Question by njzgreatone: How to Mass Produce Hydrogen for hydrogen-powered cars?
This is a little question I was thinking about for this chemistry project I’m doing for school. I know that it takes energy to create Hydrogen and remove hydrogen from water or other substances. So i wanted to know what are the most energy, time, and money efficient ways to mass produce hydrogen and transport around the world if hydrogen powered cars began popular.
Any ideas?
became** not began
How about some in depth ideas on the subject?
Best answer:
Answer by Widget Maker
Go to Neptune and scoop up hydrogen in crystal form off the surface of the planet. Then bring it back and hope the greens will let you land.
What do you think? Answer below!
9 Responses
You need to read ‘The Chemistry and Manufacture of Hydrogen’ by P Litherland Teed. First published in 1919.
http://www.american-renewable-energies.com follow link to Knowledge Publications
Buy the book and pick one of the methods and make huge amounts of hydrogen. Iron + steam = iron oxide + H2 is one of my personal favorites.
either by electrolysis, or the burning of fossil fuels
it just takes electricity to make hydrogen.>
there isn’t anything magic about it.
i was interested to read:
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one might note that you don’t mine pure iron.
you mine iron oxide, and use lots of energy to separate it from the oxygen.
if your aim it to make hydrogen, you’d do well to skip that step, and just make the hydrogen.
as for transporting it, you have a couple of options.
compress, and really cool it.
use some substance that “sops it up like a sponge”.
thus far, it seems to me that neither option would work very well for a car.
in that light, your question, “if hydrogen powered cars began popular” is not realistic.
they can’t, unless the storage problem is first solved.
Hydrogen is already mass produced and shipped on Americas highways everyday. Power plants use it in the generators. Companies that supply and deliver various bottled gases (Oxygen, Acetylene, argon, nitrogen,etc..)produce and sell it and have been doing so for years.
commercial hydrogen gas is produced from natural gas in the U.S. using a heat & chemical process.
and the currently used process releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
but its cheaper & uses less energy than seperating it from water using electrolysis.
hydrogen can also be produced in small quantities from water by using algae in bioreactors. this process could possibly be scaled up .the only practical way to transport it is as a dangerous compressed gas at 5000 to 10,000 psi or as a liquid cooled & maintained at -434 degrees below zero.
It’s not so easy to produce, and it’s really miserable to transport. Large-scale electrolysis isn’t done much of anywhere, and there’s some question as to how practical it might turn out to be. Cooking the carbon out of natural gas is not so economical, either, though unlike electrolysis you get more energy out of that process than you put in.
And shipping hydrogen is expensive because you can’t use regular pipelines like we do for petroleum-based products. Hydrogen gets into microscopic pores and cracks in steel parts and makes them brittle and weak, so conventional pipelines won’t work. Neither will conventional tanks.
Hydroelectric production seems like the most likely method of making it. Storage has always been a problem, but metal hydrates were being looked at back in the ’70’s. All I could find about it now refers to binary clathrites or some such. Here’s the link:
http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0oGkmOpiTFINncAKQFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEzMzg4c2lpBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDOARjb2xvA3NrMQR2dGlkA0gxMTlfMTE3/SIG=129k5h9q1/EXP=1211292457/**http%3a//www.mines.edu/research/chs/people/strobel.html
For the scale needed by automobile usage the electrolysis method is the best, it could hypothetically be made anywhere there is wind energy and water which would be turned into hydrogen and oxygen on the spot.
Hydrogen is not for the shade tree mechanic. It is very dangerous.