Originally published May 24 2005
Hydrogen power sources still facing vast challenges
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Hydrogen-powered fuel cells could be the environmentally friendly answer to the world's energy needs, but the technology to create a hydrogen economy, even in a market as small as Britain, remains too inefficient currently. Hydrogen would make a great electrical power source, however, electricity itself is the best, cleanest method of creating hydrogen from water. British scientists are suggesting using wind-turbine power to generate this initial spark, but the number of turbines needed to generate enough hydrogen to power Britain would make a moat of turbines, 10 km deep, around its entire coastline. At this rate, hydrogen power for the whole UK would only be probable around 2030 or 2050.
The Year is 2050 and out on the roads the stuff coming from vehicles' exhaust pipes is not sooty carbon gases but warm water vapour.
Scores of small power stations use fuel cells to consume piped-in hydrogen that generates electricity to feed hospitals, schools and communities.
This utopian vision of the so-called hydrogen economy is as seductive as it is simple, and most of the technologies that would be required are, theoretically, achievable.
Hydrogen gas is presented to one of the electrodes, where it diffuses into the pores of the platinum and splits into an electron and a proton.
Obtaining the vast volumes of hydrogen that would be needed to drive the world's transport systems and feed remote power stations is still a massive challenge.
This process releases carbon dioxide, so it does not meet the relevant environmental standards.
Nuclear power may be one option, but there is deep public, and hence political, antipathy towards that.
Britain's Clean Energy Educational Trust runs a website that carries a cogent argument for the use of wind power to provide the electricity to make hydrogen for transport.
The trust envisages offshore wind farms feeding electricity to hydrogen-producing factories.
It calculates that a single wind turbine capable of generating 2MW of electrical energy can produce enough hydrogen to run 18 large buses or 864 cars operating under city-driving conditions.
If you scale this up, a facility of 5000 such turbines sited in shallow waters off the coast of Britain could manufacture enough hydrogen to run 4.32million small- or medium-sized cars.
He believes that, in the longer term, photovoltaic technology will provide the bulk of the energy needed to power a hydrogen economy around the world, with hot, sunny regions such as North Africa exporting energy to northern Europe.
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