What is Digg?222 Comments
- BlueSkyfish, on 08/27/2008, -3/+43They don't split the water molecule. There is actually O2 gas mixed in with the water.
- IG64, on 08/27/2008, -5/+33Something I've always wondered: If gills can extract oxygen from water, what happens to the hydrogen? Or is that a stupid question? I don't even know.
- scooterbaga, on 08/27/2008, -1/+26Get to it then.
- lazerflesh, on 08/27/2008, -2/+27By the power of science !
- schoffie7, on 08/27/2008, -4/+27Please...some sort of new fuel source before we all go broke!
- IG64, on 08/27/2008, -0/+23Oh... interesting. Guess it doesn't hurt to ask.
- palmer, on 08/27/2008, -0/+23There's still a major omission here: the energy required to COMPRESS the hydrogen to make it viable as a fuel source. If you fill an entire car with hydrogen at one atmosphere, you're not going far.
Compressing gas takes a lot of energy; that's why air conditioners draw so much power. - xtothepowerofx, on 08/27/2008, -1/+20seriously.. the first guy explained it just fine. what were the rest of you hoping to accomplish?
- InfiniteNothing, on 08/27/2008, -0/+18Just stick the wires from a solar panel in water and bam! you have hydrogen
- Gndoab, on 08/27/2008, -0/+18thank you for basic understanding of how the conservation of energy works.
Just like that compressed air car that was on here a while back, it takes more energy to compress the air then one gets out of it by using it as a fuel source. - leszek, on 08/27/2008, -1/+17nope,
di-hydrogen oxide is a very dangerous substance:
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html - volandkit, on 08/27/2008, -7/+23What a hell, it has been known for years that hydrogen could be produced easily from water. The main problem with hydrogen is storage...
- Magicmasta, on 08/27/2008, -3/+18I learned in chemistry that that 2 is supposed to be in subscript.
- IG64, on 08/27/2008, -1/+14I guess it was a stupid question then. Oh well, at least I learned something.
- hockeyisgd, on 08/27/2008, -16/+28I learned in Chemistry that H stood for Hydrogen in H2O...
- Scheitbag, on 08/27/2008, -4/+15yeah...screw agricultural methods (we need farms to produce food...not fill up hummers) hydrogen is the best way to go regardless of the method of production.
- thcobbs, on 08/27/2008, -1/+12And just in case you missed that.... they extract dissolved oxygen from the water.
- LLLSecretChimp, on 08/27/2008, -0/+9Currently, hydrogen as fuel *is* storage. Nobody has a practical method of producing hydrogen such that the energy released by burning the hydrogen exceeds the energy required to get the hydrogen. Oil is practical as an energy source because it takes less energy to pump oil out of the ground and crack it into fuels than the energy that'll be released from burning those fuels.
The point of the article was that this might be a method where solar energy could be used to generate hydrogen from water, so less energy is used to extract the hydrogen than you could get from burning the hydrogen. Hydrogen would then be a practical fuel, like petroleum. - xaxxon, on 08/27/2008, -1/+10Not a stupid question, just a lot of people knew the answer.
- palmer, on 08/27/2008, -0/+8Hydrogen at one atmosphere doesn't amount to squat. It takes tons of energy to compress gas, which you're going to have to do if you want to carry enough for any practical purpose.
- RAGEdemon, on 08/27/2008, -0/+8I agree with you both and dug you both up, but I believe that compression isn't as bad as it sounds.
We can use technology like nuclear power plants to do this en mass and on the cheap. The point is that the final product will be clean and endless, and will only get cheaper instead of more expensive. What has happened is that we have moved the energy injection from the car to an external location.
Contrary to what many believe, nuclear energy is comparatively very clean, affordable, and cheaply/easily maintainable. Above all, unlike "other clean solutions" it can actually cope with the energy demands of our current societies. - sultanica, on 08/27/2008, -0/+8ah good ol' public education
- palmer, on 08/27/2008, -3/+11There are fuel crops that don't compete with food crops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha_oil - UberNick, on 08/27/2008, -0/+7...but taught to spell in fourth
- caseycoold, on 08/27/2008, -0/+7I want a time table, damn it.
- kh99, on 08/27/2008, -0/+6I think the reason they put "easily" in quotes is because they mean they have a way to do it other than the traditional way of using a lot of electricity. So they really mean "more efficiently" or "less expensively".
- Sethunplugged, on 08/27/2008, -3/+9Gills extract the free oxygen that is diffused into the water.That is why you have to have an air pump in an aquarium. They do not actually break the water molecule apart into oxygen and hydrogen.
- polalion, on 08/27/2008, -2/+8Well guess I'm too late to post a reply to tell everyone how smart *I* am.
- jerrolds, on 08/27/2008, -0/+5still probably easier to distill/filter water than it is to refine oil...
- DryMaltExtract, on 08/27/2008, -0/+5Seriously, it better be from salt water.
- majortom1981, on 08/27/2008, -2/+7Does the water have to be fresh water or can it be salt water. If its fresh water wouldnt it make a scrce resource even more hard to find?
- TPorter72, on 08/27/2008, -0/+5Avoid di-hydrogen oxide at all cost. It's the silent killer.
- thcobbs, on 08/27/2008, -0/+5Well, don't look at hydrogen. Hydrogen is an energy carrier not source. Basically, you'll be carrying whatever light energy wasn't lost in the conversion into your hydrogen consumption apparatus(also losing energy).
- doctechnical, on 08/27/2008, -0/+5So how do you drive the car at night?
I'm sorry, I read the article but I didn't see a thing about hydrogen on demand.
In any case it takes about 7.5 square feet of surface area to capture just one horsepower worth of solar energy. And that's assuming 100% conversion efficiency and a bright cloudless day. And 1hp ain't enough to run my weed-whacker, yet alone my car.
There's a reason plants don't move around much. - Mrstupid7, on 08/27/2008, -1/+6Well there's a massive problem with the reaction being very endothermic. Where does *that* energy come from to convert it to methanol.
I don't see why we don't invest in electric cars and cut out all this ridiculous middle man *****. - Syzothermy, on 08/27/2008, -2/+7Correct, but you need mon before oxide.
Dihydrogen monoxide. - Xalorous, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4Yeah, problem is that it takes more electric energy to perform the electrolysis than you can release by burning the hydrogen.
Even if you 'burn' it all at once (explode it). - Xalorous, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4RTFA again. Not an electrolytic process. It is photolysis or a photolytic process.
- InfiniteNothing, on 08/27/2008, -1/+5Store it as methanol:
CO2 + 3 H2 → CH3OH + H2O
If you can concentrate the carbon in the air and use that for your CO2 you could actually stay carbon neutral
I'm not sure if this is endothermic or not but if it is it probably isn't too endothermic. - scaaven2, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4http://chicoandbourkes.com/images/35037.jpg
- frontporsche, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4Hurray, you win!
- shortyjacobs, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4Gndoab -
Except you BURN the hydrogen, and you just use the potential energy of the compressed air to run the other car. This doesn't break conservation of energy, cuz you have an external energy input, (the frickin' sun) - Chebsi, on 08/27/2008, -1/+5Some people will mistake that link for a Rick Roll.
- glucoseboy, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4Holy grail. Call me when they've actually built the thing
- Harabeck, on 08/27/2008, -0/+4If they think theyll be able to produce enough within the car to keep it going, they are really kidding themselves.
- feliks2, on 08/27/2008, -2/+5Did you read the article? They only need to store it in small quantities as they want to produce it in the car, while driving.
- doctechnical, on 08/27/2008, -0/+3It's hugely inefficient...?
Cracking water into hydrogen is trivial (in terms of technology). Storing said hydrogen is terribly non-trivial, as you're either going to have to compress it (more energy gone!) or use cryostorage (like NASA does for rockets, but since when did NASA give a ***** about efficiency?) or something else more exotic and expensive in terms of energy efficiency.
Better to develop a more efficient battery to hold more amp-hours/kg instead of mucking around with H2.
Hey, didn't someone mention a government funded prize for new battery technology...? - Tezdoll, on 08/27/2008, -0/+3not a stupid question....google knows all.
- mikedoth, on 08/27/2008, -1/+4Maybe except the fact that they use farm land?
- smurfsahoy, on 08/27/2008, -0/+3It's very very endothermic. but that's not really a problem, since you WANT it to be very endothermic (you're trying to store lots of energy, remember?)
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