BBC Reports on Nanotech / Hydrogen energy
Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports on the hydrogen economy in today's Tech column, with an article that shines a positive light on nanotechnlogy; while the focus is on solar hydrogen production, nanocrystalline materials manage to bathe in the reflected glow. The public perception of green energy is a good one, and nanotech can only benefit from being associated with it."
August 18th, 2004 at 6:12 PM
I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
You wouldn't know from reading much of the propaganda about "alternative" energy supplies that the principles of thermodynamics exist and that they determine how much useful work, if any, we can derive from physical and chemical transformations. I'd like to see someone run the numbers on a "hydrogen economy" to show me how, for example, tens of millions of Americans in the Northeast are supposed to keep from freezing to death in the winter using solar panels, windmills and hydrogen gas burners in their homes.
Basically I'm seeing a lot of Hubbert and Dieoff denial going on, even as oil seems likely to surpass $50 a barrel in a few weeks or months. (Don't think that a temporary price collapse will falsify this prediction. The underlying fundamentals of the world oil situation look increasingly bad.) Oil, coal and natural gas have unique properties as sources of energy and chemical feedstocks that we simply have no substitutes for, no matter how much nanotech we could throw at the problem. People who think that "markets" or some unspecified technological gimmick will prevent the emerging crisis are engaging more in irrational terror management than realistic thinking.
August 19th, 2004 at 7:38 AM
Re:I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
> I'd like to see someone run the numbers on a "hydrogen economy"
Here.
You can also google for "hydrogen economy myth"
August 19th, 2004 at 9:22 AM
Re:I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
Thanks for the reference. Some of the political material on Ruppert's Website sounds dubious, but his reports on the energy situation is consistent with what I've finding and posting elsewhere. I'm just amazed at how physically ignorant and context-free the whole debate about the future of energy and other resources has become. For example, the factories which make solar panels and windmills don't use the sun and the wind to power the lights and the machines inside; they are plugged into the same electricity grid everyone else uses, powered by coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. In other words, we aren't accessing net energy by using these "Green" gadgets, because they are still being energetically subsidized by fossil fuels. The same goes for the hypnotism surrounding nuclear power. We use energy from oil and other fossil fuels to mine, transport, process and assemble fissionable materials for nuclear reactors, so even there we see a substantial energy subsidy from fossil hydrocarbons. A true alternative to fossil fuels would have to generate a high-enough EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) not only to meet our current needs without further having to dip into the struggling stream of oil etc., but it would also have to supply enough extra energy to build their replacements and allow for further economic growth. Nothing I've seen so far comes anywhere near to being able to do that.
August 20th, 2004 at 10:57 AM
Re:I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
> Some of the political material on Ruppert's Website sounds dubious
That's because it is. And this is the really scary part, because you can only find energy concerns on "environmentalist whacko" or "government conspiracy" sites, showing that the majority has heads in the sand, assuring themselves that there really is nothing to worry about. "Oil prices will come down, no problem. We still have fifty years of reserves left!" (See today's S&P (!) article) We also have maybe two hundred years of coal remaining and maybe half that of natural gas. And then what? Nobody knows. The trouble is that when the wells run dry and the coal mines are exhausted, what will bring civilization back to the modern age? It is clear that the modern world can not continue as it is now, and with the depletion of oil, depression and dark ages will set in. The last dark age was ended by the industrial revolution, which was made possible by the abundance of fossil fuels and metal ores. How will the society of the future end the next dark age, when there are no more fossil fuels, all the easy ore deposits have been mined, and all previously existing metal turned to rust? (most iron ore used by industry is FeS, which has a much lower melting point than iron oxide; the latter is usable, of course, but at a much higher energy and equipment cost) It seems possible that the current modern age may also be the last one.
August 20th, 2004 at 12:42 PM
Re:I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
I'm finding more and more stories about the oil crisis in mainstream business news sources like Bloomberg, Business Week and Fortune, which must put the free-market fundamentalists and libertarians in a cognitive bind. After all, these ideologues could readily dismiss warnings of resource depletion coming from leftists and academics; but when the elite corporate types face declining oil supplies as a practical problem that threatens their livelihoods — well, what are cornucopian free-marketeers supposed to say then?
September 7th, 2004 at 4:03 PM
Read the Web
Work being done toward a hydrogen economy is directly driven by the acknowledgment that oil prices will rise substantially over the next couple of decades, and, additionally by the acknowledgement that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could have some fairly bad consequences.
Most of the fuels we have historically used for energy (wood, coal, oil, natural gas) can be thought of as hydrogen contaminated with some amount of carbon. Historically, we have been reducing the amount of carbon contamination, and using uncontaminated hydrogen as a fuel is a logical endpoint.
However, it's clear to many that the ideal hydrogen economy is rather far away and that a methane economy will be used in at least the short term. Methane is abundant and can eventually be renewably generated; it's an efficient way to store and transport hydrogen (25% hydrogen by weight); and it can be "burned" cleanly in fuel cells, albeit with the production of carbon-dioxide.
I think that whether we eventually move from a methane economy to a hydrogen economy will boil down to two things: (1) Will we find a substance (metal hydrides, carbon nanotubes, glass microbeads) that is better for transporting hydrogen than methane? and (2) how will we deal with carbon?
In a methane economy, we recycle carbon by using plants or bacteria to generate methane from water, carbon-dioxide, soil, fertilizer, and energy.
In a hydrogen economy, we initially generate hydrogen from methane at a central power plant and work on efficiently sequestering the carbon by products. Later, we generate hydrogen from sunlight and water.
Using hydrogen to heat homes in the northeast will cost more than using methane to heat those homes. But, we are going to have to invest in either carbon sequestration technology for carbon produced by burning methane, or use hydrogen, or pay for a dike to prevent manhattan from being flooded.
People who think that research and human ingenuity won't help us minimize the impact of the emerging crisis are engaging more in irrational terror mongering than realistic thinking.
October 11th, 2004 at 7:56 PM
Re:I guess thermodynamics doesn't matter any more
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