Originally Posted by
Keith Outten
Beat me if you like but I believe Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. Our planet is 80% water so the source is inexhaustible and we can extract hydrogen from water via solar technology. There will be zero pollution and no nasty chemicals in our local recycling centers. Water is the only effluent from burning hydrogen gas. We already have the technology to convert to hydrogen gas, the only mountain to cross is our own Federal Government because it will never be able to control hydrogen the way they do every other source of fuel.
One problem of hydrogen is efficiency of conversions. Let me talk about that.
Let's start with 100 units of electric power, produced by some renewable means (solar, wind, etc.) and use that to do electrolysis of water. The energy contained in the hydrogen you get from that electrolysis is about 70% of the input energy, so now you have 70 units of energy.
Then, you get to one of the major problems - how to transport the hydrogen. You either have to have a way of producing hydrogen close to where it's going to be consumed or you have to compress it and transport it. Pipeline is the cheapest but there not much hydrogen pipeline. Compressing it and transporting it by truck is expensive. Hydrogen has the lowest amount of energy per volume of fuels. But let's be generous and assume that it takes 10% of the energy to compress and transport it. That gets us to 67.5 units of energy.
Then, the hydrogen is put into a fuel cell which is about 60% efficient, and that gets us 40.5 units of energy to go into the motors on the car. The motors are about 90% so we get to use about 34.5% of the energy we started with.
Looking at an electric battery car, let's start with the same 100 units of electric power, produced from renewal sources.
Transporting that energy to the charging station uses about 5% of the energy, which gets us to 95 units of energy.
A battery is about 90% efficient so the power to the electric motors is 85.5 units of energy.
The motors are about 90% efficient so the power we get from that 100 original units of energy is about 77 units.
Today, most of the hydrogen available is produced from fossil fuel.
While conversion efficiency is not everything, it will affect energy cost for powering your car (cents per mile).
Mike
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.