Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Problem(s) With Hydrogen

From the Dailey Caller:


https://dailycaller.com/2024/02/15/...odes-like-the-hindenburg-david-blackmon/


Like many others, I saw hydrogen having a lot of potential for powering vehicles. Looks like it ain’t all that simple.

The higher ups can not make gobbs of money off of Hydrogen power so it will not go anywhere.

If they can figure out a way to control it and make all of them selves rich then it will progress.

Does the exhaust drip water on the road?

Looks like someone paid attention in high school chemistry class.





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Why does Ivermectin, Vitamin D and Zinc come to mind here?
Hmmmm

It's not practical for cars because of the very large and heavy fuel tanks needed to contain it. Also, it's under extreme pressure and pumps necessary to pump it are very large and expensive. You don't take home a 5 gal can of H2 in your car for a lawnmower.

I had a CNG car when that fuel was $0.78 a gallon. That’s when Brobama ran the gas prices up to $3 a gallon. With my driving back then, the car paid for itself in 18 months. The only real problem with that was the relative scarcity of refueling stations. I had the foresight to have one that was dual fuel tho so it wasn’t a big deal. Fueling itself wasn’t markedly different than for a gas car. Hydrogen wouldn’t be all that different. My car had a carbon fiber fuel tank for CNG. It would be similar for hydrogen.

With regards to emissions, some of you need to brush up on basic chemistry and what is currently coming out of your tailpipe - CO2 and H20 in roughly equal proportions.

From the article…

“ DAVID BLACKMON
DAVID BLACKMON IS AN ENERGY WRITER AND CONSULTANT BASED IN TEXAS. HE SPENT 40 YEARS IN THE OIL AND GAS BUSINESS, WHERE HE SPECIALIZED IN PUBLIC POLICY AND COMMUNICATIONS.”

As to the linked article in the OP: BS, MS, PHD.

Tech can resolve the negatives. It has many possible applications. It is a clean and powerful fuel.

In West Texas back in the 60's just about every farmer used LPG (propane) for farming and many used it in their autos. It was cheap. It burns better, cleaner and the alterations are few and easy to convert from gasoline to LPG. The only way I could envision hydrogen being used is to produce it as you use it. It is too dangerous to store. EV's are a lost cause and solar would be another nightmare.

The flammable range of Hydrogen is 4 to 75% in air. Gasoline is 1 to 7%. Plus it is a gas that would spread over a large area if leaking. That makes it more dangerous. I know from using pressurized helium for gas chromatographs that small molecules are dificult to contain. It leaks out of fittings and connections that easily hold air or natural gas. Hydrogen is half the size of helium and would be difficult to keep contained in common connections and seals. Vibrations from a vehicle on the road would make them leak worse.
Hydrogen also has lower BTU than natural gas. It costs 4 1/2 times the current price of natural gas to produce hydrogen through electrolisis to do the same work.
It is non polluting for sure but dangerous and more expensive. Maybe technology will improve to change that. The flammability of it won't change. And people have wrecks in cars everyday.

An article i read 6-8 years ago said that, at that time anyway, the cheapest method to obtain hydrogen was to extract it from natural gas. The downside was that the main "residue" was CO2.

Run an energy budget on creating hydrogen and natural gas. Similar efficiencies to create, similar efficiencies in burning it (50% or less).

I grew up burning LPG in cars. As long as it’s dual fuel so you can start it on gasoline when it’s cold, they are great. We still have a few irrigation pumps around here plumbed directly into the natural gas line. Those engines seem to run FOREVER. Still only 50% efficient.

Then again, science doesn’t enter religious discussions very often.

A local Injun tribe got a hefty grant, they are constructing a self contained H generator that uses forest wood waste, (we got plenty of that here) and are building a heavy vehicle fuel stop (truck stop)...it's begun construction, at Redding CA, so I'd say the technology is there. Plus, Volvo and Toyota have been running fleet trucks in Central Europe for well over a year, safely. I'm thinkin' H is here, and boy am I glad I didn't buy lithium mining shares 2 years ago.

It took me less than a minute to google up the info on hydrogen. I have no reason to hate it. It just costs alot more and it produces alot less heat than gasoline so you have to sacrifice horsepower or burn a whole bunch more fuel to do the same work. Plus the safety problems with it. It would be great for man caused global warming theory. And there is plenty of water to extract it from.

Some interesting developments on the geological hydrogen front. That would at least negate a few of the issues mentioned against it here.

Australia has been efforting towards converting massive diesel engines, like on ships or huge mining equipment, to hydrogen. There’s not a “green” alternative to those engines, otherwise. Good idea, bad idea, FIIK. But it’s something that’s happening.

If- this is a huge if- they ever get fusion online as advertised, then clean electricity is a thing, and hence hydrogen is a thing. But fusion has problems far beyond just sustaining a net-positive reaction. Lotta materials science also needs to happen.

The closest we have at this time to green vehicles are the plug-in hybrids with around 50 miles of pure EV range. Most driving is done within that range. You give up nothing- other than complexity- because they still run on gas when needed. This is a technology that we can use as a bridge to whatever is next. You can charge them overnight with an extension cord in your garage. Does not require massive infrastructure. The batteries are a fraction the size of an actual EV, which means we could actually manufacture enough at scale. It’s already here- for example the latest gen Prius. The AWD version gets I believe 55 mpg and has that 50-ish mile EV range. Plus, bonus, the electric motor kicks in when using it as an ICE car and makes the thing actually kinda sporty.

IIRC, the early models were designed to be electric with hydrogen powered generators…right now, I’m not sure about the current technology for producing hydrogen economically, but I remember that I read something last year about some kind of breakthrough that some small college in the midwest made…

Many replies here appear to assume hydrogen would be fuel for an ICE, similar to using propane. From what I have read the larger focus is on fuel cells onboard the vehicle, which produce electricity to power electric motors. Has this changed?

Wanna go to the moon? Use liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Just like NASA did.

On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline.

Hydrogen has the highest energy per mass of any fuel; however, its low ambient temperature density results in a low energy per unit volume, therefore requiring the development of advanced storage methods that have potential for higher energy density.

Department of Energy
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage

Every internal combustion engine produces water. How much do they drip on the road?

The exhaust from an ICE vehicle is warm and the water is vapor which escapes into the atmosphere.