DIYbanter - View Single Post

George

On 11/13/2010 7:17 AM, wrote:
On Nov 12, 11:22 pm, (Larry W) wrote:
In ,

wrote:
On 2010-11-13, wrote:

If we had a practical "clean fuel alternative" we'd all be buying them

Hydrogen was proved viable 30 yrs ago. You get three guesses why it's
not available. The first 2 don't count.

nb

Hydrogen makes a fine fuel but where will it come from? Except for a very
miniscule naturally occurring amount, the only way to produce it is by
using some other energy source or from a "cracking" process during
oil refining.

--
When the game is over, the pawn and the king are returned to the same box.

Larry Wasserman - Baltimore Maryland - lwasserm(a)sdf. lonestar.org

Guys like notbob like to point to the ocean and say "It's full of
hydrogen!" Which of course ignores that fact that it's
inconveniently bonded to oxygen and we know from basic chemistry that
it takes as much energy to seperate that bond as you get out of it
when it later is recombined again. In other words, hydrogen is more
of an energy transport mechanism than a fuel. The easiest and most
cost effective solution to generate the hydrogen would be to use
nuclear power, but somehow I doubt notbob would call that clean.
It's kind of like the folks that keep saying electric cars are zero
emission, as if electricity you could ever want just comes out of the
wall outlet.

I believe in the case of hydrogen, there is also the issue of how to
safely store enough of it in a car.

Exactly, I follow this stuff pretty closely and as you noted there are
non trivial issues concerning use of hydrogen to fuel a car.