an interesting way to get hydrogen from water
 

Sounds like it's still very energy-intensive though. 200-300C and those kinds of pressures will not come cheaply - but it's a start. Perhaps if done on a large enough scale...

Nuclear still seems like the most effective way to produce huge amounts of energy for the amount of invested energy. I'd love to see a good comparative analysis of this.

Couldn't agree more. The electric company I work for used to run a plant that got shut down 20+ years ago. I work with one of the operators who ran it and the reasons it got shut down still bug him to this day. There are plenty of incidents opponents of nuclear can point to, the part they leave out is most of them were caused by or made a LOT worse by humans

I like your take on it but I don't know enough...what do you mean made worse by humans?

The separation of hydrogen from water is merely converting one form of energy to another with it's attendant losses. The reason is that water represents the lowest energy content state for Hydrogen. All other forms will go to water (if oxygen is provided) and release some quantity of energy in the conversion.

If you want to create an energy containing product from water (typically hydrogen), you need to add energy to convert the water molecule (H2O) into something else. Some portion of the energy gets stored in the hydrogen gas which releases this energy when it is burned (or otherwise) converted back to water. The remaining energy used to convert water to hydrogen goes to separating the oxygen molecules from the hydrogen molecules. No matter what the process there are unavoidable energy losses due to waste heat and other thermodynamic considerations.

As a result of the chemistry/physics involves, I always laugh when someone wants to use water as the feedstock to make hydrogen. It is a losing game unless you have free source of energy. The only two that get close is solar (very diffuse for large scale production) or nuclear (full of political minefields).

+1
Of course "free energy" eliminates the need for most hydrogen......Murphy's law gets the rest.

That explains it better that I could.

The smart way to do it is nuclear power to make the hydrogen. Then we can in essence have nuke powered cars. The pollution from cars is wide spread especially in the cities.

The only way to avoid all the pollution is to kill off all the humans. No doubt some of the enviro wackos would think that is a good idea.

Go back and read through some of the nuclear disaster's throughout history and you'll see every one had a small problem that was escalated exponentially by humans.

Three Mile Island - "The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant's user interface"

Fukushima - obvious natural disaster however "An ex-Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) executive testified that the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in 1966 was built at 10 meters above sea level, 10 meters lower than the original design at 20 meters above sea level, to cut costs. This change of placing profit before safety has resulted in the serious damage following the tsunami on March 11 and the ensuing serious nuclear disaster." That 10 meters caused the emergency pump room to flood rendering them useless. The reason it was built lower? The designer thought it was an eyesore on the city.

Chernobyl - cause has changed several times based on which Soviet report you believe but one factor remains the same for all of them "Human factors contributed to the conditions that led to the disaster. These included operating the reactor at a low power level – less than 700 MW – a level documented in the run-down test program, and operating with a small operational reactivity margin (ORM). The 1986 assertions of Soviet experts notwithstanding, regulations did not prohibit operating the reactor at this low power level"

This is common to all nuclear accidents. For how much thought and care goes into designing and engineering nuclear systems, and fail safe systems, and redundant fail safe systems, it's not to hard to see why giving a couple operators the power to simply override them because they think they know better is a bad idea.

Operators can't be blamed for everything as it's hard to comprehend what I would do in a similar situation where the lives of 100,000's of people depend on decisions you make and you're looking at a gauge that can't possibly be right, so what do you do? As my co-worker says though "Nuclear operators are paid very, very well...not because of how they operator the plant 99% of the time, it's the 1%"

Harry, this lowers the activation energy, so while you still lose (you always lose in any energy transformation), you lose less.

Randy,

Quite true (the fundamental argument for catalysts of any type), but water as a fuel source is a losing game until the scarcity of other (mostly) hydrocarbon fuels are essentially gone.

At this point in time, I suspect the best way we have to convert free solar energy into fuels is to grow plants.

and people are working on just that

Tanstaafl

Are you cussing or speaking German? ;)

Yep, no free lunch.

Bender has been saying that for quite some time now.

"I'm a Loonie..."

Nope. That will only eliminate those who can call it pollution.

The very worst biologically caused pollution event was billions of years ago and caused by a "nasty" blue-green algae. This resulted in the first, and worst, mass-extinction event. It killed almost all life on Earth.

The pollutant?

Oxygen.

The remaining organisms that survived the pollution include things we don't like, such as Clostridium tetani. The disease tetanus is caused by it.


But back to your lunch...

While there are no free lunches (except at absolute zero, which you cannot get to probably, and if you can you cannot get any work out of the lazy mofo's anyway), one can often obtain an excellent lunch for a very reasonable price. All it takes is centuries of science and technology.

it seems to me that getting oil out of the ground is not a 'free lunch' either. it takes energy and resources to do so, and energy and resources to get it into a useful form.

water is nearly free, IMO. it falls out of the sky on a regular basis. if we can get an efficient means to convert it to hydrogen, with the least amount of pollution possible, i am all for it.

The net cost, in dollars or in energy, to extract and process hydrocarbons has been very low. The only thing cheaper than liquid hydrocarbons is solid, aka coal. And very recently, natural gas extraction has become extremely inexpensive. The carbon economy replaced human and animal labor.

Hydrogen is simply a storage system. You start with water and end with water. In fact, one problem with hydrogen is you start with water in liquid form, and end with water in gas form, which is a loser from an energy cycle standpoint. Losing the heat of vaporization is a major issue in most energy cycles.

we are on the same page. but if we can sort the hydrogen energy thing out, we can have another energy/labor epiphany.