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HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE?
Posted on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 12:28:04 GMT by vlad
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Anonymous writes: Consider for a moment the effect of converting one billion cars to hydrogen: Equating the US Department of Energy's estimate for global daily consumption of gasoline (4 trillion gallons) to the equivalent hydrogen consumption, we would lose 70 million metric tons of breathable oxygen per day. At that rate, all human life would vanish in 30 yrs due to oxygen depletion. We have already lost a measurable 3-5% of earth's oxygen since 1950.
A new energy source, Magnegas, a pollution-free fuel is being commercially developed by countries around the world, but of course not here, with the oil saturated politics of the US preventing it. This article offers some really good news, amidst further documentation of the Bush administration follies.
According to the article below:
Magnegas was developed in US with tax dollars but it is being ignored by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, Europe, Russia, and China are moving to adopt it.
The Bush administration has presented GM with a billion dollar grant to develop a hydrogen powered car.
Widespread conversion of automobiles to hydrogen could lead to all human life vanishing in 30 yrs due to oxygen depletion.
Readers can get the facts at: www.magnegas.com and are urged to write to their representatives to express their outrage at this administration's closed-door energy policy.
New pollution-free fuel ignored by US
Despite the catastrophic consequences associated with a hydrogen-based world economy, the Bush administration has presented GM with a billion dollar grant to develop a hydrogen powered car. This gesture came as a surprise to many environmentally conscious observers who responded with cautious applause. After all, what could possibly be wrong with a pollution-free car? What indeed?
The answer to this question is widely known yet the media chose to remain silent and focused instead on promoting the president's technological and environmental leadership.
The answer begins with remembering that the hydrogen molecule is so small it will leak through any known container. And being lighter than air, it will rise immediately to the stratosphere destroying ozone on contact. Good-by ozone layer. By contrast, gasoline and its combustion products don't affect the ozone layer.
When hydrogen burns, atmospheric oxygen is lost and nature has no mechanism for the large-scale conversion of water back to oxygen. When gasoline burns, CO2 is produced which photosynthesis can convert back to oxygen.
What motive could there be for the Bush-Chaney-Wolfowitz cartel for using US leadership and prestige to send the world in such a dead-end direction?
To begin with, industrial quantities of hydrogen are now produced through the electrolysis of water - a process that uses enormous amounts of electricity. Oxygen is also produced but it's never released to atmosphere. It's too valuable a commodity!
To generate the electricity for this new hydrogen economy, we would need a ten-fold increase in the number of power plants, and unless we accept nuclear power, they would burn fossil fuel - lots of fossil fuel. This would create a lot of wealth for some - and a lot of anguish for the rest.
Is there a way out? A previous US administration, already alarmed by air pollution trends, solicited the US Dept. of Energy to invite Prof. Ruggero Santilli to pursue the development of new, clean energies and fuels. The year was 1979. The President was Jimmy Carter.
For the duration of the Carter Administration, Dr. Santilli, a theoretical physicist, worked with senior mathematicians at Harvard developing Hadronic Mechanics, the first major advance in particle physics since the advent of Quantum Mechanics. For the first time Dr. Santilli was able to look deeply into the processes occurring during the instant of a lightning flash. A whole new class of molecules was discovered called "magnecules" capable of being configured in ways impossible for normal chemical compounds. Gases could be bonded to solids. Liquids could become superconductors . . .and fuels could be designed that were pollution-free. The new fuel was named "Magnegas" and was designed from the outset, to yield 16% free oxygen upon combustion - solving forever the problem of global oxygen depletion and becoming the only fuel in the world whose exhaust can sustain life!
Why isn't the world jumping on this new discovery? It is. A Santilli Plasma Arc Flow Reactor has been built in Russia, another in Italy and orders for more are being placed with Euromagnegas. The Chinese are examining the Santilli reactor for ways to convert their enormous coal reserves into a pollution free, non-imported fuel.
This discovery was brought about by the vision of Jimmy Carter, the brilliant work over two decades by Dr. Santilli and others, and millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Are the US oil interests are using their favorite weapons to prevent this discovery from reaching public awareness: disinformation and no information.
Read more at: www.magnegas.com
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Join the Green Hydrogen Coalition (Score: 1)
by vlad on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 21:46:58 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | From the free_energy list: On 1/9/2004 at 5:25 PM Brendan Hoffman wrote:
***please forward widely***
***apologies for cross-posting***
January 9, 2004
Dear All, This past fall, nine of the country's leading environmental organizations joined together to form the Green Hydrogen Coalition. The goal of the Coalition is to promote the use of clean, renewable energy technologies and sources to extract the hydrogen necessary to fuel the emerging hydrogen economy.
The impetus for the Coalition's formation was a gathering of governments from around the world to form what is known as the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy (IPHE). Our fear is that this organization will be hijacked by anti-environmental forces like the Bush administration, which will use the growing need for energy as an excuse for building more dirty coal, nuclear, and natural gas power plants, hidden behind the veil of hydrogen's clean potential.
Now we're looking to expand the Green Hydrogen Coalition to include any and all local, regional, national, and international groups that endorse the group's policies. This is an important opportunity to get out in front of the coming sea change in how energy is created and distributed in our society and direct that change in a very democratic way.
The Coalition is still in its preliminary organizational stages, functioning without a website, email listserv, steering committee, or paid staff, but those issues are being worked out and should be resolved very shortly. Below is a copy of the statement drafted by the original Coalition members. If your organization supports the views put forth and is interested in becoming a member of the Green Hydrogen Coalition, please send an email to bhoffman@citizen.org with your group's contact person's name, email address, and phone number. As soon as an email listserv is established, we'll add you to it and let you know.
Please try to help this message reach as many groups as possible. Thanks for your interest.
Brendan Hoffman
Organizer, Nuclear Energy & Waste
Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
Public Citizen
p: 202.454.5130
f: 202.547.7392
bhoffman@citizen.org
www.citizen.org/cmep
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STATEMENT OF THE GREEN HYDROGEN COALITION
Nine of the nation's leading environmental, consumer, and public policy organizations have joined together in the Green Hydrogen Coalition (GHC) to challenge President Bush's launch of the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy (IPHE). While the Green Hydrogen Coalition supports a hydrogen future for America and the world, it charges the Bush administration with promoting a black hydrogen rather than a green hydrogen research and development agenda. The Green Hydrogen Coalition is comprised of Friends of the Earth, The Foundation on Economic Trends, the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, Greenpeace, the League of Conservation Voters, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the US Public Interest Research Group, and MoveOn.org.
The White House hosted a meeting of energy ministers from around the world on November 19-21, in Washington, D.C., to sign a landmark agreement to share research and development on hydrogen related activity, with a goal of ushering in a hydrogen economy over the course of the next several decades. The United States has proposed that it serve as the secretariat of this first-of-a-kind global research and development effort.
The Green Hydrogen Coalition accuses the White House of using the IPHE initiative as a smokescreen to deflect attention away from its dismal anti-environmental record and a forum to promote the interests of the coal, oil, gas, and nuclear industries. The Green Hydrogen Coalition further charges the Bush administration with using the IPHE as a delaying tactic to avoid introducing already available off-the-shelf technologies and effective policies that can address local and global environmental issues.
The Green Hydrogen Coalition warns that if the United States is successful in steering the IPHE towards a black hydrogen future, it could lock the global economy into the old energy regime for much of the 21st century, with dire environmental consequences.
The Hydrogen Economy
Hydrogen-the lightest and most abundant element of the universe-can be the next great energy revolution. People call it the "forever fuel" because it will never run out. And when hydrogen is used for power the only byproducts are pure water and heat. Hydrogen is found everywhere on Earth, yet it rarely exists free floating in nature. Instead, it has to be extracted from fossil fuels, water, or biomass. Therefore, the energy used to derive the hydrogen makes the hydrogen either dirty or clean, in other words, "black" or "green".
The Green Hydrogen Coalition believes that, if done the right way, the shift to fuel cells and a hydrogen economy will be as significant and far reaching in its impact on the American and global economy as the steam engine and coal in the 19th century and the internal combustion engine and oil in the 20th century. Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil from the Persian Gulf, the most politically unstable and volatile region of the world. It will dramatically cut down on carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming.
Black versus Green Hydrogen
Today, most commercial hydrogen is harvested from natural gas via a steam reforming process. Yet the supply of natural gas is as finite as our oil supply, and therefore not a dependable feedstock for hydrogen.
Petroleum, coal, and nuclear resources are all potential sources of hydrogen but are not clean, safe, long-term solutions. Producing hydrogen from petroleum will not free the U.S. from dependence on foreign oil. Coal extraction has significant impacts on the land and produces nearly twice the amount of carbon dioxide as natural gas, resulting in the emission of increased heat-trapping gases.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the coal industry counter that extracting hydrogen from coal would be viable if a commercially effective and safe way can be found to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) and the Bush administration is seeking more than one billion dollars for research and development to make CO2 sequestration a reality. However, carbon sequestration, and the quest for "clean coal", is not the silver bullet solution for producing hydrogen that the Bush administration is portraying it to be.
Carbon sequestration is the process of permanently storing CO2 gas in geologic or ocean reservoirs. If proven to be safe, permanent, and environmentally benign, sequestration could be used to reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions from burning coal and other fossil fuels, potentially making them more acceptable sources of hydrogen or electricity in the short term. However, producing hydrogen from coal can never be an option unless the carbon from coal can be stored safely for the long-term without other adverse environmental impacts. The safety and long-term viability of storage is uncertain, and the adverse environmental and health impacts of coal mining, mountain top removal and power plant waste disposal are still a problem with even the most advanced coal fired power plant and carbon sequestration technology being considered.
Nuclear power could also be used to produce hydrogen, but there are unresolved safety and disposal issues that have not been adequately addressed. Nuclear power plants are also vulnerable to potential terrorist attacks. Still, the Bush administration is seeking more than a billion dollars to develop a new nuclear power plant designed to produce hydrogen.
There is another way to produce hydrogen-one that uses no fossil fuels or nuclear power in the process. Renewable sources of energy-photovoltaic solar cells, wind, small sustainable hydropower, geothermal, and even wave power-are technologies that are available today and are increasingly being used to produce electricity. That electricity, in turn, can be used, in a process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Once produced, the hydrogen can be stored and used, when needed, to generate electricity or be used directly as a fuel. Storage is the key to making renewable energy economically viable. That's because when renewable energy is harnessed to produce electricity, the electricity flows immediately. So, if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, or the water isn't flowing, electricity can't be generated. But, if some of the electricity being generated is used to extract hydrogen from water, which can then be stored, for later use, society will have a more continuous supply of power.
Clean biomass, which includes non-genetically modified sustainably grown energy crops and sustainably retrievable agriculture wastes, could also be an important near-term source of hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles and electricity generation. Clean biomass is a proven source of renewable energy that is utilized today for generating heat, electricity, and liquid transportation fuels. Clean biomass can be used to produce hydrogen through a process called gasification in which the biomass is converted to a gas and hydrogen is extracted.
Virtually no net greenhouse gas emissions result because a natural cycle is maintained in which carbon is extracted from the atmosphere during plant growth and is released during hydrogen production. Replanting and reforesting are prerequisite for maintaining a renewable hydrogen supply from biomass.
President Bush's Black Hydrogen Agenda
The Bush administration says that harnessing hydrogen will free the U.S. from dependence on Mideast oil and provide a non-polluting source of energy for electricity and transport. In reality, the White House plan calls for massive subsidies to the coal and nuclear industries to extract hydrogen-a black hydrogen agenda. While Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham claims that the Bush administration is equally committed to research and development of renewable sources of energy to extract hydrogen-a green hydrogen agenda-the current energy bill tells a different story. The bill contains subsidies of more than $8 billion to the fossil fuels and nuclear industries and less than $4 billion to the renewable energy industries in its current draft.
Moreover, despite continued public pronouncements by the Department of Energy that it is equally committed to promoting renewable sources of energy, the White House and their Congressional allies have systematically blocked efforts in Congress to establish benchmarks and target dates for the phasing in of renewable sources of energy in the generation of electricity and for transport. The European Union, by contrast, has made a commitment to produce 22 percent of its electricity and 12 percent of its overall energy from renewable sources of energy by 2010.
Therefore, while we favor an international research and development partnership to help usher in a hydrogen economy, we oppose the U.S. government becoming the Secretariat as long as the Bush administration's agenda is to use hydrogen as a Trojan horse to foster the interests of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries and to avoid dealing with important environmental issues today. With this consideration in mind, we have written letters to the Presidents and Energy Ministers of each of the countries invited to take part in the IPHE, urging them to oppose the U.S. proposal that it be the secretariat of the IPHE unless the Bush administration is willing to agree to set renewable energy benchmarks and targets equivalent to those established by the European Union.
The Green Hydrogen Coalition Agenda
The Green Hydrogen Coalition believes that the full energy and ecological benefits of a hydrogen future will only be realized if renewable sources of energy are prioritized and increasingly phased in, eventually becoming the global source for extracting hydrogen. The Coalition advocates an intentional program to build a renewable hydrogen based future. While the green hydrogen economy is being phased in, the Coalition advocates simultaneously dealing with today's environmental problems directly and without delay through immediate implementation of solutions that are currently available, including: significant increases to vehicle fuel economy, the introduction of hybrid electric vehicles which pave the way to fuel cell cars, the redesign and overhaul of the nation's power grid, massive energy conservation measures, the Kyoto Protocol global warming treaty, and benchmarks targeting renewable energy adoption. The Coalition believes that these initiatives should parallel efforts by the IPHE to subsidize and underwrite the research and development of renewable energy technology, hydrogen and fuel cells. Governments should set the goal of a fully integrated green hydrogen economy by the middle of the 21st century. |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 1)
by chrish64 on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 15:19:10 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpfsystems.com | | Remember that Oxygen is also produced during electolysis. Therefore if released into the atmosphere, the net result would be zero loss in Oxygen from the atmosphere. Note that when huge amounts of Hydrogen will be produced, that precious resource called Oxygen will also need to be released because it could not possibly all be consumed by the people who produce and store the Hydrogen gas. Eventually the Oxygen will make itself into the earth's atmosphere therefore closing the cycle. |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 16:42:24 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | When HYDROcarbon fuels are burned the hydrogen atoms sticking out on the borders of those molecules gets combined with oxgen and turns into "permanent" water vapor. Mankind has been doing this for about 1000 years and that is considerably longer than 30 years. The oxygen is returned to the environment during protein synthesis and photosynthesis. |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 18:31:22 GMT | Your claim is such utter BS that you point the finger of "OIL COMPANY SHILL" directly back at yourself.
Your figures have been proven false by every major university in the world. The costs noted are offset by 5000% higher costs created by the use of oil and the cancer, war, corruption, lung disease, death, global warming and other problems CAUSED by OIL!
Hydrogen is the only available solution to provide energy when oil runs out in 2020.. OHHh They didn't tell you that!?? Read the 2500 reports on the "Hubbert Peak" , Fool! |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, January 10, 2004 @ 21:57:39 GMT | | Whatever the problems are with energy production, we need to solve it . Energy production has become toooo centralized and expensive. We need to decentralize and cut cost to one-tenth, one-hundredth, one-thousandth the current cost. |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, January 11, 2004 @ 02:34:55 GMT | Localised effect of oxygen increase and floral and
I, for one, would not want to live near a water cracking plant! Any increase in local oxygen levels will make normally unlikely or small fires, a lot more likely! But, the local floral and fauna might grow into HUGE varieties which would be great for botonists and wildlife lovers!
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, January 11, 2004 @ 02:40:45 GMT | | It also seems quite worring, as the article suggests, that moving towards a hydrogen power based world *could* caused a rapid decrease in oxygen levels, putting incredible power into the hands of those with the hydrogen stations (not all that much different from now i suppose). |
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 1)
by seanu on Sunday, January 11, 2004 @ 03:33:48 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | "..To generate the electricity for this new hydrogen economy, we would need a ten-fold increase in the number of power plants, and unless we accept nuclear power, they would burn fossil fuel - lots of fossil fuel. This would create a lot of wealth for some - and a lot of anguish for the rest.."
Why not use solar energy, like the rest of life does?
"..What motive could there be for the Bush-Chaney-Wolfowitz cartel for using US leadership and prestige to send the world in such a dead-end direction?..."
Even if they wanted world domination by controlling oxygen suppliers from water breakdown, our markets will eventualy be flooded with water-cracking home plants ... no domination!
"...The answer begins with remembering that the hydrogen molecule is so small it will leak through any known container. And being lighter than air, it will rise immediately to the stratosphere destroying ozone on contact. Good-by ozone layer. By contrast, gasoline and its combustion products don't affect the ozone layer...."
That all depends on the reaction level of H2+O3 => H2O+O2. Perhaps someone else can answer that one.
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, January 11, 2004 @ 20:34:19 GMT | PERMANENT gases in the atmosphere by percent are:
Nitrogen 78.1%
Oxygen 20.9%
--As it relates to your article this number should now read : 20.273% or 19.855% of the total atmosphere, if you mean 3-5% less of the total oxygen and the figure would be 17.9 or 15.9% oxygen in the atmosphere if you mean 3-5% less of the total atmosphere. Does that sound right to you?--
(Note that these two permanent gases together comprise 99% of the atmosphere)
Other permanent gases:
Argon 0.9%
Neon 0.002%
Helium 0.0005%
Krypton 0.0001%
Hydrogen 0.00005%
VARIABLE gases in the atmosphere and typical percentage values are:
Water vapor 0 to 4%
Carbon Dioxide 0.035%
Methane 0.0002%
Ozone 0.000004%
This hasn't changed at all since I was in school!
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Re: HYDROGEN FUEL A HUGE MISTAKE? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, January 14, 2004 @ 08:51:05 GMT | From the magnegas.com website:
"Recycling Liquid Wastes and Crude Oil into
MagneGas™ and MagneHydrogen™" (title)
Crude Oil? Liquid Wastes? While recycling may be a good idea, it still makes us dependant on Crude Oil and Liquid Wastes for energy. We are trying to eliminate the need for using such things and creating such things to produce this stuff.
And the other people here are right. When you split water you get Oxygen too. Certainly enough to majorly offset any oxygen depletion. Probably would even help the enviornment a bit; stick an H20 spliter in the Los Angelos area and help those people breath.
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