[Stoves] FW: Can anyone explain this one?

[Erin Rasmussen]

I thought Joyce's findings were pretty interesting, and thought I'd share
them with the list at large. 
Cheers,
Erin Rasmussen
erin at trmiles.com

Original message:
From: Joyce Lockard [mailto:rj.lockard at frontier.com] 
I passed the recent message about energy from water on to a couple engineers
and received the following replies.
Joyce
================
At the Alaska Energy Authority we have been investigating hydrogen off and
on over the past decade.  I even went to a couple of conferences on using
ammonia as a storage medium for hydrogen, since ammonia is easier to store
and the equipment required for storage and handling is readily available. 
Also there are existing codes, regulations, industry standards and best
practices for using ammonia, which are not trivial advantages.
There has been significant interest in using the stranded renewable energy
resources of the Aleutians (geothermal, wind, wave, tidal) to produce
hydrogen or ammonia.
None of our studies have shown it is economic to use hydrogen or ammonia for
energy storage.  Even worse, much of the interest in fuel cells appears to
have been driven by investor marketing schemes rather than good science and
engineering.
Energy efficiency still has the best bang for the buck.
David
================
Water is not the actual fuel.   Water is split into Hydrogen and Oxygen
which recombine to produce water again.
The U.S. government has invested billions in hydrogen research as the clean
fuel of the future.   There are a large number of technologies possible to
produce hydrogen with a large part of it coming from water; natural gas
cracking along with a water-gas shift reaction is the current way most
hydrogen is commercially produced (half the H2 comes from water and half
from methane and you produce carbon dioxide green house gases from the
natural gas consumed at the point of hydrogen production even though using
the hydrogen later is clean).   All hydrogen production technologies known
are extremely energy intensive and expensive, consuming way more energy in
producing the hydrogen than is available from using the hydrogen.  
Electrolysis of water and some other pure water splitting methods eliminate
the CO2 issue and simultaneously produce oxygen, but are more energy
intensive than the natural gas route.
An Environmental Science PhD dissertation at the University of Idaho/Idaho
National Lab a few years ago showed using the most theoretically energy
efficient chemical cycle known to produce hydrogen combined with nuclear
power plants to produce the energy necessary to drive the hydrogen
production facilities would require 27 large nuclear power plants just to
produce enough hydrogen to replace the energy consumed in the state of Idaho
for transportation gasoline and diesel fuel.   Not to mention using all the
water in the Snake River aquifer system.   And Idaho is a very small
population compared to the entire U.S. or world!
Yes, the first and second laws of thermodynamics cannot be escaped when you
consider the overall system and not just the partial system starting with
the already split gaseous hydrogen and oxygen;  elemental hydrogen does not
exist on earth as a gas in any significant quantity = it is combined into
water or fossil fuel hydrocarbons and some minerals.
Dave