Why aren’t we using water as an alternate energy source yet?
Hydrogen is a so high in energy. I don’t understand why there aren’t any big hydrogen plants right now. A plant that focuses on electrolysis to get the hydrogen out of water. If we could do this wouldn’t it be so convenient for everyone? Couldn’t it also prevent future wars? Why isn’t there more focus on this??
Thanks, John
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:33 am
It takes as much energy to get the hydrogen out of water as you get from the hydrogen. Hydrogen is difficult to store and contain. The volumetric energy density of hydrogen is only 405 Wh/l versus 9000 Wh/l for gasoline so in fact hydrogen is remarkably LOW in energy not high. The high energy density by mass doesn’t make a noticeable in comparison to the mass of the vehicle and the passengers.
Sandia National labs looked into finding a more efficient way of producing hydrogen from water and the conclusion was that although it was possible, it would make more sense to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline and diesel since they can be distributed in existing infrastructure and used in existing vehicles. Fundamentally, the concept of using clean power to extract hydrogen from water to use as chemically stored energy is no different than using clean power to synthesize gasoline from CO2 and H2O so it doesn’t warrant the added expenditure of manufacturing new vehicles and constructing a new infrastructure to distribute the hydrogen.
Hydrogen isn’t the focus because it is pretty much just the simplest, academic and hence worse method of chemical energy storage for our transportation systems. Just because it’s easy to demonstrate in a grade school science demonstration doesn’t mean it’s the best variation of the concept.