New Way to Make Hydrogen 591
zymano writes "Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store. The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water. A new startup is trying a new way to make hydrogen. The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water. Signa has devised a way to mix sodium with silica gel or crystalline silicon to create a powder that essentially strips electrons from the sodium molecules in advance and stores them. When water is introduced, the chemical reaction proceeds calmly. The powder generates hydrogen efficiently. More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat."
The stench that launched a thousand cars (Score:5, Funny)
Michael Lefenfeld and James Dye of Signa Chemistry wanted to make rooms smell better. Instead, they stumbled on a way that could make hydrogen fuel cells a practical reality.
Who wants to bet that Michael and James have a room full of stinky unshowered nerds to thank for stumbling onto this innovation?
Re:The stench that launched a thousand cars (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The stench that launched a thousand cars (Score:3, Informative)
so I guess only one stinky unshowered nerd
who's electrolysing water? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hence here in coal rich australia our rulers are mad keen on the "Hydrogen Economy".
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:2, Interesting)
(yeah yeah yeah, you say the new process won't do that, but the coal guys have lied to us sooooo many times now that unless you can pass the no-skid-marks-in-the-briefs test I don't want to hear about it anymore.)
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just saying don't believe the hype about the so called "Hydrogen economy" being environmentally driven.
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:5, Interesting)
For industry, the advantage of hydrogen is that it's so far in the future: it means they don't have to make changes now. There are a lot of things we could do right now to cut down on foreign oil dependency and greenhouse gas emissions: require better fuel efficiency from new cars, move more quickly towards hybrid vehicles, put in more commuter trains and subways, make cities better designed for walking and cycling. But auto makers and oil companies would lose out. So instead, they throw a few million bucks at hydrogen technologies, and that lets them say "see, we really give a shit!" and then keep building monstrosities of excess like the Hummer 2.
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your mostly right, except it's called the H2H for the hydrogen version of the Hummer. (See www.hummer.com and click "Hydrogen Hummer" for a video of the governator of Kalifornia endorsing it.)
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [wikipedia.org]
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about all the people who choose to buy fuel efficient cars. Every person I know who buys them does so because it saves them a great deal of money on gas. Oil prices get up to 70 or 80 dollars a barrel(which isn't hard to imagine with production not increasing by much and China beginning to consume oil on the level of the US) and you will see very few people who are willing to spend 100 dollars to drive a hummer 100 miles. It just gets too damn expensive.
Money works both ways. Making it drives what companies will produce and saving it drives what consumers demand(in large part). So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this isn't necessarily the case. We are extremely dependent on oil, not just for cheap energy, but as a basis for making stuff. Fertilizers, plastics, lubricants and all sorts of things necessary for the current economy are derived from oil. If the price of oil goes through the roof, things just may go down the crapper.
Having said that, I hope it's not the case, that the cost of oil keeps rising, and
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Informative)
There's a GM Assembly plant near here.
Designing cities (Score:5, Insightful)
make cities better designed for walking and cycling
You know, in discussions like this someone will usually mention that cities should "be designed for X". This strikes me as a slightly silly argument:
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
Re:Designing cities (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
Zoning laws and long term urban planning can reduce the need for cars by making urban sparl less desirable for developer
Re:Designing cities (Score:4, Insightful)
Zoning laws and long term urban planning can reduce the need for cars by making urban sparl less desirable for developers... make incentives for residentual reclamation of parts of the downtown areas ect
Fair enough - that's a good point. However, the problem (as I see it) is that essentially every extant city already has a significant amount of sprawl around it; this was the result of the urban flight that took place [IIRC] from the 1950s to 1970s. Some places - like the suburbs of Chicago, e.g. Naperville - are experiencing their own housing/development booms right now. Unfortunately I don't see an opportunity to redesign such areas for at least another 50 to 75 years, and that is if an entire neighborhood can be razed/rebuilt en masse.
Perhaps
Re:Designing cities (Score:3, Interesting)
We're in for such a rude awakening much earlier than that. Long before the oil runs out, the demand is going to exceed the supply. More specifically, the supply follows a rough bell curve shape, and we are pretty much at the peak now. This means that although demand is rising faster and faster (especially as India and China start to think that their billions of people all need cars), the supply is more or less immediately going to start to decrea
Re:You obviously weren't alive in the 1970s (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. US consumers have had cheap gas so long, the effects (sprawling metro areas, big box stores) make it much harder to construct a transit system that people will use. (They'll want other people to use it so that the roads become clearer for *them*.)
Also, most other countries are smaller than the US. Amtrak has been a disaster in part because the notion of a nationwide passenger rail company does not fit well when much of the population i
Re:You obviously weren't alive in the 1970s (Score:3, Informative)
Fossil Fuels... (Score:3, Informative)
Another process in development involves bacteria that have a hydrogen waste product, if my memory serves me correctly.
Of course, solar, wind, and geothermal are also reasonable ideas.
The first person/company that is able to produce hydrogen cheaply using renewable resources will be an unbelievably good investment. (Assuming patents are taken care of properly)
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:3)
We call those "aircraft carriers." But seriously, the real problem is, how do you effeciently ship the gas from such a remote location?
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:5, Funny)
Shipping hydrogen (Score:2)
Same way you ship oil from a remote location -- using supertankers. You might even be able to use some of the capacity of these tankers on the trip back to the source of the oil, instead of sending them back empty. Then they could deliver the hydrogen to various ports along the way, or back to the source of the oil, which could use the hydrogen to run a power plant that produces much needed clean water as the primary side benefit.
Th
Re:Shipping hydrogen (Score:4, Interesting)
Liquefied Natural Gas is shipped in specialised tankers with a row of enourmous domes.
they look pretty cool.
here's one I prepared earlier [fnnc.org].
(ok, i just googled it then)
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:2, Interesting)
One brand very expensive, one very cheap, which will most people buy?
But lets leave coal bashing aside for a moment. It's a solid fuel which causes reasonably little damage in it's extraction and transport. (As opposed to burning it which is a nightmare)
compare that to widespread sludge farms to grow your bacteria?
or wind farms destroying the skylines and slaughtering migratory birds?
Realistically I'm betting methanol fuel cells will work out s
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:2, Interesting)
Destroying skylines? I've seen maybe 2 windmills in my life, much less a wind farm. Smog and pollution does much more to destroy any views I may have than a windfarm would.
And I can't believe birds getting chopped up in windmills is a big problem. If i'm wrong, please link me, but for one there aren't many wind farms, and for two birds tend to travel much higher than the blades of any windmill.
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:2)
The Wikipedia has a good round-up [wikipedia.org] of the contra case.
Re:Fossil Fuels... (Score:5, Interesting)
- We don't put them right next to places where migrating birds are known to stop. There are no problems with dead birds - they avoid the mills, but it wouldn't do to upset them.
- LF and interference; They are noisy yes, but the LF/interference thing is tinfoil-hat stuff.
- They are ugly; yup. So are smokestacks.
Anyway. Trials are underway to stuff carbon back into the drilling holes instead of releasing it into the air. That shuld keep oil and natural gas CO2 emmission close to zero for power plants.
Hydrogen is a red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
e.g.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr29
http://www.sionpower.com/ [sionpower.com]
You'll see them in mobile phones and laptops first. They'll make it into electric vehicles in a few years.
Generating electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity is, well, stupid.
Re:Hydrogen is a red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
Lithium is considered a pollutant, as is sulfur. Perhaps you might wish to re-think the stupidity of fuel cells in that light?
Re:Hydrogen is a red herring (Score:3, Interesting)
According to my friends in the industry, one of the big problems with fuel cells is that they get easily poisoned and ruined by pollutants in the air that they suck in to consume the O2. Batteries actually last longer, and it is possible to properly recycle them, particularly if they're part of a large bank of batteries in a car. Junkyards have really become pretty darn eff
Re:Hydrogen is a red herring (Score:5, Funny)
It turns out that one of the most useful ways to store and transport hydrogen is by chemically bonding it in long chain carbon molecules. The resulting liquid has a high energy density (per volume) and is relatively easy to store.
Re:The problem with Hydrogen (Score:3, Informative)
Before you make statements like that, you should consider how much water vapor is generated naturally on this planet. If we assume that on average 500cm of rain falls annually all over the earth, then 500l/m^2 of water must have been evaporated, mostly by solar energy. At 2260kJ/kg, that comes out to 5.8e23 joules of solar energy that goes into evaporating water annually. Since the human race currently uses only about 5e20 joules of energy per y
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:3, Insightful)
But there are huge markets for the by-products if it's done right.
There's a lot of money being spent on carbon sequestration (putting it back udnerground) right now as well.
but with this industry you can bet it'll be the cheapest and dirtiest option they can find.
the point behind using coal is... (Score:2)
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:2)
Re:who's electrolysing water? (Score:2)
Coal is mainly carbon, with lots of impurities which end up causing air pollution: Sulfur (responsible for acid rain), Mercury, Radionuclides, etc.
According to this [findarticles.com], Coal is turned into a Carbon Monoxide (CO) process gas which is then reacted with water to get hydrogen and CO2, with the hydrogen being stripped from the water molecules.
Your pencil lead venture would be better off working with the original coal...
Yes, but how efficient overall? (Score:5, Informative)
So you've just shifted the electrolysis problem further upstream and instead of using nice friendly water, you're passing current through nasty, mean molten salt.
Re:Yes, but how efficient overall? (Score:5, Insightful)
New type of electrolysis (Score:2)
Re:New type of electrolysis (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yes, but how efficient overall? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ofcourse the original power still come from (mostly) coal to make the electricity to make the split the salt, to break the water, to create the electricity, to power the car, to drive to the house that Jack built. The electrity to electricity conversion is the reason H2 will not be used in cars, unless you can dodge it with a *real* breakthrough, or have the H2 source beat the crap out of batteries it's not going to work. If you could get a pound of Cesium to power the car for a few months that might be worthwhile.
This said, I'll let you savvy people in on the future. The cars of the future are going to be several generation advanced hybrid cars. They will be flexible fuel hybrids that you can directly charge with your house's power. They will also be augmented with solar panels on the roof, which will also be used to charge the batteries. And if by some freak event H2 becomes available it will also have a fuel cell to charge up the batteries. They will work like a normal car, an electric car, and a solar car all in one, with reclaiming breaks and shocks ofcourse. In theory you could do your driving for the day without using a drop of your gas, but it's there if you need it. And if it's not there you could probably do a few miles per hour with just the solar.
Re:Yes, but how efficient overall? (Score:5, Informative)
As for your comments about NASA this argument is flawed in too many ways. First, hydrogen is used for electrical generation this is obviously true, but batteries just store energy. They are never used for electrical generation. Next we have the problem of scalability. Converting water to H2 takes electricity. And, for storage (if I am to understand) NASA would just store the H2 they could pull it off. There's a large energy loss converting from one form of energy to another. For NASA they can waste a bit of energy if it works out better for them in the long run. They can get the super expensive solar panels and use any amount of energy on land based operations if it saves anything in space based operations because even if it costs a boat load it will still be cheaper than doing it in space.
NASA could take a 40% loss in overall energy. Compare this loss with all the cars in the US. That's going to be huge. NASA is obviously a special case. They can use spend 20k dollars if it saves ten pounds they don't have to shoot into space.
Coal -> Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
or
Coal -> Electricity -> Sodium -> Hydrogen -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
Both of these suffer from the same problem. They loop through the same type of fuel (electricity). This is never going to work. It's too inefficient when we are talking about large scale deployment.
Coal (powerplant) -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
Solar -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
Gasoline -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
Biofuel -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
Hydrogen (assuming there's a major breakthrough) -> Electricity -> Kinetic.
From what I can tell here the argument is that hydrogen makes for really crappy batteries so we should use it as such. Even if this were the case the lack of fueling stations for hydrogen should mean that you should just replace your batteries with a closed system electrolysis/water/fuelcell battery, to store the energy. They would have to be secondary to actual batteries and just take in the overflow. Because, we aren't talking energy creation here, we are talking energy storage. In any case putting hydrogen into the car isn't really going to work out on a large scale. And if you're going to burn off that much energy in the process there's probably better ways to have such inefficient batteries.
And unlike hydrogen powered cars, my suggested design could start rolling off the lines next year.
Re:Yes, but how efficient overall? (Score:4, Informative)
In theory though, they could still be more efficient than the internal combustion engines. See the following article on modern diesel engines [fas.org], and note the projected fuel cell efficiencies which include fuel production.
Having said that, the modern diesels look like a serious contender to FCs, since they are already available, are competitive in efficiency, and yield well to hybridization. Once cleaner diesel fuel starts rolling in look out!
Uhhh Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be overly pedantic but even though this may correspond to the yield, the hydrogen is originally part of the water, not the sodium.
Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store.
You might want to check out http://unitednuclear.com/h2.htm [unitednuclear.com], which is their R & D page. They have been working on hydrogen powered vehicles in a much more sensible method for the short-term: just convert gasoline engines to run on hydrogen. They use a solar-powered electrolysis station (though they do say their current models are too slow) to get hydrogen from water. It's then transfered into metal-hydride tanks in your vehicle, which is a brilliant way to store it. Heating elements inside the tank release the hydrogen, and very little modification needs to be done to the engine. If the tank is cut and burned, the hydrogen is still released slowly enough to just smolder.
This is a neat method, since most people think of hydrogen powered cars as electric vehicles that run off of fuel cells.
Sadly, it isn't available for diesel vehicles due to the lack of a spark plug.
United Nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
They are also using solar power to create the hydrogen - they have an experimental plant in the Mojave desert, here in California.
The cool thing is that this is a functional, buildable product created by a major car manufacturer. As soon as the hydrogent fuel supply infrastructure exists, they could start cranking these out more or less immediately. If a driver gets stuck in an area where no H2 fueling stations exist, it runs just fine on old-fashioned gasoline. For more information, see their website.
Skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)
"make" hydrogen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberate it, perhaps. I think any method of actually making it would come with its own set of problems.
Combine with (Score:3, Interesting)
What do you do with the (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you need one kilo of hydrogen... (Which is about 6 cubic inches in liquifidy form, which is roughly equal to 7.5 gallons of gasolene for the energy you get out of it.. and I go thru around 15 gallons of gass in a week due to my job)
What do you do to recycle or reuse this stuff? How much energy do you have to put into (transporting it, creating/obtaining it, mixing it, etc) it before you can get any out, and how much energy is needed to deal with the waste afterwards?
Because at my current usage a person would have to produce 88 kilos of left overs... per month. Just for me to keep my job with a hydrogen powered car instead of a gasolene powered one I already own.
seems very innefficient for such a efficient proccess.
Re:What do you do with the (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What do you do with the (Score:2)
Patented? (Score:2)
Re:Patented? (Score:2)
Assuming this is a workable idea and not some marketing hype to get capital to burn, there will probably be a lot more money spent before they see any profit.
Without the patent system, everyone would
Is it a chemical reaction or a catalyst? (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically what I want to know is, do you just keep feeding more water and electricity into the system, or are you going to be continuously replacing the used up sodium-silica gel?
Misleading post and bad article (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea is not producing hydrogen with sodium as an energy source. There is no pure sodium whatsoever around, it's too reactive (same reason there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere).
So, instead of buying methanol cartridges, we would buy sodium sticks, put some water in a small tank in our laptop, and this would produce hydrogen and power for the machine.
Furthermore, the most common way of producing hydrogen is not electrolysis, but reforming of hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas), which is done on an industrial scale in any refinery.
The article itself has a good number of inaccuracies. For instance, other than the electrolysis thing, you read:
This is insane. The powder does not get converted to hydrogen, the water does. And still I'm afraid a unit error may be lurking.
The PEM fuel cells are not a way to store hydrogen, but a way to convert it to electricity; the solid oxide fuel cells will never be used in vehicles, since they are expensive, running at temperatures up to 1000 degrees, good only for large-scale plants, and brittle. And they take 8 hours to start up, and they can start up only so many times before they start cracking (about ten).
Oh my, did they know that hydrogen is extremely reactive, and will burn with oxygen at the first occasion? You don't even need a spark, all it takes is the static electricity of a windy day. CO2 accumulates, hydrogen would disappear rapidly.
Of course it is. It contains energy. There is no such thing as an energy carrier that does not contain some sort of danger. It would not be much of an energy carrier if it were inert. So, gasoline burns, hydrogen burns, nuclear goes bad big time, methanol burns, and lithium batteries explode if you hammer them or if they are produced with poor standards.
Solid oxide fuel cells do not require a catalyst. They are the only ones that do not, since they operate at high temperatures. Assuming the article meant SOFC.
Common misconception, hydrogen costs about 0.8 euro per gasoline liter equivalent: in Europe that's already way convenient. It's the infrastructure that's missing.
Alkaline metals being ignored? Of all the bullshit... they might not be C, O or even Al, but most know sodium better than technetium, praseodimiun or some transition metal forgotten somewhere in the limbo of rare earths.
Re:Misleading post and bad article (Score:2)
Re:Misleading post and bad article (Score:2)
Praseo-what? Oh, you mean praseodymium. I guess you just proved your point about people not knowing it very well...
The key is sodium... (Score:5, Interesting)
PS: You're right, I've never heard of technetium or praseodimiun. When I saw the quote "That side of the periodic table people tend to ignore", I got a mental picture of a bunch of whitecoats (ala "The Farside" cartoons). They were hudled over a poster size periodic table that was spread out on a lab bench. None of them could complete the formula scrawled on the whiteboard because Eric was leaning on the Alkaline metals and nobody noticed them.
Re:Misleading post and bad article (Score:3, Informative)
Mind bogglingly stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously the emergency jerrycan is a technology too complex and difficult to arrange compared to a simple sodium store, water tank, reformer, purifier and additional carburetor...face it guys, most of the easily led idiot investors lost their cash in the dot-com bubble.
BTW there is an existing technology for producing "safe" sodium involving mixing it with mercury to form amalgam. This has been around for many years (it is the basis of early plants for producing sodium hydroxide from salt.) It has not revolutionised fuel cells or led to a practical mobile phone fuel cell. So explain why this should be any different?
Re:Mind bogglingly stupid (Score:3, Funny)
This must be some novel use of the word "safe" I'm not familiar with....
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
A use for all those "WARNING DO NOT EAT ME" packets.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Funny)
I've seen this before... (Score:2)
What this is really all about (Score:3, Informative)
Also bear in mind that electrolysed hydrogen also takes more energy to produce than it will release (until we get perpetual motion sorted out).
So all of this stuff is about finding more efficient ways to generate energy and store it.
In this case the innovation seems to be that this product will make it easy (in water rich environments) to create hydrogen which (it is anticipated) will be easy to make electricity from.
I've made hydrogen by mixing good old caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) with aluminium cans and water.
Year 8 science, same result as this "innovation" although we only got enough hydrogen out of the bottle to inflate a baloon which was able to take off with a 3 metre piece of string drenched in methanol.
lit the bottom as it went by and the whole thing made a very satisfying fireball.
What about the chlorine? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What about the chlorine? (Score:2)
Re:What about the chlorine? (Score:3, Informative)
The chlorine produced would be no threat to the ozone layer. Chlorine is too reactive to survive in elemental form all the way up to the ozone layer. The entire reason why CFCs were so destructive is because they were so stable they were able to survive all the way to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where they were finally broken down by UV and released the chlorine they carried. (This process is actually still continuing, eve
New way to make Hydrogen? (Score:2)
You mean different from the tried and tested one proton, one electron recipe?
Re:New way to make Hydrogen? (Score:2)
Flammable (Score:5, Insightful)
And hydrogen isn't?
WHY?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WHY?! (Score:2, Informative)
Why MAKE Hydrogen? (Score:5, Funny)
My fellow slashdotters, what we need only to do is MINE THE SUN!
All we need is a space shuttle, and a team of roughneck oil workers. With a bit of training they will be SPACE MINERS, and we can send them on their merry way into the sun to mine it for us!
Re:Why MAKE Hydrogen? (Score:5, Funny)
(obligatory)
And for all those naysayers who claim it can't be done because the sun is too hot - we'd only mine the sun AT NIGHT!
Interesting, but impractical (Score:2, Informative)
(as a note, as you progress down the alkali metal group, the reaction with water becomes more violent. Lithium and sodium fizz, potassium will ignite on the surface of the water, and you do not want to be around rubidium or cesium [Caesium if your British] if they go into water unless you want to be covered in molten metal.)
As a further note, the reason that there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere is that it is so light it escapes from the atmos
Hydrogen is usually made from fossil fuels (Score:5, Informative)
"The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water."
From what I understand, this is wrong. I've heard that most hydrogen is ironically produced as a byproduct of refining oil.
Wikipedia for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen [wikipedia.org] says that:
"Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas."
So where does the sodium come from? (Score:2)
You've got to be frickin kidding me! (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got to be fricken' kidding me.
Ok here is a major hint to the world leaders of this planet...
Nuclear power plant, Gulf of Mexico == Hydrogen. Ship it to all the countries that don't want or have nuclear. Become new major energy provider...
This is not rocket science people! Stop making it harder than it is!
'Most Common Way'? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Millions of tons of hydrogen are made every year around the world (for ammonia synthesis, for example), and very little of it comes from electrolysis. Thermal reforming of natural gas and other carbonaceous compounds is much more economical.
Convenient but globally inefficient (Score:3, Informative)
A tougher problem is upstream. Making sodium is gross and inefficient. It's done from brine (salt domes) the in old chlor-alkali process with mercury electrodes. This needs more [over]voltage 3.5V IIRC than hydrolysis. It is the voltage, and particularly the overvoltage needed to drive the process at industrial scales, that makes the process inefficient.
Nobody is saying the energy cost fo this stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like we're doing an awful lot of work, in terms of energy in, to get hydrogen in a form that can be stored, transported, and used. I'm sure batteries produce lots of crap too, but what are the relative effects, and does this particular process scale to global proportions? Seems like a pretty low yield (9%) with a lot of unsavory byproducts produced.
(Of course, this doesn't even meniton my normal "hydrogen is a bad thisg to give to consumers" rant. Example: 2 rednecks, a trashcan liner, a full tank of hydrogen, and a lighter.)
Full of Errors (Score:5, Informative)
2) You cannot electrolyze pure water -it's a poor conductor. You need some salt, or other electrolyte. Even then, the amount of electrical energy that goes in is less than the energy value of the hydrogen that comes out. And guess where most of the electricity comes from . .
3) Sodium metal causes a fire when dropped into water because of the hydrogen it releases. The activation energy for the reaction between oxygen and hydrogen is very low, and the heat released from the sodium metal - being converted into sodium hydroxide (aka lye, or Drano)- is more than sufficient to cause the reaction (fire).
4) Sodium metal is made by electrolyzing molten sodium chloride (table salt). A very expensive, energy consuming reaction, not to mention nasty (it releases chlorine gas, also).
5) The amount of energy released when an electron is stripped from a sodium atom is the same, whether it's in water or in silica.The energy is either converted to heat or to some other form of energy. Ever hear of conservation of energy (or mass/energy for nuclear reactions)? Unless they've developed something that can do what the transporters and replicators on Star Trek do, the enrgy is still going somehwere. Entropy demands it, otherwise we'd have perpetual motion machines, and ebergy would not be an issue.
6) Mediating the reactivity of alkalai metals is nothing new - that's what amalgams do.
This story does not deserve the attention it has already received.
MM
Quitting Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
After this article...maybe I'll try just ignoring Slashdot or a week or so...read Ars Technica and Tomshardware.
In the beginning Slashdot was pretty cool...Now it's not so cool
Re:They're not making Hydrogen (Score:3, Funny)
Yes they are... they're taking a bunch of protons and putting them together with a bunch of electrons.
They're just gathering the stuff that was formed at the start of the universe
There wasn't any hydrogen in the early universe; it didn't form until about half a million years later, once the temperature of the universe had dropped to around 3000K.
Ahem. (Score:2, Funny)
You've repeated yourself.
Re:They're not making Hydrogen (Score:2)
Re:great... (Score:3)
Seriously though, using water directly might not yield as much H but it is a much simpler process. If a nuclear plant is built then the electricity and distilled water is all you need to get some hydrogen. With this company's process you have to get the sodium from somewhere, then the silica gel. Anyone know of any pure sodium lingering around ready to be picked up
Re:great... (Score:2)
OK cheap jokes out of the way, the process may be intended to combine hydrogen generation and re-absorption within one "closed cycle" container. Seems to me they might have a better chance of a prize to get the electrons directly off the sodium and eliminate hydrogen from the who
Re:Still breaking water (Score:2)
Maybe you missed the point that when you convert hydrogen, you get water back. It's the reaction baby.
You are thinking about drink water. You don't necessarily need that for electrolysis. And anyway, the scales are waaay diffe
Re:Converted to hydrogen? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Converted to hydrogen? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously though, this whole thread is refreshingly optimistic. Let me be the pessimist: it isn't just inefficiency that will stop the advent of this new technology. The oil industry is keeping a lot of powerful people rich, who could give a flip about anything new or better. It also gives a seemingly great reason for the US to exert its global muscle.
Now I want to respond seriously to the Anonymous Coward who frowns on the use of the word pedantic. Some of us have a vocabulary, something that's good for self expression. It does not make us pricks, we are not speaking with condescension (well you know, some of us). I really get riled when someone lashes out at another because they say "whom" or because they don't otherwise contribute to what is, in my opinion, the language being dumbed down.
If the Family Guy can get a new word out to the masses, then I applaud it (moreso). Screw you, consciousness shrinker.
Re:Greenhouse gases... (Score:2)
Yes, it is. Luckily for life on this planet, though, water vapour exists in rapid (cf. 3 days) equlibrium and hence cannot drive a change in climate. Doubling the concentration of water vapour would simply lead to a few days of rain. Were this not true, any slight deviation from normal concentrations would quickly lead to the planet freezing or baking; as you will note, this has not happened.
However, the equlibrium concentration of water vapour is dependant on the temperature of the atmosphere (quite o
Re:better (Score:3, Informative)
1- crush sugar cane
2- burn the pulp leftp to produce steam power to drive the crusher
3- ferment sugar cane dip
4- distil the result of fermenatation using whatever is left from the pulp to heat the distiler
5- let the next sugar cane crop capture the carbon spilt in the atmosphere
6-
7- PROFIT!!!
this business model is what drives a considerable part of brasilian cars. my next car will sure be flex fuel, so i can choose between more pow
Re:better (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked with a fuel company for a while, researching the possibility of introducing a bio-diesel blended fuel for trucks and heating. I'm fairly convinced that this will be one of those big milestones on the road to more environmentally friendly fuel. It's safer to handle, has a higher lubricity and cetane rating and reduces almost all the major emissions (except SO2). Not only that, but some of the newer manufacturing techniques really lower the impact of the manufacturing - using chemicals that can be reclaimed, room temp and pressure production etc. Plus, in low blends (~10%), you can stick it right into a diesel engine (at higher blends, usually the manufacturers get worried about warrently, and there may be some effect on certain types of rubber seals with really high blends). Not only that, but you can make it out of TONNES of stuff - we were working with soy based fuel, but we also had a bin of fuel from rendered animal fat. Not the greatest smelling stuff, and it wasn't as good as the soy, but they company we were working with was doing major reserach with a rendering plant - killing 2 birds with one stone - enviro-fuel and a way to recycle rendered fats. In fact, the most major problem to the introduction of these fuels is cost, and the gap between the bio (soy) diesel and the regular fuel is closing fairly rapidly. We managed to get to market for farm fuel with 2, 5 and 10% blends, and I think they're expanding those soon.
As the parent points out, hydrogen isn't the only alternate fuel out there, and it's a fairly long way off from being a viable source. Using stuff like ethanol and biodiesel would be an excellent first step, and would be way easier than transitioning to hydrogen, since the infrastructure is already in place. The current fuel prices are making this more viable than ever before.
Re:Cut out the middle man (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also the cost. A Prius is a great alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
Others have wondered the same thing you just asked. And then they've looked at the price tag, and the increased weight, and decided that they need an alternative that can be as cheap and easy to refill as gasoline. Personally, I think the solution lies not in fuel cells, but in implementing a renewable-energy way to generate hydrogen.
Consider... I was at Canadian Tire yesterday. There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction. Set it up with a rain barrel and something in which to store the hydrogen, and you've got a renewable source of hydrogen for less than $1500 outlay. Sure, there are more efficient ways to store the energy being generated, but it's also freely renewable (no $10,000 expenditure every 8 years). All that's missing is a car that burns hydrogen.
And for times of drought, or during the winter, all it needs is a source of water, such as city water or a well. (You *could* use some of the wind power to melt snow, but that, like a rain barrel, wouldn't be all that useful on a scale larger than one or two cars)