When I first saw this drop I went down so many rabbit holes...so much sauce in this post alone....😉
(media.greatawakening.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (199)
sorted by:
It takes energy to extract hydrogen from some source. "Burning" hydrogen as fuel (oxidation to create water e.g.) will only produce power proportional to the energy released in the oxidation process (forming of chemical bonds). That energy (in the form of heat) will not be 100% efficient in the creation of electrical or mechanical energy; i.e. some will be lost to heat exchange with the surroundings. Even in a perfect system the energy you require to get the hydrogen by itself in the first place will not net you much of an increase in energy, if any at all.
For example:
The total hydrogen bond energy for methane (CH4) is 397kcal/mol. This is the minimum amount of energy required to extract 2 H2 from one CH4.
The amount of hydrogen bond energy in a water molecule is 232kcal/mol, thus two H2 from water requires (or releases) 464kcal/mol.
Its not as simple as all that, because we have to form the H2 molecules, and we have to do something with the O and C left over, which means more bond energies. The ambient temperature, the pressure, the state of matter all make a fair bit of difference, but for simplicity lets just look at these numbers.
So it takes 397kcal/mol to create the 2 H2, and then we get 464kical/mol out of it when we oxidize it netting us 67kcal/mol. Not a whole lot, and we've had to get the methane in the first place, and we had to put energy into the system to extract it, but we did net some energy through this chemical process. Then we have the inefficiencies in the system, the energy lost to heat, etc.
But what if we start with water and then end with water?
Then its a net of 0kcal/mol, and its actually less than that for reasons I've already stated, costing us more energy in than out.
Now we can get that energy from natural sources, like the sun, or geothermal. We are then really getting the energy from the sun or earth, and storing it in a chemical battery. Which btw is exactly what solar energy and battery storage is, but instead of storing the energy in hydrogen gas, which is not very energy dense, we are storing it in lithium batteries (aka chemical storage).
So the question I have for you is, if someone produced a super wonderful hydrogen chemical energy extraction engine, where did they get the hydrogen from? What was the initial energy source?
Now don't get me wrong, there are potential other uses of hydrogen other than chemical energy that can extract TONS of energy from a small amount of hydrogen, making the creation of H2 from other stores of hydrogen (like methane or water) well worth it (fusion e.g.), but in a purely chemical process, hydrogen is at best a weak battery (aka storage of chemical energy requiring input from an external source to create).
Unless your suggesting mining H2 from the sun, or maybe the clouds of Jupiter, in which case, knock yourself out.
This does NOT use electricity to split the hydrogen. I never said it did.
am not a chemist, nor do I play one on the internet...
this is the mixture (use caution)
When Aluminum metal reacts with diluted. sulfuric acid, it gives Hydrogen gas and Aluminum sulfate.
Reaction follows: Al + H2SO4 → Al2(SO4)3 + H2
(see more in posts above)
No problem. I just want to make sure this is not confused with electrolysis or HH0 or other methods of splitting water. This is liberating the hydrogen from the aluminum. I hope by sharing this might spark creativity in others.
I appreciate you making this point. It drives me mad when the government (UK) start talking about "hydrogen boilers" or "hydrogen cars" because, as you say, it is really only a storage media for energy, there is no vast reservoir of hydrogen waiting to be tapped.
Best case scenario is producing it alongside a nuclear power plant, but if its intended for domestic heating you might as well just have resistive panel heaters because there is no advantage to piping hydrogen all over the place, that you made using electricity.
This does NOT use electricity to split the hydrogen. I never said it did. The "storage media for energy" would be in the form of aluminum/acid mixture. We are not storing hydrogen with the method I have described.
am not a chemist, nor do I play one on the internet...
this is the mixture (use caution)
When Aluminum metal reacts with diluted. sulfuric acid, it gives Hydrogen gas and Aluminum sulfate.
Reaction follows: Al + H2SO4 → Al2(SO4)3 + H2
(see more in posts above)
I take your point, but the aluminium is made with electricity so actually this energy cycle is worse than I thought. I suppose you could recycle used aluminium like this thought.
Yes, all we ever used was recycle scrap aluminum. I have wanted to try with a nice piece of pure aluminum.
I am not a chemist, nor do I play one on the internet...
this is the mixture
When Aluminum metal reacts with diluted. sulfuric acid, it gives Hydrogen gas and Aluminum sulfate.
Reaction follows: Al + H2SO4 → Al2(SO4)3 + H2
I explained more to someone above. This only produces the hydrogen, what he hook it into after was a converted diesel engine. He said he keep melting parts and needed better components. This was in the early 1980s btw.
And where does one get sulfuric acid and pure aluminum? I mean, they aren't that hard to get, but they take energy to create those things. Again, any chemical engine is just another form of battery. That doesn't mean you can't get more energy out than you put in, but if you go back in time, you will find the energy came from somewhere else, and was just stored in the chemicals for later use.
I am not suggesting there is no merits to such a system. I am not saying hydrogen is useless. But to suggest it is somehow better than hydrocarbons (i.e. more chemically efficient, more reliable mining or extraction source, etc.) just isn't in line with chemistry. If there was a huge pile of pure Al and a gigantic bottle of H2SO4 sitting around and you had no better use for it, creating an engine to create electricity from H2 is probably a pretty good idea. But there is nothing there that is better than a gasoline engine for the same purpose (chemically speaking).
What IS better is using H2 (or rather D2) for fusion. Cold fusion has tons of evidential support (at some point I will do a proper write up for that). That is a real suppressed technology. Then we aren't talking about chemical energy storage but nuclear energy storage. That's a whole other ball of waxy atomic particles.
I do understand what you are getting at, kinda. But this is not a chemical engine. It is a hydrogen extraction method which the gas is then used to run a converted gas/diesel engine with. Clean burning. Also we are using scraps here, my first run of it I used a bunch of crushed cans. Pure aluminum is not required and sulfuric acid is cheap, get it from restaurant supply for cleaning drains. The system he had (mine is smaller) held about 5 gallons, and when he ran his 1935 ford truck off it, he only had to fill it every 8 months or so. The main issue was the conversion in the engine in the truck where the heat of the hydrogen was burning out parts. Back then we did not have the composite materials we have today that can withstand such heat.
If you were running a truck off of hydrogen for 8 months either you were never driving it or it was not using chemical energy. It's pretty much that simple.
As for the rest, a "battery" is something that stores energy for later use. We use the term to mean something that stores chemical energy in such a way that when released charged particles will move between two nodes, thus creating a current. But really, a battery is any storage of energy. In the case of stored chemical energy, it really is just like a battery (electric) except it doesn't have a path for charged particles to flow and thus is really a heat battery (or photon battery, depending on how you look at it).