Hydrogen and Turbines

Go on Google and type in homemade hydrogen generators. then read,read,read. Try to stay away from costic chemicals because of the hazzard of working with them and the difficulty in disposeing of them.

There are many ways to make/get hydrogen. Most industial production of hydrogen is done by removing it from fossil fuels. (gasification) However, you can seperate water into hydrogen and oxygen with simple electrolysis. (An anode and a cathode in a salt, or other electrolyte, water solution.) Couple electrolysis with solar, wind, or other clean energy resource and you can solve the environmental problems of the world. (Except for nitric and nitrous oxide emmisions.)

For a good idea of where it all comes from and what is economically viable, there is a decent article in the magazine "Popular Mechanics" November 2006 titled "Hydrogen power". But remember, it's a magazine and the projections are not written in stone.

Yeah that's the problem with the hydrogen fuel thing, there are no hydrogen wells. Hydrogen is not a source of energy. Let me repeat that. Hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is only a medium. Hydrogen must be gotten from something that has hydrogen in it and that is just the first problem to solve.

Hi rcapper. It is nice to encounter someone with a brain that thinks! Congratulations! To produce Hydrogen, one has to put energy in to the system that produces it, where does this energy come from? The cleanest way that I can think of is using wind power or solar cells to produce the electricity necessary to extract hydrogen from water. This is not really clean either, as the energy used to produce both wind turbines and solar cells is not so clean! Then there is the falacy that Hydrogen cells are the future energy source for powering motor vehicles? No matter how one looks at it, to obtain power that is completely clean is just so much rubbish at the present time in our history. Spencer.

Quite. Hydrogen does not occur in the form of an unreacted molecule on this planet, as its molecular velocity exceeds the escape velocity due to gravitation.

On Earth, Hydrogen is a secondary fuel source; a "carrier", like electricity. The primary energy source comes from elsewhere. One could use steam likewise, and there's plenty of stuff on making and using steam. Even in turbines.

...a "carrier", like electricity...

Come to think of it, it's main "pure" civilised use is, as a chemical bonding agent between organic molecules, mainly in the industrialised food technology

rcapper got it pinned. #3 describes the dilemma: Once you extracted it, you have to guard it (It will leak through almost anything, so tiny the molecule is), you have to seal it (So reactive it is), you have to cool it...

You have to frickin nurture it like a spoiled brat, and that costs more than it's burning worth.

Sure, it's the cleanest flame around, to leave only water vapor behind, but not very practical in economic terms.

Check out materials from US Government Hydrogen Project.

When will people understand there is no perpetual motion, water really does run downhill, and that principle cam be applied to everything you see and interact with. Eventually, everything decays to the most random, lowest energy state. When we try to 'harvest' or 'make' a concentrated source of 'energy', we must expend 'energy' to do that. It is a no-win situation--the more concentrated form of 'energy' we try to make, the higher the 'energy' cost to make it. This is called 'efficiency' Electrical power generation from fossil fuels has maximum theoretical limit of about 60%-when using extremely complex intergated gassifier-combined cycle (IGCC)turbines. Then we want to move that energy to someplace else (like our home air conditioner.) Taint free--costs 'energy' to move anything. Then we 'use' that energy to power another machine to pump the heat out of our house--and lose still more of the initial 'energy' that was collected in the coal (which itself consumed energy'. ) Oh, by the way, it took 'nature' millions of years to collect solar energy, grow plants, etc to concentrate that solar energy into 'coal'. -all the while at very low 'efficiency'.

Now we have the ability to 'harvest' solar energy directly- either to heat water for space heating, or with photo-voltaic devices that make more useful(more concentrated) electricity. We can short-cut the millions of years it took Nature' to make coal (and oil and natural gas) and collect energy directly.

It is inevitable that MAN will convert to solar (and nuclear fission) as primary power sources. It may well take place in the lifetime of our children. Fossil fuels, by their very nature, are one-time use, and we, in less than 100 years, have exploited the best and most usable of those 'fossil fuels'.

All the hype about 'hydrogen' and 'bio-fuels' are just noise and 'much ado about nothing'. None of these 'alternative' fuels deal with the fundamentals--the ONLY continuous energy source we have to use is SOLAR. Nuclear can be a bridge for a century or two. Oil, coal, natural gas--they are in the early winter of their lives.

That was so cool and definitive. Thanx.

Also:

...Fossil fuels, by their very nature, are one-time use...

Be better used for chemical synthesis, instead of using it to move wheeled metal boxes back and forth

Quite.

In the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "gullible" got left out. It seems like the fossil fuel industries have received all the faulty copies...

You can extract Hydrogen from water by applying a DC current through electrodes emersed in the water. It's a bad return on investment,

Except that DC can be obtained directly from sunlight, and in some economic situations, storing solar energy as chemical energy, in the form of unreacted hydrogen in a pressure vessel or otherwise in a battery, can prove an attractive investment.

I believe that work is being done on an enzyme or bacteria that will do it chemically without electricity. Cracking water is a pretty nasty process since you have to put something into the water to make it conduct electricity. Distilled water is an insulator. Consequently, you get precipitates, electrode erosion and gasses. Why not just pump water into a storage tank or store thermal energy underground? Both of these have no maintenance issues like disassociating water.