You think aliens are laughing at us for using

[RevBrown]

Of course they are laughing at us. I figure Earth is the Alabama of the galaxy.

[Maggot6]

I heard that until gas prices (canadian keep in mind) have to get like, $3.00 before hydrogen would be semi worth using, canadian gas is at around 1.30 now, so that will be a while....

[PyRo]

I heard that until gas prices (canadian keep in mind) have to get like, $3.00 before hydrogen would be semi worth using, canadian gas is at around 1.30 now, so that will be a while....

No, to make hydrogen worth it we need to convert to nuclear power and figure out how store all the waste in such a manor it won't come back to haunt us for atleast seventy years or so. It's like electric cars. Sure you're not burning any gas in your car but where do you think that power is comming from when you plug it in every night?

[Alpha]

Buy a hydrogen powered car. Where are you going to fill up?
Who is going to invest the billions of dollars to build hydrogen filling stations all over the country when their is no customer base?

Simply their is no customer base so no stations will be built but their won't be a customer base until stations are built.

Hydrogen is suprisingly simple to make. Take some water (preferably without too much extra crap), and run an electric current through it.

Now, everyone says "But alpha, it takes fossil fuels to produce hydrogen, so it doesn't matter"

WEll people are too stupid to realise, you make the first batch of hydrogen using fossil fuels, but look, you have a batch of hydrogen! So use that batch to make even more hydrogen! Problem solved.

[bofh]

WEll people are too stupid to realise, you make the first batch of hydrogen using fossil fuels, but look, you have a batch of hydrogen! So use that batch to make even more hydrogen! Problem solved.

Um, that won't work.

Um. It takes at least as much energy to seperate the hydrogen from Water, as you get from burning hydrogen... which makes water.

I'll leave the "too stupid to realize" comment for somebody else.

[Jonneh]

slinky on escalator == perpetual energy!

[Kai]

slinky on escalator == perpetual energy!

WE MUST FIND A WAY TO GET THIS INFORMATION TO THE BIGWIGS IN WASHINGTON!

[CoolHand]

. . . . . . WEll people are too stupid to realise, you make the first batch of hydrogen using fossil fuels, but look, you have a batch of hydrogen! So use that batch to make even more hydrogen! Problem solved.

It takes more energy to win the hydrogen than it contains once its free. This is the loss due to conversion. No process is 100% efficient. You would have to add more power back to the hydrogen you burn just to be able to create the same volume of hydrogen that you had when you started. That's a losing battle, and a pointless one at that.

If hydrogen is to ever be used it has to be won via more efficient method of extraction, or at least be powered by a cleaner and more efficient form of electrical generation.

Hydrogen powered cars, without a paradigm shift in electricity generation are just a cheap PR trick and a stopgap for smog. That's about all the good they will do.

Now, if we could find a way to harness fusion effectively. . . . . . . .

[Will Wood]

slinky on escalator == perpetual energy!

Oh... I'm SOO trying this next time I go to the mall.

[Will Wood]

I say we all become cavemen once again... that would solve all the problems.

[PyRo]

I say we all become cavemen once again... that would solve all the problems.

Only their isn't enough wood left for everyone to burn. Some people are going to have to be sacrificed. I'll be the one who chooses the voulenteres

[Alpha]

It takes more energy to win the hydrogen than it contains once its free. This is the loss due to conversion. No process is 100% efficient. You would have to add more power back to the hydrogen you burn just to be able to create the same volume of hydrogen that you had when you started. That's a losing battle, and a pointless one at that.

If hydrogen is to ever be used it has to be won via more efficient method of extraction, or at least be powered by a cleaner and more efficient form of electrical generation.

Hydrogen powered cars, without a paradigm shift in electricity generation are just a cheap PR trick and a stopgap for smog. That's about all the good they will do.

Now, if we could find a way to harness fusion effectively. . . . . . . .

It doesn't have to be 100% efficient. Juts a percent more then it takes to make it is all you need. After that the fossil fuel requirement will decrease exponentially.

What about tha giant dam I drive over every time I go to vegas? Or the huge windmills I pass when I drive my boat through Hull gut? Or that huge solar panel array I saw in the movie Sahara?

The problem is, we're not trying hard enough. There ARE easier ways to produce hydrogen.

There are better ways to utilize that hydrogen.

It will take a drastic situation for us to figure it out.

Meaning, gas prices SO high, that nobody can afford it (more then just 5 or 6 bucks a gallon). It will take a war or similar situation to produce adequate technology.

Look at the history of mankind. Take airplanes as an example. Nobody cared about airplanes, it was just a sport for rich french guys. Boom WW1, research and devlopment, then airplanes went higher faster. WW2, again. Most of the technology we're using in our aircraft is some 30-40 years old. We only replace an aircraft when they get so old they literally fall apart or are vulnerable to something new and crazy.

Same thing will happen with our transportation and fuel issues.

[daviselk]

GM has hydro. cars... lol, look it up

[CoolHand]

It doesn't have to be 100% efficient. Juts a percent more then it takes to make it is all you need. After that the fossil fuel requirement will decrease exponentially.

What about tha giant dam I drive over every time I go to vegas? Or the huge windmills I pass when I drive my boat through Hull gut? Or that huge solar panel array I saw in the movie Sahara?

The problem is, we're not trying hard enough. There ARE easier ways to produce hydrogen.

There are better ways to utilize that hydrogen.

It will take a drastic situation for us to figure it out.

Meaning, gas prices SO high, that nobody can afford it (more then just 5 or 6 bucks a gallon). It will take a war or similar situation to produce adequate technology.

Look at the history of mankind. Take airplanes as an example. Nobody cared about airplanes, it was just a sport for rich french guys. Boom WW1, research and devlopment, then airplanes went higher faster. WW2, again. Most of the technology we're using in our aircraft is some 30-40 years old. We only replace an aircraft when they get so old they literally fall apart or are vulnerable to something new and crazy.

Same thing will happen with our transportation and fuel issues.

You're just not getting it.

There really aren't easier ways to make hydrogen. You can:

A) Capture it from the air.
B) Break it off of water via electrolysis.
C) Process fossil fuels (coal gasification, steam stripping of methane, etc)
D) Break if off of fossil fuels and organics via chemical reactions.

Option A is basically pointless. There isn't enough floating around in the atmosphere to make it worth while, and the process is complex and expensive.

Option B is the cleanest (given that the electricity used is also generated in a clean manner), but also the most expensive currently. Water is abundant, and goes back into circulation when the hydrogen is burned. The hang up here is providing the electricity. You cannot fire the power plants with hydrogen, as the energy output is less than what is required to create more hydrogen (thusly you would be burning all the hydrogen produced and then some just to run the plants to produce the hydrogen).

Option C is the cheapest, but produces CO2 as a byproduct, which is one of the gasses we are trying to curb by going to H2, not to mention the fact that they require fossil fuels to begin with.

Option D is in the same category as Option A, the volume required to make a difference simply isn't feasible to be created in this manner. Chemical reactions of the sort that liberate H2 are also dangerous (IE high energy).

The thing you aren't seeing is that you can't build a giant dam everywhere (in fact, pretty much every place that can have a big dam in it, has one), not to mention the enormous environmental impact of such a construction (IE the acres of land submerged verses the kW of power produced). Its a clean energy source, but I'd be willing to bet that ethanol from corn has a higher energy density (IE BTU's or kW per acre) than hydro-power does.

Wind is also not dense enough. We'd have to cover the entirety of the nation with windmills to provide the power we need, and that says nothing for growth.

Believe it or not, the nation's energy providers aren't out to spoil the environment. Nor are they there to retard development of cleaner energy sources (as so many want to believe). They are the ones doing the development work, because they know that's where we need to go. There is money to be made in clean fuels and clean energy. The oil companies know this, the big energy companies know this. They aren't fighting the transition, they are racing to be the first into it. Technology takes time, especially when it's a drastic departure from the status quo (which H2 power certainly is).

People that are way smarter than this whole board combined are working on the problem even as we bicker over it. Given enough time, they will figure it out.

Believe what you like, but if there really were easier ways to go to H2 (or some other miraculous clean fuel/energy source) it would have already been done.

[Alpha]

I dont think you understand what I'm getting at. In one sentence:

Use existing clean, renewable, NON fossil fuel power sources to produce hydrogen through the electrolysis method.

If we can figure out how to take mud that is trapped thousands of feet under the earth and convert it into enough force to move a 2 ton vehicle across a continent, then we can figure out a way of producting hydrogen more efficiently then we are doing now.

I'd like to see some actual figures showing how much electrical energy and how much and what type of water it takes to produce a certain amount of hydrogen.

Then how much hydrogen can you produce from that of which you already have. Like an atomic explosion, I'm pretty sure you could take that hydrogen and keep producing more and more and more hydrogen.

EDIT: And if not, we should focus on nuclear energy. How to make it smaller, and safer, using less amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes.