Same ones at the same time. He is deeply concerned for the enviorment. 

Actually hydrogen fuel cars would emit less water vapor then the cars we drive now. And it is a negligable amount anyway.

andy_fl Guest

Join Date: Jun 2001

For stoichiometry calculations, Gasoline is often considered as Octane (C8H18)

So the combustion of C8H18 is:

C8H18 + 12.5O2 --> 8CO2 + 9H2O

So the stoichiometry gives (118lb of C8H18 reacts with 400lb of Oxygen to give 353 lb of CO2 and 162 lbs of water). So per pound of gasoline burnt you get 1.42 lbs of water. Density of gasoline is around 6 lbs / gal and that of water is 8.3 lbs/gal. Plugging in those numbers you get 1.03 gallons of water are produced per gallons of gasoline burnt. Now to be able to compare apple to apple, I convert the water produced per mile of travel. Assuming 25 miles to a gallon average of a US Car that works out to be : 0.04 gal of water produced per mile

2> Water Production in a Hydrogen Powered Fuel Cell Car

The earliest (not the best) hydrogen powered fuel cell car gives 220 miles with a hydrogen storage tank (5,000 psi) of 156.6 liters volume. Density of Hydrogen at 300k and 5000psi (300K) is 0.023 g/ml ( NIST - isothermal properties of hydrogen). So a 156.6l tank holds 3.6 kg of hydrogen. And 3.6 kg of hydrogen will give 32.4 kg (14.7 lb) of water. 14.7 lb of water is 1.77 gal of water. Now 1.77 gallons of water is distributed over 220 miles. So that works out to be : 0.008 gal of water produced per mile

So hydrogen powered fuel cell cars will produce 5 times lesser water than gasoline cars.



It would be nice if hydrogen fusion started to pay off so we would have the energy needed to create a hydrogen fuel economy.

The USA would need about 7 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year to produce enough hydrogen to replace current gasoline usage.
(50 kilowatt hours to produce hydrogen to the equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline)
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/hydrogen.aspx

This can be produced by a 100x100 mile solar farm in the Californian desert.
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx
Quite a big area, nevermind the amount of materials needed to produce 100 sq miles of solar panels. Hydrogen fusion plants should be more efficient I would think.

The 7 trillion is on top of the 4 trillion kilowatt hours that are used now each year of which 42% is produced by burning coal, 25% by natural gas, 19% nuclear, 8% hydropower, 3% wind, biomass 1%, geothermal and solar less then 1%
http://205.254.135.7/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_in_the_united_states

Nuclear seems the only option in the near future to keep the lights and the airconditioning on. Hopefully we'll get a breakthrough in hydrogen fusion technology before we get ships running on nuclear reactors to replace oil. Imagine those illegaly dumping waste in international waters :/
http://www.atomicengines.com/ships.html

In groupthink, organizations value consensus more than free thought. The emphasis on consensus leads to group polarization, in which a group’s positions become more extreme than any individual would come up with. Alarmist climate science is a textbook example of groupthink in action.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/why-climate-science-is-a-textbook-example-of-groupthink/

Climate change is inherently unpredictable.

I will say though I do think human industry is certainly negatively impacting the environment in which we live in.

Even people who love coal and nuclear ... would you build your house and raise your children next door to one of those factories? Would you let your kids swim in the waters in Louisana where dead fish are turning up every day thanks to BP?

Who knows what the hell is in our drinking water or the amount of pesticides we spray onto our fruits and vegetables.

I think things like cancer rates and the dropping of testosterone in the male population will continue on unabated in the next 20-30 years.

More than global warming I'd be worried that all the sh*t we dump into the water and pump into the air and all the deforestation we've done might cause some kind of virus/bug (not unlike bird flu or mad cow but much worse) to rapidly spread through our water/food sources and not get under control until it's caused a catastrophic loss of life.

I love airports, they make everyone lives much easier, but I don't want to live near one. Should we close them all? People don't seem to know how much costlier are the renewable energies than the non-renewable. You can see it in Spain, where we have one of the costlier electricities of Europe, and it's even sold at a 30% loss due to government fixed price. We have a great percentage of renewable energy, but it makes our high electricity consume industries uncompetitive, and they have to relocate. That's what you want, uncompetitive industry due to huge electricity cost? We're now at a 25% unemployment rate, and the electricity cost has helped in reaching that number. Last year the renewable energies were subsidized in more than 7000 million Euro, when we need to cut the budget in more than 35000 million Euro... It's a ridiculous situation

SvennoJ said: happydolphin said: Guys, this may seem like a dumb question, but: If "warming due to CO2 leads to more evaporation of water and more water vapor in general in the atmosphere, Water is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 and can cause even more warming." and we use hydrogen cars, then wouldn't that pose a problem? Actually hydrogen fuel cars would emit less water vapor then the cars we drive now. And it is a negligable amount anyway.   andy_fl Guest   Join Date: Jun 2001 For stoichiometry calculations, Gasoline is often considered as Octane (C8H18) So the combustion of C8H18 is: C8H18 + 12.5O2 --> 8CO2 + 9H2O So the stoichiometry gives (118lb of C8H18 reacts with 400lb of Oxygen to give 353 lb of CO2 and 162 lbs of water). So per pound of gasoline burnt you get 1.42 lbs of water. Density of gasoline is around 6 lbs / gal and that of water is 8.3 lbs/gal. Plugging in those numbers you get 1.03 gallons of water are produced per gallons of gasoline burnt. Now to be able to compare apple to apple, I convert the water produced per mile of travel. Assuming 25 miles to a gallon average of a US Car that works out to be : 0.04 gal of water produced per mile 2> Water Production in a Hydrogen Powered Fuel Cell Car The earliest (not the best) hydrogen powered fuel cell car gives 220 miles with a hydrogen storage tank (5,000 psi) of 156.6 liters volume. Density of Hydrogen at 300k and 5000psi (300K) is 0.023 g/ml ( NIST - isothermal properties of hydrogen). So a 156.6l tank holds 3.6 kg of hydrogen. And 3.6 kg of hydrogen will give 32.4 kg (14.7 lb) of water. 14.7 lb of water is 1.77 gal of water. Now 1.77 gallons of water is distributed over 220 miles. So that works out to be : 0.008 gal of water produced per mile So hydrogen powered fuel cell cars will produce 5 times lesser water than gasoline cars. It would be nice if hydrogen fusion started to pay off so we would have the energy needed to create a hydrogen fuel economy. The USA would need about 7 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year to produce enough hydrogen to replace current gasoline usage. (50 kilowatt hours to produce hydrogen to the equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline) http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/hydrogen.aspx This can be produced by a 100x100 mile solar farm in the Californian desert. http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx Quite a big area, nevermind the amount of materials needed to produce 100 sq miles of solar panels. Hydrogen fusion plants should be more efficient I would think. The 7 trillion is on top of the 4 trillion kilowatt hours that are used now each year of which 42% is produced by burning coal, 25% by natural gas, 19% nuclear, 8% hydropower, 3% wind, biomass 1%, geothermal and solar less then 1% http://205.254.135.7/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_in_the_united_states Nuclear seems the only option in the near future to keep the lights and the airconditioning on. Hopefully we'll get a breakthrough in hydrogen fusion technology before we get ships running on nuclear reactors to replace oil. Imagine those illegaly dumping waste in international waters :/ http://www.atomicengines.com/ships.html

So what's stopping us from making it happen?

Also, can commercial airplanes run off hydrogen cells with today's technology?

Two things mainly:

Hydrogen is highly flammable. It also escapes through normal deposits walls, due to the tiny size of the hydrogen molecule, so you need do develop a much thicker wall to enclose it and make it secure in case of crash, and that is really heavy.

It's not something you can obtain without spending huge quantities of electricity in the electrolysis. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's only an accumulator, as we can't extract H2 without spending more energy than we obtain burning it. Where do you obtain that electricity to do the electrolysis? when we have much more efficient renewable energy sources, then it would be a good way to store that energy. Until then, you'll need to burn carbon, petrol, gas... to obtain that hydrogen.

In Quebec (where born and I'm originally from) we have many water beds, and the whole province runs off of hydro electricity. We export to some nothern states I believe and to Ontario. Places like Quebec (and New Zealand it seems) can help in the electrolysis. From there the containers could be shipped to other places using hydrogen fuel-powered engines.

It would be a good start point. You would need hundreds of Quebecs and New Zealands to provide all the hydrogen needed to substitute petrol/coal/gas.

Cost, as you see from the Spain example being the first to force renewable energy has the risk of pricing yourself out of the market. This can only be done as a global effort or when oil becomes more expensive, although that might be too late to start the transition.
Hopefully oil, gas and coal prices will go up gradually enough to make the transition to alternative energy production and storage.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still really expensive to build, $120.000 to build one in 2015 according to Toyota. Hawaii is the new testing ground after Iceland went belly up. The biggest problem though is having to build the delivery infrastructure for H2 from the ground up.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/green-driving/news-and-notes/hawaii-the-testing-ground-for-hydrogen-cars/article1953437/

The battery alternative is great for city use, but who wants to wait an hour at a recharge station to wait for the battery to recharge. Another good thing about H2 production is it can take all the excess electricity that is now simply lost. Power plants over produce to make sure we don't have brownouts. A lot of energy is wasted this way. It could help with solar and wind too, store the excess during the day, feed it back to the net during the night to recharge all those car batteries.

Boeing doesn't believe in hydrogen for commercial airplanes yet, there are some plans for private planes though.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/news/4257294


You're right Quebec is great with hydro power, and Canada as a whole has almost 60% of it's power from hydro plants. However as my example shows you need to nearly triple electricity production to replace the use of gasoline. Whether you store it in batteries or in hydrogen doesn't make that much of a difference. The question is can we realize that in time before the lack of cheap oil starts to hinder us.


Some wild speculation about the future. Maybe futuristic cars can be charged while being propelled by magnetic propulsion on main roads. The same way maglev trains are propelled. That way the electric engines in the wheels can recharge the car battery while the car is being pushed along. My gut tells me that will be highly energy inefficient and requires a lot of expensive technology to be build under main roads. It would be cool though. Self driving cars that recharge while driving on main roads.