Originally published September 24 2005
How the hydrogen economy works
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Fuel cells and ozone alerts are leading the world toward what is broadly known as the hydrogen economy. Forty-eight percent of current hydrogen production is from natural gas, 30 percent is from oil, 18 percent is from coal and electrolysis accounts for about 4 percent.
A hydrogen economy is a hypothetical future economy in which the primary form of stored energy for mobile applications and load balancing is hydrogen.
Because hydrogen storage and transport are so expensive, most hydrogen is currently produced locally, and used immediately, generally by the same company producing it.
General Atomics projects that hydrogen produced in a High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGR) would cost $1.53/kg.
Internal combustion engines beat the competition at the time, such as compressed air, or electric automobiles powered by batteries, because they provided better range, by virtue of the efficiency of the internal combustion engine and high energy density of the hydrocarbon fuel.
The large tank reduces the fuel efficiency of the vehicle.
Because it is a small energetic molecule, hydrogen tends to diffuse through any liner material intended to contain it leading to the embrittlement, or weakening of its container.
These have good energy density per volume, although their energy density per weight is often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels.
The problem is reformers are slow and given the energy losses involved plus the extra cost of the fuel cell you were probably better off burning it in a cheap internal combustion engine to begin with.
Direct alcohol fuel cells do not require a reformer, but provide lower efficiencies and power densities compared to conventional fuel cells, although this could be counter balanced with the much better energy densities of ethanol and methanol over hydrogen.
Long distance power lines are used to average out imbalances between local electrical supply and demand, by moving a small portion of the total electricity generated.
For example, California burns an average of about 30 gigawatts of electricity, and has a north-south transmission capacity bottleneck (the 500 kV Path 15) of 5.4 gigawatts.
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