What is Hydrogen Fuel and why can't we use it?
By taiguy
@taiguy (478)
United States
April 9, 2008 4:44pm CST
Hydrogen as a fuel is a very interestesting topic.
First let us go over a couple methods used to generate hydrogen. Hydrogen is most commonly created for gasoline refineries who need it to break up the gasoline components. This process is referred to as "cracking". Most all refineries will use natural gas (methane) in order to create the hydrogen. Natural gas (methane) molecular structure is CH4. Meaning you break off the carbon chunk (which combines with oxygen to create CO2) and you get two H2 molecules (which is hydrogen's most common form). The other common, albeit is only 2% commerical use in U.S., method of creating hydrogen is through electrolysis. Electrolysis is the method of splitting H2O (water) molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Essentially the oxygen is junked (oh no, more green house gasses!) even when the hydrogen is destined for fuel cells [which combine the hydrogen and oxygen in the air to create electricity]. Electrolysis is more expensive to create hydrogen because of the effenciency loss in comparison to natura gas. For example, around 5% to 10% of our electricity is created from natural gas -- and therefore it does not make much sense to convert natural gas into electricity and then into hydrogen.
One of the preventive measures to using hydrogen as a fuel source, in the U.S., is the high price of natural gas. Currently natural gas is 4 to 5 times higher in the U.S. than in Europe. Why you ask? because they can, that's why. You also have to take into consideration that the conversion from natural gas to hydrogen is not 100% effecient. Meaning you will lose some of your "energy" in the conversion itself. Since hydrogen and natural gas have similiar molecular properties it makes more sense to use natural gas as a fueld than to waste the trouble of converting it to hydrogen.
Electrolysis through renewable energy (i.e. wind, solar) has potentional. You must consider, though, that if you are creating a 10 acre wind farm you are really just replacing a very very small industrial coal plant. Solar, currently, does not have the amperage that is needed to produce the high-voltage required for electrolysis. You can use low voltage, but it further degrages the effenciency and you also have a byproduct of chlorine instead of oxygen.
There are two major directions I have noticed that are potentially inviting for electrolysis. One if to use off-peak energy from hydro dam resources. "Off-peak" energy is the base load of energy available at night and day. In the day-time the "on-peak" electricity added to the grid is around 50% to 150% of the "off-peak" load. Since there are large portions of the night where the base load must be, just that, a base load there is alot of electricity that simply get's wasted (under my understanding which may be wrong). A good approach to this would be to create hydrogen during the night from the [cheaper] base load energy, and then sell it back to the grid in the day time by creating electric through fuel cells. In places where there is a distinct difference between off-peak and on-peak pricing for electricity this will not only allow for a profit but will, in general, make the on-peak power less expensive by adding an additional source.
The second directory I have noticed is via nuclear power stations. Nuclear basically burn uranium at 8000 degrees F which causes the uranium to "blow up" and make alot of heat. They then turn a bunch of water into steam which turns a turbine to create electricity. They then must take all this very hot steam and turn it back into water so they can "re-steam" it. This heat can be a source of electrolysis itself. This means that they basically can be performing electrolysis through the heat of the nuclear power plant for essentially nothing more than the capital costs to install the equipment.
1 response
@ShepherdSpy (8544)
• Omagh, Northern Ireland
10 Apr 08
Hydrogen is not easy enough to produce (yet) that it will be a suitable replacement for petroleum based fuels-I'm interested in Electric vehicles and the best method to create their power-As Hydrogen requires a lot of electricity in it's production,why not just use the Volts directly for Vehicle power,instead of using it in an intermediate stage of creating another fuel?