I'll say! Straight from the people with more liquid hydrogen experience than anyone else (https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/hydrogen/hydrogen_fuel_of_choice.html):
Many of us will remember TV footage of a big rocket sitting on the launch pad, with clouds of vapour all around it from extremely expensive cryogenic liquid fuel boiling off in vast quantities.
The stuff is barely manageable when you have vast amounts of government funding, huge numbers of high-IQ and highly trained personnel, a vast amount of extremely expensive safety gear, a high risk threshold, and a large safety separation distance from the general public. There's absolutely no way liquid hydrogen could ever be a practical fuel for automobiles for the general public.
This is about the point at which the magic pixie dust usually shows up in the press release. 😀
A grad school friend worked in experimental condensed matter physics. There was an enormous LN2 tank on a gigantic concrete pad just outside the lab, and they used buckets of the stuff on a regular basis.
Liquid helium became involved, too, when they were using their superconducting magnet. No buckets there, but special cryogenic flasks handled with extreme care.
The undergrads liked to chuck excess liquid nitrogen into the various decorative pools and ponds on campus. It made some crazy-looking ice formations. I doubt the aquatic life in the ponds was very happy about it, though.
I remember reading that the earth slowed down measurably when a huge tidal power station in France began to operate.
Given the several much more serious planetary-level threats we're facing, a teensy little bit of rotational slow-down doesn't seem to be much of a worry. 🙂
-Gnobuddy
Apply a little lateral thinking.
Gaseous Hydrogen is useless because of the incredibly low volumetric energy density, period.
Liquefying it is very complicated and relatively expensive, storing it in a car is a nightmare.
So, as I said before, pure Hydrogen is useless for everyday needs such as powering a car.
So what do we actually need?
IF (and that´s a big IF nobody yet answers) Hydrogen is plentiful and cheap, THEN we should synthesize some Hydrogen compound which is both flammable and liquid at ambient pressure and temperature.
Hydrogen loves Carbon, which is also a nice fuel, so we should synthesize hydrocarbons.
Then, of course, we should develop some kind of engine which can burn hydrocarbons to run cars, planes and ships; consider that a "liquid battery" if you wish.
Gaseous Hydrogen is useless because of the incredibly low volumetric energy density, period.
Liquefying it is very complicated and relatively expensive, storing it in a car is a nightmare.
So, as I said before, pure Hydrogen is useless for everyday needs such as powering a car.
So what do we actually need?
IF (and that´s a big IF nobody yet answers) Hydrogen is plentiful and cheap, THEN we should synthesize some Hydrogen compound which is both flammable and liquid at ambient pressure and temperature.
Hydrogen loves Carbon, which is also a nice fuel, so we should synthesize hydrocarbons.
Then, of course, we should develop some kind of engine which can burn hydrocarbons to run cars, planes and ships; consider that a "liquid battery" if you wish.
Excellent reasoning! 😀
The irony of the whole thing is that liquid hydrocarbons really are an absolutely wonderful fuel. Except for a few minor little side-effects, like unbreathable air, and eventually, extinction-level global climate change.
-Gnobuddy
so, we're back to where we started from
except, Gno, you forgot that climate change is a hoax 😉
there are some in power apparently so dense that the simplest truths can't penetrate
except, Gno, you forgot that climate change is a hoax 😉
there are some in power apparently so dense that the simplest truths can't penetrate
There are a lot of hybrids out there which are a short leap from this idea. In the US I believe Ford now sells a hybrid that is more electric than gas, i.e. There are smaller leaps being made also.
Open question: what are the issues with powering big stationary power plants with hydrogen? Then running elec. cars from that? Yeah, the batteries,
But I'm confident that at least in developed countries the battery recycling has been studied and there are regulations. In fact for home power use when you buy them you pay a disposal fee.
Also probably the battery materials are expensive enough to make recycling them profitable
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I do wonder what facial expressions are made by electric car owners (in certain regions) upon discovery of the fact that they now have a coal powered car!
This is the way to do things. The Chevy Volt is an example. A spin-off of tesla is doing truck retrofits with electric engines and turbine generators: A Tesla Co-Founder Is Making Electric Garbage Trucks With Jet Tech, and Why Not | WIRED
At some point the generator can be replaced with small plug-in fusion reactors.
dave
Ah, yes. All those wildfires going on in BC now have nothing to do with a newly hotter, drier climate, of course. 😀
There's smoke everywhere here on the mainland. Is Victoria far enough away to have escaped, or do you have bad air quality too? Friends as far away as Olympia (Washington) tell me their air is smoky from our BC fires, too.
Or maybe so psychopathic that they don't care about the truth, only about immediate attention-getting and personal gain?
-Gnobuddy
Smoke here too… at least when we descend off the mountain, not nearly as bad up here.
dave
I remember reading about South African project, to build "gas stations" with liquid air, for absolutely environment-friendly cars... Back in 1999. ;-)
But what about hybrid cars, that would heat up cylinders of liquid air engines burning some natural gas producing another part of an energy? Or think of it as a liquid-air cooled gas - burning engine? 🙂
Compressed air car - Wikipedia
But what about hybrid cars, that would heat up cylinders of liquid air engines burning some natural gas producing another part of an energy? Or think of it as a liquid-air cooled gas - burning engine? 🙂
Compressed air car - Wikipedia
Portland is socked in as well with smoke.
As far as the question of large-scale power generation from hydrogen -- remember the intent would be as an intermittent supply. Bank it from renewables during excess generation and burn it when you need it.
With attention to losses and size-scaling effects (fuel cells scale nicely), the talk on the street is that it makes more sense to distribute such fuel cells at the substation or even more local and distributed rather than large-scale centralized. Just not all the way down to cars. But we'll see what actually comes out.
> Hydrogen ...Carbon
There are in fact only TWO useful fuels. (*)
Hydrogen burns easily to water but is thin in earth-surface conditions.
Carbon is hard dense lumps but burns to CO or CO2.
As you say, H and C compounds offer many choices of storage and flame and smoke. Heavy sludge/tar to light gasses.
Natural Gas is mostly Methane, CH4, high H/C ratio, 4:1. Propane C3H8 is 2.67. They burn real easy. But even selling here with no-road-tax and low profit, transportation and tankage make these fuels not-popular outside special cases. Bucket of gasoline (around C8H18, 2.25) is so much easier to handle. As we go to more-C fuels we get denser and less leaky.
(*) Oh, Sulfur "can" be a fuel. Oil refineries burn-off unwanted S and capture the energy. The main problem is the stink. Secondary is that it tends to be more expensive than H/C/HC fuels. Iron will burn if you throw BTU and Oxygen in; most metals will, and I suppose Thermite "is a fuel", but not an engine fuel.
There are in fact only TWO useful fuels. (*)
Hydrogen burns easily to water but is thin in earth-surface conditions.
Carbon is hard dense lumps but burns to CO or CO2.
As you say, H and C compounds offer many choices of storage and flame and smoke. Heavy sludge/tar to light gasses.
Natural Gas is mostly Methane, CH4, high H/C ratio, 4:1. Propane C3H8 is 2.67. They burn real easy. But even selling here with no-road-tax and low profit, transportation and tankage make these fuels not-popular outside special cases. Bucket of gasoline (around C8H18, 2.25) is so much easier to handle. As we go to more-C fuels we get denser and less leaky.
(*) Oh, Sulfur "can" be a fuel. Oil refineries burn-off unwanted S and capture the energy. The main problem is the stink. Secondary is that it tends to be more expensive than H/C/HC fuels. Iron will burn if you throw BTU and Oxygen in; most metals will, and I suppose Thermite "is a fuel", but not an engine fuel.
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Deuterium is a fuel as well. ;-)
Ultra-dense Deuterium May Be Nuclear Fuel Of The Future -- ScienceDaily
Ultra-dense Deuterium May Be Nuclear Fuel Of The Future -- ScienceDaily
Think it's interesting, just the thought of having a fusion reactor to turn on and off at will. To me that sounds like science fiction, at least for the moment.
"It's a real viable energy source of the future! ... Oh, but it seems we do have a slight problem with containment."
"It's a real viable energy source of the future! ... Oh, but it seems we do have a slight problem with containment."
Yeah, practically there isn't such thing as a fusion reactor, other than a bomb, right? So it has been science fiction for decades, and still doesn't appear to be happening anytime soon, or necessarily ever even. Sad..
This is more of a long term soft goal that the survivors of today's politicians ... none of those who came up with this "policy" will be alive in 2040 ... hope that maybe the UK can get close to achieving.
It's also a heads-up to automakers, giving them a timetable to move forward on phasing out the internal combustion engine.
It will be a miracle of unheard of proportions if this actually sticks in it's current form and comes to pass in the year 2040. Something will happen, but probably not what this proclamation suggests will happen, or when.
It's also a heads-up to automakers, giving them a timetable to move forward on phasing out the internal combustion engine.
It will be a miracle of unheard of proportions if this actually sticks in it's current form and comes to pass in the year 2040. Something will happen, but probably not what this proclamation suggests will happen, or when.
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Yeah.
The reason why the sun works is because it provides it's own containment by gravity. Difficult making a small scale continous explosion with too little gravity to self limit. It will probably work if done at a small enough scale, and you manage to safely continually feed the reaction with more material at the same time. Remember there was some small scale project using Hydrogen on the news a couple years ago, it is not unrealistic.
Hydrogen-Boron Fusion | Drawdown
Fusion Reactor Spits Out First Hydrogen Plasma - Seeker
Wendelstein 7-X | Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik
Caution, do not enter while burning plasma is in the chamber. You WILL be toasted until the point of evaporation and beyond.
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