Modified Algae Produce Clean, Easy Hydrogen

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Modified Algae Produce Clean, Easy Hydrogen

Still begs the question of economical storage and transport....

Also the question of quantity. Can it produce enough hydrogen to fulfill economic requirements. The U.S. consumes 4 quads of energy a year. What proportion can algae derived hydrogen convert from sunlight?

ruveyn

it's always a good thing; complex problems require complex solutions. However, just remember the Hindenburg...

that said; I likes it.

Every time I hear about the Hindenberg I want to swell up (with anger) and float.

The Hindenberg burned as fiercely as it did because the envelope of the airship was "doped" with essentially the same chemicals that are used as propellant in solid rocket boosters. If the envelope had been "undoped" It would have made a big "whomp" with much less heat and much less damage to human flesh. Set off a small hand held, hydrogen filled balloon and see how much of a bang you get.

Hydrogen can be store cryogenically and it can be store in containers where the leakage rate is very slow. The problem with free hydrogen gas is that it will leak out of just about any tank or container you can think of. That is because the gas can work its way between the molecules of chrystaline substances. To store the gas, it has to be made to adhere to some surface and be held in place by electrostatic forces. A container made of metallic hydrides is good. The hydrogen can be driven out by heating the container.

Here is the basic flaw. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It is a form of energy storage. There is very little free hydrogen on Earth. Most of it is bound into other molecules, especially water. The only way hydrogen can be an energy source is if it is fused into helium in a fusion reaction. Controlled fusion is technologically infeasible. It takes much more energy to cause a mass of hydrogen to fuse, than is gotten out of the reaction. The only practical fusion reactors at this juncture are stars. Billyuns and Billyuns of stars.

Controlled hydrogen fusion has been 30 years in the future for the last 50 years and 100 years from now it will still be 30 years in the future.

ruveyn

Not to mention that hydrogen is one of the few gases that expand exothermally, so getting a hole in a tank can be a whole hell of a lot scarier than a hole in a gasoline/diesel tank. The advice we have in the labs I work in is "If the valve gets broken off of one of these hydrogen tanks, run like hell before it ignites".

What I'm curious about is if this collection rate and ultimately the amount of energy you get per square meter of land production is better than that with using the algae to produce biodiesel (the rotating bag solution one fellow's come up with is quite neat).

The downside of biodiesel is that it must be burned to produce usable energy. Clearly the only way to go for industrial strength energy sources is nuclear fission. Solar power, wind power, hydro-electric and tidal power have niche uses but cannot produce what our economy requires. We U.S. 4 quads a year in the U.S.

ruveyn

Photosynthesis is ~90% efficient, this is nature making use of quantum physics. If we are able to tap into it that would be excellent.

However it begs the question, what happens if we eventually end up with not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? We may have to start “polluting” again.

Why does everyone think cars when it comes to hydrogen? You don't necessarily have to use it for cars.

Coal and pressurised steam are not exactly safe, but we stopped using them for transport ages ago.

All we need is heat, and we are on a mostly molten ball of rock. A few miles down in the Yellowstone Caldera is all the heat we need, and it will delay the eruption. Geo-thermal is clean, the eruption will just melt it, no millions of years of radioactives hanging aroud.

I saw a Scientfic American article, What whould happen to New York Without People, only 100,000 years till the lead from gas is no longer a problem.

Atomic Power now, is forever, and we are just not old enough to deal with forever. We still have the waste from Fat Man and Little Boy, and everything else produced.

Oh I agree heartily that none of those are full options. And of course I just recycled all of the worksheets from the guest lecture given to the class for which I was the GTA by Dr. Octave Levenspiel (he's the father of Reaction Engineering) on this subject, but nuclear fusion isn't even an option (though it's better than the others). It can only produce, with all of the reactors in play and being planned, something around 10 Quads. And the US uses way more than just 4 Quads a year, it's over 100 Quads. 4 may be just that used in households (not including industrial, transportation, etc). Fusion may be feasible if they can get the tokamok to work properly and well, but the only truly viable option is reducing the human population by about an order of magnitude. Hopefully we discover something like Zero Point Energy by the time coal runs out (on that matter, it turns out there really is such a thing as clean coal, I was surprised about this too).

The fusion folks have been trying to get magnetic containment working for the last thirty years. Do not hold your breath until they succeed or you will turn blue and die. If you want fusion energy use sunlight.

By the way we can get our fission output up by using breeder reactors. This also solves the waste problem. There is virtually no waste with breeder reactors.

Another "source" of energy (it really isn't a source) is increased efficiency of our machines and lighting. If we go full scale on efficiency (with an up-front cost) we can "mine" about 25 percent of our energy usage. Based on 100 quads total, that comes out to 25 quads reallocated to producing useful work.

ruveyn

didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers... Just pointing out that yes, hydrogen is an excellent source of energy, only that it has to be carefully controlled for use.

I do hope something comes out of this, we'll see in time.

The following may also be of some interest:

"Fuel from Thin Air? Joule reports direct microbial conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons; no biomass, no extraction, no refinement"
link disrupting page layout encapsulated by lau

For anyone else who, like me, has a casual interest in this sort of thing, this web-site
http://greenstockinvesting.com/
provides links to various articles. The catch is trying to sort out what is realistically feasible from all of the hype.