First off, I've not been very productive here, and I'll be amazed if anyone is still paying attention. That said, I slogged through this paper on Hydrogen as a fuel source, and I think it's required reading for anyone to understand why you won't be pulling up to the pump at the local gas station to fill up your hydrogen powered car.
Your car will run on H2 with little modification; the stuff explodes just fine. The things I didn't know were the energy required to separate it and near impossibility to transport it any significant distance in any economic or useful quantity.
I did see a really good article about some engineer in the US who got grants to convert his house and car to H2. He electrolyses it himself from rainwater using electricity generated by his solar array, and the H2 he doesn't need during the summer is stored in bulk tanks and is topped up by whatever he can generate during the low solar periods and is used to run things until the sun is out enough to make it unnecessary again.
That has potential, but it's a major investment (c. $250K for your house) and not likely to be economical any time soon. Maybe some sort of planned community thing? It will work on a neighbourhood scale and may make sense there before anywhere else, but I'm not in that racket.
I won't summarize it more than that. It's a bit dry but it's only 15 pages, and those of you math-challenged like myself can skim the equations and get the gist from the graphs. We have to come up with some new ways of doing things, and there are some useful suggestions in this paper even if I don't agree with all of their assumptions about global warming.
2 comments:
Good to see you're back!
Thanks, I'm glad someone was here to notice!
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