Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
As a result of my post on energy storage entitled Getting Energy From The Energy Store, a few people brought up the idea of replacing our current energy sources such as gas and oil with hydrogen (often written as H2, because two hydrogen atoms make up one hydrogen molecule).
You see this on the web, that we could power our civilization on hydrogen, convert all the trucks and buses to run on hydrogen, they call it shifting to a “hydrogen economy”… and why not? You can burn hydrogen just like natural gas, you can run an internal combustion engine on hydrogen, what’s not to like? Here’s a typical intro to an analysis:
A Comparison of Hydrogen and Propane Fuels.
Hydrogen and propane have long histories of being used as fuel. Both fuels can be used safely if their physical, chemical, and thermal properties are understood and if appropriate codes, standards, and guidelines are followed. Although the properties of hydrogen have been compared to those of propane and methane, these comparisons were made to facilitate appreciation of the physical and chemical differences and similarities among these fuels. It is not possible to rank these fuels according to safety because plausible accident scenarios can be formulated in which any one of the fuels can be considered the safest or the most hazardous.
So what’s wrong with this comparison, between hydrogen and other competitive fuel sources like propane and methane?
What’s wrong is that people misunderstand hydrogen. Unlike say propane or methane, hydrogen is not an energy source. There are no hydrogen mines. You can’t go out and drill somewhere into a deposit of pure hydrogen and bring it back home to burn.
And why can’t we mine or drill for hydrogen and bring it home and burn it to power our cars?
The reason we can’t mine and burn hydrogen is simple … it’s all been burnt already. The nerve of nature! I mean, people are always warning that we’ll burn up all the fossil fuels, and now we find out that nature has already gone rogue on us and burned up all the hydrogen …
Figure 1. Burnt hydrogen, showing the hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
Most of the burnt hydrogen we call “the ocean”. Another bunch of burned hydrogen we call ice and rain and rivers and lakes. But there’s no hydrogen that is available for drilling or mining—it’s all bound up in other compounds. And as a result, hydrogen is not a source of energy—it is merely a way to transport energy from Point A to Point B.
[UPDATE April 17, 2023: It’s been pointed out to me that there is one small hydrogen well in Africa, and that there is hydrogen produced naturally by reactions with water in the depth of the earth. However, as far as we know currently, it only collects in commercial quantities under very unusual conditions. Most is constantly escaping in tiny seeps. In addition, the global annual geological H2 production, not usable production but total production, is estimated at 23 Tg/year, which contains energy equal to less than 1% of the world’s annual energy usage. A possible future energy source for the globe? Seems doubtful, but it’s early days, time will tell.]
And this in turn means that the main competition to hydrogen, what we should be comparing it to, is not natural gas, nor propane as the quote above says, nor any other gas.
Instead, the main competition to hydrogen, the true comparison, is to electricity, which is our current means of transporting energy. Saying that we could “power our civilization on hydrogen” is as meaningless as saying we could “power our civilization on electricity” … neither one is a source of power, they’re just different ways to transport energy around the planet.
This is not to say that hydrogen is not useful, merely to clarify what it is useful for—transporting energy from one place to another. It is not a source of energy, it is a way to move energy. This distinction is very important because it lets us make the proper comparison, which is not comparing hydrogen to propane as they did above, but comparing hydrogen to its real competition—electricity.
Now, compared to electricity as a means of transporting energy, hydrogen suffers from a number of disadvantages.
The first disadvantage results from what I modestly call “Willis’s Rule Of Small Stuff”, which states:
It is far easier to move electrons than to move molecules.
This rule has ramifications in a number of fields, particularly the transportation of energy. For example, consider the difference between moving a large amount of energy on a constant basis over say a hundred miles (160 km) by the two competing transportation methods, electricity and hydrogen.
For electricity, you just have to move electrons. So you string a pair of copper wires up on poles from Point A to Point B, and … well … that’s about it. You hook one end to a generator of electricity, and a charge appears at the other end of the wires. There’s not much leakage, not many problems of any kind. The system is robust and relatively safe, and able to withstand storms and temperature extremes.
Now, consider moving the same amount of energy as hydrogen. For that, you have to move molecules. First off, you need a pipeline. Now, we’re all familiar with pipelines for moving energy. The trans-Alaska pipeline is a fine example. Pump oil in at one end, add some pumping stations along the route to keep it moving, and oil pours out the other end.
Hydrogen, though, is a very difficult beast to pump through a pipeline. To start with, hydrogen has very, very low energy density. So you have to pump a huge amount of it, about 4,000 times the volume of gasoline or oil for the same energy.
Next, hydrogen is incredibly sneaky. Do you know how a rubber balloon filled with helium gradually loses its helium over time? The helium is small enough to go through holes in the rubber balloon, tiny holes that are too small for air to pass through. Well, hydrogen is even worse. It can escape right around a piston in a pump, and run happily out through the pipe threads in any pipeline connectors. It requires special gas-tight connections from end to end of the delivery chain. You can’t just stick the hydrogen pump nozzle into your gas tank like you can with gasoline or diesel. So moving the molecules of hydrogen turns out to be a much, much harder problem than moving the electrons with electricity.
The second disadvantage of hydrogen as a means of transporting energy is the low energy density mentioned above. In general, the energy content of fuels varies with their density. So for example, diesel has more energy per liter than gasoline, which is lighter. And alcohol is even less dense, so it contains less energy per liter than either gas or diesel.
Now, consider hydrogen gas. Figure 2 shows a chart comparing various materials regarding energy density in two different measures—megajoules per liter (MJ/L), and megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg).
Figure 2. Energy density of selected materials. Vertical scale is in megajoules per litre, and the horizontal scale is in megajoules per kilogram. Hydrogen is at the lower right. Click to embiggen. SOURCE
This leads to an oddity. Hydrogen gas has a huge amount of energy per kilogram … but almost no energy per liter. Gasoline holds about 35 megajoules per liter (MJ/L). But even compressed at 700 bar (about 10,000 psi) hydrogen has only about 5 megajoules per liter. That means that you have to move a lot of hydrogen, or pack a lot of it into a car or truck fuel tank, to have enough energy for practical purposes.
Now folks are always claiming that this problem will be solved by adsorbing the hydrogen onto the surface of an as-yet-unknown sponge-like substance from which it can be recovered as hydrogen gas by heating the substrate. But that can’t possibly be as energy-dense as liquid hydrogen, and liquid hydrogen has only a measly ten megajoules per liter. So adsorbing it will not solve the problem.
Nor will liquefying it, seeing as how you have to keep liquid hydrogen at about 240 degrees C below zero (-405°F) … not practical.
And that means that if someone wants to store much energy, say at a hydrogen fueling station, well, they’ll need a whole lot of high-pressure tanks with special fittings, and they’ll need to be about six times as large as the corresponding gasoline tanks to contain the same amount of energy. Or if they are storing the hydrogen adsorbed onto the surface of some as-yet-undiscovered material, they won’t need to be high pressure, but they’ll need to be even bigger.
The third disadvantage of hydrogen as a transportation medium is safety. Yes, electricity is dangerous, of course. But electricity isn’t flammable, and hydrogen is extremely flammable. Hydrogen has an unusual quality. Most fuels only burn when there is a certain ratio of fuel to oxygen. But hydrogen will burn whether it’s a little hydrogen mixed with a lot of air, or a lot of hydrogen mixed with a little air. Not only that, but the hydrogen flame is colorless, smokeless, and invisible in sunlight … a very bad safety combination.
The fourth disadvantage of hydrogen is something called “hydrogen embrittlement”. Here’s a crazy fact. Hydrogen molecules are so small that they can leak out through solid steel. It can either react with steel, or it can leak right through the steel. But that minuscule slow leakage is not the real problem. The real issue is that hydrogen penetrating into and through the metal lattice weakens the steel, fatigues the metal, and decreases fracture resistance. In the long run, it can embrittle solid steel to the point where it cracks all the way through after only a slight impact.
The final disadvantage of hydrogen as a transportation medium is that after using hydrogen to transport energy from A to B, it is hard to convert the hydrogen back into other useful forms of energy. For example, electricity can be used to drive a crankshaft, heat a cup of tea, shoot a railgun projectile at supersonic speeds, energize a magnet, wash my clothes, power a laser, propel a train via linear induction, light up a football stadium, split water into hydrogen and oxygen, charge my computer’s battery, or to drive a chemical reaction against an energy gradient.
Out of all of those uses, hydrogen can drive a crankshaft with very low efficiency compared to electricity, and it can heat a cup of tea … yes, you can use hydrogen in a fuel cell to convert it back to electricity, but that kinda defeats the purpose.
I mean, isn’t it rather goofy to use electricity to create hydrogen, transport the hydrogen, and then convert it back to electricity??? What’s wrong with this picture? Why not just use the electricity directly?
All of this taken together, of course, is the reason that our civilization did not adopt the use of hydrogen as an energy transportation medium, and we settled on electricity instead … because, well, it’s kind of a no-brainer. For just about any purpose you can name, including transporting energy around for powering cars and trucks, hydrogen is well down on my list of good candidates.
Now, if I can just find out who burned up all the hydrogen and didn’t save it for the grandkids like Death Train Jim Hansen advised us to do …
w.
denniswingo says:
July 1, 2013 at 10:32 am
Right, and I guess that “all the lights and heat” part means in the 1850s there was no coal or wood heat or candles or whale-oil lamps in all of New York City? … Dennis, you’re nothing if not dependable.
I didn’t say hydrogen was unusable. I said it was unsuitable, and that there were far better solutions … as your point amply proves, since hydrogen doesn’t provide any of New York City’s light or heat now, and hasn’t for a century or so …
A couple of final points. First, as you point out, gas was used to transport energy for lighting in NYC, but that was before the invention of its main competitor, electricity. Once that came along, distributing energy for lighting quickly shifted to electricity.
Second, the gas used in the 1850s was “coal gas”, a mixture of methane, hydrogen, and other volatile hydrocarbons. It was not hydrogen, as is obvious by the fact that it burned yellow and was thus good for lighting purposes … while the hydrogen flame is almost invisible and thus useless for lighting. So the hydrogen just happened to be along for the ride, it didn’t even help with the lighting. That was all done by the methane and other hydrocarbons.
As to whether coal gas was used for heating in NYC, that seems like it would only occur in special circumstances, for the usual reason—cost. Coal gas was manufactured from coal, and only contains part of the energy in coal, so fuel costs for heating with coal would always be cheaper than for heating with coal gas.
w.
jkanders says:
July 1, 2013 at 11:46 am
“If you need to transport really huge amounts of energy over very long distances it will probably be cheaper to use a hydrogen pipeline than electric power wires.”
No way. The electric wire of a given diameter can transport more energy than a liquid hydrogen pipeline of same diameter.
For instance: One liter of liquid hydrogen carries 8.4 MJ which is 8.4 MegaWattseconds. A long distance electric line here in Europe operates at 440 000 Volts is three-phase snd so has three 150 mm^2 active cross-section tripple (triangle setup to tackle losses) cables + one 150 mm^2 zero cable, and the allowed continuous power through is 1800 MegaWatt electric power (and withstands peak 3000 MW) which means you would need to get through a comparable diameter pipe of (150*10/3.14)^0.5 = 21.86 milimeter inner diameter the1800/8.4 = 214 liters per second of liquid hydrogen to transport same amount of energy as the high voltage electric powerline.
I will omit the problems with the pipeline insulation for under 23K temperatures in hot deserts and I’ll give you a high school math question: how fast the liquid hydrogen would need to move through the 21.86 milimeter diameter pipe to bring at its end the same amount of energy (1800 MW) as the high-voltage power line can usually carry?
For those who are lazy to calculate the liquid hydrogen would need to move through the pipe at the speed of 570 km/h and if it would want to satisfy peak demand simmilarly as the high voltage lines then at around the speed of sound. That are in any case both much higher speeds than at which the light electrons move through the coper conductor when voltage connected, while anyway able to carry relatively huge energy…
Second, the gas used in the 1850s was “coal gas”, a mixture of methane, hydrogen, and other volatile hydrocarbons. It was not hydrogen, as is obvious by the fact that it burned yellow and was thus good for lighting purposes … while the hydrogen flame is almost invisible and thus useless for lighting. So the hydrogen just happened to be along for the ride, it didn’t even help with the lighting. That was all done by the methane and other hydrocarbons.
Coal gas in the UK contained CO as the 2nd component, don’t know about the US. Your comment about the yellow flame was correct until the 1890s when a practical mantle was invented which greatly increased the luminosity of the lamps.
Heat energy production is best compared in a Ragone plot, which plots specific energy against peak power.
The following link shows a Ragone plot comparing a dozen or so well-known energy sources, along with the output from Pu-238 and the eCat test from March 2013.
http://b-i.forbesimg.com/markgibbs/files/2013/05/130520_ragone_04.png
It was taken from this Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/
tumeuestumefaisdubien1 says:
July 1, 2013 at 2:10 pm
jkanders says:
July 1, 2013 at 11:46 am
“If you need to transport really huge amounts of energy over very long distances it will probably be cheaper to use a hydrogen pipeline than electric power wires.”
“No way. The electric wire of a given diameter can transport more energy than a liquid hydrogen pipeline of same diameter.”
—
Yes, but the diameter of the wire is the smallest problem.
What’s more important is that a three phase high voltage line requires a corridor of approximately 100 meter. A pipe with for example two meter diameter for pressurized hydrogen would require far less space and move more energy than an electric line.
“””””…..Edohiguma says:
July 1, 2013 at 2:21 am
Hydrogen economy… The captain of the Hindenburg is calling and he’s on fire over this……..”””””
The captain of the Hindenberg, had another problem; they forgot to tell him they coated the skin with an electrically conductive aluminium, “thermite” look alike explosive material. The electric charge dissipating to ground while landing, ignited the fuze skin, which set the whole thing on fire.
The hydrogen mostly escaped harmlessly, but ablaze, out of the top into the air. The burning skin, did in the ship and the human losses.
If they had filled it with helium, it still would have been set ablaze
Just need to clarify your first disadvantage a little bit there Willis.
True electrons are indeed a little easier to move than hydrogen.
This is a common misconception about electricity. What actually happens in a conductor is that an electron moves from one atom to the next. All good conductors have electrons in their outer orbits that are easily moved by the presence of a difference in electric potential. Electrons can only move about 10 meters/sec. What happens is the absence of the electron in a given atom is a hole and is a net positive charge. Basically, the appearance of a hole creates a potential difference and it steals an electron from an upstream adjacent atom. This action is almost instantaneous (about 90% the speed of light). Thus the traveling of the potential difference is what we perceive as electric current which is opposite the flow of electrons. Remember that Grace Hopper (bless her heart) had a piece of string that she called a nanosecond which was the distance the electricity would travel in a nanosecond. That being said, another factor is that no matter how you store hydrogen it wants to get out. It is such a small molecule (H2) that it will diffuse through almost any known material. You can confirm this by putting hydrogen in a balloon and come back the next day and almost all the hydrogen will be gone. Need to be careful lest you have a mini Hindenburg on your hands.
“””””…..
Phil. says:
July 1, 2013 at 12:54 pm
Willis Eschenbach says:
July 1, 2013 at 12:39 pm
So like I said … seems very doubtful, although I’ve been surprised before. Does anyone have actual numbers for the energy density by volume of adsorbed hydrogen?……”””””
Phil; re the density of Hydrogen; where you say it can be double that of liquid hydrogen (in hydrides), What does that translate to in density; kg/kg (hydrogen/hydride) or kg / m^3 hydrogen / hydride ??
I’d seen the twice liquid number before, but never recall seeing the “packaging overhead”.
And what does a particular usable hydride consist of. I’ve never understood just what the heck is the “hydride” in Nickel/metal hydride rechargeable batteries ??
The Solar Hydrogen Stirling Engine deserves at least an honorable mention here-
However, Hydrogen is merely transporting the energy by exchanging heat, not by combustion.
Still a novel idea.
If hydrogen is such a rich and simple ‘source’ of energy then why didn’t industrialists adopt this ‘source’ a long time ago? If wind power is so ‘free’ then why does it need special breaks? If solar power is so brilliant then why have so many solar power companies go bankrupt?
Good article, Willis. These hydrogen people just can’t seem to grasp the concept.
One thing though. I think helium, being a monatomic gas, is leakier than hydrogen which is diatomic and therefore much bigger.
There is a good reason water is called “Nature’s Ash”.
And this highlights a core problem of society today – the bulk of the people are brain-dead sheeple. If you can pry them away from playing Angry Birds or Cut The Rope long enough to even explain this, their minds will explode once you tell them that Electricity is not an energy “source” at all, but an energy “product” ( and at best a lossy transport mechanism ). The despicable cabal of pseudo-Scientists are capitalizing on this ignorance by feeding them endless propaganda to achieve their goals of a de-industrialized, de-civilized society even though the consequences would be dire for both humans, and the environment itself.
Maybe someday on some grand scale electricity could be developed into an energy “source”. Perhaps sticking hundreds of miles tall lightning rods into the ground and harnessing lightning from passing clouds to charge city or state sized batteries made of mountains of icky chemicals ( Who knows? I don’t know, no-one knows, but some outside-the-box thinking centuries or millenia from now might know ). In the meantime, all we can do is note all the misinformation about harnessing hydrogen from water and similar money pits and despair over the inevitability of pseudo-Science wasting time exploring every rabbit hole, well, all the politically correct ones.
You would think that this simple comparison would be enough to wake them up, but you would be wrong. Not as long as that city bus keeps driving by with a big sign “powered by hydrogen” plastered on the side. It sows the seeds of ignorance in the sheeple, quite successfully. The old analogy I remember was ‘ if you have a gallon of gasoline and a gallon of hydrogen, which would have the most energy? ‘ Besides the fact that you wouldn’t want and couldn’t have a gallon of hydrogen without extraordinarily expensive preparation and nearly impossible storage concerns, the carbon-rich gasoline outperforms the carbon-free hydrogen and that is simply politically incorrect. This perfectly describes the strategy of the scoundrels that demonize Carbon. AGW and all pseudo-Science is about making efficiency politically-incorrect, and their Neo-Communist de-industrialized pipe-dreams politically correct. In short, *they* are anti-Science, anti-Common-Sense, anti-Logical and indeed anti-Human.
Put another way, They are plainly willing to suspend all the basic tenets of Science, of Logic, and of Common Sense to achieve their goals. This is bigger than Science though. It permeates everywhere in modern life and politics. It is sometimes coordinated, sometimes haphazard coincidence, but it all leads to the same result – the destruction of modern civilized life. Welcome to the de-Enlightenment. You can draw a pretty straight line through those that decried Gutenberg’s printing press, Luddites that sabotaged machines, and the quacks that want to demonize and regress from using Carbon in almost any form.
Sorry about the digression. Skimming the comments proves my point as quite a few sheeple who had their bubble burst showed up here to complain about Willis exposing some simple truths of physics on Planet Earth. As I said, political correctness is all about suspending the laws of man and nature to instead achieve some obsessive compulsive goal of a fictitious fantasyland.
There are additional disadvantages of using H2 to power a civilization. One is that H2 is a powerful greenhouse gas and that fact seems to be ignored by the H2 proponents, frequently the same people who care about greenhouse gases. Of course there will be a percentage spilled/leaked, and that goes directly into the atmosphere.
Another problem with burning H2 is also glossed over. In internal combustion engines (Otto, Diesel) there are 3 basic pollutants generated. Carbon Monoxide (CO), unburned hydrocarbons (HC) and Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx). The NOx is generated at the peak combustion temperatures, which is why Diesels produce a bit more. However, burning H2 in an IC engine generates just as much NOx as burning a hydrocarbon fuel at the same compression ratio. So you still need the catalytic converter.
Slightly OT, but we’ve already had a few hydrazine posters: Hydrazine is acutely toxic, chronically toxic, it can be taken up by absorption through the skin, by inhalation (it has high vapor pressure), and by ingestion (eating or drinking). It is a carcinogen, and a mutagen. The threshold limit value is a tiny 0.1 mg/m3 air, and the LD50 is another tiny 570 ppm for 4 hours. About the only good thing you can say about hydrazine is that it’s not radioactive. 🙂
jkanders says:
July 1, 2013 at 3:26 pm
pipe with for example two meter diameter for pressurized hydrogen would require far less space and move more energy than an electric line.
I was actually talking about liquid hydrogen, which has equivalent in 690 bar pressurized hydrogen. No affordable 2 meter diameter pipeline material would withstand 690 bar.
What pressure you actually mean? For example pressures in gas pipelines are at max 100 bar and usually like 30 bar at which the Hydrogen would have ~20 times less density than the liquid hydrogen and like 0.2 MJ/L, which is way much less than even CNG has. Then I don’t see the point why use hydrogen instead of electricity or suitable hydrocarbons.
And even if you would have a material for a 690 bar pipeline then you would have surely need of a heavily guarded security zone around the pipeline, I would think much wider than the 100m (because a 690 bar Hydrogen pipeline I think would be a terrorist target of a special atractivity with really spectacular results if blown up) and the land there unlike below power lines would so lie fallow behind double to tripple electric fences.
Just btw. if you would transport by a conventional 2 meter diameter pipeline the hydrogen at 30 bar at a speed of say 50 meters/second, you anyway would get through just 31 GW. For same task you would need 3phase/3mount 2620 mm^2 cross-section cables (~35mm diameter for idea, although such cables aren’t in use and it would be made rather by several paralel lines using thiner cables) + zero cable at 440 000 kV electric power line. Such a power line would still fit in the 100 meter corridor and will be much more easier and less costly to install than an even conventional gas pipeline which anyway would be a potential target.
I used to work for a specialty compressor company. These were compressors to ahndle large amounts of gas for various purposes. One of the gases we were trying to design for was Hydrogen. Everything Willis said is absolutley true. Even worse is that Hygrogen attach itself to anything that enters into the system witch does wonders for lubrication.. As for trying to build a nonlube machine, well we tried, using the best material options for pisont ring packings and seal and we got a machine life of about 300 hours or so. This for a machine that was supposed to run continuously for a year before teardown. The problem is that Hydrogen is such a small molecule that you can’t use it as a bearing and it will leak right through walls. We never tried to build a 40,000 psi hydrogen machine and I’m not sure that it’s even possible. maybe with some sort of new material that’s slippier than anything we had available in the early nineties. I do know one thing, a compressor running that high is going to be so inefficient athat any attempt to extract energy from the Hydrogen will be a significant loss. The lubricator alone would require a 100 HP motor and I think the frame would require at least a 1000 HP motor just to get the last stage to pump. The valve springs on that last stage would probably have to be hot wound as no machine would could bend them.
“It is far easier to move electrons than to move molecules.”
That reminded me of this article describing the ongoing replacement of mechanical systems, e.g. your car’s drive shaft, with electrical.
tumetuestumefaisdubien1’s comment (July 1, 2013 at 12:13 pm) reinforced the point.
“And as a result, hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is merely a way to transport energy from Point A to Point B.”
Fossil fuels are not energy sources, they’re just Nature’s way to transport sunlight from the past to the future. 🙂
I ran labs for years and we used bottled hydrogen in our Gas Chromatographs. If you want to go stalk raving bonkers try finding and sealing hydrogen gas leaks.
And then there is the little problem that hydrogen makes metal brittle.
Oh and for real fun have a tank explode taking out the wall of the concrete blockhouse.
Sorry, I will stick with diesel.
While I agree with Willis (nice article! Thanks Willis!) about the large scale use of hydrogen, there is one automotive use which should be considered. that of “boosting” more conventional fuels. The addition of roughly 15% H2 gas into the air intake of a conventional gasoline engine (and a slight change in ignition timing) allows the use of fuels that would not normally be usable. Want to burn kerosene in your car? Boost the air intake with hydrogen.
As always Willis begins with an amusing troph about hydrygen: “But there’s none of it that is available for drilling or mining, it’s all bound up in other compounds. ”
without noting that the same is true of just about everything else, and those minerals, as with hydrogen, often come in oxidized forms. This is one of those things which, while true are designed to push the reader in a direction. Hydrogen generation via low intensity power sources (wind/solar) is not without promise nor problems, but worth thinking about.
Dan in California says:
July 1, 2013 at 4:19 pm
“H2 is a powerful greenhouse gas”
No it isn’t. H2 has no absorption band at mid-IR 288 K spectra. Moreover it has very short life in atmosphere, because it its highly reactive. It can with Oxygen form water, which has an absorption band in the 288K spectra, but this water only adds to natural precipitable water pool which is a powerful negative temperature feedback transporting latent heat from surface up to the atmosphere through convection and has therefore no significant surface warming effect.
Willis
Compliments from this engineer on lucid accurate explanations for interested laypersons.
The best use of hydrogen as an “energy carrier” is to “chemically liquify” H2 by reacting it with CO or CO2 to convert it to Methanol (CH3OH). Methanol was selected as the preferred racing fuel starting in 1965 for the USAC Indy car race circuit for its higher efficiency per fuel energy in racing engines and greater safety in crashes.
For those interested in this pragmatic replacement fuel, see the detailed review:
David L. Hagen, (1976) Methanol: Its Synthesis, Use as a Fuel, Economics and Hazards. 180 pp, with 608 ref. NTIS# NP-21727.
Nobel Laureate George Olah pursued this theme in:
George A. Olah et al. (2009) Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, ISBN: 978-3527324224, 350 pp
The sustainable “energy source” could be stored solar energy (aka archaic biomass, aka coal), current solar thermal energy, or nuclear energy such as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).
Overview of LENT Theory Low Energy Nuclear Transmutations, Yogendra Srivastava at CERN March 22, 2012
Levi et al. “Indication of anomalous heat energy production in a reactor device”
See LENR-CANR.org;
Now which will become most cost effective?
Excellent, Willis!
(I don’t know which I like best–your excellent posts, or your taking apart of your dim-witted detractors.)
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Uhhh …. perhaps I’m missing something but don’t we drill for oil and don’t we drill for natural gas and don’t we mine for coal? To what “everything else” are you referring?
Not sure if this has been mentioned before, if so apologies.
Hydrogen is produced industrially by the electrolysis of Brine (NaCl). The resultant electrolytes are Sodium Hydroxide, Chlorine and Hydrogen. There are viable markets for all three materials BUT you need a boat load of Electrical power to do it and they come out in the same proportions all the time so you need commercial uses for all three.
I worked for a company where the Cell Room pulled ~ 40 MW from the grid and it wasn’t a big plant by any means. The cost of the electricity is a huge factor in terms of the economics of plant operation.