Have you seen this!?! Burning saltwater

[Joe Fish]

>
> 4) The idea that we shouldn't use hydrogen as fuel
> because it takes more energy to extract it than it
> will deliver is silly.  The only way to get fuel
> that takes less energy to produce than it takes to
> make is to pump it out of the ground, and I'm not
> entirely certain even that is true.



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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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?

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.

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?

And don't even get me STARTED on how impractical hydrogen-as-a-fuel is in
terms of STORAGE losses ...


Do you think it
> costs less to produce batteries than it does to
> produce  an energy equivalent of Hydrogen?



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.


All that said, this technique may be useful for
> extracting Hydrogen. It needs to be determined if
> it takes less energy to do this than other methods of
> extracting Hydrogen.



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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