<div><span class="q"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">4) The idea that we shouldn't use hydrogen as fuel<br>because it takes more energy to extract it than it
<br>will deliver is silly. The only way to get fuel<br>that takes less energy to produce than it takes to<br>make is to pump it out of the ground, and I'm not<br>entirely certain even that is true. </blockquote></span>
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<br><br>Incorrect. Hydrogen makes no sense as a fuel EXACTLY because it takes more energy for us to produce it RIGHT NOW, than it gives us back RIGHT NOW.<br><br>Oil takes more energy to produce than it gives off also, but that's unimportant, because the energy input was from the sun millions of years ago, but we can get the output NOW, with far less energy than we have to put in NOW.
<br><br>The same goes for wood, even though its sun energy is put in more or less contemporaneously with our use of it (ie, the sun puts in energy over the course of sometime during the last 100 years, we burn wood and get that energy back NOW).
<br><br>Its called EROEI -- Energy Returned On Energy Invested .... Invested, not Input -- if it were INPUT, all fuels would have EROEI's of less than 1. As it turns out, using current techniques and technologies, EROEI for hydrogen is FAR LESS than 1, while oil is probably more like in the range of 30 to 100 (depending mainly on the grade of oil, depth, and extraction method).
<br><br>Now, in terms of EROEI, there are several things that have greater-than-one values that are NOT fuels, such as windmills and solar panels and wave generators -- we can make these on a relatively "cheap" energy budget, then use them to HARVEST energy that WE (humans) don't have to invest ... because it comes from the sun, or from gravitational forces, in the case of wave energy.
<br><br>The question hydrogen skeptics are asking is, once we have this power generated, why waste a huge portion of it making a fuel, just so Fat Bastards in the fuel-distribution business can keep their jobs? Why not just use the energy directly, instead of shifting it all around into different forms?
<br><br>All THAT said, it does take energy input and materials to make batteries or some other means of storing the energy to propel a vehicle, assuming you want some sort of system where the vehicles don't have to travel along energized tracks of some sort.
<br><br>So the question really becomes, can this (or any tech) make it so the currently-exorbitant-and-unrealistically-huge cost of electrolysis and creation of precious-metal-intensive fuel cells are actually cheaper and more efficient than simply creating batteries and using the generated electricity (almost) directly?
<br><br>And don't even get me STARTED on how impractical hydrogen-as-a-fuel is in terms of STORAGE losses ... <br><br></div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Do you think it<br>costs less to produce batteries than it does to<br>produce an energy equivalent of Hydrogen? </blockquote></span><div><br><br>Actually it does ... especially considering the creation of the fuel cell to USE that hydrogen, which nobody's come up with an economical way of making without the extraordinarily rare metal PLATINUM -- the reality is that, without a breakthrough in that area, we CAN'T use hydrogen as a viable fuel, because we DON'T HAVE ENOUGH platinum to create fuel cells for our huge fuel-using infrastructure.
<br><br></div><span class="q"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">All that said, this technique may be useful for<br>extracting Hydrogen. It needs to be determined if
<br>it takes less energy to do this than other methods of<br>extracting Hydrogen.</blockquote></span><div><br><br>At this point, this method could reduce the energy input for electrolyzing hydrogen by an order of magnitude, and creating hydrogen for fuel STILL wouldn't make good engineering sense ...
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