Hydrogen Thread:8-6-05 MIT Chemist attempts splitting water

[dmcowen674]

Where can you buy a Hydrogen Car?

This article says this station is the first, I thought there was a handful of Stations in California a couple of years ago???

5-25-2005 Bush Pushing Hydrogen Fuel

WASHINGTON - President Bush stared inquisitively down into the nozzle of a hydrogen fuel hose on Wednesday, then pumped the fuel into a blue compact car as he renewed his plea for Congress to pass a wide-ranging energy bill.

"This is the beginning of fantastic technology," Bush said at a Shell station in northeast Washington, the first retail hydrogen and gasoline fueling station in North America. "Hydrogen is the wave of the future. We're too dependent on foreign sources of energy."

Rick Scott, operations and safety coordinator at the station, helped Bush pump 1.83 kilograms into the four-door parked at the pump. Scott said the hydrogen cost $4.75 a kilogram, which is equal to a gallon of gas, but noted that the 1.83 kilograms would power the car twice as far ? about 100 miles.

Administration officials have said it's possible fuel cell cars will be mass marketed in 15 years.

Cars running on fuel cells that produce energy by mixing hydrogen with oxygen are already on the road.
==================
Where???

 

[dmcowen674]

This guy is my new hero:

8-6-2005 Chemist Tries to Solve World's Energy Woes

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's generally locked up in compounds with other elements. Currently, it is chiefly harvested from fossil fuels, whose use is the main cause of carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

And so while hydrogen fuel cells ? in which hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce electricity and water ? have a green reputation, their long-term promise could be limited unless the hydrogen they consume comes from clean sources.

That's where Nocera's method comes in. If it works, it would be free of carbon and the epitome of renewable, since it would be powered by the sun. Enough energy from sunlight hits the earth every hour to supply the world for months. The challenge is harnessing it and storing it efficiently, which existing solar technologies do not do.

"This is nirvana in energy. This will make the problem go away," Nocera says one morning in his MIT office, where the Grateful Dead devotee has a "Mean People Suck" sticker on his window. "If it doesn't, we will cease to exist as humanity."

Lots of people have explored this challenge, but Nocera had a big breakthrough when he used light to coax multiple hydrogen atoms out of liquid. The key was figuring out the right chemical catalyst.

Nocera has performed the reaction with acidic solutions, but not water yet.

Nocera believes it might be 20 years before engineers might design systems based on his work. And he frets that too few scientists are exploring the problem, with many top minds instead focused on biomedical research.

"This is a massive construction project," he says. "You can go back to building New York City in the '20s and '30s. You can't do it with just a few construction workers. So I need more construction workers, more hard hats, with me as a hard hat."

There's another big hurdle. While Nocera plugs away at trying to save the world, some people don't believe it needs saving.

Most scientists concur that continuing to burn fossil fuels will send the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ? it's now 35 percent higher than in preindustrial times ? to dangerous levels, causing global temperatures to rise with potentially devastating effects.

"We are literally poisoning ourselves," Nocera says. "People don't get it because they can't see it."

Pointing to a whiteboard sketch of his vision for using sunlight to split water, Nocera acknowledges that it ultimately might not be an energy panacea.

"Is it right? Maybe not. But it will be something. And it might be something I can't see right now," he says. "That's OK. But you don't stop doing something because you can't see it.

It's antiscientific. It's anti-intellectual."
==============================================
Sadly if he gets close to a breakthrough I fear it would not see the light of day

The Oil Barons, Politicians and Corporations stand too much to lose.

 

[mect]

Originally posted by: dannybin1742

Aren't there some fundamental laws of thermodynamics that make that bolded sentence impossible? I mean, I may be a "Red Stater," but I swear I done read that in one of them thar scientifical doohickies..

yes but you also realise that we are dealing with bacteria, a living system, so what they are simply doing i think is drawing off the oxygen which shift equilibrium in favor of producing more products, mainly hydorgen and oxygen, but the oxygen is sapped off, so you get more hydrogen. i'm sure the laws of thermodynamics are being followed

Shifting the equilibrium will not change the thermodynamics of the process. If you look at an energy vs reaction coordinate diagram, regardless of the equilibrium, the energy consumpion is based purely on the transition state energy and the energy of the products vs reactants. The bacteria likely serve as a catalyst to decrease the activation energy and probably also provide chemical energy to help drive the system, decreasing the amount of energy that must be pumped in. Also, the enthalpy law that applies here is the one that says that no process is 100% efficient. Therefore, it is impossible with any source of energy to get as much out as you put in. Even oil required more energy to produce than we get out. It really comes down to what fuel source do we have the smallest energy loss obtaining, and what fuel sources get their energy from solar (less further energy that we have to put in). So basically, the main factor is the ratio of the power we put in from our power grid to the power that we get out. If this is positive, we can consider something a power source (the sun makes up the difference). If this is negative, it can still be used as a portable power source, especially if we reach the point where our power grid isn't dependant on oil.

As for hydrogen fuel cells, the biggest problem isn't really producing hydrogen. The main problem is storing it. If you want to use hydrogen as a typical combustion engine, then you could just pressurize it, although a lot of people aren't comfortable with pressurized hydrogen in their car (you have to be at pretty high pressures for H2). If you're talking fuels cells, most people are trying to find a way to either physisorb or chemisorb sufficient hydrogen in a small enough space to make it feasible. Also, devoloping a process for refueling a fuel cell fast enough is an issue (unless people are interested in wating a few hours at the hydrogen station). There are also efficiency issues, developing materials that are good conductors of hydrogen (same idea as electrical conductivity, but now you have a hydrogen atom moving through a host material). My understanding is that right now the production of hydrogen isn't really considered a big obstacle.

 

[assemblage]

Perhaps he's ineffective at filing for government research grants.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: assemblage
Perhaps he's ineffective at filing for government research grants.

I doubt that.

He is at MIT, one of the last vestages of Science in the U.S. now that the U.S. no longer places any emphasis on Science.

I'm sure he can get all the grants he needed if MIT changed over to a Rectory.