Reply #54: Yes, hydrogen is all that you say. [View All]

not to mention the most abundant element in the universe.

Unfortunately, there just isn't very much laying about HERE that is in the form of H2 or Hydrogen gas.

It has this uncanny nack for combining with other elements. Like, say, H2O. Thats great, but breaking the bonding energies to free hydrogen so we can use it requires a great deal of energy. In fact, the same amount of energy that is release when you "burn" hydrogen again (2H2 + O2 = 2H2O for example).

So, I run down to the local filling station and "fill 'er up" with hydrogen gas (safely storing H2 is another issues, but at least it's tractable). I start driving and either "burn" H2 in my handy dandy fuel cell, producing lots of energy and some water vapor OR I burn some H2 in my HICE (hydrogen internal combustion engine) and produce some heat and mechanical motion that I translate into wheels turning and I make some water and some other (trace) not so nice compounds.

Wonderful.

The only problem is WHERE did the filling station come up with the H2 I filled up with?

Well, they MIGHT have got it the same way you did as a kid in chemistry class. They stuck some electrodes in a vat of water, turned on the juice and collected the bubbles (only need to collect the H2 bubbles, the O2 can be in the atmosphere roaming around just waiting to combine with the H2 you collected and go back to being water). Unfortunately that takes just a whole bunch of electricity from somewhere. Just huge amounts.

So you are back to square one. How do you make the electricity in the first place? nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, coal, natural gas, or, god forbid, crude oil? And when you do that, you have made hydrogen into an "energy carrier" (by creating the H2 in one place - at the factory - you have created a great deal of potential energy - and now you "carry" that energy around by filling high pressure tanks with H2 - waiting for the time you will need the energy as kinetic energy. But it's the same energy that you "stored" at the hydrogen gas factory.


So, unless we develop technology to go to space and retrieve free hydrogen, hydrogen is NOT an energy source.

BTW, the most common way today to make H2 is to "split" natural gas or methane, usually using nuclear power as the source for doing so, and, as a result, producing CO2 as a byproduct. Oops.