Hydrogen production from sunlight

[spacewolflord]

Them use a BIG (54-metre-high tower) as a "solar reactor" with a lot of mirrors around it to heat zinc oxide and wood charcoal to 1200°C. After baking them they recycle whats left in to usable compounds that will be used to make Hydrogen. It SOUNDS good so there might be hydrogen power soon after all. Article

[Handarazuur]

Except it's cheaper and more efficient to burn extinct animal products. Plants, too.

[A176]

what's wood charcoal made of?

[Enterprize]

Charcoal is the blackish residue consisting of impure carbon obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents of animal and vegetable substances. It is usually produced by heating wood in the absence of oxygen (see char), but sugar charcoal, bone charcoal (which contains a great amount of calcium phosphate), and others can be produced as well.

Yay for wikipedia.

Sounds promising

[the_living_god]

Isn't hydrogen supposed to be the most abundant element in the universe anyway?

[EarthBorn]

Isn't hydrogen supposed to be the most abundant element in the universe anyway?

In the Universe as a whole... not on Earth.

[Moe]

Yes, we have next to no hydrogen on earth. If only 70% of our planet's surface were covered in a substance that is made up of two hydrogen and one oxygen atom!

Oh wait.

[Retroboy]

The first sentence does a good job of destroying the point of the process, in addition to being horribly misleading in and of itself. The author of that article should be shot.

HYDROGEN has been touted as the pollution-free fuel of the future, except that producing it still involves burning fossil fuels.

Electrolysis requires electricity, which can easily come from hydroelectric dams, solar, or wind. Fossil fuels are only one source. Sheesh.

Anyways, the problem isn't making H2, it's distributing it due to its high volatility. What this process does is allow you to ship powdered zinc as a solid (although still not safe) fuel to wherever you want to manufacture hydrogen locally. Here's the good bit.

The zinc is condensed into zinc powder that can either be used directly in zinc-air batteries or reacted with water to give hydrogen and zinc oxide, which can then be recycled.

Regardless, it sounds inefficient as hell, not to mention dangerous.

Finally, Zinc has atomic mass of 65 particles per nucleus, versus Hydrogen's one particle per nucleus. The energy per pound would be a heck of a lot higher for delivered product if you could send pure H2 safely to its destination.

-- Retro

[Nurizeko]

Ohwell, back to the drawing boards scientist dudes, getting closer....maybe...

[Lawrence]

Yeah, it would be amazingly dangerous as hydrogen is flammable. I believe it is used in Gas Canisters and have caused many disasters such as the Zeppelin crash over New York (might be New Jersey...).

[No Surrender]

So how much more volitile/explosive is hydrogen compared to gasoline anyway?

[Nurizeko]

Enough to create hydrogen bombs?, lol, i dunno.

[Atreides]

That was the Hindenburg... "Oh the humanity!"<-- If you ever wondered where that phrase came from, it was spoken by a radio news reporter on the scene of the disastor while on the air.

I think improving the tech of splitting water molecules will be far more productive than scraping stuff out of a super high tech charcoal grill, but maybe that is just too simple.

[Harmanoff]

Pretty damn volatile i'd say. If i remember correctly you can even make hydrogen spontanously ignite at room temperatur in the presence of a catalyst(platinum). It was a while ago since my chemistry days... Anyway, if you were to use hydrogen in cars for instance an accident could case the involved cars to blow up.. imagine what a serial crash could do. They'll just have to find some way to work around it though... the benefits of using hydrogen as fuel are just too great imo.

[Moe]

Hydrogen by itself isn't that bad, however if you mix it with oxygen (which invariably happens when you have a leak and the stuff touches the atmosphere) it becomes pretty darn explosive.

A hydrogen bomb does not use exploding hydrogen, it uses nuclear fusion, which is not a chemical process.

[Void]

Isn't hydrogen supposed to be the most abundant element in the universe anyway?

It is, but down here on Earth it isn't 'free'.

[Retroboy]

The other big problems with hydrogen are its natural state is a gaseous form that vanishes into the sky the second it gets a chance, and its molecular size - it can squeeze out through the itty-bittiest little holes over time. Gasoline just kind of sits there in liquid form, giving off the occasional fume just to keep you alert, until someone sprays it into a combustion chamber or tosses a lit match on it.

-- Retro

[Paladin]

Electrolysis requires electricity, which can easily come from hydroelectric dams, solar, or wind. Fossil fuels are only one source. Sheesh.

However, 75+% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuel.

-Paladin

[Moe]

Hydrogen isn't so much energy production, it's more of an energy storage solution. A hydrogen-powered car essentially runs off electric energy from some power plant which was used to separate hydrogen from oxygen.

[Paladin]

And that power was generated mostly by fossil fuel burning power plants, and a certain amount of energy is lost in the creation of the hydrogen and the fuel cell, so in the end you're talking about using fossil fuel even less efficiently than we already do.

[DatonKallandor]

But we dont HAVE to use fossile fuels. We just do currently, but alternative means of energy production are on the rise.
Eg.: We manage to build fusion power plants - without hydrogen powered cars we would still be dependant on fossile fuels for cars, even when bigger scale electricity is not reliant on them anymore.


Daton

[Paladin]

Sure, but fix the power grid first. It's a bigger offender than automobiles.

[SquidDNA]

Do you have any links that do a good, thorough job of explaining why our power grid sucks, Paladin? You're always talking smack about it but I'm totally unfamiliar with the details.

[TheSilentOne]

There is actually a prototype hydrogen filler station somewhere in California that uses solar panels mounted on top of the main building and the area over the pumps to produce the electricity needed for electrolysis.

Also, the flammability of hydrogen was not the only contributor to the Hindenburg fire-apparently, the outer skin was coated, yes, coated, in the same material used as propellant by the Shuttle's SRBs. Yeeouch...

On a side note, for a little extra every month, 90% of the electricity coming to my home is from "green" sources, such as solar/wind etc.

Finally, the "Oh the humanity" thing was apparently recorded well after the Hindenburg crash. At least, as far as I know.

[The Collector]

At least half of our power comes from coal, for starters.

[DatonKallandor]

Who's "we", Collector?

On further notice a company in germany is making gasoline from wood.


Daton

[Moe]

Squid: The US power grid is using alternating current, same as most other nations. The reason one chooses AC over DC is that you can easily change the AC voltage.
At high voltages, power flows better through copper wires in the sense that the wires don't offer as much resistance, which in turn means they don't heat up as much -> less energy is wasted on the grid itself. Here's the problem with the US power grid: They don't change the voltages.

In Germany for example, power is transformed up to about 110 kV after leaving the power plant and sent over the long-distance lines. It is then transformed back to 20kV when it reaches a city, and transformed down again to our nominal voltage of 230V at each block or so. This means that the long-distance lines are used at 110 thousand volts.

In the US, for some reason I can't explain, they use 110 Volts everywhere. Even on the long distance lines. The long-distance lines thus become horribly inefficient, and a lot of energy is wasted, all it does is heat the copper wires, which in turn heat the air around them a little - basically you're wasting power to heat the sky.

[Atreides]

That would explain why in the winter birds love to sit on power lines.

[AceRimmer]

Slight problem there, Atreides: Birds aren't fried by the power lines anyway because they don't form a complete circuit for the electricity to flow. If they could reach the ground AND touch the wire at the same time, then a circuit would be formed, killing the bird.

As for the 110V problem (not that it affects me here Down under, mind), it's all the more reason to develop room-temperature super-conductors. I wonder how thats going.

Also, this is off-topic.

[General Nuke Em]

I believe the reason birds like to sit on power lines is because they "heat the air around them a little - basically you're wasting power to heat the sky", according to Professor Moe.

[Beelzebuddy]

In the US, for some reason I can't explain, they use 110 Volts everywhere.

Sorry to tell you, but that's blatantly wrong.

Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 [1], and in the UK at 7.4% in 1998. [2]

[Moe]

What the...? It looks like I have to slap my physics professor around a bit with a large trout.

[yetanotherplayer]

Well, depending on the speed of the swing, a small trout can have just as much impact as a large one...

[Caesar]

Interestingly enough, france has a good idea for once. They generate most of their power from nuclear sources. That's what we here in the US need to do. It's clean, efficient and will last for a helluva long time.

Now with pebble reactors, we don't even have to worry about meltdowns. Seems win win for me. Just gotta find a good way to get rid of the waste.

[spacewolflord]

Don't for get 'those' people that think ANYTHING with Nulcear in the name is EVIL. But people are getting over that. I would be happy if they just replace all the old reactors and generators to newer and a hell lot more effient ones.

[Moe]

Well, the waste is a problem. Actually, I rather like the German approach: we buy power from the French and their nukes.

[[Vertigo]]

So, sunlight is produced by nuclear reaction between hydrogen and other compounds in the sun. When that sunlight reaches earth we use it to produce hydrogen... oh, the irony.

[Black]

There is a fermentation process that utilizes bacteria and electricity to produce hydrogen remarkably fast. Apparently a small current causes the fermenting process to go into overdrive :P.

[spacewolflord]

Got a link to it or a name for us to look up Black Star?

[ShamrockMan]

First google hit,Second

It requires 1/10 the energy needed for electrolysis.

[Retroboy]

It also requires sealing so oxygen can't get in, but that's more inconvenience than it is problematic. The first link is hard to read - I'm guessing because it was translated using babelfish or something from german? - but the second is interesting. I drive by our city's sewage treatment plant every day. I wonder how much hydrogen it would produce if hooked up like this?

Once again, the big problem - and danger - here is storage of the resulting gas.

-- Retro

[Moe]

That wasn't babelfish, that was something even worse, called "German Professor"...