http://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_358595_en.html
*Might* make a difference to storing energy from intermittent renewable sources and perhaps make electric cars 'viable'(?)
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
"Hydrogen production breakthrough could herald cheap green energy"
(5 posts)-
Posted 10 years ago #
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Cheap and easy hydrogen generation and transportation will (IMO) do a very good job of keeping the more unstable areas of the world unstable.
I foresee Europe spending billions on large scale solar farms in North Africa generating gigawatt's of power converted to hydrogen and shipping it back to Europe to either use in household scale fuel cells or to be "burned" in conventional gas power plants for distribution. Imagine how much power could be generated from the Sahara if it could be easily got to the consumer. With that kind of investment and reliance the urge to keep a friendly government in power would be pretty high.
The oil rich Middle Eastern countries will probably stop investing in London and start building hydrogen production to deal with the tapering of oil demand keeping the ruling classes rich and continuing the status quo.
Russia will get "upset" at no longer being able to use its gas as a way of keeping relevant and probably raise its sabre rattling to a new high.
The only benefit to the world at large is that the US would probably become energy independent and stop interfering with the rest of the world...
/baseless prediction.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Back in the day when I were a physical chemist I worked on artificial photosynthetic systems and I've seen these kind of articles appear regularly since the early nineteen eighties. There's a whole academic discipline dedicated to the study of the 'hydrogen economy'.
The principal problem has always been the storage, rather than the generation, of the hydrogen. Hydrogen/air mixtures are horribly explosive, which means that the compressed gas is just a non-starter as a transport fuel. Many people have tried to absorb the gas onto substrates or dissolve it in a liquid (acetlylene is generally stored this way), but seemingly to little avail. I'll have a read of the Glasgow paper to see if it really is newsworthy.
I think @steveo is quite right about the solar farms in North Africa, but I suspect the technology will be thermal rather than electrochemical;
Posted 10 years ago # -
will be thermal rather than electrochemical;
I presume you mean the big mirror farms pointing up at a tower generating steam for electricity? Rather than PV pannels? If so I agree, if you're going very large scale PV just doesn't seem to compete.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@steveo
Just so. PV has always struck me as too fragile or involved for industrial scale use. The economics of PV used to depend on high grade silicon being available as a waste product from the manufacture of integrated circuits - I suspect they still do.
Posted 10 years ago #
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