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Bio-Hydrogen and fuel cells fundamental different energy scenario

#21 User is offline   mink 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 08:30

helene_t, on Jul 12 2006, 09:45 AM, said:

Hybrid cars polute less than conventional cars and they're available.

They do pollute less because they need less fuel because they do not
waste fuel. Of course this is true only if the car is travelling in
urban areas where much stop and go occurs. When travelling on the
highway, a hybrid car has no advantage at all. This is probably the
reason why I have never heard about hybrid trucks - trucks relatively
seldom drive into the middle of the city.

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Fuel cells and hydrogen are nice science fiction dreams.
This is the essential misconception. Production of syngas from coal
started already in the 19th century. It was first used for street
illumination, and became available to homes for heating and cooking in
the early 20th century. The hydrogen portion in the gas was 50%. What
needs to be done in order to get pure hydrogen is just separate it,
which is no problem with todays technology. This means, it is easy and
efficient to produce hydrogen from biomass or any other hydrocarbon
material. The technology is available.

Fuel cells are available as well. If you plan to operate them with
hydrogen you need a most simple device with no moving parts inside,
which could be produced very cheaply if high quantities were demanded.

A network for the transportation of hydrogen from the biomass
converters to homes and business is available, too: I was first used
for the syngas, today it is used for natural gas, and can be easily
used for hydrogen in future.

This concept is unique because prevents pollution, saves very
significant amounts of money and eliminates the dependency from the big
energy multies and oil producing countries.

The only problem is that you cannot start to produce hydrogen if
nobody has fuel cells and there is no point in buying a fuel cell if
hydrogen is not available. Therefore, the society would have to decide
to restructure the energy distribution by converting from electrical
current to hydrogen. This is not easy of course as both oil industry
and the providers of electrical energy would lose their whole business
if this succeeds. But the advantages are so great that I think it is
worth a try. This is why I started this thread: to promote the idea.
It can only become true if at least many people know about it.

Karl
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#22 User is offline   mink 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 08:36

whereagles, on Jul 12 2006, 10:33 AM, said:

mink: mr. Tetzlaff's calculation of 0,26€/100 km cannot be right. Right now energy is STILL just about as cheap as water because oil is very cheap and very energetic.

You are right in one respect: 0.26 Euro/100km was incorrect, I made a
mistake when copying the figure. The correct value is 0.42Euro/100km.

I did not have the time yet to verify all of Mr. Tetzlaff's
calculations. However, my impression is that his work is well-though
and the presentation is flawless. I have already asked him a similar
question by email and was satisfied by his response.

Your idea, however, to compare prices of energy and water, does not
sound serious, as energy is measured in kWh and Water in m3. It makes
no sense to say 1 kWh Energy can be compared with 1 m3 water and then
compare the prices for both. But what we could do is compare the fuel
costs for hydrogen out of biomass with the fuel costs of gasoline out
of crude oil. A year ago the German gasoline price was 1.20
Euro/liter. Without taxes this is 0.36 Euro/liter. Density of gasoline
is about 0.72 kg/l, so we have exactly 0.50 Euro/kg. Energy density
for gasoline is 12 kWh/kg, so we have 0.042 Euro/kWh. Mr. Tetzlaff has
calculated 0.041 Euro/kWh for hydrogen as it would be available at the
filling station. So you could say it is the same price. What makes the
difference is the fuel cell. The efficiency of the system fuel cell -
electrical engine - wheel is 80 % at least, while the efficiency of a
gasoline car is only 14%. This means, if you calculate the energy
price for the energy that arrives at the wheels of the car, you get
3.00 Euro/kWh for the gasoline car but only 0.51 Euro/kWh for the
hydrogen car. This is roughly factor 6.

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Given we are quite tight in oil production and there's no expectancy
of it relieving (quite the opposite, actually), energy prices will
inevitable rise quite a lot and that will have an impact on hydrogen
as well.

In other words, if you buy hydrogen at 0,26€/100 km, everybody will
rush out to do the same and price will increase to the same as oil
price.
This of course is only true if you do not have enough bio-hydrogen for
all. Mr. Tetzlaff claims at least in Europe it would be no problem for
the farmers to meet the demand. (He has presented his concept at
farmer meetings already.) However, if this was really the problem, you
could generate hydrogen from natural gas or crude oil and still enjoy
the cost benefits of a hydrogen car.

On the other hand, when you really have enough hydrogen in a developed
bio-hydrogen economy, then it will be impossible to sell oil anymore.

Karl
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#23 User is offline   whereagles 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 09:17

Well, even factoring that hydrogen engines are more efficient than motor engines, I am very, very skeptical that farmers can produce the amounts of hydrogen necessary to keep energy usage at current levels. I'd say they'd be lucky if they could produce 2 or 3%.
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#24 User is offline   mink 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 09:52

I have every trust in Mr. Tetzlaffs word that they can, and even would
like to. What helps in this respect is that you do not need to wait
until the crops are mature, but you can harvest them after the initial
growth is completed, which also requires less fertilizer. This way you
can gain several harvest per year even in Europe. Selecting the right
crops further optimizes this, and different crops should be grown in
order to make efficient use of the soil.

Karl
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#25 User is offline   Blofeld 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 10:00

A back of the envelope calculation (should be correct to within an order of magnitude or so) suggests that if getting energy out of sunlight is ~1% efficient then we'd need to devote about 5% of the earth's landmass to cover the world's total energy usage.

The 1% I used for efficiency may well be too high a figure.
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#26 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 10:10

As I noted before, I'm high skeptical about converting biomass to hydrogen. I admit that I haven't done a deep dive into this side of the biomass equation (I did study bio-mass to ethanol conversion and concluded that its not a good place to invest my money)

Ultimately, my main critique is a simple one...

I don't see anyone investing much money in this. There's a lot of money being spent on alternative energy. If this system is as good as you say, there would be efforts to commercialize it. I would be able to go and invest $$$ in a company that was working to bring this to market. The fact that i can't suggests that there is some major problem... I don't know if its with converting biomass to hydrogen or the fact that there aren't any good ways to transport hydrogen (you need massive investment in infrastructure to pressurize and cool the gas)

So, where is the investment prospectus?
Alderaan delenda est
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#27 User is offline   whereagles 

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Posted 2006-July-12, 10:51

Blofeld, on Jul 12 2006, 04:00 PM, said:

A back of the envelope calculation (should be correct to within an order of magnitude or so) suggests that if getting energy out of sunlight is ~1% efficient then we'd need to devote about 5% of the earth's landmass to cover the world's total energy usage.

The 1% I used for efficiency may well be too high a figure.

Solar panels work around 10-20% efficiency, with research being done aiming at an increase to ~30%. Cover half the Sahara desert with solar panels and it should be enough :)

Plants used to produce ethanol or biodiesel feed on sunlight as well (that's where the energy comes from), with efficiencies of around 1-2%.
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