Why Are DUer's Attacking A Solution that could Save the World from Global Warming?

[berni_mccoy]

I don't get it. A country is actually DOING something about using alternative fuels and what do DUers have to say about it?

Take a look for yourself: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2399740

Paraphrasing: "It'll Never Work", "There are better solutions", "That won't work for Murika", "Maybe in 20 years..."

WTF? Norway is doing it NOW. They will complete their project. People will be using Hydrogen Energy to power their vehicles. But if the most progressive people in America are doubting Thomas's and wringing their hands over a solution like this, then there truly is no hope for America succeeding in a venture like this. I bet we could get enough votes to Impeach a President for suggesting such a solution though.

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. US automakers and the oil industry both HATE such plans

Therefore, "America is simply not interested."

If we, like Norway, had reasonable limits on the influence business played in national politics, we would very likely be with them in such programs.

[dysfunctional press]

39. actually us automakers and oil companies LOVE such plans...

because they're red herrings that help keep the status quo well entrenched.

[Toots]

2. Unless we can bomb them and take their energy it won't work

We have to spend all our money on military industrial complex. It is the american way..

[Pab Sungenis]

3. Because the program WON'T work in America.

We're too large a nation with too varied a terrain to accomplish this.

I also agree with the person who said that fuel cell vehicles are a distraction. Viable electric cars are a necessity, and their development must take priority.

[berni_mccoy]

13. How are you going to power 150 million electric cars? Coal? Nuclear?

We don't have the energy infrastructure to handle that kind of electric distribution either.

[Deja Q]

21. Infrastructure can be revised... but politicians will say "it's too expensive, waaaah".

Hell, it's hard enough to bring in mass transit buses into some parts because the local politicians whine "it's too expensive and not cost effective".

Talk about myopia.

[muriel_volestrangler]

26. Same way you produce the electricity to generate all the hydrogen

hydrogen is a way of storing energy - and the only non-fossil fuel way of producing it is with electricity. The infrastructure for electricity distribution is in fact far more developed than that for hydrogen. The only question is whether storing the energy in a tank holding hydrogen is more efficient than storing it in a battery.

[dysfunctional press]

40. and how are you going to provide hydrogen to 150 million cars?

how/where is the hydrogen to be produced? and how/where will it be distributed?

[snooper2]

42. Solar....

Solar panels on home plug car in at night...

pretty simple... Have you signed up for your Solar panels yet...I have

http://renu.citizenre.com/

[Deja Q]

20. I should start doing research in these technologies just to prove naysayers wrong.

[Ikonoklast]

25. They said the same things about gasoline-fueled

vehicles, when first made.

No one ever believed that the vast distribution system would ever be built. People laughed and asked if there would be a filling station on every corner.

That was when electric cars were more plentiful than internal-combustion autos.

[opihimoimoi]

4. Who knows why we do these sort of things....not all of us humans are well.

Yes, we should be working/embracing on things to lessen the Global pain

[rucky]

5. Some people automatically attack anything new.

Nothing to do with politics or a hidden agenda. Some personalities just instinctively like to poke holes in things.

They drive me nuts.

[northzax]

6. they have 20 cars

20. they cost a million bucks a pop. why don't you drive a hydrogen car? oh, you don't have a million bucks to spare? no one is going to mass produce them just for Norway (which is fortunate to have good ability to produce hydrogen locally along the highway)

[piedmont]

7. Because hydrogen isn't an energy PRODUCTION technology.

It's an energy STORAGE technology, with lots of drawbacks. And the energy to produce the hydrogen has to come from somewhere.

[ProfessorGAC]

10. That's True Of Any Combustion Fuel. No?

That seems a distinction without a difference.
The Professor

[piedmont]

31. There's a huge difference. Cracking H2 from water is an energy-wasting process...

Compared to storing the energy in other ways, such as batteries.

[Canuckistanian]

50. Hydrogen should be considered as a BATTERY, not as FUEL

Hydrogen does not exist as a natural resource. It must be generated.

Usually, by hydrolysis, which requires energy from somewhere else.

This is only moving the "exhaust pipe" further away from the vehicle.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

8. because many here are of the mindset that America can never change

Part of the problem, I think, is that they see change coming from the top down--and they've decided government will never work. The key to this is to make the change come from the bottom up. I could see folks coming up with their own versions of hydrogen cars--there are kits on the market to do this, in fact-as well as kits to build electric cars. Just as individuals now are using solar power and geothermal to power and heat their homes, individuals will come up with alternatives for transportation.

[mainegreen]

9. It could save the world from global warming? Untrue!

Some serious misunderstanding of where the hydrogen comes from if that's what you think.

It works for, say, Iceland, because they are sitting on top of foolishly huge amounts of geothermal energy. Norway will likely get it's hydrogen from oil. We would likely get it from coal or natural gas.
That's where most people would get it from.

[ProfessorGAC]

11. That Doesn't Make Technical Sense

Even if we removed the hydrogen from natural gas for use as a fuel, that wouldn't require carbon dioxide emissions. Unless the methane was burned, the CO2 released, and the water hydrolytically decomposed to hydrogen.

However, high energy plasma reactions could strip the hydrogen off a hydrocarbon and leave only the elemental carbon. (Ion bomardment is another way to do this, which is how some high energy NMR techniques are performed.)

Why would the source lead to CO2 emissions? Are people actually proposing the scenario in my first paragraph?
The Professor

[mainegreen]

17. I am referring to the source of power to generate the hydrogen.

It doesn't really matter if the hydrogen comes from oil, natural gas, coal or even water. Power is necessary to do that, and that power is going to come off the grid. For us, that is more than likely going to be coal. Hence, it's not as environmentally friendly as often touted.

I'm not saying it doesn't have benefits, and certainly is great in certain scenarios, but switching America over to hydrogen fueled cars to prevent global warming is certainly not a really good argument.

To reduce smog in cities? Perhaps.

Unless we move our power generation to cleaner sources, hydrogen fuel as 'green' in America, and most of the world, is not really valid.

That's what I meant.

[ProfessorGAC]

18. OK

Of course, nuke power would obviate some of that. I'm not nuke's biggest fan, but i'm also not its biggest critic. I live 3 miles from a nuke plant, so i guess i have to assume/hope they can be run safely for years. Call it wishful thinking if you must.

But, i am a proponent of the hydrogen infrastructure. I'd like us to see a way to progress in that direction, even if it's NOT the perfect system. Progress, to me, doesn't always require a great leap forward. Incremental steps, my friend. Incremental steps.

The Professor

[muriel_volestrangler]

28. Not only does it make tecnical sense, it the normal way of producing hydrogen, right now

Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas. At high temperatures (700–1100 °C), steam (H2O) reacts with methane (CH4) to yield syngas.

CH4 + H2O → CO + 3 H2 - 191.7 kJ/mol

The heat required to drive the process is generally supplied by burning some portion of the methane.

Additional hydrogen can be recovered from the carbon monoxide (CO) through the lower-temperature water gas shift reaction, performed at about 130 °C:

CO + H2O → CO2 + H2 + 40.4 kJ/mol

Essentially, the oxygen (O) atom is stripped from the water (steam) to oxidize the carbon (C), liberating the hydrogen formerly bound to the carbon and oxygen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

Is this high energy plasma reaction something that is already done? If so, how much energy does it take, compared to electrolysis of water?

[ProfessorGAC]

29. I Know That's The Normal Way

I know the path because i know a fellow that works for one of the big gas product companies. That's how they do it. But, it doesn't have to be done that way.

The energy for plasma reactions is very high, but research could be done to develop more energy efficient magnetic fields and lasers. It's energy intensive, but still doesn't need to actually burn any fossil fuel.

If the energy source is NOT fossil fuel, then we would accept a trade off of having high energy expenditures to produce a transportable fuel that would liberate only water vapor at 114MJ per kg. That's 250% of what we get from burning gasoline.

I'm not suggesting it's cheap. But, it's a path that we could use to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

In addition, the hydrolysis step does not absolutely require the burning of natural gas. One could simply start from water. But, that gets into the whole issue of depleting another highly critical resource.
The Professor

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. There's plenty of water available for electrolysis

Because it doesn't get used up in the process - it just goes via the engine to become water vapour in the atmosphere, rather than evaporating from lakes, oceans etc.

Energy density of hydrogen is 143 MJ/kg, and gasoline 46.9 MJ/kg, so the amount of hydrogen you need is a third of the weight of gasoline - and the weight of water you'd need is therefore 3 times that of gasoline (atomic weight of oxygen being 16 times hydrogen). US gasoline consumption per day is 388.6 million gallons/day - so that would be about 1000 million gallons per day (a little less than 3 times teh volums of gasoline, since water is denser). Compare that with US water usage of 408 billion gallons of water per day, and it's 0.25%. A drop in a bucket, you might say.

So high-tech plasma solutions are only worth it if they use less energy than simple electrolysis. If they don't, and if there's no reason to think they will (it would surprise me, given you'd have to heat the material up to get a plasma), then it's not worth it as a solution. We have plenty of water for use in the cycle. It may be, however, that batteries, either existing or new technology, will store the electrical energy better than hydrogen. The figures given in the thread the OP refers to say batteries are more efficient, at present, anyway.

(I still don't understand why you said it didn't "make technical sense", if you knew it is already done that way - the technology clearly already exists.)

[berni_mccoy]

14. LOL. You are thinking of Iceland. Norway uses sewage as a renewable energy source, as well as

Solar and Wind.

[Tesha]

12. Hydrogen isn't an energy source; it's an energy transport mechanism.

We need non-warming *ENERGY SOURCES*.

Tesha

[berni_mccoy]

15. Like Oil, Gas and Biodiesel? Look how Norway is collecting Hydrogen. They do it ONSITE.

No distribution. Renewable sources generate the energy to obtain it.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

22. Where are the technical details? I want to know more. Where does it come from?

Wind? Solar? Tides? Something else?

[SyntaxError]

16. Hey, I did a search on this and found this in California...

http://hydrogenhighway.ca.gov/

I'm sure others know about this, but it's new to me.

[LanternWaste]

19. All we have to do is...

All we have to do is reign in our spending habits and stop buying I-pods, console games, new cars, cut back on clothing expenditures, hair dies, gels, mousses, and other unnecessary cosmetics, geegaw's, mp3's, rims, CD's, cell phones, big screen tv's, walking billboards pretending to be t-shirts, etc. ...

For all intents and purposes, stop buying all the useless crap we don't need-- if the demand is not there, the supply will wither and die. (I know, I know... people are going to say, "but I NEED the useless crap I buy", but we don't really.)

Even the poorest in America live like kings compared to most of the world's population. And all the justification as to why we need to see the newest movie, buy the latest book or stand in line for three days to buy a PC game won't help our energy and consumption addictions.

But even the most progressive among us would rather someone in east Africa starve than go without Halo III or World of Warcraft XXVII. Even the most progressive among us is complacent, lazy and self-centered compared to those who are truly in need...

But woe befall anyone who suggests that, and upsets our precarious balance of justifications we've constructed to excuse each useless purchase we make...

[hunter]

23. The biggest problem is automobiles, not what fuels them.

Even if you had automobiles that ran on non-polluting fairy dust made from sunshine, the automobile culture still demands a tremendous input of natural resources and is the root cause of tremendous environmental destruction.

Fewer cars = fewer highways, less development on wilderness and agricultural lands, fewer metal and plastic refining facilities... and the list goes on.

But even if I wasn't opposed to the automobile culture, I don't think hydrogen powered automobiles will ever be economically viable simply because hydrogen will always be too valuable to use as a simple motor fuel. The environmental and economic forces that make hydrogen look attractive as an energy source for automobiles are the very same environmental and economic forces that would make the automobile culture impossible.

The personal automobile exists because hydrocarbons were so incredibly inexpensive. Without inexpensive hydrocarbons their is no inexpensive fuel for automobiles, and no inexpensive source of the raw materials required to build either automobiles or the highway infrastructure that makes them useful.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. Two reasons:

1. It takes as much energy to create hydrogen fuel as it does to run a car on hydrogen fuel.

2. The byproduct of burning hydrogen is water vapor. Imagine the same amount of water vapor being released into the atmosphere as there is CO2 from cars being released now. Imagine the warm parts of the world with the same temperatures as now only MORE HUMIDITY.

And hunter is right. Cars are the problem no matter how they're fueled.

They encourage urban sprawl, which destroys agricultural land and wildlife habitat, as well as green spaces that could absorb CO2.

[Johonny]

35. thing about humidity

is once it hits 100 % it doesn't go higher. No the release of water vapor at CO2 emmision levels isn't that great a concern. Remember motor vehicles burning gas already produce a large amount of water vapor. The net result of switching from (H2) from (-CH2-) fuel isn't going to produce vastly much more H2O.

[porphyrian]

27. The end doesn't justify the means.

And if the idea can't stand up to simple criticism, it might not be worth trying.

[lpbk2713]

30. You know this is a message board, don't you?

We throw thoughts, ideas and opinions up against the wall. Some stick. Some don't. If we happen to come up with a workable solution to a serious problem now and then that's a good thing. But I don't think anyone has the idea that this board was created as the go-to place to solve all the world's problems.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

33. Because it's a red herring.

Some of us remember science class.

[Johonny]

34. hydrogen isn't a good fuel choice

First it take more energy to create hydrogen than you get burning it. So you still have to generate the hydrogen. Second hydrogen is very hard to store. It leaks readily from containers due to it's size and is hard to liquefy. Third colorless/odorless gases are rather dangerous to handle in mass quantities. Fourth it's unclear that the fuel cell catalysts needed for mass production will be economically feasible in large scale production. A hydrogen economy where every person in the society drives around in individual hydrogen fueled cars is not a very practical energy economy. Most likely electric vehicles where the energy is derived at a central power plant are much more practical.

[Occam Bandage]

36. Okay. Where are we getting the hydrogen?

[dysfunctional press]

37. do some actual research on the topic and you'll know why.

hydrogen is NOT going to work as a fuel source of the future- oil companies keep touting that the technology is "just around the corner"...

2 questions for you- how many hydrogen cars does norway have on the road, and how much does each one cost to produce/purchase/operate?

[cgrindley]

38. The only thing that can slow down global warming is to physically stop

industrialization in the developing world. Stop it as in stop it utterly and completely and overnight. That's the only way to slow it down. Stopping it would require the elimination of the human species. China's and India's and the rest of the developing world's drive toward Western levels of industrialization must be stopped or we are utterly and completely fucked. Neither of those nations has the ethical framework to give a shit, and the Western world lacks the balls to force the matter, so we're fucked anyways.

[dysfunctional press]

41. don't blame india and china-

they have just as much right to our "way of life" as we do/did.

[cgrindley]

43. No... they don't

that's like saying that since the Ancient Greeks kept slaves and catamites, then we have the same rights. Just absurd. Our way of life is toxic. No one has the "right" to it.

[dysfunctional press]

44. tell them that.

explain to them how they'll have to settle for a pre-industrial existence, because we went and fucked up the planet's climate with our selfish hedonism. oh and btw- even if you folks do stop all your modernization, the planet is still gonna be completely fucked, because we're gonna keep on living the same way we always have.

go ahead, tell them...see how far you get, and how many people are willing to take heed.

you might as well get used to the idea that we aren't going to "save the planet" that we fucked up for ourselves(as a species)- but rather, the planet is going to shed us off like old skin.

get ready to enjoy the showspectacle that climate change will hopefully provide in our lifetimes- there are plenty of interesting times ahead.

[cgrindley]

45. Okay... HEY INDIA AND CHINA... STOP WRECKING THE WORLD, K, THKX (nt)

[dysfunctional press]

47. they aren't wrecking it- we already did.

imho- they should pursue whatever lifestyle they choose to, just as we did.

[cgrindley]

48. Well that's either dumb or cynical (nt)

[arcos]

49. Wow... that's because the US doesn't emit any greenhouse gases, right?

:sarcasm:

[cgrindley]

52. The US is the world's biggest culprit

but just because the US has wrecked stuff doesn't mean that everyone gets a turn. That's absurd. Stop industrialization everywhere else and work to reverse the damage here.

[MilesColtrane]

46. The American military machine can't run on hydrogen.

We must have oil for our military so that it can maintain U.S. hegemony over countries that have oil because we must have oil for our military so that it can maintain U.S. hegemony over countries that have oil because we...........

[fascisthunter]

51. We Need to Embrace All Forms of Alternative Fuels

One form will not quench our counties energy appetite, however with other forms being utilized, we can manage. We have no other choice. I say if fuel cell technology works well in other countries, we should try to integrate it into our energy usage. We are running out of time.