[gregpawin]

I was wondering about other people's opinion about the realistic feasibility and advantages of using hydrogen gas instead of fuels derived from the usual carbon based sources as a way to help the environment and remove our dependancy from foreign oil.

[vanisaac]

Where will we get the hydrogen from?  The easiest way of making H2 is by electrolosys.  Where do we get most of our electricity?  From fossil fuels!  We burn coal and oil to generate electricity in this country, which means all this talk about hydrogen being a miracle fuel is a bunch of hooey.  That said, hydrogen is a great way of turning alternative means of energy production like solar and geothermal into viable sources of energy.  The sun only shines part of the day, and the heat of the earth doesn't turn on and off at human convenience.  But hydrogen is a perfect means of storing the energy harnessed from these sources.  Living in the Northwest, I also view hydrogen as a good means of harnessing the extensive pre-existing hydroelectric infrastructure.

[Seymor-Omnis]

Very good point vanisaac.

I, personally, believe that if we could harness the act of nuclear fusion that would be the best power source.

[gregpawin]

Yes, usually we produce hydrogen from fossil fuels: from stripping the hydrogens off of methane or reacting coal with steam.  Either way you produce carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that we're trying to avoid.  If you think about it, like vanisaac was saying, this "fuel" molecules are merely ways of storing chemical energy to be convieniently used later.  Fossil fuels come from solar and geothermal energy as organic matter that has been cooked overtime in the earth.  Using hydrogen as the energy transport has the advantage of having only water as a byproduct but I think those engineers had better think of a way to effectly get rid of the heat so that the steam turns into liquid or we'd just be adding another greenhouse gas into the air.  It would be really nice if we could use fission energy and store it as hydrogen... but fission has always seemed to stay in the "40 years and it will be finished timeline".

[Seymor-Omnis]

I know, the fusion thing is a thing of the future, not the present.

[gregpawin]

Scratch that, fission is already used in conventional nuclear weapons and reactors.... I meant fusion.  Actually, a thermonuclear/fusion bomb uses a conventional nuclear weapon to create the conditions necessary for the fusion to occur... a fusion bomb with a fission ignitor.

One of the coolest and worst things about fusion are the high temperatures necessary to overcome the electrostatic forces that keep nuclei apart and smack them till the strong force takes over.  This means that the reaction is totally controllable since those temperatures are externally maintained usually by lasers.  Unfortunately, this glowing ball of plasma would melt through anything it came in contact with so they keep it in confinement with a donut shaped chamber with huge magnetic fields keeping the plasma in the middle.  They are literally making it possible to have a little piece of the sun here on earth.

[Seymor-Omnis]

Where could I get more info on Nuclear Fusion, I have always been interested in it, but never understood how it worked.

P.S.  I meant fusion in the first place  

NOTE---I edited my above posts to say fusion---ENDNOTE

[Mitch]

I've worked on nuclear fission before. Nuclear Chemistry is all about making new atoms by means of nuclear fusion or fission.

Seymour http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/content/fusion1.html

[Seymor-Omnis]

That link was very informative and was very interesting.  I can't believe how much heat is required.

Thanks for the link, it should be added to the link section.

[Donaldson Tan]

I have my skeptism against hydrogen as fossil fuel replacement. It's been proven that hydrogen always leaks. Given it's flammable nature, I dont think we should compromise safety to advocate hydrogen for mass use. Also, even prototypes of nano structures developed worldwide to store hydrogen efficiently is far from success.

Vannisac rasied a good point that hydrogen production as of current yield carbon dioxide. In this way, carbon dioxide is no longer produced in cars/factories but at chemical plants. It's just a change of location, not reduction in carbon dioxide emmission.

I disagree with Vannisac that hydrogen is good means to store energy harnesed from geochemical & solar plants. I am already skeptic against hydrogen given my points mentioned above. Furthurmore, how is the energy harnessed use to produce hydrogen? Let say the energy harnessed is used to strip hydrogen atoms from hydrocarbon, then is it true that fossil fuel is indirectly fueling the hydrogen economy? Perhaps new technology is required to directly convert these energy into electricity efficiently and then employed for use in rechargeable electrochemical cells. Eg. using heat energy to make electrons on metal surfaces move, consequently producing current.

I think alcohol is good alternative to fossil fuel. It can be mass-fermented from plant sugar in our factories or made from petroleum distillates. Plant sugar is a renewable resources. Alcohol can be oxidised efficiently via fuel cell. Since the energy production is efficient, we can use less alcohol to produce energy for useful work done. In this way, carbon dioxide emission is reduced.

[jdurg]

I believe that the harnessing of solar and thermal energy to generate hydrogen means converting solar and geothermal energy into an electrical current in order to pull apart molecules of water.  In doing that, no fossil fuels need to be burnt and no carbon dioxide is generated.  (At least at the levels they are now).

In regards to the storage of hydrogen, yes, it does tend to leak out from its containers.  But so does propane, butane, oil, gasoline, etc. etc.  They all have the same propensity to escape from their ocntainers.  With hydrogen, it's not really the same type of escaping.  It's more of a leeching effect.  The hydrogen will leech through the container walls since it is such a small molecule.  However, it doesn't do this at a dangerous/flammable level.  The amounts that leak out are so small that it cannot support combustion.  The only problems it generates are that after a while, all of you "fuel" has dissipated away.  That is why palladium storage cells are such the hot topic in terms of storing hydrogen.  Palladium can store a massive amount of hydrogen and keep it in place for a good long time.  If a hydrogen economy does take off, make sure to hold onto your palladium as it's price per ounce will undoubtably skyrocket.

Now what's really preventing us from moving towards an alternative fuel source?  Simple; MONEY.  Scientific research is not cheap, so grants need to be given in order allow the work to continue.  The main sources of these grants are generally the government and private organizations.  The government gets paid a lot of money by fossil fuel supporters to continue using fossil fuels, and a good deal of the private organizations which give research grants are in one form or another involved with the usage of fossil fuels.  Also, any country which is a member of OPEC will in no way support the use of an alternative fuel.  So without financial support, the research into using alternative fuels will be a slow, drawn-out process.  We just need to hope that our governments quit being in cohorts with all these fossil fuel corporations and start looking towards the betterment of society as a whole.

[jackygrahamez]

I would like to bounce an idea arround. Last spring for a graduate project, I took up the challenge of producing hydrogen with low energies. I looked at biotechnology as an answer. I proposed a method of identifying enzyme catalysts based on protein structures obtained from RCSB.ORG. I used two types of computer simulations:

1) Dalton is a molecular dynamics application. I used this to obtain saddle point energy minimizations of proposed transistion state structures of two water molecules.
2) 3D Dock Suite, a molecular docking simulation to screen for surface complements between the proposed transistion state structures and a library of proteins containing Zinc.

My reasoning, any metal can server to catalyze hydrolysis, why not have one within the active site of an enzyme. Maybe the enzyme can increase reaction rate by stabilizing intermediates within the active site. This work generated libraries of potential enzymes for hydrogen production, but I lack the resources currently to pursue experiments. I would appreciate hearing what people think about this work.

[Donaldson Tan]

This work generated libraries of potential enzymes for hydrogen production, but I lack the resources currently to pursue experiments.

Awesome. At least we have somewhere to start for H production.

However, why strip hydrogen from water? Freshwater is an important natural resource. It is used for drinking, cooking and industrial heating and cooling. (Seawater cannot be used for industrial cooling as the salt content accelerates the corrosion of metal pipes). If we use hydrogen derrived from freshwater for our fuel consumption, we will face a shortage in freshwater.

I like your idea, but it would be much better enzymes can be identified to strip hydrogen from organic sources, such as biomass. After all, it is the most abundant form of substances all.

[Yggdrasil]

I would like to bounce an idea arround. Last spring for a graduate project, I took up the challenge of producing hydrogen with low energies. I looked at biotechnology as an answer. I proposed a method of identifying enzyme catalysts based on protein structures obtained from RCSB.ORG. I used two types of computer simulations:

1) Dalton is a molecular dynamics application. I used this to obtain saddle point energy minimizations of proposed transistion state structures of two water molecules.
2) 3D Dock Suite, a molecular docking simulation to screen for surface complements between the proposed transistion state structures and a library of proteins containing Zinc.

My reasoning, any metal can server to catalyze hydrolysis, why not have one within the active site of an enzyme. Maybe the enzyme can increase reaction rate by stabilizing intermediates within the active site. This work generated libraries of potential enzymes for hydrogen production, but I lack the resources currently to pursue experiments. I would appreciate hearing what people think about this work.

Protein engineering, creating proteins with new or improved catalytic functions, is a major area of research in biochemistry.  However, the field is also relatively new and successes in this field are mainly limited to changing binding specificities.  In studies where people have been able to alter the catalytic function of the enzyme, they have only been able to design new catalytic sites based on the catalytic sites of other known enzymes.  To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any naturally occurring enzymes which produce hydrogen gas which have been characterized extensively (although nitrogenase comes to mind, but the H₂ production by nitrogenase is from a side reaction).  People have yet to design an enzyme with novel catalytic function.

Based on the protein engineering work I have seen, I think you would be able to take one of your candidate proteins and engineer a water/zinc binding site into it.  However, I don't know if we understand protein structure well enough to be able to engineer the working machinery into the enzyme to catalyze the production of hydrogen.  First, the reaction is endothermic, so bringing two water molecules together is not enough; some energy releasing reaction would need to be coupled to the reaction in order to get the reaction to go forward.  Second, the reaction is a redox reaction, so redox centers and electron carriers would also have to be present in the enzyme.  So, it would be a difficult task to say the least.

However, as I first step, I would investigate whether there are any known enzymes which create H₂.  If there are, I would look at how that enzyme achieves the conversion in order to gain insight into what elements are necessary.  Second, I would re-screen your library for enzymes containing elements which could aid in a redox reaction (e.g. an NADPH binding site).

[P-man]

1. Hydrogen is flammable, but by the time it has caught fire it will be high in the air.

2. There are more advantages to hydrogen than there are disadvantages.