Interesting. However if I were Dr. Sen Kim I should be very afraid that I might mysteriously disappear one night.

Anyone care to guess on how this works? Chemistry for me is just one hair-thin notch this side of pure voodoo. I expect the process involves Glauber's salt and sacred rattles and Avocado's number.

As the article states, skepticism seems in order for now. I've seen many claims of various types of hydrogen-making magic where the cost is too cheap to measure and the only byproducts of manufacture are gold and beautiful young women.

assuming hypotheticaly that this claim is true, i refuse to stand idly by. my childrens future is one knock away, i plan to invest a little time and money in fuel cells and stock. i beat myself up now for not jumping in on the wind turbine train several years back.

korea? north or south... would they dare to keep this advancement behind closed doors to have a leg up on U.S. or anyone else?

true or flase?

there are alway some falsifiers in the korea academe

kw/what unit of volume/mass???

We seem to be missing some critical information. Also it still is not more efficient to burn it somewhere else and ship the electricity to your house where you convert it to a different medium.

Now if maybe you have a generator hooked to a bicycle or a tread mill... except that oil was used in the production of your food, but maybe if you have a garden, ok maybe now you are slightly ahead of the game unless you have really bad flatulence then you are still creating a greenhouse gas.

I wonder if they have found a catalyst that separates hydrogen and oxygen out from water, with little electrical input.......

The catalytic converter on cars exhaust does it providing it gets to a certain temperature, adding an extra oxygen molecule to the carbon monoxide amonst other things if my memory serves me correctly......

Yes I have ..... approx. half amp draw dc .... up to 700 % more .... It's underwater opera .... And it's coming to all free .... For a balance will be kept with this impending chaos .....

Here we go again - less energy to seperate H and O than you generate when you recombine them. I think I smell a violation of a law of physics here, and it doesn't smell good.

Not enough info to tell but a way to look at this is that he cut the amount of surplus energy needed to separate the O's and H's. This doesn't mean that he found a way to cut through the required energy of separation.

Let's say that it takes x joules to separate H and O under ideal conditions. This is also the energy we get back when they re-combine.

In real life, you will need x + y joules to do the work. The conversion has losses = y that turns into heat into the electrolysis tank. But when they recombine you only get x joules.

What he might have done is cut y by 30.

This is good and doesn't violate the laws of physics. It just doesn't sound impressive but it would be a very good thing in order to use H2 as an energy storage. But you still need to supply the energy of separation. It just like a better battery.

Now, all they need to do is to make it work at industrial scale...

This might prove difficult but we can hope.

The figure they are touting - 0.1 (whatever their units are) versus 4.5 has got to be in the realm of less in for more out. And, no, you don't get as much back as you put in.

We are still chasing a losing situation - hydrogen is not a free energy source - you have to put in more than you will get back. If indeed they have a way to get a lot more hydrogen for a bit less energy in than electrolysis, this is still not solving the energy crisis - just delaying the final outcome. Yes - a good green alternative if the energy in is derived from a cleaner source than say gasoline or oil, but not a long term fix for too little petroleum. (another topic that raises a whole bunch of questions)

You want to save the economy and solve the energy crisis whilst making little birdies and critters happy and healthy? Find an efficient way to use solar energy to break the ties that bind hydrogen to oxygen - then you have free energy. Use the process of this discussion, if it is indeed a real process, and use solar energy as the energy input. Then we have something to sing about, and dance, and party....

Solar energy is not the solution. Its low energy density will always keep it as a fringe source of energy. It is and will be for a long time too expensive to capture, maintain, and distribute even if you would find a 100% efficient system. It will be a used by people who have no other choice or have money to waste. It can help heat the house but is not enough for most people.

While Hydrogen is a SEXY means of transporting energy, it will be very difficult to make it dense enough to transport it cheaply. This looks like another gouv dead end technology.

To be competitive with oil, an energy source needs to be dense. Hydro, waves, tides are dense enough to get meaningful amount from small infra-structure. They have a chance to make it but might not have enough capacity. The "not in my backyard" mentality will soon transform into "not on my beach".

The densest energy sources would be fusion but we are not there yet. Nuclear fission is the next best thing even with all its problems.

The best solution that seems to solve most problems is to become more efficient. We could easily cut our energy demand by a large fraction by using double glazes windows, adding more insulation, getting the energy out of the grey water and using the heat from the AC to make hot water. And yes, encouraging solar efficiency in our buildings. I use all these in my house. All these technologies already existing and would probably cost less per KW saved than all the money we are spending in developing new energy sources and increasing the infrastructure needed to transport it.

Think reduction not maintaining our wasteful ways.

Density of solar energy - excuse me but I have never seen an energy expressed in units of gm/cc. Yeah - the hydrogen can be expressed as a low density source, since it is indeed a material.

Let's try to express our thoughts in a scientifically acceptable manner. I have a very difficult time trying to imagine dense energy.

It looks like you haven't seen everything yet. Let me educate you and widen your narrow horizon.

Energy density

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

Energy density is the amount of energy stored in a given system or region of space per unit volume, or per unit mass, depending on the context, although the latter is more formally specific energy

By the way, the units would be Joules / cc or something equivalent.

Okay - there is an energy density (J/kg) that can be applied when energy is stored in a given volume, but in your reference, the solar energy incident on the earth is in fact an energy (J), not an energy density, as we are not storing it in a given volume. I understand what you were trying to convey is the poor results we have trying to capture and convert that energy to a more useful form for transportation purposes. If we had solar cells that were closer to unity efficiency, the solar energy impinging on this ball of rock would indeed be quite useful. I have heard claims of 40% efficiency lately, but under extreme temperature conditions that make it almost a useless method of energy conversion. So we are left with the standard solar cell with less than 10% efficiency. We certainly have enough barren sunny areas to use for this purpose if we can improve conversion, and we seem to have no qualms about transporting electricity over many miles.

From your own source, the Wikipedia description of energy density, the second highest density is Nuclear fusion of hydrogen (energy from the sun). In that case, it is indeed stored in a given volume. Unfortunately it is a bit tough to store here without an efficient conversion method.

Forget the nuclear and its troublesome waste - You want a second elusive but impressive source - try geothermal energy. Or, how about the energy disipated by lightening strikes. Ocean currects - yes you have one there. We are sitting on a throbbing ball of energy that we can't harness - yet.

We still need to find a free energy source to break that hydrogen/oxygen binding energy for the short term. People are actually a bit slow to change - give us that engine that burns a fuel. We have free solar energy stored in the form of oil and coal that will run out someday and we need to find a new source.

I actually use a geothermal heat pump at home. This is one thechnology that really works well. I even improved mine with hot water generation from the AC mode.

As for other sources of energy:

Basically, other than nuclear and most of the tidal movement, all the energy we have is from the sun.

Oil comes from biomass that grew from the sun,

Wind is mostly caused by the sun heating. Earth rotation seems to add little energy otherwise we would be slowing down rapidly.

Waves come from the wind. See above.

The problems with extreme sources like lightning strikes is that they are too intense! and too short. Storage becomes a nightmare and there is not that much energy in a strike. Your house would not operate very long if you were to be able to drain one.

From Wikipedia:

An average bolt of lightning carries an electric current of 40 kilo-amperes (kA), and transfers a charge of five coulombs and 500 MJ.

A house power consumption is about 10KW. Each hour it uses 10e3J/S * 3600 S/H = 36 MJ. You would operate less than a day with your average strike. Not very good for millions of dollars of capture, storage, and conversion equipment.

As an engineer, one must dream of possibilities but deal with reality. Pure dreamers don't like us because we have to deal with reality.

Keep on dreaming but don't shoot the engineer who pops your bubble.

Regards,

I said that the sources were elusive. But there are on average 30 lightning strikes per second world wide, or 108000 per hour. I think that's about 1.5 million houses.

Geothermal is a bit more elusive than you think. You are barely tapping what's there, but to harness the true magnitude of the heat in the earth would be a monumental undertaking. Our own government had a try at it.

I described this blunder in another section several months ago. I was at one time a well analyst. I normally ran tests on oil/gas wells for density/resistivity/fracture zones/water in place/temperature. Our USGS and US Dept. of Energy decided that there should be a very hot zone of dry rocks at about 7000 feet down in Crisfield, MD. that would provide the local industries with many years of steam. I was picked to log this well for the government. We took our high temperature tools for this job, because we were expecting temperatures in excess of 350 degrees. A normal 7000 foot well would be around 150 to 180 degrees. Well, they missed the spot by many miles, because the well had a very normal temperature profile. They could make some nice bath water with it, but no steam. But it was dry. So actually getting to a seriously warm spot to make useable energy is a bit of a crap shoot.

You should stop thinking like the government. You sound like one of them.

The geothermal that I am using is easy to do on an individual basis. The technology exist. Thousands of home use it. It is easy to integrate in the house.

You and your employer should stop dreaming about impossible set-ups to capture lava energy. This is just ways to pay big salaries to people that don't have enough common sense to produce anything that works.

As for your 108000 lightning strikes per hours, good luck trying to catch two per day to keep your house running. This is just a waste of time.

Not lava - hot dry rocks - pump in water - out comes reasonably clean steam with no salt/hydrogen sulfide/petroleum - there are rock formations like this out there. I know from a wildcat gas well I logged in Vermont that there should be some hot dry spots up there. Canada should have quite a few good areas too.

Not my employer - we were into gas/oil and we logged plenty of it - (note: natural gas is not in short supply in North America no matter what they are saying) - the US Government was behind this one. However, even the USGS with all their PhD Geologists and Geophysicists can't find them without multiple deep hole drillings. This well, had it been as they predicted, would have run the local Mrs. Pauls Seafood plant for centuries. Quite a bit more energy than a few thousand houses. Plus the local home owners would have had heat too.

Sorry mate, but Marcot is correct.

The energy density he was refering to is the available energy/m^2. It's a perfectly normal use of the term, understood by engineers all over the world.

"manufacturing the H2 by our method will lower the cost of H2 as much as 20 - 30 times" compared to electrolytic H2."

Highly unlikely since electrolytic splitting of water is already at least 70% energy efficient. If the claim is true, then it either:

1) violates the 1st law of thermodynamics by creating energy out of nothing

or

2) violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics by converting high-entropy ambient heat into low-entropy H₂

or

3) taps the zero-point energy (maybe via the Casimir force)

or

4) involves a low-energy nuclear reaction (ala "cold fusion")

I consider explanation 1 to be extremely unlikely, explanations 2 and 3 to be very unlikely, and explanation 4 to be merely unlikely

Most likely of all is that this is just another of many attempts to fleece investors. But I hope I'm wrong.

The Hydrogen may be "clean", but it is not easily transportable, nor is the actual energy density very high.

It is not truly eco-friendly either, as much of the potential energy is wasted in the form of heat, when the Hydrogen is burned.

Kind Regards....

... much of the potential energy is wasted in the form of heat, when the Hydrogen is burned.

Very true, so we feed the H₂ into fuel cells (which can be over 70% energy efficicient) instead of combustion engines. Fuel cells are still too expensive, but lots of clever researchers are working on ways to bring the price down (mainly by finding a replacement for the platinum catalyst).

Fuel Cells are ready for the challange. Its already been designed and is similar to how people use solar panels (and will probably require working along side solar panels). Each house has there own to minimize dissipation though the power grid, waste heat is used to heat water for the house, and in the case of solid oxide fuel cells waste heat is used to keep the system operating. Power can be given back to the power grid. Each house, or area will have to have their own setup to produce the hydrogen to minimize transport issues (can be done using the solar cells). The only problems are the durability, costs, and consistancies of fuel cells and the cost to produce hydrogen. This supposedly solves one of the problems. Korea puts alot of effort into fuel cell research and it appears they hit something.