent of a 600MW Powerstation. 600000/1.3=461538.5, and that assumes that ALL of the solar energy is being turned into hydrogen gass.) And then you have to work out how to collect the hydrogen bubling off. Thats a lot of water, a lot of neutrients, and a lot of plastic/glass sheeting (the only way I can think of imidiately to allow sunlight through but retain hydrogen.) This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that these guys are not talking about saving the world, they are fishing for a research grant. This is probably why they went for a press release rather than the normal procedures, because the peer review would involve people doing feasability studies, and it would appear asa comment. It would become a scientific curiosity rather thana great new idea. BUT... it does have aplication for making hydrocarbons I guess. But for power generation, no.

  • Re:Minor issues (Score:4)

    by GregWebb ( 26123 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @06:15AM (#1254082)
    Pedant here...

    The Hindenburg fire wasn't started by the Hydrogen, it was started by the envelope. It was cloth, doped in either aluminium or iron powder - I forget which. Anyway, pretty explosive stuff. As it flew through the highly charged air with an electrical storm about, it got very wet and charged itelf. Problem, though - the individual cloth panels weren't properly earthed to the frame. So, as the mooring rope goes to ground, some panels discharge and some don't. Somewhere along the line this caused a spark on a sheet of cloth doped in an explosive (in effect - and it wasn't known as an explosive then, so it's not as stupid as it sounds) which set that panel alight, which triggered others. As that burns, it heats up the hydrogen so that catches fire and the whole thing goes up in smoke.

    Two problems have perpetuated the myth about it being a pure hydrogen fire: The film and the camera angle. The film was black and white so you couldn't see the colour of the flames, while the fire broke out on the tail of the opposite side to the camera so wasn't picked up on film until it had already taken hold. If you'd had colour film you'd have seen (they got eyewitness reports to test this one) that the flaems were an orangey-red, whereas hydrogen burns with a very pale blue IIRC.

    Hydrogen's flammable, sure, but it doesn't just explode all by itself. Hydrogen airships are perfectly viable, now we know more about the properties of these things.

    Does anyone have the proper details? This is all from memory.

    Greg

  • Re:Storage... (Score:5)

    by stevelinton ( 4044 ) <sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk> on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:39AM (#1254083) Homepage
    One option is to store it as a very cold liquid, requiring a well insulated fuel tank. This is possible, but a bit hard to handle safely. If the tank cracks, or some heat gets in, you will have rather a lot of hydrogen gas trying to get out, and hydrogen gas is explosive in proportions of something like 4% to 80% in air.

    Another is to store it under moderate pressure (a few atmospheres) adsorbed onto the surface of a metal dust. In this model your fuel tank is lightly pressurized, and full of dust. You pump hydrogen gas in under pressure, and it is adsorbed, but when you let some out and reduce the pressure slightly, it is released again. The problem here is that the tank is heavy.

    The third option is to store it as a gas, under very high pressure. This requires a really serious pressure vessel as your fuel tank, which is likely to be heavy, and you will need to engineer the tank to seal itself and remain intact in a crash, adding still more weight, and a rather heavy object flying through the wreckage flattening people.

    It might be better to use the hydrogen to make something which is a bit easier to store and not too much more polluting, like methanol.
  • Having studied the so-called "hydrogen economy" for a few years right now, I applaud these researchers, but I still tell my engineering "work associates" not to get excited yet, because so far there is not a low cost, safe method of transporting "average consumer" quantities of the finished fuel.

    That said, I also have read of research (sorry, I haven't found a good web link yet) into diatom algae that grow readily in warm climates and that are 50% oil by weight. The cool thing about the oil produced by processing this particular type of algae is that it can be quickly converted into biodiesel and run in existing diesel engines -- from home generators, to trucks, all the way up to large marine diesels and diesel power generating plants.

    Equally significant, the algae removes as much CO2 from the atmosphere as can be burned in the fuel-- so there is no net gain in the so-called "greenhouse effect".

    So what I am looking forward to are the so-called hybrid diesel electric engines, and for someone to develop turbine engines using biodiesel or biodiesel like fuels. Then maybe we can at last grow our own fuels and leave the environmentally damaging, old-earth fuels alone.

  • Found the link: http://www.nrel.gov/lab/pao/ftlb.html [nrel.gov]

    " Research conducted in these labs is aimed at producing biodiesel fuel from microalgae and other plants. Biodiesel fuel is made from oils and fats found in microalgae. It can be substituted for diesel fuel or used as an additive. Biodiesel generates fewer pollutants than typical diesel fuels.

    Quoting what I found to be the more interesting part of the page:

    1. Typically, microalgae are grown in ponds, harvested and the oils extracted. The extracted oils are chemically reacted with alcohols to produce diesel fuels. Research in the laboratory is directed towards genetic enhancement of the fat and oil content of the algae to make the biodiesel fuel product more cost-competitive by 2010."
    My opinion? to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive", if you build it we will come. (And because of competition, the costs will come down anyway.) Secondarily -- will these algae be patented like Monsanto's new seed crops such that only big businesses can benefit from the research that our tax dollars pay for?

  • Minor issues (Score:5)

    by Tony Hammitt ( 73675 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:47AM (#1254086)
    For one, if you burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, you get nitrogen oxides as well as water coming out of the tailpipe. Nitrogen oxides are noxious, cause acid rain and contribute to smog. This is not the perfect solution, although as a fuel for power plants or other large-scale installations, it's about as good as methane.

    Humongous ponds of this would also tie up a large quantity of greenhouse-effect causing CO2 and of course using hydrogen for fuel will reduce the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere for a two-fold effect. That would be a Good Thing.

    Now if the car companies would just invent a catalytic converter that got rid of the nitrogen oxides and invent a safe way to store hydrogen in a car, this would be very cool. Although, hydrogen isn't all that dangerous to carry around; e.g. a lot of the people on the Hindenberg lived through the explosion (more died from falling and getting burned to death than being blown to bits).

    I'd love to have my own little hydrogen refinery pond in my back yard. I'd like to see this get developed further, but someone may come along and kill the project. Let's hope not.

  • Hydrogen as a fuel (er, energy carrier) (Score:5)

    by Neandertal ( 126319 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @05:43AM (#1254087)

    Some rambling comments about hydrogen:

    Hydrogen has been thoroughly investigated as a fuel for all kinds of uses (automotive, home heating, etc) in the 70's and 80's. The DOE even had a hydrogen powered Buick that was powered by liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen embrittlement caused turbo-charger failure, but that was solved by a bit of metalurgy. The car ran great, the hydrogen fueling station was managable, and the car had great performance and safety. They even crashed the thing once on accident, no Hindenburg. Hydrogen is probably an overall safer energy carrier than gasoline.

    However, what became clear in all my hydrogen readings and research a few years ago is that hydrogen as an energy carrier for any mobile application just plains sucks - its density is too low. Even for liquid hydrogen the tank volume is so great your vehicle looks like a mini space shuttle - small cargo space, huge tank. As far as compressed hydrogen, don't even go there. Tanks of 4,000 PSI hydrogen stuffed all over, in, and under a vehicle will get you back and forth accross town a few times. Maybe practicle for a bus. Barely. Also, there is enough energy just from the compression of the hydrogen to launch an average vehicle vertically up a few thousand feet. No thank you. (this is a risk introduced by the compression, the fact that it is hydrogen is irrelevant to this particular risk, mostly. Hydrogen does throttle hot). Compressed natural gas is even more stupid - all the drawbacks of compressed hydrogen, plus you'd still be burning a hydrocarbon. Cleaner than gasoline or diesel, yes, but still nasty. For functionality, safety and cleanliness (overall) liquid propane is still way nicer than compressed natural gas. Its liquid, very easy to fill a tank, great energy density per tank volume. Its almost as convenient as gasoline or diesel, actually, more so in some ways.

    Some people think metal hydrides will make nice hydrogen storage systems. Yeah, right. Trade massive volume for massive mass. Or, go the carbon composite adsorption route - a nice mix of volume and mass, but it still sucks. How many people want to wait tens of minutes if not hours to fill their tank? Some have proposed tank swapping: drop off an empty, pick up a full tank. So, now fueling stations become warehouses. Nice. "Sorry, we're out of full tanks right now, you'll have to wait an hour". Again, no thank you.

    Hopefully this makes it clear that the fuel (or energy carrier, as it actually is) is not the real issue, distribution and fueling stations are the issue. Hydrogen is nice cuz it doesn't have any carbon to mess up our air, but its such a pain to transfer around for any kind of mobile application. Maybe the gas companies can pipe it to your house - this would be nice, you could 'burn' it in a fuel cell, produce electricity and heat your house all at the same time. Molten carbonate fuel cells and/or solid oxide fuel cells could do this now with natural gas, hydrogen would just make it a little easier to keep the membranes from being loaded up with sulfur and other nasty crap from natural gas.

    For a mobile application we really need a hydrogen based energy carrier thats more like liquid propane. And we have one, a rather nice one. Ammonia.

    Sure, its stinky, but its relatively safe. Dumb-ass Kansas/Colorado/Nebraska farm kids (me) have been dragging HUGE tanks of ammonia around the countryside and spraying it into the ground as fertilizer for generations. It has great energy density per tank volume, and its not a hydrocarbon. The X-15 space plane flew into space on two relatively small tanks, one was ammonia, the other LOX. Remember, if you are flying in and out of the atmosphere alot (as the X-15 was designed to do) huge tanks won't cut it - too much drag.

    So, in short, making hydrogen is one small step towards a clean and sustainable energy economy that we as a race MUST move towards, that is if we want to keep breathing. NH3 is a much nicer way to move hydrogen around. Making hydrogen with the sun is cute. Maybe it will amount to something someday. I doubt it though. I honestly think Henk Monkhorst and clan are onto a much nicer path with their Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor [ufl.edu].

    Henk is the man, fusion rocks.

  • My own research.... (Score:5)

    by WhiskeyJack ( 126722 ) on Tuesday February 22, 2000 @04:37AM (#1254088)

    This parallels my own research into producing methane gas by combining rednecks and beer. The process only has one remainign hurdle to overcome: isolating the rednecks from their pickup trucks so they live long enough to provide enough methane to hit the break-even point. Unfortunately, this has proven nearly impossible (with pickup trucks apparently playing a critical role in the redneck reproductive process), resulting in the untimely (and often spectacular) demise of 87% of my test subjects within the first two days of the study (usually preceded by the words "Hold m'beer, Bubba, and watch this!"). We've also run into unexpected expenses which lead me to believe that this process doesn't hold quite so much promise as I initially projected (who could've predicted we'd need to spend $347,000 on pink garden flamingoes?), and the cost overruns make the future of this study uncertain.

    -- WhiskeyJack

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