An article on the Boston Globe Web wite this morning.

http://www.boston.com/business/techn...t_of_thin_air/

 

I discuss this with my freshman engineering students. Hydrogen is not an "renewable resource" as it requires (as stated near the end of the article) energy from another source to produce the hydrogen. You can't just grow or mine hydrogen.

This artcle ignores the main problem of developing the delivery and storage infrastucture --- safety. I see this as an investment opportunity (its a shame i'll be in retirement by then). If a manufacturer starts to sell hydrogen-based vehicles, sell their stock short. The lawers will have a field day after the first "Hindenburg Incident".

JeffD

 

I used to think that Y2K was the defining idiocy of my generation, but it pales in comparison to the "Hydrogen Economy".

As Jeff says, short them all

 

Sometimes it's probably better to oversimplify things to get a point across to the general public.

A fuel cell vehicle is no different than a rubber-band powered vehicle in that it takes another energy source to "wind it up".

 

The question the "Big Three" never seems to answer is how massive quantities of hydrogen will be produced. I'm all for vehicles that produce water vapor as the sole exhaust. But I don't think it's going to be that simple.

You can get hydrogen a number of ways:
-- Electrolisys (sp?) of water. This will be a heavy burden on the power grids, many of which burn fossil fuels to produce electricity.
-- A catylizing (sp?) reaction. Through the use of a catylist, hydrogen could be extracted from some other compound. However, what do you do with the residue of the original compound?

Also, it is currently very difficult to store hydrogen long-term. The atom is very small, and thus defies most attempts to seal in inside a container. Thus, if you had a hydrogen-powered car, and didn't drive it for a week, you could find your storage tank is empty.

Hydrogen is a very reactive gas. Thus, the hydrogen that escaped unburned could combine with other elements in the atmosphere. I'm not a climetologist, so I don't know what the long-term effects of this phenomenon would be, but I doubt it'd be beneficial to the environment.

 

Most of the big manufacturers have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D money into developing hydrogen, forged many business deals and signed many "agreements".

Giving up on all that now would cause massive problems in the boardrooms. That's the main reason they're all still on about it - they have to protect their investment.

One recent exception is VW, who are (not so quietly any more) moving away from hydrogen and shouting at everyone (rightly so, I think) that it's crazy to try working with a hugely voluminous gas when liquid energy transport is so much simpler and more efficient. It does help that they and their associate companies are leading the world in the development of plant- and other biomass-produced renewable fuels (which happen to be liquids, very like diesel, the engine for which they have also invested millions in).

 

There's always some kind of genetic engineering, taking a leaf and changing it so it emits Hydrogen instead of Oxygen.

Anywho, insteresting points, some of which I never thought of, like evaporation. Seems like Hydrogen isn't the wave of the future afterall.

 

Jeff I'll keep that in mind in my next life when all my brokerage acct's are full again. But as far as I know, you can make H2 in your own back yard using solar cells and just plain old rain water, (totally renewable and green). There's got to be a budding entrepreneur who can invent a closed system so when you come HOME at night the tanks are full at no cost to you. The big oil boys would not want to see that happen and that's when I'll sell 'em all short....

 

H2 - we have got to redefine the connotation of "H2"

 

If this Honda "ultra capacitor" is anything like a "flux capacitor" I'm gettin' me one of them things and going back, way back...